Video Game / Streets of Rogue

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Streets of Rogue is a real-time Roguelike-ish PC game set in a Wretched Hive of a vertical City filled with crooks and governed by a corrupt Mayor. The player, an agent of the The Resistance, is sent to climb the City and remove him from power.

In a movie or book, this would probably involve the player making subtle moves until they're finally in place to take down the Mayor. Streets of Rogue, however, is a game of emergent mayhem and Black Comedy, where your exploits in a level might fall anywhere from "as smooth as silk" to "downright apocalyptic carnage and property damage".

The game is billed as a cross between traditional roguelikes and Immersive Sim games, such as Deus Ex. While there is permadeath, the layout of the game is very unusual by the standards of traditional roguelikes. Upon loading up any given floor of the City, the game generates a few missions for the player to complete: upon failure or success of all of these missions, the game allows the player to head to the next floor.

The game encourages multiple solutions to every problem, and its many systems facilitate this: why blow open a wall to get inside a room, for example, when you can cut out the window, teleport into the room, or lure everyone outside and sneak in while they're oblivious? There are dozens of items to play around with and many different character classes, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Finding the solution to a problem that also results in victory is where the real difficulty of the game lies, as a single mistake can spell the end of your run or cost you more than you can make up for.

The game left Early Access and released on consoles as well as PC July 12th, 2019.

A sequel, Streets Of Rogue 2 is in development. It was originally meant as a DLC expansion, but was turned into its own game after it ballooned out of control. It is planned to drop the roguelike structure of the first one in favor of a Wide-Open Sandbox format while keeping certain roguelike elements, taking place on a single massive map instead. On 10 April 2024, it got a gameplay trailer as part of the Triple-I Showcase, with a demo released on 15 October 2024, and an Early Access release to be announced.

No relation to Streets of Rage, as the title is a mere Shout-Out.

Tropes found in the game include:

• 0% Approval Rating: The Mayor, who got elected on a platform of lower taxes and more beer, proceeded to raise taxes dramatically, ban chicken tenders, and confiscate all the alcohol, purely to hold a giant party... and the party wasn't even that great. Of course, this is The Resistance's account of events, and they're not entirely trustworthy.
• 1-Up: Resurrection Shampoo is a rare item which gives the Resurrection status effect, reviving you should you run out of health. This can be extremely valuable, since dying sends you all the way back to level 1.
• Action Bomb: When playing as the Slavemaster, you can send your slaves anywhere you want. You also have an item to detonate their Explosive Leash whenever you want. Do the math.
• All Crimes Are Equal: Commit a crime in front of a cop and the penalty is death, regardless of whether you've just murdered somebody or tried to hack into an ATM. Averted with the Cop Bots in Uptown, who will either confiscate your drugs and alcohol or deport you if you're not a citizen, and only become violent if you attack first.
• The All-Seeing A.I.: If an NPC is in "alert" because of property damage caused by you, it doesn't matter how indirect it was or how far away you were when the actual damage happened they'll realize you as the source and turn hostile if they see you when the ? is still over their head, even in situations as wild as the Alien sending a mind slave to pick a fight, or the demolitionist setting off all of his bombs and returning to see the carnage.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Cannibals and Zombies (unless you're a Zombie yourself) will ALWAYS attack you on sight. There is a perk that keeps cannibals from attacking on sight.
• Always Critical Hit Attack: The "Always Crit" status turns every attack into a critical hit for its duration.
• Anti-Escape Mechanism: There are many items that can keep enemies from escaping, such bear traps and dizzying grenades. An interesting variant comes up in the terrain generation in later levels (or anywhere with the mixed-up floors mutation) in the form of large indestructible barriers that the police can raise when alarmed, quarantining their target (often you) to a small area where avoiding a shootout can be difficult.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • When playing as the Cop, criminals will have the "Guilty" added beneath their name to indicate people you can safely arrest or kill. In addition, all mission-relevant NPCs (including sidequests) are automatically tagged Guilty, so there's no worries about losing XP just for progressing the game.
