10 Deltarune Moments That Completely Change Once You Understand the Characters Better

2 weeks ago 10

Published Jul 7, 2026, 1:53 PM EDT

Daniel Trock is a Contributor at DualShockers specializing in PC games, lists, and reviews. He has been writing professionally since 2018 and covering games since 2020, with previous work spanning guides, news, lists, and reviews across multiple publications.

Before joining DualShockers, Daniel contributed guides to GamerJournalist and lists to TheGamer. He currently covers tech topics for SlashGear and BGR. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from Marist College and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative and Professional Writing from Western Connecticut State University.

Something I heard once about stories is that they change when you read them a second time. Not in the literal sense, obviously, but in how you parse and experience them. How you react to a particular event or a character’s action can be completely different if you already have the full context of the lore or a character’s personality and motivations. Part of what makes each subsequent chapter of Deltarune interesting, besides getting to play new stuff, is getting new context for characters and what they’ve gotten up to.

As each chapter has revealed a little more about the setting and provided moments of focus and character-building, certain bits of the earlier story experience a distinctive change. A moment that may have made you laugh or confused you before can suddenly take on a drastically different meaning, sparking feelings in you that you’d never have expected to feel the first time around.

Spoilers for Deltarune Chapters 1-5 ahead!

10 Berdly Keeping Noelle from Making a Group of Three

He Can’t Let Anyone Know He’s Not Smart

In the classroom in Chapter 1, before Susie shows up, you can talk to Noelle and ask her if she and Berdly would be willing to make a group of three with you. Noelle seems fine with it, and Alphys probably would’ve said yes, but Berdly interjects, insisting that he doesn’t want Kris working with them and driving their grade down. This reads like stereotypical arrogant smart kid behavior, and that’s certainly a factor, but not the only factor.

As Berdly divulges in Chapter 2, he’s not actually that smart, and only maintains his place of perceived prominence in class because Noelle helps him study. In all likelihood, he didn’t want Kris working with them on their project because they would probably learn that Noelle’s the only one with any idea what she’s doing. Additionally, Berdly’s relationship with Noelle has led to something of a possessive streak, so rather than any real concerns about scholastic achievement, he probably just didn’t want anyone hoarding in on his time with her.

9 Susie Eating Chalk

It Wasn’t Just an Act of Rebellion

After you follow Susie into the hall, you spot her eating the last stick of chalk from Alphys’s classroom, something that she has apparently been making a habit of. This is presented as another stereotypical bit of adolescence, a bully character doing mildly incomprehensible acts of rebellion. However, as we’ve learned more about Susie, her chalk-eating habits have become less of a mildly silly rebellious act and more of a tragic hunt for something to eat.

As we’ve learned throughout the game, Susie has a habit of eating trash, day-old food, and technically harmless non-foodstuffs like chalk. Given we’ve never seen her family or her home, there’s a very good chance Susie is food-insecure, and so her eating chalk may just be her trying to fill her stomach. Come to think of it, I’m not sure what the dynamics are when it comes to food in the Dark World, so it’s very possible Susie has a worrying amount of non-edible objects in her stomach.

8 Ralsei Focusing on Sparing

Trying to Subvert Destiny

When Kris and Susie first meet Ralsei in the Dark World, it seems like he’s trying as hard as he possibly can to be nice and accommodating of the both of them while still trying to guide them on the path of the whole destined hero thing. In particular, before entering the Card Castle Dark World, Ralsei tries to impress the importance of ACTing and sparing enemies upon Kris. You could read this as a deliberate counterpart to the Mercy tutorial in Undertale, but I think it goes a little deeper than that.

As we learned in Chapter 4, Ralsei has a full working knowledge of the entire prophecy, which means that, while he’s not omniscient, he does have a general idea of what’s supposed to happen and when. We don’t know exactly where all this is going, but if Ralsei’s reactions are any indication, it’s not going anywhere pleasant, so he’s probably trying to be both nice and encouraging of mercy in order to prevent things from getting any more violent and painful than they need to be. Maybe if he’s lucky, all this mercy will lead to a happier ending.

7 King Serving the Knight

A Card Scorned

When the party confronts King at the top of the Card Castle, he declares his servitude to the Roaring Knight, with intentions of opening more Dark Fountains, covering the world in darkness, and having Darkners rule over Lightners. It’s a good hook into the greater-scale antagonist of the Knight, but why would someone so full of himself like King ever deign to bow to another? Well, as it turns out, there are two reasons for that.

Firstly, in a discussion in Chapter 4, King reveals that he’s never actually met the Knight. In fact, it was Jevil who talked the Knight up to him so much, as well as incepted the plan to sprout more Fountains. Additionally, in Chapter 5, King reveals that the usually-hidden scar on the left side of his face comes from his Light World counterpart, a playing card, getting torn, apparently prompting the school to declare the whole card pack a dud and lock it in the unused classroom. That’s why he hates Lightners so much, and why he so eagerly latched onto the Knight as a messianic figure.

6 Noelle’s Interest in Susie

An Avenue of Freedom

After Kris and Susie’s first Dark World adventure, Kris meanders around town before returning home, first running into Noelle visiting Rudy in the hospital and again in front of her house’s gate. In that second time, in particular, Noelle grills them a bit about Susie, as she’s apparently been curious about her for some time. She’s downright ecstatic if Kris says she’s a nice person.

