"It is here. No more planning, no more training, no more time. It. Is. Here. Appropriate firearm discipline is paramount to your survival: the Threat will not wait while you fumble rounds into your magazine, the Threat will not wait for you to slowly chamber a round, the Threat will not wait to kill you. Find the tapes, they are our only chance for survival. Be constantly vigilant, always assume the worst, and take no chances. The threat will insure anything can go wrong, will go wrong. Be ready for your firearm to jam, be ready for the glass beneath your feet to shatter, be ready for anything. Make no mistake that the full force of the Threat can and will overwhelm even the strongest of Receivers, so use any time you have to drill your firearm, and study your enemy. Your life depends on it. If you are hearing this, know you are one of the few, listen to the tapes, this is our last transmission. It. Is. He-[END TRANSMISSION]"

— Launch Trailer

Receiver 2 is the sequel to Receiver, once again developed by Wolfire Games. The game was released on April 14th, 2020, see the reveal trailer here.

The game, like the original, places the operation and mechanics of firearms center-stage as the focus of game-play. If you want to reload for example, you need to remove the magazine from the firearm, insert bullets into it, re-insert the magazine, and pull the slide to chamber a round.

And you have to do it all manually.

Pressing "R" does not automatically reload your gun with a cool animation. You have to do each step by yourself, while trying to avoid turrets and flying taser kill-drones that are coming after you.

Your objective is to navigate a string of metropolitan buildings and collect cassette tapes to prepare yourself against the Threat and become an awake Receiver.

The game features the same guns that were present in the original (Colt M1911A1, Smith & Wesson Model 10, and Glock 17 with aftermarket fire select), but also adds 6 new ones: the Colt Detective Special, SIG Sauer P226, Beretta 92FS, Desert Eagle, Hi-Point C-9, and Colt Single Action Army.

In March 2021, Wolfire released a major update which added the Compound to the game, which includes a shooting range, a "challenge dome" and a lot of secret areas, including an arcade cabinet that allows the player to play the first game's levels with this game's improved mechanics.

Receiver 2 contains examples of:

• Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
  • In Real Life, faulty ammo can be the source of catastrophic malfunctions. The Threat's commitment to enforcing Finagle's Law on you doesn't seem to extend to your ammo, presumably because a squib rendering your gun unusable for the rest of the level would be frustrating.
  • Turrets fire rifle rounds but drop ammo for your handgun when incapacitated.
    • However, the bullets dropped just seem to appear, while the rifle rounds are left behind implying your character (Or The Benefactors) are manifesting them.
  • You can break some glass panes by dashing into them, and you won't take any lasting damage.
  • You can walk, and even run on railings without having to balance yourself.
  • There are floating balloons which give at least one bullet each when popped, even when shot at distance.
• After the End: Several places in the city appear to have been abandoned or trashed as a result of the Mindkill.
• A.K.A.-47: Averted, all guns have their real-world names and designations (if they were used as service weapons).
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: The gun safety note specifically mentions that, for reasons that should be obvious, you should never use firearms while intoxicated. One Receiver didn't get the hint, and while she doesn't use her gun while drunk, she does write messages that wrongfully imply the Receivers are, in fact, Deceivers. This misleads a different Receiver to believe that the Threat is a benevolent entity, which the Threat immediately takes advantage of.
• All-or-Nothing Reloads: Just like in the original game, simply by the virtue of the gun operation mechanics, this is averted. Each step of the reloading process can be interrupted or partially completed, such as half-loading a magazine or revolver cylinder, or even chamber loading the semi-auto pistols.
• Always Night: Prior to Liminal, the Dreaming's sky is constantly dark.
• Ammunition Conservation: The number of rounds you have is strictly limited, so you must make an effort for each shot to be well-placed.
• Antepiece: The tutorial shows you how to sneak past, hack, and run past turrets, and a proto turret's exposed vitals allow players to learn how to shoot them. The only sleeping turret present is also unloaded.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • If you've already disabled a turret to the point where it is impossible for it to kill you, the Hacking Minigame on that turret becomes faster and impossible to fail.