  • If one of your quests becomes unwinnable (for instance, if someone you need to rescue dies), it'll be marked as a failure and you'll get no rewards, but you'll still be allowed to proceed as if you completed it, preventing the player from getting stuck due to a freak accident.
  • The "Status Effects in the Air" Disaster will never give anyone poison or acid, to keep from players, escort missions and targets randomly dying by attrition.
  • When playing as a Cannibal, you normally cannot use your Eat ability when at full health. Since its purpose is to recover your health, you normally wouldn't want to, with one exception: the Cannibal's Big Quest requires them to eat one specific class of person on each level. In order to stop players from having to intentionally damage themselves, the restriction on eating people while at full health is waived when eating your current Big Quest target.
  • Once discovered, you can teleport to any point of interest on a floor's map (as long as no hostiles are nearby).
  • The game takes a few steps to avoid frustrations common to roguelike macrogames.
    • You can turn off items and perks you don't want showing up as rewards during the game from home base. Got a perk you know you'll never use? Take it out of rotation. Item you don't like? It won't show up as a mission reward.
    • Adding modifiers doesn't prevent progress unless it's "sandbox", meaning if you want to make a few tweaks to make the game more playable for you, like removing disasters every 3rd level or giving weapons infinite uses, you can do so without worry.
    • There is a machine that will let you pay money to remove or reroll perks. Get a bad lineup of perks from your level-up and want to change it? For around $200-300 you can convert it to another random perk, or if you pick one that ends up being detrimental, such as not making noise when hitting walls and realizing you really need to draw attention without angering everybody, then you can swap it or just remove it.
    • There's a "loadout-o-matic" vending machine that will give you a chance to buy your starting items from it. On some, like slum dweller, it's simply useful but on others, like doctor's tranq gun or bartender's mixing kit, you can lose some essential items for your character, bartender needs his mixing kit to work as intended and the doctor's big quest relies on not killing people as well as their super class letting you get as much ammo as you want for the tranq gun, you can buy them back for a cost.
    • Reaching the 99 cap on chicken nuggets turns the rewards from random NPC missions on levels into item rewards like main level missions, so you don't feel like you have to pass them up entirely because they're not worth your while once you're not spending nuggets.
• Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: Even though guns are available, swords tend to pop up surprisingly frequently. In the right hands, they can actually be deadlier than guns.
• Artistic License – Chemistry: For some odd reason, you can place anything that's considered a "drug" into an air purifier, and it will suddenly leak as gas throughout the building it was attached to. This can include "sugar", muscly pills, and cigarettes.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: A Giantizer pill lets you temporarily turn into one of these, smashing any walls in your path. This is part of the Scientist class starting loadout.
• Auto-Revive: Drinking the Resurrection Shampoo grants you a status effect that will revive you once when you die.
• Back Stab: Backstabber is an unlockable trait that lets you do twice the damage if attacking somebody from behind. The Assassin starts with it.
• Banana Peel: You can get it after eating a banana; people who step on it will trip and become stunned for a moment. Killing someone with this unlocks the Comedian class.
• Bandit Mook: The Thief NPCs will try to pickpocket your items from behind.
• Batman Grabs a Gun: Can be invoked by the player with the Doctor (or any custom class with the Pacifist trait). Normally they can't use any weapons other than a tranquilizer gun or taser (not even a water gun), but by spending a few hundred dollars to remove the trait at an augmentation booth they suddenly find the will to take up machineguns and rocket launchers against their enemies. Appropriate as well, since given how limited money can be and how much experience completing the Big Quest is worth (which specifically forbids lethal solutions to problems) you can safely assume that a player has been pushed to their limits and doesn't see any other option if they resort to this.
• Batter Up!: Baseball bats are one of the most common melee weapons in the game. Also, the Jock starts with one.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: The Mayor's government is a brutal totalitarian regime with legalized slavery, massive wealth disparity between the rich and poor, widespread Police Brutality, and more. But the Resistance, spearheaded by the player, can (and often must, depending on your assigned missions) murder, assault, and steal from many seemingly-innocent people, perform widespread property damage, release convicted criminals onto the street, and perform many other acts of Video Game Cruelty Potential besides. Some of the playable classes with more violent quests (such as the Assassin, Shapeshifter, and Zombie) can hedge into outright Evil vs. Evil. The end of the game, when the player usurps the government, lampshades this in spades, with your character either eventually becoming just as bad as the previous Mayor or being The Caligula right from the start, depending on your previous actions.
