Banger piece of Chapter 3 analysis and metaphysics of Deltarune:
Quoting most important parts:
"The parallels between the game of DELTARUNE and the experience of the Dark Worlds have been obvious to most since at least Chapter 2, but what makes Chapter 3 so interesting is that it introduces yet another layer to this recursive analogy.
- Today's "GAME" SHOW will be... A VIRTUAL ADVENTURE THROUGH TV DESERT!
- Each of you will use our CUTTING EDGE, PROPRIETARY CONTROLLER PADS...
- To control FANTASY VERSIONS OF YOURSELF in a world so REAL, you'll forget IT'S NOT!
Indeed, the bulk of the Chapter takes place in these fictional video game "boards". You could say we're "three layers" deep in fictional worlds. And yet, what makes these boards stand out in comparison to something like the Dark Worlds, as well as pre-Chapter 3 speculation about hypothesized "darker than dark worlds", is how clearly established from the beginning these are as
fake worlds - even if Tenna says that you'll forget they're not. We always see our heroes on screen with controllers in hand, literally framing the action visually as artificial and second-order. Unlike the Dark Worlds - whose artificiality are initially treated with a sort of "wink, wink, nudge nudge" attitude (this one's for the Media Literacy Understanders!) - Chapter 3 takes pains to firmly establish a clear division between the comparative reality of the Dark World, and the obvious unreality of the boards.
All the more interesting, then, that the presentation of the boards evolve in the opposite direction to the presentation of the Dark Worlds up until Chapter 3; whereas Deltarune has become more and more explicit about the artificial, contingent nature of the Dark Worlds, Chapter 3 progressively complicates this division in the boards between "the real" and "the fake" which seemed so clean and simple to begin with. As Kris (and you) go through the first board of MANTLE - which pushes the player into an imitation of Undertale's Genocide Route, where every enemy needs to be killed for your player avatar to become maximally strong - solace is taken in the fact that none of this is "real" and that you (and Kris) aren't truly responsible for anything that happens within this game; even if there is a spooky disembodied voice asking if you're having fun... But come Board 2, you may find an in-game avatar of Tenna, hidden off in one of the rooms, seemingly having escaped into MANTLE for a place to air out his anxieties in private. Is that really Tenna? Is that someone else playing as Tenna? Is that some sort of imitation of him spontaneously generated by the game? What is happening here, exactly? Progress further into the ICE PALACE, and things become more disquietingly real. You meet Noelle in the guise of the "White Cloak". You use her to open a door visually alluding to the often referenced headband Kris used to wear, and speak to that mysterious voice again before it grants you the Shelter Key. When I played this moment for this first time, a shock ran through my body and I briefly thought I had just gotten the actual key to the Shelter in the Light World - I had forgotten that this was all just "fake". Come next board, you're not just killing random enemies - you are (Kris is) killing digital representations of your (Kris's) friends. You go through a final dungeon, reminiscent of Queen's Mansion in Chapter 2 and possibly alluding to the site of some traumatic event in Kris's past, and after you cut down some Hometown-looking trees, you enter a digital recreation of the Shelter, fight the Shadow Mantle (with your "real" SOUL taking "real" damage), before your (second) player avatar simply exits the screen, causing Kris to drop the controller, terrified.
The boundaries are shattered at this point; it is clear as day that the divide is illusory. This is all a Dark World. None of this is real. All of this is real.
Going into Chapter 3, it felt like the obvious thematic conclusion that the Dark Worlds werent truly real - they only appeared as such. Ralsei articulates this sensible perspective at the start of the Chapter. And yet the question the game actually seems much more interested in, especially with the coming of 3 and 4, is: what if they are real?
Light and Dark seemed like such fixed boundaries to us. Until the horror monster appeared on screen, killed the personification of "escapism" itself, and kidnapped a real person into the real shelter. Until the mystical fantasy prophecy was actually revealed to be the basis of the mundane suburbia's local religion all along. Until the game-logic of "equipping items" is forcibly imposed on Noelle in the real world. Until the Titan - bred from the deepest dark - appeared as an angel of light."
"Grey, hissing static - and endless, empty strings of zeroes. At bottom, it's all dark. There is no reality or fantasy and certainly no hard separation between the two - there is only DELTARUNE. This world and its illusory boundaries are artificially constructed. It's what the Secret Bosses came to realize. And our heroes are marching, chapter by chapter, towards a confrontation with that inevitable truth. ".
Full is here: