Toby Fox says 'most of the development team has moved on' from Deltarune's fifth chapter, as focus moves to bug fixes and translation

It's been a long road for enjoyers of Deltarune, the follow-up to EarthBoundy RPG masterclass Undertale. Four of the game's chapters have been released since 2018, and the fifth is closer than ever; Toby Fox took to Bluesky last week to share some details on where it's at.

The professional testers are familiarizing themselves with the game now. They begin formally testing on April 1st. Japanese translation quality assurance is projected to be completed in April. Outside of addressing bugs and translation, most of the development team has moved on from Chapter 5.

"The professional testers are familiarizing themselves with the game now. They begin formally testing on April 1st," Fox said in the thread. "Japanese translation quality assurance is projected to be completed in April. Outside of addressing bugs and translation, most of the development team has moved on from Chapter 5."

That certainly sounds like things are wrapping up, though Fox noted in a follow-up post that "the actual testing period will last for an indefinite amount of time" and "the game needs to get approved on consoles and we need to do various other things to prepare for release." Fox said "that'll be all" on the topic for the foreseeable future, so hopefully the next time we're talking about Deltarune's next chapter it'll be with a release date at hand.

Article continues below

Assuming it comes out at some point this year as Fox predicted on Jan. 1, it'll be a much shorter gap than between the first and second chapter (three years) or the second chapter and the dual release of chapters three and four (nearly four years). It's a slow drip feed for an RPG of this style, but it seems like Fox has earned the benefit of the doubt from fans—and the previous chapter drop took the game straight to top of the Steam best sellers list when it landed last year, so the hype clearly hasn't worn off.

If you're holding out until the whole thing is definitively done and you can binge it one go, you might be waiting for a while⁠—it's not clear exactly how many chapters players can expect in the end⁠, though seven appears to be the prevailing assumption—but you can try the first two chapters for free on Steam. Until then, you can keep up with everything we know about Deltarune on PC Gamer.