• Black Comedy: The whole game has a very dark sense of humor. The Crapsack World it's set in is full of crime, murder, corruption, slavery, police brutality, cannibalism, and so on, all Played for Laughs. The lack of seriousness with which these atrocities are treated helps make it more palatable for players to pick a character whose gameplay requires them to engage in such acts.
• Body Horror: In order to make the fire department better at their job, the Mayor ordered that every firefighter should have one of their arms replaced by a water cannon. The firefighter's consent is not required.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The Assassin, Doctor, and Vampire all require somebody to have their back turned to use their specials to their fullest, and the game seems aware of this (hence why there are so many people walking around, including officers with itchy trigger fingers). Despite this, said classes are easy to use and their abilities are expected to be frequently used.
  • The Soldier, the Shopkeeper, both Gangsters and the Goon lack any game-breaking quirks or abilities, have no significant downsides, and start with decent equipment and a firearm for dealing damage at a distance.
  • The Zombie. Kill everyone you meet, converting them to zombies, who will spread out to kill more people and create even more zombies, on and on until the whole floor is yours. You just need to make sure you can survive at the start of the floor long enough to get your Zombie Apocalypse ball rolling.
  • Placing any drug into an air purifier will cause the inhabitants to run out, even if the effect is beneficial. This can be used to either force a target to get out into the open, or walk into the building while the inhabitants can't see you.
  • The pistol might be the weakest firearm, but it still has the major advantage of range, and has the benefit of being extremely widespread, especially as you progress further into the game. It truly comes into its own if you have Firearms at 3+ (or add an accuracy upgrade at Firearms 2), as it then fires as fast as you click, allowing you to compensate for its weakness by spraying down enemies.
• Bottomless Magazines: The Killer Robot has a rocket launcher that effectively (it only has 10,000 rockets in reserve) never runs out of ammo, and the player can activate a mutation that gives all guns infinite ammo.
• Boulder Bludgeon: Rocks can be thrown even if you have the Pacifist trait, but they don't do much damage. They're actually supposed to be a Utility Weapon.
• Bowdlerise: Backstories of Gangster (Crepe) and Gangster (Blahd) originally mentioned fornication, but it was censored for console releases.
• Breakable Weapons: Melee weapons have at most 100 durability points by default (which can be pushed up to 200 with a rare Melee Durability Spray), and lose about 15 durability per successful attack, after which they break and are removed from your inventory. Picking up multiple of the same melee weapon will result in their durability being added together, but if you don't, you'll usually only get a maximum of 7 melee attacks before losing your weapon, making melee combat actually cost more resources than using guns, which have much higher ammo capacities than that.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • The Goon's ending speech will have them ask why people assign them to guard the crappiest buildings and loot (like a chest with 10 bucks inside), only for an audience member to blame it on procedural generation. The Goon ends up asking them to stop breaking the fourth wall.
  • The Shapeshifter's ending has them state that the player is the Shapeshifter possessing them. Which is then lampshaded by the Player Character with "Oooooooh, so meta!"
  • The Firefighter's speech has them give some advice on fire safety, including one advising people not to bump into a fire with less than 10 health.
• Bribing the Homeless: Slum Dwellers are among the first NPCs the player will encounter during a playthrough. If you give them some money, they will temporarily join your party and can be ordered to cause a distraction. This also secures their vote if you want to win by getting elected.
• Bystander Syndrome: Unless they're a cop, NPCs will only pay a brief attention to the deaths of people who are neither part of their faction, nor the owner of the same property.
• By-the-Book Cop: Cop players start as this, as they have the power to use force and make arrests, but will suffer losses to XP and Big Quest progress if they arrest or kill an innocent NPC.
