10 Deltarune Secrets That Players Often Miss During Their First Playthrough

2 hours ago 1

Published Jul 2, 2026, 1:44 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 swiftly learned about Toby Fox after playing Undertale is that he and his dev team have an almost supernatural skill for hiding secret bits in every nook and cranny of their games. It’s not just a matter of hidden stuff, it’s the kind of secrets you, in all likelihood, wouldn’t even find if you didn’t already know about them. Naturally, Deltarune is positively lousy with these as well.

Deltarune: How To Recruit Everyone

When your friends are you power, it helps to know an army.

Deltarune is bursting at the seams with little incidental fun bits, jokey cameos, useful perks and items, and even entire secret bosses and story routes that, for the most part, are heavily obfuscated at best and borderline invisible at worst, made all the more tricky by the game’s linear chapter-based structure. Because of this, if you’re playing the game completely blind and don’t have either a friend or a streaming audience backseating you, there is a very real chance you’ll miss details that, while not necessarily plot-mandatory, may leave you out of the loop on certain gameplay techniques or popular memes. We’d be here all day if we tried to cover all of them, so here’s a selection of both minor and major missable secrets.

Spoilers for Deltarune chapters 1-5 ahead!

10 Top Chef and the Spin Cake

Free Pastries for Life

Midway through Chapter 1, Kris and Ralsei encounter Top Chef, a spinning, golden chef guy with a very exaggerated Italian accent. He baked a lovely cake, and then Susie walked by and ate it so hard, it was left as a smoldering crater. This just seems like a sight gag at first, but you can actually take the “broken” cake off the table and, later on, bring it to Malius the smith, who can repair it for you. If you bring the repaired Top Cake back to Top Chef before you progress the story too far, he’ll give you a free Spin Cake recovery item, as well as offer to make you another if it’s lost or used.

The interesting part of this is that the Spin Cake offer isn’t one-time. In subsequent chapters, Top Chef becomes a regular resident of your Castle Town. If you’ve used or lost your Spin Cake, and don’t currently have it in your Storage, Top Chef will keep on replacing it for you at no cost. It’s a nice way to get a free recovery item, though starting in Chapter 4, asking for a new cake will have him offhandedly comment that “Lightners only want one thing, and it’s disgusting.”

9 Eating Moss

Eat Your Greens

Unless it’s like, growing on outdoor wooden furniture, I don’t typically pay any mind to moss. Why would you? It’s moss, it’s one of the most innocuous things in nature. Apparently, though, when Kris (or the SOUL, maybe) sees moss, they’re very first inclination is to eat it. No idea why, but it’s something the game actually keeps track of.

Starting from Kris and Ralsei’s imprisonment in Chapter 1, where there’s a patch of moss growing in the corner, you can observe any patch of moss you come across throughout the game and choose to consume it. Doing so refills Kris’s health, which is quasi-useful, but it also affects the title displayed on Kris’s status screen, alongside the choices you make and the route you’re on. The more moss you eat, the fancier Kris’s title becomes, and in the specific case of the PlayStation version of the game, you also get achievements for this. All of this is tracked in your save file, too, so you can go back to previous chapters and eat all the moss your little heart desires.

8 Starwalker

The Original Starwalker

Besides coming up with obtuse secrets, it seems Toby Fox also has a talent for coming up with throwaway characters that manage to be endearing despite themselves. There are plenty of examples of this throughout Deltarune, though one of the most popular and heavily memed is Starwalker. Oh, sorry, I mean “The Original Starwalker,” formatting included.

Starwalker is an easily-missable NPC who first appears in Chapter 1 on the path where the party is attacked by the Starwalker Bird. Normally, you’d have no particular reason to backtrack along this path after ringing the bell, but if you do, you’ll encounter Starwalker on the other side, who remarks, “these birds are pissing me off,” and stresses that he is the original. If you go through this initial encounter, Starwalker will begin appearing at multiple points in subsequent chapters, such as randomly joining your giant robot in Chapter 2, showing up backstage at a few points in Chapter 3, appearing as a statue in Chapter 4, and appearing as the all-powerful “Final Starwalker” in Chapter 5. None of this has any practical application, but I always appreciate a good running bit.

7 Annoying Dog Cameos

Dang it, Toby

If Toby Fox ever wants to make an appearance in one of his games, he usually does it in the form of the Annoying Dog. First appearing in Undertale, the Annoying Dog appears throughout Deltarune in a variety of cameos, easter eggs, and sight gags, though most of them are hidden in extremely out-of-the-way pockets of the map that you would only stumble upon if you’re being very thorough.

Some of my favorite Annoying Dog cameos include one in Chapter 2, where walking down a certain empty alleyway sees the Dog drive by in a Little Tykes Cozy Coupe toy car and kill you instantly, and one in Chapter 4, where attempting to play the melody to MEGALOVANIA has the Dog drive by and kill you again. Interestingly, some of these cameos actually do reward you with an item, a DogDollar, which, according to its description, decreases in value with each subsequent chapter. It can also be synthesized into the DogWidow armor, which causes you to drop 90% of your money after every battle. How… helpful?

6 The Original Game

Let’s Have Some Real Fun

During Chapter 3, you receive ranks for how well you do in each level of Tenna’s little game, with the highest S-rank giving you access to the exclusive (and rather shabby) back area of the green room between boards. Back here, you can find the green room shopkeeper, Ramb, who offers to let you play the “original” version of Tenna’s game, if in a somewhat cryptic and overly-familiar manner.