  • You'll hear singing when in the proximity of tapes so that they're harder to miss.
  • If a turret has a bead on you and you're not looking at it, the edge of your screen closest to it glows yellow to give you a split second chance to react and blast it.
  • If the safety is on (on guns that have it) or the hammer is not cocked (in single-action semi-autos), the gun will be slightly but visibly skewed when aiming, letting you notice the problem and fix it.
• Arc Words: "This is the time we have prepared for."
• Art Evolution: The original game looked decent enough, but lacked textures in its environments and the city was pretty obviously a backdrop. This game features much more advanced lighting, gun models, and detailed environments.
• Balance Buff: One mechanic that was generally disliked from the original Receiver is that the player character was too prone to dying from Falling Damage, even if the height they fell was very short. This game makes the player character slightly more resistant to it, as falling shorter heights will now only injure you and cause you to stagger for a while.
• Blackout Basement: In Asleep, most of the lights are out. You will need the flashlight you start with.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!: Completing enough Compound challenges will unlock gold-plated magazines and guns for you to use there.
• Blown Across the Room: Taser drones, being extremely light, are prone to suffer this when shot. Gets especially ridiculous with the Desert Eagle, as shooting a drone may result in them flying 20 meters away, or even farther.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Following the rules of gun safety. Things like engaging the safety of your gun (if it has one) or simply slow holstering your gun whenever you don't need it aren't going to help you fight killdrones. However, practicing these extensively will ensure that you don't waste ammo or shoot yourself by accident.
  • Because turrets have limited ammo, it is possible to force them to run dry by repeatedly gaining one's attention and then hiding behind cover until its light flashes red without it firing. Doing so adds minutes to every level, exaggerating the Boring part, but such will also make them easier to complete.
  • The M1911 has a decent amount of power behind it (able to occasionally knock down turrets, along with having a decent amount of knockback against drones), benefits from a safety, has a light trigger pull, and can be fired rapidly. It may not have the high magazine capacity of the 9mm pistols (which you usually don't need), the simplicity of .38 revolvers, or the extreme power of the Colt SAA and Desert Eagle (the former being difficult to use and slow to fire, the latter being extremely punishing if you accidentally shoot yourself), but it's a reliable workhorse that strikes a midpoint between all of these guns.
• Cassette Craze: Receivers train with the help of these tapes, which are disconnected from the online media that the Threat has a strong grasp on.
• Cessation of Existence: It's theorised that, like the first game, anyone who was not Awake by the time of the Mindkill was obliviated, and the Threat is trying to knock down Receivers into giving up and getting Mindkilled.
• Cinematic Platform Game: The Player Character can't jump very high, can get injured or die by falling from heights, and dies in one hit from turret fire and shock drones.
• Company Cross-References: All of the arcade cabinets except for Polybius are of the developer's previous games.
• Concealment Equals Cover: Downplayed. Concrete and thick metal can stop bullets, but wood and drywall won't; if you use a particle board to dive for cover from a turret, you might just see its bullets pass straight through its wood and fly out the other side. This works in the opposite way too and you can blast enemies through thin surfaces with your own gun.
• Crash in Through the Ceiling: Two glass panes on each arcade's roof are broken, and it is possible to die by falling through one of them.
• Cue the Sun: In Awake, the sun is rising as you are starting to tear at the fabric of the Dreaming.
• Cult: The Receivers sure seem like this on a surface level — doing yoga, having secret messages to one another through tapes, training obsessively with firearms and distrusting the media. But deep down they actually do want to help people, shown when they turn around the lives of many once-suicidal folk, stress focus on strength of the self, and nonetheless frown upon competitive hierarchies — making them a subversion of traditionally cultish behavior.