• The Can Kicked Him: The Wrestler can pick up toilets and throw it at an enemy. A thrown toilet will poison the enemy while dealing damage, presumably from unclean water.
• Cannibal Clan: A constant presence throughout the Parks district. Staying far away from them unless you have the Cool With Cannibals trait (or are a Cannibal yourself) is highly recommended. They also like to set bear traps and hide in bushes to ambush unsuspecting players.
• Cast from Hit Points: The Zombie's Zombie Puke Attack ability damages you slightly when used.
• The Charmer: The Bartender class begins with this trait, which makes most of the NPCs in any given level friendly towards you by default. The Vampire class starts the game with the Cologne item, which has the same effect but lasts only one level. The Comedian is a slightly different take on this; his jokes can charm people into becoming his allies or even followers, but sometimes backfire and make them into enemies instead.
• Collateral Damage: Bullets will continue traveling if they miss, and melee weapons can easily knock people through walls. As such, it's common for a fight between two people to result in massive property destruction and a dozen deaths, due to people getting drawn into the fight after being accidentally damaged by one of the combatants.
• Corrupt Politician: The Mayor, the Big Bad of the game. He confiscated all the alcohol in the City to hold a giant party. The party sucked, consisting of a single keg and a bag of tortilla chips.
• Crapsaccharine World: Uptown and (to a lesser extent) Downtown. Both stages look nicer than the Slums or Industrial zone, with more elaborate buildings as well as upper-class NPCs like Mobsters and Upper-Crusters. But both stages harbor even more dangers than the lower zones, hostile NPCs start appearing in groups or are more buffed than their lower zone counterparts, and the brutal police are supplemented by Supercops and Cop Bots who can't be bribed.
• Crapsack World: The City is a terrible place. Bystander Syndrome is in full effect, the Mayor is corrupt and doesn't care, the police are also corrupt and will lethally assault you for even trivial crimes, there is No OSHA Compliance anywhere, drug dealers and cannibals and monsters wander about in broad daylight, and professionals are hilariously unreliable. This is not counting the random disasters every three floors that all seem to be man-made, such as radiation storms, saturation bombings, implacable killbots, and more.
• Cutting the Knot: Encouraged. Why go through the hassle of sneaking through a base to get a code for a safe when you can just remotely hack a computer and open it yourself? Or blow open the outside wall between you and the safe and then use a Safe Buster item? Or loot the code off a corpse after you storm the building and kill everyone Terminator-style?
• Dance Party Ending: Everyone listening to your speech after becoming Mayor dances to the credits music.
• Defeat Equals Explosion:
  • Cop Bots will explode if killed. So will slaves, owing to their Explosive Leash.
  • The player character will also explode into Ludicrous Gibs, if you select "End Run" from the menu instead of dying normally.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • The tutorial covers all its bases.
    • Punch the door down instead of opening it like you're instructed to? The Resistance Leader responds in amazement.
    • Kill the shopkeeper you're supposed to purchase a key from? His corpse will drop the key, and the Resistance Leader responds appropriately.
    • Kill the friendly bouncer who serves as the tutorial's living punching bag instead of tranquilizing him? The leader's suitably annoyed.
    • Try to tranquilize the leader instead? He's wearing protective thermal underwear, you see.
    • Throw a rock at the leader after he just made you walk through an explosive tripwire? Admits he probably deserved that.
    • Purposely throw all your rocks away such that you can't safely disarm the second explosive tripwire from a distance? He asks if you're trying to break the tutorial or something.
    • Smart enough to step away from the generator that's clearly about to explode? He's disappointed that you're not a total schmuck.
  • The game proper has some interesting examples as well.
    • The doctor can't use their ability to knock out Gas Mask Mooks because it relies on the victim inhaling chemical fumes.
    • Security cameras can't detect moving boxes. Hacking them shows they're completely A.I. in universe and can recognize owners and non-owners, but apparently it's ability to recognize and distinguish humans also means it can distinguish non-humanoids and chooses to ignore them.
