Being evil is a complicated thing—in video games, at least. Not all players, or studios, have the stomach for it: For allowing the freedom of choice inherent to gaming to extend into making bad choices. Or at least cruel ones, since being a villain in a video game game can often come with plenty of benefits. (Traditionally focused on short-term gain, but there are plenty of games out there that have made a casual, pragmatic pursuit of evil a long-term growth strategy, in all defiance of how the ever-fair-and-just real world actually operates.) And not all “evil routes” in video games are created equal—or equally plausible.
Take 2015’s Undertale, a game where its “evil route” is so decidedly unsubtle that it’s frequently referred to as the “Genocide Route” by fans. And not for no reason, as the path sees the player systematically kill an entire world full of odd, weird, funny monsters that they damn well know they could have spared or befriended instead. As a comment by creator Toby Fox on gamer mentality, completionist mindsets, and power fantasies, the idea basically works—not least of which because it provides tangible benefits for a certain kind of player, in the form of the game’s best boss fight (and its best boss fight music). But as an actual moral lesson, “Don’t kill literally everybody you meet” is a fairly low bar to clear, and not hugely applicable to modern life. (Note: This column was written in December of 2025; if you’re reading this in the future, fingers crossed that the previous sentence doesn’t feel absolutely revolutionary.)
Fox’s follow-up game, Deltarune, is an altogether different beast. When players first started playing the serialized title back in 2018, an “evil” playthrough wasn’t even possible, as the game—set in an alternate universe version of Undertale‘s—made a repeated point of how little control the player actually had over the narrative outcome of its first chapter. (Culminating in the reveal that you weren’t even playing as Kris, the supposed player character, but a little floating heart hidden inside them called the SOUL.) Spare or kill, be kind or cruel, but Deltarune was intent on funneling you toward the same place, in an apparent rejection of the earlier game’s core ethos.
Things shifted in 2021, though, when Fox and his rapidly growing team released Deltarune: Chapter 2. Industrious players discovered that, although the game’s surface-level narrative remained fairly light, and the choices they could impose on Kris still firmly on rails, said protections were lax around some of the game’s party members. Specifically around a character named Noelle, a young reindeer with frost magic, who, players discovered, they could coerce into not just dispersing enemies with violence, as usual, but literally freezing their bodies solid.
If Deltarune‘s “Weird Route”—a name adopted from references to it found in the game’s files by fans sniffing around for secrets—was just about finding a workaround to the usual rules around not killing people, it’d just be a retread of Undertale‘s Genocide Route, except at a slight remove. Instead, though, the path is focused less on body count than on a sort of twisted romance that develops between Noelle—who’s normally fixated on the party’s good-hearted “bad girl,” Susie—and the player, who must take on the role of a domineering, possessive, controlling partner in order to proceed, all while repeatedly telling Noelle that everything that’s happening (freezing people with her magic, contemplating murder, and ultimately being coerced into casting a spell listed as “fatal” on a long-time friend) is simply in service of making her “stronger.” The evils it traffics in aren’t the slightly cartoonish kill-’em-all theatrics of Undertale, but something the game’s player base is much more likely to have actually encountered in the real world: A “loved one” swearing that everything awful they’re doing to/for them is simply for their own good.
The game’s most recent chapters, released earlier this year—and earning Deltarune a spot on our list of the best games of 2025—ease off on this darkness at first, with Chapter 3 only alluding to it in subtle ways. But Chapter 4, released at the same time, not only involves double-downing on the corruption of Noelle, but emphasizing that it is the SOUL (i.e., the player) choosing to do all this ugly, manipulative stuff. Indeed, the big Weird Route scene of the chapter includes Noelle revealing that Kris, outside the player’s control, apparently visited her in an attempt to undo some of the damage already done, trying to laugh off the previous manipulations as a prank. Kris all but begs the player—who, the rest of the chapter, on either route, reveals, they seem to hate and oppose—not to go through with the next steps of their plan, throwing up dialogue choices that allow you to buy into the “prank” lie. But if you want to seize control of the narrative for yourself, the only choice is to proceed—causing the game to show a cracking design on the screen suggesting that something precious and irreplaceable is beginning to shatter.
Evil routes in video games often focus on material damage: Wealth stolen, lives taken, etc. Deltarune‘s isn’t like that. It focuses, if you’ll excuse the pun, on the evils of the heart, on cruelties that can happen so invisibly that no one else will even know their world has been shifted onto a “weirder” route. Fox’s work has always had a kernel of horror embedded underneath all the puns, the memes, the riffs on classic RPG conventions that it uses as its surface armor. Deltarune is a more mature game than Undertale in almost every regard; its taste for malice, turns out, has matured right along with the rest.
