So after Deltarune Chapter 2 came out Friday night, I downloaded it and played it over the weekend.
Like Chapter 1, Chapter 2 is free. Both can be downloaded together now and are considered a long Deltarune demo. The current plan is that Chapters 3-5 will be released together and cost money.
But anyway, let’s get back to talking about Chapter 2.
The first chapter ended on quite an unsettling note, and Chapter 2’s beginning suggests that nothing sinister happened after all… or did it? With that note of uncertainty hanging over you, you soon return to the Dark World.
Like in the first chapter, you have a small party of characters and various options during combat. You can either attack enemies to force them to run away, or choose the correct actions that will allow you to spare the enemies. Although at first only the main character can use these actions or ask another character to, the other characters eventually gain the ability to use their own actions.
A new system introduced in Chapter 2 is recruitment, which means that spared enemies will go to your town. Recruits don’t do a whole lot here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s expanded in subsequent chapters.
The main area for Chapter 2 is based on the Internet, with an AI queen who has seemingly become a tyrant due to the Internet outage and the appearance of a fountain, which you need to seal. There’s a lot of humor again, with several goofy situations and wacky characters getting in your way.
It also has its share of sweet moments, a few moments that hint at darker things to come, and some continued questioning of the relationship between the player and the main character.
(Apparently there’s also a much darker alternate route that sounds incredibly disturbing.)
Chapter 2 was a bit longer than Chapter 1 and took me over five hours to complete. Together with Chapter 1, the Deltarune demo has now taken me almost as long as all of Undertale. That’s a hefty amount of content for a free demo!
Now, due to the way it started, I was concerned that each chapter might end on a shocking cliffhanger that would be left ambiguous in the next part. However, while Chapter 2 definitely ends on another unsettling note, it suggests a much clearer picture of what’s going on and raises some intriguing possibilities for what will occur in Chapter 3.
I’m really enjoying Deltarune now in its own right (rather than viewing it as an Undertale alternate universe) and I can’t wait to see how this story will unfold.
It also looks as though there will be 7 chapters total, which is more than I expected. Here’s hoping the wait to 3-5 and then 6-7 won’t be too long!
