Maze Theory: Deltarune, Free Will, and the Garden of Forking Paths [WIP-ish}

Note: This is currently only a rough draft that I decided to publish because I was losing motivation to work on it. I might (probably won't) clean it up later. This doesn’t live up to my previous post on the rules for good Deltarune theories.  However, I recently looked at the state of Stranger Things diehards, and I think that in retrospect I am too harsh on Deltarune theorists. Also, SPOILERS for Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Garden of Forking Paths.” 

Mazes are of interest in Deltarune because they offer choice, and can represent being lost and in need of an end that one does not know the way to. This is clearly important to Deltarune, which seems set up to subvert or at least discuss the idea that “your choices don’t matter.” The themes of fate, prophecy, and trying to find another ending as branching from the root of the question of free will are very prominently highlighted in Chapter four. To begin our analysis, let’s collate all occurrences of mazes in each chapter. 

Chapter 1: 
The only maze is the one in the forest. It’s likely irrelevant, but you are meant to go down the path Susie does not go down… because Susie is wrong? But that’s almost certainly overthinking it. 

(Image cropped from map in https://deltarune.wiki/w/Forest) 

Chapter 2: 

(image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOZBqQF3fIo)

This maze scene only happens in the Weird Route. You can walk through the walls of pipis through patience and fighting. I don’t really think there’s much to take away from it, other than a punishment for doing the Weird Route reminiscent of Undertale’s No Mercy grinding, unless you want to make something out of being able to walk through the pipis. 

Chapter 3: 

(image from https://thegameslayer.com/guides/how-to-get-shadow-mantle-in-deltarune/  )

This is the maze from the Sword Route’s second board, which if you’ve played the game you will probably remember. Noelle also mentions this on her blog in the sweepstakes, and being able to find the door without the white cloak, likely because she is(?) the white cloak and is capable of finding video game glitches in any case. 
I’m unsure how important Roots theory—the theory that the Sword Route represents the Weird Route and the layout of board 3 on the sword route represents hometown—makes this. Weird route softlock unless we do something to get Noelle? General softlock on progress without Noelle that can only be defeated via weird route?

(images from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiyKLmIBCKM )

There is also the maze that you get to by putting 1225 points into the gacha machine in Ch3. 

Note that after you make the payment, the room turns blue before you walk into the gaping black void of the gacha machine, as if it has gotten colder. Susie and Ralsei disappear, much like for the egg cutscenes, weird route, and sword route. The stars also disappear and stop sparkling, presumably because that would be movement. “You thought you saw Undyne frozen in ice” much?

(Image from https://deltarune.wiki/w/Gacharoom_unknown) 
This is the layout from the gamefiles of the maze. Note the gumball machine can be reached by following the red path without straying over the lines. The maze overlaps itself and is infinitely tesselated, but you can walk over the boundaries.

One could argue that this is a visual metaphor for the state of the game; we are wandering a maze, looking for Dess—well, probably looking for Dess—and there is no way out except to find her, which makes us exit the maze entirely. We can cross out of bounds (which might represent doing secret boss/egg man/weird route things) and are only nominally constrained, but we don’t need to stray from the path to find the objective. Note that the gumball machine is only place of interest and there is no exit to the maze. 
I saw a maze a little like this as a child, although I can’t find an image of it now. It had a beginning, and a nominal end, and it stretched off the pages it was printed on. There was no path from the beginning to the end (I checked the answer to the puzzle in the back of the book) but there was a unicorn that could be reached from the start. This, together with Toby Fox’s statement that “there is something more important than reaching an end” makes me think that there might be some method to contact Dess that might not necessarily happen at the end, but will instead be hidden in the game itself. 

Chapter 4: 
The first standout is the repeated use of mazes in the dark, where you must use the ring of bells to find your way. This serves as a mini-game.

(Images from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AttWezsgbYw)

Gerson accompanies the party for some of these mazes, in a sequence that starts with him claiming that he was following the prophecy “so closely that [he] couldn’t see where [he] was going.” Him breaking the prophecy reveals another path for the heroes to go down, giving them not only another way, but a choice. Gerson then misleads the party on the way to go, leading Susie to reject his choices and go another way. If Kris follows him, they will reach a dead end, and Gerson—who teleports offscreen much like how Sans did in Undertale—tells them that he likes going the wrong way because you “can get better ideas that way.”

 

(Images from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AttWezsgbYw)

Gerson asks you where you want to go, and is supportive of your choice regardless. Notice that Susie is an option (d’awww! They’re friends!) If you choose Further Left, then you can walk left and out of bounds. This leads to an empty chest, but Gerson says that even though the chest has nothing, at least you got exercise going down it. This makes your max HP increase by 1. It stands to reason this segment also supports the idea that there is something more important than reaching the end.

If the player is on the Weird Route, Gerson’s dialog leading up to the question is unchanged—meaning he still supports making ones own path—except for if you choose nowhere, at which point he gives Kris a pep-talk and references the world getting cold, saying that they will get through it. 
This is, so to speak, very, very, interesting. 
Revealingingly, the most recent newsletter says that Toby originally intended to have more nonlinearity.

 

(Text from https://toby.fangamer.com/newsletters/winter2025/)

Toby specifically highlights the game’s linearity and says that the difficulty of having a linear story with a nonlinear map would have weakened the Old Man’s implementation specifically. 

The Garden of Forking Paths:

Now, having analyzed the appearance of mazes in game, let’s do some comparative analysis: consider Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941). The short story is thematically connected to free will, and one of the ways it explores this is through a “labyrinth” that is not a physical labyrinth, but a book. This book is a labyrinth through which one navigates by reading the different chapters as different branches. It is a maze that traverses not space, but time. This may not be so revolutionary now, but remember that this was far before the first video games or CYOA books. We, as the player of Deltarune, with the ability to duplicate our saves, can be said to possess similar abilities. Consider the pre-Ch1 completion text “PREPARATIONS ARE COMPLETE” in the case of duplicating all files to be identical.

The theme of free will appears in various facets in the short story: the main character is fleeing a force he expects to catch him (the story is set during WW1) but is hesitant because he plans to do something illegal to aid the war effort. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, he is caught, and he commits the crime. He narrates the story after it has happened, another technique to perhaps diminish arguments for free will, and he muses if someone could use lack of free will to excuse their own crimes (this is before his crime is revealed). An example of the question of free will another character gives him from the labyrinth book is of a group of soldiers. In one timeline, the soldiers have a restful time, and they party. When they fight, they win the battle due to their high morale. In another timeline, the soldiers have to travel a long time over barren mountains. When they fight, they win the battle, because travelling in the mountains has kept them in shape. Do they have free will? Does what they did matter? Or would they have won regardless?

The old man’s association with mazes and his question seems to mirror the presentation of mazes in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” which is especially pertinent, given that Gerson is a writer, and Chapter 4 deals especially with questions of fate and free will. 

 

I think that this example is again pertinent to Deltarune, because of Toby Fox’s statements that there is something more important than reaching an end, and that there is only one ending to reach. It is not the end, it is the friends we meet and the road we take along the way. 

  

Deltarune is a maze, with only one exit. I propose that if we want to Find Her, we will have to look within the game itself.