• Cut and Paste Environments: Present, and discussed. One of the diskettes has someone comment that they don't think any of these buildings are real, exactly.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Defied. The game actively encourages you to drill your firearm's operation controls so that you can reload quickly and instinctively. It also has the same controls as the first Receiver, so any muscle memory should carry over if you played it. The game also has re-mappable controls, so you can adjust them to whatever suits you.
  • However, players of the original game who had sufficiently quick muscle memory when reloading semiautomatics may end up shooting themselves to death because of this game's added negligent discharge mechanic.
• Deconstruction Game: Even more so than the first game, Receiver 2 is a clear Take That! against Gun Porn and firearms-focused media, as well as tackling the relationship modern society has with guns. In media, guns are portrayed as easy-to-use death machines that operate on a point-and-shoot basis. In Receiver 2, guns are irritating and fussy pieces of equipment that require training, hand-eye coordination, and muscle memory to effectively use, and even then there are factors like ricochets and accidental discharges that make using them dangerous, just like how guns are in real life. The game also lampoons the fascination society has with guns, treating them more like status symbols and toys rather than the deadly weapons they really are. The entries on the Desert Eagle point out how the iconic gun is cool yet dangerous and expensive, while the Glock's lack of an external safety and full-auto feature turns what would be a useful weapon into a hazard for your health. At the same time, the game does reconstruct these tropes — guns are weapons, after all, and treating them with respect brings out their real effectiveness.
• Developer's Foresight: There's quite a bit of this, mostly revolving around the guns and drones, since those are the only two complex elements of the game.
  • It is entirely possible to play a "magazineless" run using automatics by manually chambering each round. You can do this by ejecting a magazine, dropping it or placing it in your inventory, and then pulling back the slide on your automatic and clicking in the slide lock. You can then press Z by default to load a round in the chamber and can fire it after closing the slide. This will not work with the Hi-Point C9, however, which, despite being breech-loadable has a mag safety, preventing the gun from firing with an empty magwell.
  • There are ways to circumvent the penalty mechanic for drawing your gun too fast and having it shoot you. For the automatics, you can keep the gun completely unloaded (which one of the tapes heavily pushes you towards) or empty it, place a full mag inside, and only rack the slide when you want to fire. For the revolvers, you can pop the cylinder open and holster it, preventing the trigger from even firing the bullet. The only aversion to this is the Single Action Army, whose cylinder cannot be popped out and can discharge if the hammer is resting on a live round, but even that can be circumvented either by half-cocking the hammer, or letting it rest on an empty chamber.
  • All enemy types have a surprising number of places to shoot, and each one causes the enemy to behave in a different way, even if it's not immediately disabling.
    • Glancing shots to shock drones can break off their bumpers, allowing an agile Receiver to lead them into walls and blow out the rotors. They're still capable of electrocuting you on the ground, unless your shot took out their taser or IR sensor.
    • Drones can also be split in half, with the battery and camera hanging by a lone cable. This both prevents them from seeing you effectively, and from flying straight should they catch a visual.
    • The IR sensor of turrets, the small component sticking out the top of the main gun, delays their firing if destroyed, while sleeping turrets never wake up if it's shot off, and drones cannot activate their tasers without them.
    • Turrets that see you at least once will chamber a round from their magazine. Shooting the magazine before they spot you means they will never fire, but shooting it after they see you means they still have a chance to kill you.
    • Lastly, turrets can also have their barrel bent out of alignment, so that even if it tries to fire on you, it'll waste its ammo into the wall or ground; and their legs can be bent or broken off entirely, toppling the turret and rendering it mostly harmless.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • The Desert Eagle's weight and recoil make follow-up shots very difficult, and a single negligent discharge with it will kill you. However, its .50 Action Express cartridge is the most powerful in the whole game and can pierce the armor of floor turrets.
  • The Colt Single Action Army is very slow to reload, requires manually cocking the hammer for every shot, has the standard 6-round capacity of revolvers, and decocking the hammer over a live round will make it fire in the holster the next time you fall a little too hard (to make it safe you instead need to half-cock the hammer). The awesome part is that its .45 Long Colt bullets hit almost as hard as .50 Action Express, meaning that if you take careful aim, one shot will almost always be enough to take down a killdrone. And of course, it's the Colt Single Action Army, the famous Cowboy revolver of the real-world Wild West and used by Gunslinger icons like The Man With No Name and Revolver Ocelot.
