pretty sure i figured deltarune out lol
the whole thing's a simulation of how growing up playing video games changed Toby as a person for the better; taught him a certain outlook on life and changed his way of thinking. deltarune is an attempt to share that experience with as many people as possible. it's going to be a statement about the educational and narrative potential of video games, basically.
it's evolving, both narratively and mechanically with each passing chapter. number 1 was preschool-level board games and simple good vs evil morality with a big bad stubborn dude at the end. number 7's probably gonna be cutting edge technological fireworks with some kind of post-modern meta-analysis literary mumbo jumbo. it's basically an educational game lol, just not stopping at the preschooler level of teaching basic math and history like most educational games, but showing you the merit of a certain completely serious and adult way of thinking through a web of game mechanics. it maybe feels like i'm dancing around the topic here, but this kind of stuff is nigh-impossible to put into words, right? that's why you make a game about it, not write a book.
i also think that this revalation about the higher meaning if deltarune was meant to be realized by tons of people with similar enough video-games-growing-up-experience to me and toby right now by playing chapter 5, but psy-opped out of public discussion by the way of how many new cutting-edge radical surface-level narrative and gameplay doohickeys it introduces to get distracted by xd no one wants to talk about narrative structure rn did u see how insanely good the animation on the Flowery bossfight is?!?? he is fucking winning irl he is distracting the fandom from thinking about the actual story of deltarune with how cool he is
there are a ton of lore implications with this realisation, but i already probably wrote too much so maybe i'll stop here. feel free to either roast or ask me anything in the comments for more context