Buckle up, everyone, and don’t punch bananas. Were less than two weeks from Deltarune Chapter 5and it seems the game’s ominous, multi-year ARG has once again opened and closed faster than any of us could blink, leaving exactly 1,229 people capable of solving it and the rest of us left alone in the dark.
The basics for Deltarune’s ARG was initially created in 2022, but it didn’t really take off until last year. The actual, in-depth explanations of what’s happening are quite convoluted and require extensive knowledge of events, not just in the world. Deltarune itself, but in its deeply affecting “Strange Road” and adjacent lore, so I won’t go down that rabbit hole today. I talked about it earlier this year in more detailand there are plenty of good videos explaining what’s going on if you’re interested:
The short version is that a mysterious and hidden page appeared on the Deltarune website in May 2025 with two blanks, a button and a question: “How long did it take him to smile?” Deltarune fans quickly managed to piece together at least a semblance of what the page wanted: the “she” is Noelle, a main character from Deltarune in the center of the aforementioned “strange road”, and the two spaces were intended to allow someone to enter their email and an answer to the question, submitted by pressing the button. Those who managed to get an email and digital response during the brief window the website was open received a strange blank confirmation email shortly after, followed by months of silence.
In November last year, the website reopened with the same blank spaces and questions. This time, the community was ready and started grabbing all kinds of answers from numbers to concepts like “Never.” This time, those who managed to get a reasonable response received an email repeating their answer and offering a sort of “clue,” cryptic lines like “So, ‘she never stopped smiling'” and “So, ‘Before the sun went down’.” These emails also contained the line “Move forward with this response,” but no further instructions on what that meant, and they were followed by another period of mysterious silence.
Then, following the announcement of Chapter 5, the ARG page was updated again with a brand new question and three additional spaces: Where will it take place?
As before, the page was only up for a day before closing again, and here’s where things get complicated: It appears that only people who received “Move forward with this response” emails earlier will actually receive meaningful responses from this website. The reason people think it’s because of current text displayed on the ARG website:
Available participants: 1,571
Total received: 1,229
Next connection: When less than 24 hours remain.
Fans interpret this to mean that there were 1,571 people initially asked to “move forward” with their latest responses, and of that number, 1,229 actually submitted a response this time around during the time the form was open. As for the last sentence, the consensus is that these new emails will arrive 24 hours before Chapter 5 releases, which developer Toby Fox said would happen at 11 a.m. ET on June 24.
What does all this mean? Who knows! Many people have theories ranging from the plausible to the complicated, and you can easily find videos and posts about them if you want, although it seems like only 1,229 people are eligible to solve what’s going on here. Also, just to be clear: for the vast majority of people who play Deltarunenone of that matters. It’s crazy stuff. Deltarune is an amazing game even if you don’t get into all of its hidden and wild story; I think it’s worth playing just for the surface-level story of friendship and hope, and I see no reason why future chapters would betray that by forcing you to know something about a weird ARG that only 1,229 people have access to.
And yet, I love watching the roller coasters here because of their seemingly close ties to one of the DeltaruneThe biggest themes of: what free will means in a game and who really has it. Much of the main plot of DeltaruneThe first four chapters of have revolved around the idea of a “prophecy”, and much of the ongoing critical character development involves questions about free will, both in a general sense and also in a very video game sense for the protagonist Kris and us, the player controlling them. The game has been hinting for some time that the ultimate conclusion of fulfilling the “prophecy” to the letter will be bad in some way, and we may want to move away from that. However, the only way to deviate that we have seen so far is to take Deltarune’s disturbing “bizarre” route, which involves the player choosing to hurt and traumatize multiple characters, something that seems to go directly against what Fox has established in his previous work, Undertale.
In the same way that I recently enjoyed both Titanium Court and the end of Mina la Hollowhere I’m really intrigued by the metanarrative of forcing players to ask themselves what they are willing to do in a video game to achieve a perceived “good” ending, and what a “good” ending actually means. I don’t think this ARG will be forced to pick up on that layer of the story, but I think it’s related to it, and for people like me who are closely following the release of each chapter, it’s a really clever way to keep our brains spinning while we wait.
So if you are one of these 1,229 people, hold on and maybe join a Discord community…before the sun sets.