  • Undamaged taser drones can be hacked. Doing so is risky and requires you to lure each drone to where you can reach it from behind with no other dangers present, but it will save you many a bullet that shock drones don't give back to you, and it is especially useful in a pinch where you don't have any ammo at all.
• Dramatic Thunder: In Sleepwalker, lightning occasionally illuminates the environment, and thunder suddenly follows.
• Driven to Suicide: Sometimes, you will come across the tape of a suicidal Receiver who's about to do this. This is when the Threat Echo steps in and tries to force you to kill yourself.
• Embedded Precursor: The Compound's secret apartment includes a working arcade cabinet for the original Receiver that allows the player to play "Classic Mode", basically the original game's levels with the sequel's Killdrones, firearms, and player movement. Hacking, stoppages, holster discharges, and aim fatigue are disabled and turrets spawn with a round already chambered, emulating the feel of the original game.
• Fackler Scale of FPS Realism: This game is highly simulationist when it comes to its approach to realism. Reloading a gun is not a "press button, wait for animation" matter: each gun has a multiple-input reload process to memorize and execute every time you need new bullets. Magazines must have fresh rounds manually inserted into them before they can be loaded into a gun. Holstering a loaded gun can be dangerous to yourself unless you put it away carefully (simulated by holding the button instead of tapping it), activate the gun's safety, or make sure there aren't any live rounds in the chamber. Shooting causes your screen to blink from your character flinching, and aiming requires you to move your mouse to align the gun with wherever you want to shoot. Bullets can penetrate thin cover such as glass or wood, while being stopped by bulky terrain like brick or metal. Guns may jam and thus you'll need to know the buttons to fix them during potentially heated situations. This heavy emphasis on realism and simulation of every moving part within a gun is one of the main points of the experience.
• Falling Damage: Your character only has the knees of a real human. Dropping a couple yards will have you limping and barely able to move for a bit, and falling much farther than that will kill you outright. However, if a fall is at all survivable, then it remains consistently so, no matter how many times you break your ankles. It's also the only way to progress through certain paths or reach hidden collectibles. There's even a Receiver calling herself "the Mongoose" who leaves tips on "crazy drops" that are difficult but survivable.
  • An audio tape details why you hurt yourself so frequently when falling; after the mindkill, the Threat gained some control over probability. As a result, whenever you fall you always just happen to land badly.
• Fanning the Hammer: Cocking the hammer of a revolver is a separate input from pulling the trigger. As a result, you can hold the button for the latter while tapping the former to rapidly discharge all shots in a revolver.
• Fantastic Aesop: One of the tapes found on the Asleep rank states that people who have nurtured damaging thoughts of the Threat cannot be helped, and that one must focus inward on themself first. Due to the Receivers vouching to help others understand their own value, such a contradictory message only makes sense in the context of the impending Mindkill.
• Finagle's Law: Discussed in the launch trailer (see the page quote), and this mindset is actively encouraged by the game itself. It's also discussed in one of the tapes, but it's incorrectly refered to as Murphy's Law.
• First-Person Ghost: Like the first game, all items you manipulate and use hover in front of you. However, if you look at your reflection in a mirror or glass window, you'll see yourself as a gun range target.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: While the first game paid lip service to this idea with its "fictional context" tape (which is also present here), this game takes it a step further. The Receivers discover that the "fictional context" they speculated about means that you are in Reality C, and that you have been experiencing Reality B as if it was a game. The final set of tapes explains that the Threat exists in Real Life; it is reaching into Reality C to target you directly. However, this is also inverted, because by collecting the final tape, and becoming an awake Receiver, you are ready to take the fight to the Threat – in Real Life. The fourth wall will not protect you from the Threat, but at the same time, the fourth wall will not protect the Threat from you.
