// KOTAKU — GAMING
Deltarune Chapter 5 – The Festival: The Kotaku Review
The wait for Deltarune Chapter 5 after the release of 3+4 last year was three whole years shorter than the gap between 2 and 3+4. But given where Chapter 4 ended, it somehow felt much longer. There’s something about this drawn out, episodic format that drives people a little nuts, I think, especially with a game as full of double meanings and hidden messages as Deltarune has become. I’ve been obsessively following it all for over a year now: the speculation, the datamining, the ARG, all of it leading up to the release of Chapter 5 yesterday.
I don’t spoil any major plot details in this review, but I do talk in broad strokes about the events, characters, and themes present throughout all of Chapter 5, including the very end. I have also included images in this piece in which new Chapter 5 characters are visible, but did not include images of major story spoilers. Anyway, read on at your own risk:
Deltarune Chapter 5 is exactly what Toby Fox billed it as: “one more fun adventure” before the sun sets completely. Structurally, Chapter 5 closely and purposefully mirrors Chapter 1, playing on themes of nostalgia and Susie’s reiterated desire for good times to last forever, while knowing they can’t. There are a number of excellent callbacks to the start of this adventure eight (eight!!) years ago, though the best might be the needle-drop reprise of Chapter 1’s “Field of Hopes and Dreams” remixed by composer and musician insaneintherain. I screamed when I recognized that piano riff! The rest of the soundtrack is typically fantastic, too, if surprisingly a bit shorter than that of the other chapters.
Chapter 5 is doing far more than retracing earlier steps. Every chapter needs a gimmick, and this one takes the shocking swing of becoming an action-RPG about half the time. Switches around the chapter activate a perspective shift that swaps you from top-down RPG to side scroller, leading to some interesting puzzles that require you to imagine what the world looks like from the other perspective in order to know where to go, and where to find all the chapter’s secrets. I won’t pretend this mechanic was a gamechanger—it was fine. Maybe a little unnecessary, except as a way to vary things up in the middle of a significantly longer but otherwise well-paced chapter. But I respect the energy of taking a risk like this midway through your (probably) seven-chapter-long episodic game. I liked this better than Chapter 4’s climbing (which unfortunately also returns), anyway.
Everything else is pure Deltarune, excellent in the way past chapters have been excellent. I continue to enjoy the mash-up of turn-based RPG and bullet hell battles. There’s a healthy, non-irritating amount of hidden secrets, including a secret boss battle that had me exactly the right amount of pissed off. The deeply messed-up alternate game route continues to ensure I will never touch it, even as reading up on its revelations enriches my understanding of the far more whimsical normal playthrough. It’s colorful, at times even lovely thanks to thoughtful use of the series’….ah, simplistic aesthetic. Its puzzles are sort of whatever, but they always have been. The writing is as on-point as ever here: often funny and charming, but cutting deep where it matters. As usual, I took a gazillion screenshots as I played, mostly in anticipation of using Deltarune’s many, many good jokes as memes contextually in online conversation as needed. The consistent nailing of natural, unapologetic humor does a lot of work to make every last one of Deltarune’s new and returning cast members lovable, memeable, and memorable. Even the ones you initially want to strangle:
Turn-based RPG, bullet hell, also this chapter's an action-RPG too?
Witty writing, lovable characters, great music, continuation of a twisty mystery, mostly fun battles.
Climbing walls, the section of the secret boss fight that's like Bomberman.
Played on PC; also on Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, PS4, PS5.
Eight hours on Chapte