#have some helpful hints and immediate visual indicators you don't need to kill literally everything in the area to see!

[acerikus]

It's still wild to me that ppl are insisting the weird/snowgrave route is harder to discover or stumble upon than in undertale. Sure, your triggering of it in deltarune is more likely to be intentional whereas in undertale someone could easily just get caught up in level grinding, but... It's a pretty simple route to figure out without any kind of guide or spoiler.

Most people playing have played undertale before and know exactly what that provided, so ofc naturally people would try to push deltarune to its limits too - sure in chapter 1 you couldn't really kill anything, but no mercy'ing it still provided an alt ending to the board game world where everyone hated the fun gang and had to escape as quickly as possible.

Personally, I was curious to see if the same would happen with chapter 2 - especially since berdly gathers everyone you recruited to add to the thrash machine mech. So you start a simple no mercy - but huh, Noelle's attack sure sucks, huh.

Maybe you get tired of seeing her do so little damage and you've gathered a little tp - so why not see how much her magic attack does? You've probably already dealt enough damage at this point for IceShock to finish off what you were fighting, and are caught off guard by the 'frozen' status. 'cool,' you think 'there's status effects in this game.'

Except you exit the battle and the enemy is frozen solid in front of you, and the narrator even mentions this if you interact with the frozen enemy. Huh. You played undertale, you know what the game changing means. You just found the hidden murder route.

You leave the area when exploring, and return to see the enemy is still frozen, but placed somewhere else now, almost like they're on display. You're onto something. However, after killing more things normally and not realising you had to backtrack, the frozen bodies are gone and you may have even heard a small ding. An indicator.

You reset and try to see if you can freeze them ALL. Maybe they they'll stay, and the indicator will keep getting lower. You figure it out.

Deltarune gives you a LOT of ways out of the murder route compared to undertale, but combine the above with lancer's 'can we make them a bad guy?', Noelle expressing regret if you try to backtrack, spamton insisting you should've started killing sooner so you could've got his ring if you kill him in his neutral fight, the way you can force noelle to 'proceed' in the same terrifying way with the first puzzle even if you're pacifist and the occasional ding to tell you if you're furthering the route/if you've accidentally aborted it... Yeah, this game is much more upfront about it being possible.

(not to mention the way some guides make it seem more complicated than it is - the 'noelle will ride with me' option isn't needed at all - I did the route mostly blind and selected 'susie wouldn't' lol. The only thing I can think that could be a struggle is realising you gotta get the thorn ring from spamton - I was confused about why I had snowgrave but it had 200tp.)