• Fragile Speedster:
  • The player can run fairly quickly, and skilled players can jump onto thin platforms to reach places unconventionally, but they're no hardier than a Real Life human.
  • Flying drones are designed to be as light as possible. While this allows them to fly and give chase swiftly, an accurate shot or even a bad crash can easily take one to the ground.
• Frustration Simulator: You have to manually keep track of all the actions involved with using a gun. You have to manually count how many bullets are in your clip, check that the safety isn't on, manually cock the hammer, pull the slide back, manually load a clip bullet by individual bullet, among other actions while trying not to accidentally shoot yourself in the process. There's more guns than in the first game, but at least there's a Hub Level with a shooting range to help you practice.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: As of version 2.0.6, the Colt Single Action Army will discharge when holstered if the hammer is down on a live round and you bump it by taking too big of a fall. A tape explaining the gun warns against fully loading it unless if the player wants to shoot themself in the foot due to its lack of a drop safety.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • One of the four tapes that describe the Desert Eagle gives it (and the people who use it) some scathing lambasting that borders on "The Reason You Suck" Speech territory. Gameplay-wise, it's a useful gun to have, due to the obscene power of the .50AE cartridge it uses allowing it to hit enemies where they'd normally be resistant to shots. All the user needs is to be mindful that they don't accidentally shoot themselves while holstering it, because that stopping power will One-Hit Kill them if turned around.
  • The Hi-Point C-9 tape describes the gun as one that, while made cheap and often made fun of at shooting ranges, is considered very reliable and a good gun to give to newbie shooters because of its simplicity. In game however, it's pretty much the opposite, suffering very frequently from out-of-battery stoppages and being difficult to aim correctly due to its weight distribution and awkward sights.
• Ghost City: The metropolitan environment that the player explores is completely devoid of other people, the only things accompanying you are kill-drones. Background info states that this is due to the Mindkill killing anyone not Awake.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • The game's malfunction system has fixed probabilities for each kind of malfunction, and certain guns or conditions have a higher or lower probability for a particular malfunction than others. For example, while the Beretta has only a 0.5% chance for casings to stovepipe compared to other automatics' 2%, it also has a 10% chance of having issues seating its magazine properly every single time you reload, which can cause a failure-to-feed rate of 90% if not properly fixed. To remedy this, make sure you tap the mag for every single load. Most of these are hinted at under each weapon's Help entry, though a Steam forum user dug into the code and found the exact values for everything, which can be found here.
  • The achievements for completely destroying a turret or a drone require you to shoot some parts off that may not be easily apparent. For turrets, it's a small red cable that goes from the main body into the weapon assembly, and for drones, the two halves of the body are connected by a small cable.
• Hack Your Enemy: This can be done to killdrones at close range to fully deactivate them.
• Happily Failed Suicide: If you manage to thwart the Threat Echo by emptying your gun before you kill yourself, you will get a Threat Recovery tape, showing that the suicidal subjects attempted to off themselves but failed. They have since managed to turn their lives around.
• Hard Truth Aesop: There are several pause menu tips with the harshness typical to this trope:
  "There is no normal life that is free of pain."
  "The moral high ground does not provide effective cover from small arms fire."
  "There are times when explanations, no matter how reasonable, just don't seem to help."
  "Sometimes our best is not good enough, but that's okay."
• Hub Level: The Compound is a mixture of this and a tutorial level, allowing players to practice freely, as Death Is a Slap on the Wrist. The Compound also includes a lot of secrets, and to unlock every single shooting range/challenge dome challenge they basically have to find and gain entry to every section of the Compound to find the floppy disks. The player can also unlock guns in the Compound long before they unlock them in the main game by getting high scores on challenges.
• I Just Shot Marvin in the Face: An invoked and discussed trope. This game adds several negligent discharge triggers (in addition to the first game's sole trigger of shooting while pointing straight down) and makes it a major game mechanic, encouraging handling the gun safely to prevent getting shot by your own gun. For example, guns will shoot your leg if holstered too quickly while the safety is off.
