beat Deltarune chapter 1 last night and saw a lot of things i liked about the way it presents and structures itself and how that structure is pointed out to the audience, which is for all intents and purposes a character and mechanic in the game's story
the lines of dialogue that Ralsei the tutorial character tells you, the wording of the speech that Jevil gives you and the information you receive from Seam afterwards, the setting of Card Castle, the game being originally framed as a survey software, the gameplay shift away from mostly reactable bullet patterns to experimentatiom and paying attention to things like turn count and damage output
all those things contribute to the beginning of Card Castle and its basement prison both being "the beginning of the game", the game itself has turned to the player and said "you now have access to the final party member and all the mechanics you will have to finish this game. you are now out of the tutorial. you know what this game is doing with its mechanics and what type of story it will be. now play it. you are now playing the game"
now, it turns to you and says that, then it puts you into this 2-bit Atari ass castle with music that only has 3 tracks and video game™️ mechanics and graphics like elevators that only work both ways when you reach the top, floor sprites that get cut off by object sprites because the tilesets aren't made with a bed being in a corner in mind, Roulxs Kaard's block pushing puzzles puzzles that are the easiest thing in the world but he's soooo proud of them he hypes them up like they're ULTIMATE PUZZLES
the first thing my mind went to was that its someone making their first game. wether you want to interpret that as something that Gaster is doing for the purposes of your plot theory or it's just Toby being funny, this setting is being crafted with the specific feeling that its the beginning of the creative process
you beat the final boss (which i don't mean to gloss over because there is a ton of meat there but for the purposes of describing my reading i will skip) and yippee the world is saved you beat the boss and suddenly everyone loves you, you can even do another video game™️ thing and go say bye to everyone just like Undertale, just like Mother, just like Dragon Quest and look !! you don't even have to go those pesky checkpoint doors to reach every environment, you don't have to inconveniently explore the world, the whole charming cast of characters came back to tell you goodbye golly gee what a bow tie of an ending. which i think is probably starting to say something about the balance of conveniece of cutting things out of a sequence for time's sake and leaving something in a sequence because its fun
Susie has a few heartwarming lines about wanting to come back and a couple scary ones acknowledging we stumbled into forces we should not be stumbling over, which has interesting implications if you put it in this framing that i don't think i'm ready to speak on yet
then, in what is supposed to be the real world, the game gives you the player a bunch of dialogue options that imply that we have knowledge that Kris does not. and we compel Kris to speak on that information and the characters treat Kris like they're sick or acting weird or saying things that make no sense. because this is Deltarune, not Undertale. its a different game. your assumptions and prior experiences as a player are being leveraged as a mechanic of the story to show you that you're playing a different game now
now i want to be clear that this isn't a theory or anything like that, but i've just wanted to describe how and why i've fallen in love with the presentation of the concept and the subtle things this game might be saying about what it takes to make a video game and what it takes to play one. the communication that happens between author and audience. the minutae of the creation procress and how that trickles into the experience of interpreting a story or an art. i'm seeing this game touch on things about the nature of expression in ways i've never seen people talk about and i'm really excited to get to the meatier parts of it to see what else it has to say
understanding that the future chapters are themed around forms of expression and the creation of worlds and life makes me extremely excited
