There was a Deltarune patch update today. Given that Chapter 5 just released a few weeks ago, updates at this stage are mostly just bug fixes, or at times difficulty-tuning adjustments. And that’s most of what this update is. So why write about it at all?
Well…
TEXT CHANGES
・The shop in the Cliffs has new dialogue in an extremely obscure circumstance.
・Credits have been added for the following people:
Matt Cummings – Festival Concept Art
Zu Ehtisham – Platforming VFX
Marcy Nabors – Music Assistance
・The manual in Castle Town now mentions Susie’s SCYTHEMARE.
・Various minor fixes.
“The shop in the Cliffs has new dialogue in an extremely obscure circumstance.” Holy hell tail, okay. What could that dialogue be? Something innocuous, probably?
Wrong. This new dialogue has massive implications for Deltarune‘s story. It’s one of very, very few acknowledgements anywhere in the game of a well-hidden, mysterious collectible, and it’s thus far the only acknowledgement we have of an extremely creepy secret that players have, up to this point, thought could be anything from a joke to the true villain of Deltarune.
Spoilers for all of Deltarune, including Chapter 5, follow:
Let’s get some context in here, shall we? As the patch notes claim, this dialogue only appears “in an extremely obscure circumstance.” That circumstance is threefold: first you have to have beaten the chapter’s secret boss, Mew Mew, who provides Kris with one of five Shadow Crystals. The Shadow Crystals are a mysterious item only gifted by beating the secret boss of each of the five chapters, and while we have some theories as to what they might do (maybe forge a really cool sword?), no one is 100-percent sure as to their purpose. There’s tons of fan theory about the secret bosses, the crystals, and what they all represent that I won’t get into here, but I mention it because it’s important to know that the secret bosses and crystals appear to be tied to all of this somehow.
The second condition is that you must have found Chapter 5’s Egg. If you’ve never acquired an egg in Deltarune, don’t feel bad. They’re absurdly well hidden. Like the Shadow Crystals, there’s one egg hidden in each chapter, and each egg is given to Kris in very strange circumstances in the Dark World while they’re alone, by a Mysterious Man who you never actually see. To give you an idea of how hidden these are, the first chapter’s egg is acquired by moving back and forth between two rooms across a screen transition until, randomly, it dumps you into a secret room. Chapter 3’s egg has a whole weird sidequest involved with it where you have to acquire a specific item, move an item in one room in a very specific way so it is usable in a totally different room you access later in the chapter, get caught by a specific guard while sneaking around, respond to his questions correctly, and finally perform an action in a battle that you would never know you could do.
In Chapter 5, you get the egg in the room with the wheat field. One sheaf of wheat refuses to be cut down, even if you cut down the whole rest of the field and keep cutting the stubborn wheat again and again. Keep doing it until you see a balloon, then follow the balloon:
So. Beat the secret boss, get the egg, and finally…
You have to interact with FRIEND.
Who is FRIEND? We don’t know. But that’s how we’ve been referring to a creature that’s shown up in a few places in the game so far, looking like this:
©Toby FoxAgain, you’d be readily forgiven for never picking up on FRIEND’s presence. Named for the file name of his image, FRIEND only appears once thus far in a casual Deltarune playthrough: when Ralsei explains how Dark Worlds work in Chapter 3. He appears as part of a compilation of other images intended to be seen as scary:
©Toby FoxBut you can find FRIEND lurking elsewhere. His creepy smile is hiding in the shadows in a few places, such as near where you fight Spamton in Chapter 2, on several webpages connected to the Deltarune Spamton Sweepstakes a few years ago, and again in a background, essentially invisible, during Chapter 4. More noticeably, this face shows up during Chapter 3’s secret fight against the strange game-within-a-game entity ERAM, as part of an attack that sends several of these creepy smiles flying at Kris.
And he’s also in Chapter 5, appearing in a very strange circumstance. After you obtain the feather and begin climbing up to the cliffs, stop short of the vine that takes you to the next screen. Instead, run to the right and jump. You’ll immediately start falling, but just before you start to fall, open Kris’ action menu. There’s nothing to target, but the SOUL targets something anyway. Confirm interacting with it for FRIEND’s horrible smile to briefly flash on screen, and the entire party will take damage.
That’s the last thing you have to do to unlock the secret dialogue. With all these things accomplished, return to the shop in the Cliffs and select “Talk,” which will immediately prompt Mew Mew’s body to notice Kris has a cat bite wound on their hand. The dialogue that follows is completely unexpected, as it seems to be the first time someone acknowledges both the existence of FRIEND as well as the existence of Eggs, as it refers to cats like the one that hurt Kris being very vigorous about pursuing protein, such as that found in eggs.
“The cats are not too smart, but once they find a target, they never stop chasing it until they get bored. And when they find you, the bite… very, VERY hard. Some people would do anything to get away from them, even change their appearance, or go into hiding…”
The fan community has exploded over this new dialogue. No one is confident in what it means, though there are plenty of theories. Most critically, it links three of Deltarune‘s four biggest secrets together: FRIEND, the eggs, and the secret bosses, whereas before their connections were tenuous at best. FRIEND is now officially more than just a weird gag thrown in by developer Toby Fox to troll the audience. FRIEND is a real, in-universe threat, and it seems to be after the eggs we’ve been carefully gathering, chapter by chapter.
There’s so much I could go into here about the theories as to how the eggs represent some trauma that Kris has been repressing, or how this all somehow must link back to the mystery man behind the tree that fans believe to be Undertale‘s missing scientist W.D. Gaster, or how FRIEND’s eye colors of pink and gold seem to just keep cropping up everywhere, from Spamton’s glasses to a knock-off game controller in Chapter 3 to the entire color scheme of Chapter 5. Suffice to say, this was a really cool, unexpected addition. No one knows why Fox added it several weeks after launch. The FRIEND encounter mentioned above has been there since the start, and it seems unlikely Fox just forgot to put this dialogue in. I’m of the mind that this is a sign the road from Chapter 5 to 6 isn’t going to be a quiet one, especially when you remember that the weird ARG tied to the game’s secret route is also still going on.
Bring on the weird, creepy teases, Fox. My eggs are at the ready, and I’m prepared for whatever horrors FRIEND has for us.
English (US) ·