• Instant Death Bullet: Played with. It takes just one shot from a turret to kill you, but it's often a little over a second after being shot that you die, such that a fleeing player might think they got away only to find themselves falling over while running; other times, one shot immediately kills you. Negligent discharges with any firearm other than the Desert Eagle are survivable the first time, but fatal subsequent times during the same level.
• Interface Screw: Combined with a little Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay. Shooting a gun will black out the screen for a moment. This usually isn't noticeable enough to be a problem when you're taking your time with each shot. But if you start shooting a Glock G17 in full auto, it's almost impossible to keep a good sight picture because the screen is constantly blacking out. People who've shot automatic firearms will tell you that it puts you in enough of a daze that makes it hard to retain a sight picture.
• Jack of All Stats: The M1911 is average in ease of operation (with detachable magazines and the need to cock the gun after an empty reload), safety (as it isn't double-action, but has a safety), reliability (lacking a revolver's immunity to malfunctions, but not having an increased chance to fail), capacity (holding 7+1 rounds), and knockback power (occasionally able to knock down turrets or destroy a drone by getting them to slam into a wall).
• Kaizo Trap: It is possible to die while listening to the last tape to collect in a level, which will result in your rank going down.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Receivers train themselves by focusing on their minds and training themselves to be intelligent, patient, focused, and capable of making quick decisions. Part of the reason why Receivers are taught to use guns is that they are complicated pieces of machinery, yet using them is rote and easy enough to learn that they can be a powerful tool for focus and are good for testing the mind both while under stress and while the situation is calm. If any of this sounds familiar, it's because you're doing the exact same thing Receivers do to train while you play Receiver 2. The ending draws on this, revealing that the entire game is the Receiver's message to you, the player, who exists in a level even lower than Reality "B" — Reality "C". Completing the game completes your Receiver training and "wakes you up" into Reality "A", which is implied to be a state of self-actualization and inner peace rather than a literal Alternate Dimension.
• Lemony Narrator: Some of the tapes that narrate over the game are jokes delivered in the most deadpan way possible. The "Conspicuous Caliber" tape about the Desert Eagle for instance, uses the neutrally-factual tone of voice to tell the listener that the gun's target audience are people who are Compensating for Something, that people who use it for murder are intentionally trying to make it miserable to be part of a crime-scene cleanup crew, that the titanium gold tiger stripe paint finish is good for camouflage for hunting bears in the Palace of Versailles, and that the single legitimate use case is if Shaq goes deer hunting and uses it to Mercy Kill his prey after wounding it in some other way.
• Lethal Lava Land: In Liminal, some of the background buildings are on fire.
• Nerf:
  • The flying drones were infamous in the first game for being fast, relentless, and very hard to kill. While they still have the same behavior from the original game, they move slightly slower, and their body frame is breakable. Also, hitting their rotor blades with bullets is more likely to cause them to spiral out of control into a wall.
  • The 2.0.4 update made it possible to hack security cameras.
• No Ending: After you collect all the tapes in the final level, the game fades to black with a tone, and then exits to desktop. There's an ending cutscene in debug mode, but it seems unfinished, lacking in sound or context, and doesn't play if you actually finished the game.
• Notice This: Having your weapon in a state from which it won't fire, whether by a malfunction or just by, say, toggling the safety, is shown by it being pointed and angled in different directions, to cue in the player on what needs to be done. In addition, the flashlight gives collectables a small glow when it shines on them, helping distinguish them a little better from a distance, especially in the darker scenes.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: Zig-zagged. Attacks from turrets and taser drones still kill you in one hit, but the former usually isn't instantaneous. Otherwise, the player character can survive damaging falls reliably and repeatedly, shooting near a window without pressing into it will just hurt you momentarily, and you can survive one negligent discharge from most firearms (though it's better to avoid such scenarios altogether). However, shooting yourself with the Desert Eagle or in the head due to a Threat Echo is a One-Hit Kill.
