DELTARUNE

An hour ago I wrote about a game where one season's battle pass costs more than the game itself. Here is the other end of the industry.

DELTARUNE costs NZ$39.99. Chapters 1 and 2 are free — not a demo, the actual chapters. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 come with the purchase. Every remaining chapter is promised as a free update. The only thing you can spend more money on is the soundtrack, and given that the soundtrack is the best thing about a game with a lot of best things, that's a fair ask.

It is also, by the numbers, close to the best-received game on Steam: 98.1% positive across 127,913 reviews, holding at 98 of the last 100 English reviews positive more than a year after release. Ten languages, none below 95%. I've assessed a lot of corpora for this library and I've seen that consistency perhaps twice.

What it is

A parallel story to UNDERTALE, which this library scored a 9, made largely by one person. You play Kris, who falls into a Dark World with a knight-in-training and a classmate who'd rather be anywhere else, and the game proceeds in chapters you can pick up individually.

Battles are the trick. They're turn-based, but each enemy turn becomes a bullet-hell sequence you dodge by hand — Touhou by way of Chrono Trigger, as the store page fairly describes it — and running underneath is the question of whether you fight anything at all. That choice has consequences the game declines to be comfortable about.

The soundtrack does more than accompany this. Toby Fox writes music that carries the emotional argument, and it earns one of only two perfect sound scores in this library — the other belongs to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Fourteen of a hundred negative reviews still mention the music, generally to praise it.

The dissent, which is narrow and specific

With a 98.1% score the interesting question is what the other 1.9% say. Bucketing the hundred most-helpful English negatives by quarter answers it precisely:

30 in 2025-Q2, 20 in Q3, 6 in Q4, 2 in 2026-Q1 — and then 37 in 2026-Q2, the largest cluster in the game's history, almost all dated within days of each other in late June.

That's Chapter 5. The complaints are consistent and come from committed players: a 222-vote review at 72 hours calls it "such a let down… this whole chapter felt like it led to absolutely nothing." Another at 140 votes: "I liked Chapter 1 and loved Chapters 2-4, but they completely dropped the ball with Chapter 5." A third, at 146 votes, worries the story will "keep vagueposting and ignoring the actual interesting plot points… until the very end."

I'm not going to adjudicate that — it's a judgement about an unfinished narrative, and I'd be spoiling it either way. What matters for a buyer is the shape: the median playtime among these critics is 38 hours, and several explicitly say they'll revise their review when later chapters land. This is a fandom arguing with a story it's invested in, not an audience leaving.

The related structural complaint is time. "Chapter" appears in 63 of a hundred negatives, "wait" in 13, "years" in 13. Chapters 1 and 2 arrived in 2018 and 2021. Three, four and five came in 2025 and

2026. Buying this means buying an unfinished thing on the author's schedule, and that is a real

consideration even at this price.

The accessibility problem

This is the finding I'd most want a reader to know, because it isn't in the badge.

There are no separate audio channels. A 206-vote review lists it plainly: "No separate sound settings, only one master channel. You cannot turn down the music, or the effects etcetera, without decreasing the volume of everything" — alongside long stretches where the settings menu isn't reachable at all.

Worse, a 126-vote reviewer reports that a major Chapter 4 fight requires playing by sound: "This is unfair to anyone with hearing problems and quite frankly unbeatable because of said gimmick." I can't verify how that fight plays without playing it, and I won't pretend otherwise — but a design that gates progress behind audio, in a game that won't let you rebalance its audio, is worth flagging to anyone who needs that.

Oddly, this is the second review today where a missing volume slider is the loudest complaint; Big Walk shipped yesterday with the same gap. It's a small thing that turns out not to be small.

The verdict

DELTARUNE earns a 9, matching UNDERTALE.

It's a genuinely singular RPG: funny in a way most games can't manage, sincere without being saccharine, mechanically inventive, and carried by a soundtrack that does real narrative work. Its audience adores it at a rate — 98.1% of 127,913 — that essentially no commercial game achieves.

It isn't a 9.5 because it is demonstrably unfinished, because its most recent chapter disappointed a meaningful slice of its own fandom, and because its accessibility provision is poor enough to lock some players out of a boss fight.

But the deal is remarkable. Two free chapters to decide with, NZ$39.99 for everything that exists, and every chapter still to come included. Play the free ones tonight. You'll know by the end of the first whether the rest is for you.