The Original Game, also known as the Sword Route, is a mini-game with three levels stretched out over the course of Chapter 3, in which you wield a sword in a top-down view Legend of Zelda-style and kill enemies to get stronger. It’s rather creepy, and Kris clearly doesn’t like you playing it, but doing so, alongside defeating the Original Game’s boss, is the only way to obtain the secret Shadow Mantle armor, which is required for a completely different secret we’ll get to later.

5 The Mikes

Testing, Testing, One, Two

Throughout Chapter 3, while Tenna is doing all his TV show hosting shtick, he regularly calls upon someone named Mike backstage. Presumably, Mike is his stage assistant, but throughout the entirety of Chapter 3, we never actually see him, and he apparently quits the show alongside everyone else near the end. In Chapter 4, if you return to Castle Town after attending church, you can find a new TV station area with a door labeled “MIKE” on it, but it’s locked with a four-digit code, which you can only get by clearing the chapter and then coming back.

Within this locked room is a special area that’s navigated differently depending on the platform you’re playing the game on. On PC, for example, you need to connect a microphone and move a Maus with your voice, while on Switch 2, you use the Joy-Con 2s’ mouse controls. Either way, within this area, you’ll finally meet Mike… and then another Mike. And then another Mike. Apparently, these are three completely unrelated Darkners who had been independently serving the role of “Mike” for Tenna, but none of them have ever actually met the real Mike, and they’re not sure Tenna has either.

4 The Donation Fountain

Both Sides of the Fountain

In the first Dark World of Chapter 4, the Dark Sanctuary, there’s a distinctive room with a large waterfall fountain, with a sign nearby giving a cryptic message telling you that you should donate some cash. Throwing some money into the fountain will open up a secret passageway leading to a maze with part of the solution to the golden piano puzzle, and you’d probably assume that was all there was to it. That is not, in fact, all there was to it.

You only need to donate a dollar to open the fountain, but you can actually donate as much as you want in intervals of 10. This might seem meaningless at first, but much later in the chapter, when you enter the 2nd Sanctuary, you can find another fountain that has apparently been receiving your donations. Depending on how much money you donated, the nearby NPC will offer up some different dialogue, and the chest in the room will contain a different reward. Interestingly, if you donate over 9,999 dollars, you’ll get a unique armor item, the Gold Widow, which boosts most of your stats but reduces the amount of money you make. I guess you don’t really need more money if you’re dropping that kind of cash.

3 The Shadow Crystal Bosses

The Air Crackles with Freedom

The most prominent secrets of Deltarune, and the ones you’re most likely to hear about through simple discussion and cultural osmosis, are the Shadow Crystal bosses. Chapters 1 through 5 each have a secret optional superboss fight that can only be unlocked by completing some manner of obscure roundabout sidequest, some of which are even more obscure than others. These fights are downright punishing, but if you can beat them, you’ll receive a strong piece of equipment, as well as a Shadow Crystal, the purposes of which are currently unknown.

In Chapter 1, finding the key to the mysterious jail cell beneath Card Castle will allow you to fight the cackling Jevil. In Chapter 2, going along with Spamton’s incredibly sketchy plan has you fight him as the powered-up Spamton NEO. In Chapter 4, opening the passage behind Gerson’s fireplace lets you fight him in his prime as the Hammer of Justice. In Chapter 5, finding enough pink coins to buy the Mystery Key and open the pink door lets you fight Pink, a Lightner ghost possessing an anime figure. The exception to all of this is Chapter 3’s secret boss, the Knight, who you always fight in the main story, but is borderline impossible to defeat without the Shadow Mantle from the Original Game.

2 The Forgotten Man

Offers You an Egg in these Trying Times

Even if you make a habit of searching levels thoroughly and backtracking in each chapter, odds are good that there is still one secret that you will almost certainly miss out on if you don’t know where to look: that of the Forgotten Man. Every chapter has an appearance by this mysterious individual, a man hidden behind an oddly-placed tree who offers up some extremely cryptic exposition before offering you an Egg to “remember him by.”

Each of the Forgotten Man’s hiding spots require exceptionally extensive detective work to find, not to mention sheer blind luck, as his rooms’ appearances are partially determined by random chance. I genuinely didn’t even know about the Forgotten Man’s existence until after the release of Chapter 4. That’s how obscure he is. As of now, nobody knows who this guy is or what his deal is. If you asked most theorycrafters, they’d probably say he’s W.D. Gaster or something, but then again, pretty much any unknown factor in Undertale or Deltarune is usually attributed to Gaster.

1 The Weird Route

Maybe Don’t, Actually?

Arguably the most infamous part of Undertale’s enduring presence in gaming consciousness is its hidden Genocide Route, in which you have to go severely out of your way to completely and utterly destroy each and every monster in the game to earn its worst possible ending. Deltarune doesn’t have a Genocide Route, but it does have another very obtuse story route, one that is less horrible than the Genocide Route in some ways, and so, so much worse in others.

Deltarune’s Weird Route, also known as the Snowgrave Route, can only be started once Noelle joins your party in Chapter 2. Rather than just murdering every enemy you encounter yourself, you specifically have to goad Noelle into doing it with her ice magic, as well as obtain a special, very expensive piece of equipment to make her stronger. This has… rippling consequences, to put it mildly, ultimately culminating in some very upsetting scenes in Chapters 4 and 5. Like, seriously, if you have any hangups about themes of abuse, manipulation, or self-harm, don’t even watch it on YouTube.