    • One kind of Cop Bot will attempt to confiscate all the player's alcohol and drugs. If the player attempts to use a drug or alcohol while the Cop Bot is asking the player to do so, the Cop Bot will turn hostile, saying "Nice try!"
    • Cannibals will not eat gorillas or shapeshifters, because they're that committed to only eating human meat. Another cannibal one is that their Big Quest on zombie disaster levels is automatically cleared because of the likely chance of their target being zombified upon death, which changes their class as a result.
    • If a level's disaster is Zombies or a Killer Robot, the death of the last zombie (and all infected people) or the death of the killer robot will cause the level's disaster status to end — allowing players to teleport again. Same goes for killing every cop during the Police Lockdown disaster.
    • The ending for the Gorilla depends on whether you have a translator or not. If you don't, the Gorilla will realize that nobody understands them, and ends up insulting them behind the language barrier. If you do, a member of the crowd will note that they expected a manlier voice, only for the Gorilla to ask how they know they're a male gorilla, causing the human to apologize.
    • If there aren't any people around when you give the ending speech, your character won't actually say anything, and the ending will note that it's a bummer that there wasn't anybody to listen to the speech.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Quite a few characters.
  • The Hacker is able to manipulate computers better than anyone else in the game, and can even hack from a distance for free, but is fragile, does poorly in combat, and is bad with weapons. Paired with someone who can dish out damage, he can poke weak spots in enemy strongholds and make him and his comrades's lives much easier.
  • The Comedian has one notable ability: he can tell a joke to a crowd, who will either like or dislike it. If enough people like him, he gets free followers, and thus can become extremely powerful in later levels.
  • Well played, the Investment Banker will be rolling in cash and constantly buffed by drugs. Badly played, he'll be struggling to pay his debts and drugs and constantly dealing with withdrawal.
• Dirty Cop:
  • The police force in the City is so corrupt and easily bribed it's laughable. For a price, they will ignore any criminal activity you carry out during the current level (although they will become hostile if you attack them, obviously). There's even a sign in the Slums that flat-out says that if the crime isn't committed in front of them, it might as well have never happened.
  • Averted with the Supercops (who start appearing in Downtown) and Cop Bots (who appear in Uptown). While they are no less trigger happy than the regular cops, they do not accept bribes.
  • Cop players can become this if they choose the "Crooked" line of traits at level up, allowing them to arrest or kill even innocent citizens at reduced (or no) penalty.
• Dude, Not Funny!: In-Universe, a possible reaction from NPCs to the Comedian's jokes. People who dislike your jokes will become permanently annoyed at you (causing you to be unable to interact with them, and annoyed property owners will also demand you leave) or even outright attack you.
• Dumb Jock: The Jock, obviously. He's all about wanton property damage, but can't use a computer to save his life.
• Dumb Muscle: The Wrestler. Has tons of HP and hits like a train in melee, but the only use he has for computers is to use them as throwing weapons.
• Dungeon Town: The City is incredibly dangerous, with fights constantly breaking out, especially when you reach the Park, as the game then adds various enemies who will take hostile actions against the player by default (cannibals, The Mafia, police bots). With some characters, you also have traits that make some groups attack you on sight, further forcing you to traverse each level as if you're in a warzone.
• Earn Your Bad Ending: The bad ending (or at least the ending the game officially considers "bad") requires pushing the Mayor's hat into a pit, none of which are anywhere near you when you acquire it — making this a convoluted process that almost by definition means you could have gotten a better ending far more easily by just picking it up and using it to win the game as intended.
• Easy Level Trick:
  • The Killer Robot hazard is intended to be a classic case of "Run or die." It's packing a rocket launcher with nearly unlimited ammo,^note it may appear to be unlimited, but it actually "only" holds 10,000 rounds takes nearly no knockback, and boasts a prodigious health pool of 1,000 by default, 1,400 with Extra Health For All mutator, and3000, with full health for all. This easily exceedes any other NPC in the game; fighting it head-on is nearly suicidal. However, it is extremely slow, and it will always walk in a direct line towards the player unless something obstructs it. As such, all you need to do to kill it is lure it into a building with a flame trap on the wall, and watch as the metallic menace blindly and repeatedly walks directly into the stream of fire until it dies. Alternatively, if you have an Ammo Stealer on hand, a simple point and click will remove its ability to shoot rockets, causing it to default to a much weaker punch attack.
