Buckle up, everyone, and don’t hit any bananas. We’re less than two weeks out from Deltarune Chapter 5, and it looks like 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 able to solve it and the rest of us left alone in the dark.
The groundwork for Deltarune‘s ARG was initially laid way back in 2022, but it didn’t really kick off until last year. The actual, in-depth explanations for what’s going on are pretty convoluted and require some spoiler-heavy knowledge of happenings not just in Deltarune itself, but in its deeply upsetting “Weird Route” and adjacent lore, so I won’t go down that rabbit hole today. I wrote about it earlier this year in greater detail, and there are plenty of good lore videos explaining what’s going on if you’re interested:
The short version is that a mysterious, hidden page popped up on the Deltarune website in May of 2025 with two blanks, a button, and a question: “How long did it take her to smile?” Deltarune fans quickly managed to put together at least a semblance of what the page wanted: the “her” is Noelle, a main character in Deltarune at the center of the aforementioned “Weird Route,” and the two blanks were for someone to input their email and an answer to the question, submitted by hitting the button. Those who managed to get an email and a numerical answer in during the brief window the website was open received a weird, blank confirmation email shortly after, followed by months of silence.
In November of last year, the website opened again with the same blanks and question. This time, the community was ready, and began inputting all sorts of responses ranging from numbers to concepts like “Never.” This time, those who managed to get in something like a reasonable answer received back an email repeating their answer and offering a “hint” of sorts, 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 answer,” but no further instructions as to 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 once again with a brand new question and three more blanks: Where will it take place?
As before, the page was only open for a day before closing again, and here’s where things get tricky: it looks like only people who received “Move forward with this answer” emails earlier will actually receive meaningful responses from this website. The reason people think this is because of the current text displayed on the ARG site:
Available entrants: 1,571
Total received: 1,229
Next correspondence: When less than 24 hours are left.
Fans are interpreting this to mean that there were 1,571 people originally told to “Move forward” with their last answers, and of that number, 1,229 actually submitted a response this time during the period the form was open. As for the final sentence, the consensus is that these new emails will come through 24 hours before Chapter 5 releases, which developer Toby Fox has revealed will happen at precisely 11 am ET on June 24.
What does it all mean? Who knows! Plenty of people have theories ranging from the plausible to the overcomplicated, and you can easily find videos and posts on them if you like, though it seems like only 1,229 people are even eligible to solve whatever’s going on here. Also, just to be clear: for the vast majority of people playing Deltarune, none of this matters. This is sicko stuff. Deltarune is an incredible game even if you don’t get into all its wild hidden lore; I think it’s worth playing just for the surface-level story of friendship and hope, and I don’t see any reason why future chapters are going to betray that by forcing you to know something about a weird ARG that only 1,229 people have access to.
And yet, I’m kinda loving watching the roller coaster here because of its seeming close ties to one of Deltarune‘s biggest themes: what free will in a game means, and who truly has it. Much of the main plot of Deltarune‘s first four chapters has hovered around the idea of a “prophecy,” and a lot of the critical character development going on involves questions about free will, both in a general sense and also in a very video-gamey sense for the protagonist Kris and us, the player controlling them. The game’s been hinting for a while that the ultimate conclusion of fulfilling the “prophecy” to the letter is going to be bad in some way, and we may want to deviate from it. However, the only way to deviate that we’ve seen so far is by taking Deltarune‘s disturbing “Weird” route, which involves the player choosing to harm and traumatize multiple characters, something that seems to fly directly in the face of what Fox established in his previous work, Undertale.
In a similar way to how I recently enjoyed both Titanium Court and the ending of Mina the Hollower, here I’m really intrigued by the metanarrative of forcing players to ask themselves what they’re willing to do in a video game to achieve a perceived “good” ending, and what a “good” ending really means. I don’t think this ARG is going to be required to pick up on that layer of the story, but I do think it’s tied to it, and for people like me who are following along closely as each chapter releases, this is a really clever way to keep our brains spinning while we wait.
So if you’re one of those 1,229 people, hold tight and maybe join a community Discord…before the sun goes down.
