The latest installment of Toby Fox’s seven-part RPG saga Deltarune launched this week, and it has all the oddball humor, incredible music, and video game metacommentary you’d expect. Chapter 5 sees Kris and Susie enjoying amusement games and snacks at Hometown’s annual festival, before venturing into a brand-new Dark World that appears within Asgore’s flower shop.
At least, that’s what happens if you stick to the main storyline. Real sickos will know that, like its predecessor Undertale, Deltarune has an alternate route in which you’re encouraged to make the most vile choices imaginable. In Undertale, it was called the genocide route, since you must violently defeat every monster you encounter. In Deltarune, it’s called the weird route, and it involves our protagonist Kris asserting a very troubling level of control over the actions of their childhood pal Noelle Holiday, a sweetie-pie reindeer whose house looks like Homegoods in December all year round. The weird route has consistently been creepy and upsetting, but in Chapter 5 it takes an even more sinister turn.
Major spoilers for Deltarune’s weird route ahead.
If it’s been a while since you’ve played Deltarune — fair enough, since the first chapter came out all the way back in 2018 — let me bring you up to speed: The weird route is essentially an abbreviated, alternate version of the main story, which only appears in Chapters 2, 4, and 5. To trigger the weird route, you must force Noelle to defeat every enemy using her ice magic in Chapter 2. While she’ll protest at first, eventually she’ll grow more comfortable with the idea, and you’ll soon gain access to equipment that makes her magic stronger.
One such item is the ThornRing, which allows Noelle to cast the SnowGrave spell. This is the only magic in Deltarune said to deal “fatal damage” to enemies. At the end of the weird route in Chapter 2, Kris compels Noelle to use the spell against their annoying classmate Berdly, and it’s strongly implied that Berdly is dead in this version of the story.
The weird route resumes in Chapter 4, a significant portion of which takes place at Noelle’s house as she works on a school project with Kris and Susie. During a private conversation, Noelle tells Kris she had a dream where everything was covered in snow, and alludes to Berdly being comatose in the hospital. Kris insists the dream really happened, and during a tough-to-watch sequence, once again forces her to equip the ThornRing. The scene then cuts to black, and a small red rose sheds its petals as red lines fill the screen like shattered glass. (Fox quietly changed this scene shortly after the launch of Chapters 3 and 4 back in June 2025, without making public comment, after numerous players interpreted it as a metaphor for sexual assault.)
Chapter 5 offers another ghoulish twist to the weird route. As the sun sets on the day of the festival, Noelle insists that using the deadly SnowGrave spell makes her feel stronger than ever, and asks Kris to do “something crazy” with her. She then pulls Kris into the lake, and they walk, hand in hand, steadily deeper into the water. The player is repeatedly prompted to “proceed” as the pair are fully immersed, seemingly drowning in real time. Noelle’s character portrait grows horribly distorted, along with the sound effects. The screen goes fully white, accompanied by a roaring white noise. Then an image of a CRT television screen appears, along with the words “Insert Chapter 7 side B.” After this, the player is returned to the chapter select screen. As shown in the video above, it’s also possible to stop this event from playing out by refusing to respond to the button prompts.
In the main storyline, this sunset moment by the lake is a heartwarming scene between Susie and Noelle, as they sweetly share their affection for one another. The contrast between the two is the epitome of tonal whiplash.
Clearly, Chapter 5 isn’t the end of Deltarune‘s weird route, even though Noelle and Kris attempting to drown themselves certainly seems very final. Then again, Noelle does tell Kris she wants to go “somewhere no one has ever been before,” so it’s possible that Hometown’s mysterious lake is actually hiding some kind of physical location beneath the surface. After all, this is a world where rooms full of inanimate objects can be transformed into full-blown cities and castles. Unsurprisingly, the Deltarune fan community over on Reddit is already on the case, with a couple commentors making convincing arguments that this is Noelle’s attempt to break out of a literal video game, a theme that appears elsewhere in Deltarune‘s main story.
Unfortunately, we won’t have a clear answer about what these kids were doing in that lake for quite a while. Earlier this week, Fox confirmed that Chapter 6 will be released sometime in 2027 — no word yet on Chapter 7.
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