thinking about what might cause weird player behaviors in deltarune
in undertale the "no mercy" route has a couple obvious "onboarding" clues that might hint to the player that something would happen if they tried killing everyone, such as the fact that the rest of the game is trying to steer you towards doing the opposite (so you might think "oh, i should try to be evil on purpose to see what happens") or that the fights are tough so you naively decide to start grinding
in deltarune the "weird" route is way more specific and does not have the same obvious entry points as in undertale. in chapter 2 you get this character noelle in your party for the first time and at the very moment that this happens you need to immediately backtrack to a locked door, interact with it, and then start having noelle use her ice magic to kill everything in this entire area of the game. not only that, but you need to equip her with the strongest weapon items and obsessively choose options that involve getting romantically close to her. so far noelle is not a playable character in any other released chapter of the game and will likely not become more important until later. so the big question is: what could possibly happen later in the game that would make the player think to come back to chapter 2 and try this? why would the player want to obsessively grind this specific character for a later moment in the game where noelle would need to be as strong as possible- OH MY GOD AERITH LOOK OUT