It’s funny… Ramb refer to the Mantle game as being more ‘free’ than the restrictive and railroady ‘Legend of Tenna’. Calling it “the original game, where you decide what to do” is obviously supposed to call into mind Undertale, and so do the designs of the enemies.
But… how ‘free’ is it, really?
Tenna removed the sword-based combat and replaced it with more ‘wholesome’ activities like puzzles and quizzes that progress in a fairly-linear order but… the ‘original game’ was nothing but combat. Fighting is something you have no choice but to do if you want to progress the game. In fact, you have to literally follow orders the game tells you.
This is obviously a huge contrast to Undertale, and Deltarune's Weird Route, as well as the Dragon Blazerz game that seems to have been the in-universe inspiration to this game (as well as kind of an Undertale parallel in its own right).
All of these feature a choice between being a Horrible Murderbastard and solving conflicts through other means to some degree. The Mantle Game is a one where you have to be violent, you basically don’t have a choice.
Sure, I guess you can go to any screen you’d like and decide to fight the enemies in whatever order you want… but by this metric, even “Legend of Tenna” had some degree of non-linearity in terms of which puzzles you do when or the order you pick up keys/take photos. I guess comparatively, Mantle has more freedom of movement, but it also had it's own progression-based roadblocks.
Even when you can upgrade your sword to go ‘out of bounds’ in the Mantle Game, there’s really only one thing to find and one thing to do there.
If anything, you can argue that Tenna’s game is a lot more ‘free’, because Tenna replaced the in-game combat with regular Deltarune battles… which do allow you to choose between different violent and non-violent options.
I’ve often said that Deltarune’s central theme is less “your choices don’t matter” and more like “do your choices matter?”, "what makes your choices matter?" and this feels like an extension of that. How many roadblocks does a game need before it starts feeling truly railroady?
How do games sell you the illusion of freedom, and what do they need to do to make it truly convincing?
Does a game that allows you to do a violence actually feel more ‘free’ than non-violent game, even if they’re both equally restrictive in terms of your interactions?
And of course, neither of these games have any ounce of ‘Freedom’ from Kris’ perspective. Because violence or pacifism, puzzles or swords, they never get to be the one in control.
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