  • While you can't leave a level while you have active quests, failing them works just fine (you'll miss out on the rewards, but over the course of an entire run individual quest rewards are rarely important.) Additionally, the nature of the game means that most of the threats only occur as a result of you actively pursuing your goals, and even the remaining threats can generally be outrun. This means if all your quests are ones with easy failure conditions, you can just rapidly fail them intentionally, then dash to the exit, effectively skipping the level.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: Completing the Big Quest of a class turns it into a "super" variant of said class with new abilities or buffs, most of them not that useful since the quest ends once you reach the Mayor's Village (the last level). However, a mutator allows you to play with the "super" variants.
• Elite Mooks: Later levels have Supergoons and Supercops, which are stronger than ordinary goons and cops. Supercops also equip better guns like a shotgun or revolver and can't be bribed like normal cops.
• Emergency Weapon: Any character can fight with their fists. They're weak, and blocking a weapon will result in minor injury, but they're a good option if you don't have a melee weapon or don't want to waste its durability.
• EMP: The EMP Grenade can disable electronics and robots.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: Say what you will about the Mayor's abuses, but his City extends citizenship to even the most inhuman (or subhuman) of residents, including Cannibals, Vampires, Werewolves, Gangbangers, Robots, and Zombies — so long as they refrain from committing crimes in front of a cop. They even have the right to vote! And the Resistance, who fall somewhere between Black-and-Gray Morality and Evil Versus Evil, go one better by allowing all of these beings to serve as operatives.
• Escort Mission: Rescue mission require you to free a prisoner, then escort them to an elevator. Fortunately, you can heal them or tell them to wait in a place, and, depending on who they are, they might be competent fighters.
• Eternal Recurrence: At the ending when the player becomes the new Mayor, the text says he becomes corrupt and events repeated themselves in an infinite loop which came to be known as "the circle of life".
• Even Evil Has Standards: Your characters could be murderers, thieves and harbingers of mayhem and destruction, but the one thing none of them will do is read another person's emails - because that would be rude.
• Explosive Instrumentation: The Hacker with the Cybernuke trait can blow up most electronics with his hacking ability. And there is the Explodevice item, which allows players to blow up all nearby electronics.
• Explosive Leash: The Slavemaster can turn any NPC into their slave by placing one of these on them.
• Exact Words: For both missions and unlock requirements. "Neutralize" doesn't strictly mean kill, it means "take care of them": if you convince them to leave town, then that's good enough. This can also work against you: unlocking the Blahd gang member as a character requires that you kill 10 Crepe gang members. You get no credit for causing the death of Crepes; you have to do the deed yourself.
  • The best example, however, is unlocking the Comedian, which requires killing someone with a banana peel. This is pretty tricky to do to someone, as banana peels have to be on the ground, the target has to walk over it (when they can walk anywhere they want, including around it), and slipping only does 5 damage. As a result, this can seem like a ridiculously strict requirement. However, you are someone, and killing yourself with the banana peel absolutely counts.
• Fantastic Drug: Drugs in this game are totally fictional, except alcohols and cigarettes. Interestingly, the original name of Sugar was Cocaine, but it was renamed during the development.
• Fantastic Racism: Gorillas are very intelligent, but this is a result of experiments on them by scientists. Unless you're in multiplayer and have two characters playing each class, then gorillas and scientists will always be hostile towards each other.
• Fatal Fireworks: The Fireworks item is a box with many fireworks. Once placed, it will shoot 10 rockets in random directions. Using this item inside buildings is a great way to cause destruction and deaths.
• The Fettered: The Cop, who has the ability to take down unsuspecting people from any angle with only a small use bar (and loud noises from the cuffs) in the way. However, he's the only person who can lose XP, in this case by stealing from, attacking, arresting, or killing innocents. A trait that can show up is "Crooked", which removes this penalties while keeping the bonus for dealing with guilty. (Note that for some reason, looting chests and safes never counts against you, whether you're Crooked or otherwise.)