Noelle’s interest and eventual infatuation with Susie feels like another school story stereotype, the shy bookworm girl being interested in the new rebel kid. However, as we’ve learned throughout the game, and especially in Chapter 5, Noelle feels extremely stifled in her current life. Without her sister or any of the family friends she has a little kid, life has basically just been running on autopilot for her. Susie’s presence is an X factor, a major point of divergence from her daily routine. That’s the root of her interest, anyway, though it does gradually blossom into genuine fondness, at least outside the corrosive influence of the Weird Route.

5 Kris Pulling the SOUL Out

Not a Monster, Not a Villain

At the end of Chapter 1, while Kris is asleep in bed, they suddenly stumble upwards, rip the SOUL out of their chest, chuck it in a birdcage, and pull out a knife with a devious grin. Naturally, many players, myself included, assumed this was like Chara in Undertale, a malevolent force locking us out of our own character to wreak havoc. In actuality, though, it’s kind of the other way around: we’re the malevolent force locking Kris out of their own life.

As we see in the multiple times Kris performs this little SOUL extraction over subsequent chapters, they have their own desires and agenda wholly independent of our role in the story. There’s the stuff they’re doing for whoever the spooky person on the phone is, of course, but they also want to do innocuous things like down an entire glass of chocolate syrup or play the piano in Noelle’s house. Kris is only really an antagonistic element by circumstance, as we’ve hijacked their body to play hero and kept them from doing whatever it was they did on a daily basis before we showed up. Literally, the first thing they did with that scary-looking knife was cut out a big slice of pie and stuff their face.

4 Queen Wanting More Fountains

A Logical Conclusion

Unlike King, who utterly despises Lightners, Queen’s actually pretty stoked on them. She is a computer, after all; providing people with information and entertainment is her entire purpose in life. In spite of their opposite feelings, Queen also wants to open more Dark Fountains in order to expand the scope of her personal Dark World, apparently after having watched the Knight make the first one. What she does not know is what such an act would eventually lead to.

Queen is genuinely surprised when Ralsei reveals the terror of the Roaring following their battle, and admits she just wanted more Dark Worlds so she could expand her influence over Lightners by providing them with what they want. It might seem like a cop-out explanation, but remember, Queen is a machine. She can only make educated guesses based on what information is available to her, as we see in Kris and Susie’s “perfect” rooms in her castle full of confusing search inquiries. Obviously, no information about the Dark World, Fountains, or the creation thereof would be available to her, so she was just extrapolating based on what little she had observed when the Knight made the library fountain.

3 Asgore and Toriel at Sans’s Store

He’s Desperate

While Kris and Susie are bumming around town in Chapter 4, you can enter Sans’s newly-opened… grocery store, I guess? Whatever it’s supposed to be. Anyway, while they’re there, they happen to overhear Sans chatting with Toriel, and it’s a pleasant conversation, at least until Asgore suddenly interjects with a poorly-timed pun and awkward attempt at reconciliation with Toriel. Unsurprisingly, she’s not having it, and the whole thing reads like another awkward Asgore moment.

With the context of Chapter 5, though, we know it’s not just a matter of Asgore being a bumbling dope of an ex-husband. He is genuinely, sincerely desperate to get back what he lost after that mysterious incident way back when. The entire reason he’s been pursuing his investigation of the Dark World all these years is so he can prove he was right and win back Toriel and his family. While he’s decent at hiding it, Asgore isn’t in the best state of mind, and sometimes that manifests as these aggressively awkward moments with Toriel.

2 Toriel and Sans’s Little Party

A Lapse in Judgment

At the end of Chapter 4, after realizing that Toriel wasn’t in the church when the Dark World was formed, Kris and Susie return to Kris’s house to find Toriel and Sans getting drunk and dancing the night away. It’s awkward and kind of upsetting, to the point that Susie doesn’t even want to hang around anymore, and I distinctly remember a lot of discussion after Chapter 4 released decrying Toriel as a bad parent for not being worried about Kris. As is often the case, though, it seems we were missing some information.

At the start of Chapter 5, while Toriel is recovering from her hangover on the couch, she reveals that she actually was worried that Kris wasn’t home when she returned, and confused that they didn’t use their hidden spare key to get into the house (not knowing that we, as the SOUL, didn’t know about that key and couldn’t use it). Apparently, she tried to call Kris’s phone, which didn’t work in the Dark World, and was about to go looking for them, but Sans told her she saw them hanging out with Susie and figured it’d be okay to leave them be for the day. Still doesn’t really excuse keeping Kris up all night with the music, though…

1 Spamton’s References to Tenna

And Vice Versa

While talking to Spamton in his shop in Chapter 2, you can bring up the subject of being friends. Spamton, in his own disjointed way, says he doesn’t need any friends, specifically name-dropping Mike, who we later know as Tenna’s unseen assistant. He contemplates for a moment, then insists Kris not believe anything he sees on TV. This, of course, is an allusion to Tenna, and the entire relationship the two had before the game’s events.

Through some flavor text and Tenna’s own musings on the matter in Chapter 3, we learned that, after getting very successful with the help of an unknown consultant, Spamton entered a partnership with Tenna. Spamton wanted to get on TV and hit it big with commercials, and Tenna wanted to learn how to use tech to broaden his influence. The two were supposed to sign some kind of contract, but Spamton received a frightening phone call during the signing and ran out, with his entire business collapsing shortly afterward. Not only was this the inciting incident in both Tenna and Spamton’s intense loneliness, but it carries an interesting implication: whatever Spamton knew about being “big,” his consultant didn’t want him sharing it around.