• Press X to Die: By default, the K button is mapped as "Ending Mistake".
• Psychic-Assisted Suicide: If you find a tape of someone who is suicidal and have a loaded firearm in your hand, the Threat will force you to load your gun, rack the slide/cock the hammer, and turn it on yourself. Fortunately, you can thwart the forced suicide by emptying the gun before this happens.
• Reckless Gun Usage: Discouraged, the game makes an active effort to educate you on proper firearm safety. If you don't follow the proper procedure for holstering your gun in a safe position for example, you WILL shoot yourself and die.
• Reliably Unreliable Guns: A major gameplay mechanic, in addition to the intricate reloading of your firearms, is managing and dealing with the inevitable jams (for semi-autos) or blocked cylinders (for revolvers). They span in complexity, from simple stovepipe jams to double feeds. All guns can also go off involuntarily when being holstered improperly or in unsafe conditions.
• Revolvers Are for Amateurs: Two revolvers are your starting weapons in this game, and exist to ease you in to the complicated reload mechanics. Unlike semi-automatics, revolvers don't suffer from malfunctions or stoppages, don't rely on complicated magazine management, are harder to accidentally discharge when put away, and can be easily checked for live rounds (the pinhole for the hammer opens to show such). One of the lore documents even says that ease of use is a considerable advantage over semi-automatics. However this is inverted with the Colt Single Action Army, which has the longest and most complicated reloading procedure out of all the guns in the game, and can suffer an accidental discharge if the player falls with it holstered while uncocked.
• Short Range Guy, Long Range Guy: A drone might electrocute you almost instantly if it notices you very close to it. Turrets are more dangerous to be detected by at a distance, yet floor turrets can be leaped over in a pinch.
• Shout-Out: Wolfire seems to be a fan of these.
  • Some arcade cabinets can be found around the building environments. All of them are the developer's previous games, including Overgrowth, and Polybius makes an appearance.
  • In one of the rooms, 3 trapezoid-shaped tables are arranged against each-other to look like the Abstergo Industries logo.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: This game is surprisingly idealistic for a Deconstruction Game. It (as well as its predecessor) is a Decon-Recon Switch of Gun Porn and society's relationship with firearms. It places center stage how deceptively complex and dangerous guns can be by forcing you to manually perform every action of re-loading a gun. If you've never handled a firearm in your life (which you probably haven't if you don't live in the US or served in a military/police force), the game will show you right to your face how hard guns can be to handle as you fumble rounds into your magazine, eject perfectly good rounds like an idiot, shoot yourself in the leg, or make other such mistakes. However, the game also makes its best effort to teach you the proper and safe way to handle the guns so that you can learn to actually use them to their greatest effectiveness. Also, the cassette tapes that you can find illustrate how Humans Are Special and that You Are Better Than You Think You Are.
• Soft Glass: Zig-zagged. Some glass panes cannot be run through, no matter your momentum, so they require being shot at to weaken, while other panes allow a running jump to break it. Smashing through a glass pane by walking or running into it never hurts your character, thanks to their Mindtech, but shooting glass at very close distances (or any other surface that sparks or makes bullets ricochet) can hurt you, and if glass shards fall onto you from above for any reason, it's lethal.
• Take That!: Some of the notes are from a person that starts to doubt the Receivers' cause once he starts getting messages from another person that says "DON'T TRUST OTHER RECEIVERS!" and starts to believe that the Threat is actually a benevolent entity. As it turns out, those notes were written by someone who got drunk and instantly regretted doing so once she sees she sent those messages to other Receivers. This is a jab at how commonly putting Draco in Leather Pants and Villain Protagonist theories occur in some Misaimed Fandoms. invoked
• Urban Ruins: Downplayed. The entire building complex the player is in is completely abandoned.
• Xanatos Gambit: Discussed in a Compound tape. The Threat is willing to undermine relationships between people, causing harm regardless of whether or not such friendships end. If no outcome is favorable on Receivers' end, people still have the chance to minimize damage.