• Frothy Mugs of Water: In order to avoid problems on more family-friendly platforms, Cocaine was renamed to Sugar, while Steroids were renamed to Muscly Pills.
• Fur Against Fang: The Vampire's quest has him hunt down werewolves hidden in each level.
• Future Food Is Artificial: The "Food Processor" item lets you turn almost any item into (extremely unhealthy, to the point of being carcinogenic) "Fud".
  It's like food, but worse!
• Five-Finger Discount: The Thief can pick the pockets of any unsuspecting NPC.
• Foe-Tossing Charge: The Jock's special ability.
• Fragile Speedster: The "I'm Outtie" trait makes you faster while your health is low.
• Freeze Ray: A starting weapon for the scientist (and something others can find at random). It freezes victims solid, at least until they get hit. Enemies killed while frozen shatter into ice cublets.
• Full-Circle Revolution: After you deal with the Mayor, the next Mayor either goes corrupt or is even worse from the start. Or, you can intentionally destroy the government, causing the whole City to fall to total chaos.
• Full-Frontal Assault: The Shapeshifter starts with the "Naked" trait (you won't see anything, don't worry). This isn't just a cosmetic effect; waltzing around naked is illegal, which makes cops automatically hostile towards you until you possess someone.
• Functional Addict: The Investment Banker needs to take drugs once per minute or else he goes into withdrawal, which decreases his stats and gradually reduces his health until he gets his fix.
• Gangbangers: The Crepes (blue gangsters) and the Blahds (red gangsters), an obvious parody of the real Bloods and Crips gangs.
• Gas Mask Mooks: A few NPCs wear gas masks. The "functionally unnecessary" part of the trope is averted, as you'll only find NPCs wearing them in areas where it makes sense. They are a common sight on Floor 2, where many industrial buildings are full of poisonous gas.
• Godzilla Threshold: It's not said in as many words, but this is clearly Resistance policy. The Mayor must be removed from power, and it doesn't matter if the Resistance agent to do it is a relatively subtle Assassin who at least tries to avoid leaving witnesses, a heavily-armed Soldier who will cause Rambo levels of carnage, or an outright Zombie who will nonchalantly zombify the entire population of the City.
• Grave Robbing: Busting up tombstones is ridiculously lucrative, especially in the slums where graveyards spawn with relative regularity. However unless you have a Ghost Gibber you need to be ready to run from the otherwise invincible ghosts who will be non-too-pleased about their graves being desecrated.
• Guide Dang It!: How to raise Electability. While it's somewhat obvious that you have to be liked by people so they'll vote for you, the fact that you have to deal with people who do not like you (usually by killing them) and that everybody votes (including the slaves and the prisoners) isn't explained until Mayor's Village. Those gorillas you freed in the Slums? Yeah, they're registered voters and will remember the guy who let them out.
  • The game rarely mentions it, but if you have an unwanted status effect and no pressing issues you can use a toilet to "purge" all temporary status effects, including positive. This can be a somewhat safe way to test syringes.
• Hand Cannon: The Revolver has slower fire rate compared to the Pistol, but bullets from it are faster and deal much higher damage, to the point that it's a worthwhile competitor to the shotgun.
• Haunted House: The Boo-Urn item turns any building into this, forcing all living occupants to flee in terror.
• Hat of Authority: Anyone who wears the Mayor's hat (and reaches the podium to give a speech) becomes the Mayor, full stop, no matter how they obtained it and no matter how electable they are at that point.
• Hated by All:
  • Any and all NPCs will either run away from you or attack you on sight when playing as the Zombie.
  • Potentially, you, if you're a total psychopath who has earned the ire and hatred of every single floor.
• Hedge Maze: Can appear in park levels, patrolled by Cannibals.
• Hide Your Children: The City doesn't have any children. And thankfully so, given all the carnage that happens there.
  • Lampshaded by the Doctor in his victory speech.
  Doctor: It's amazing anybody made it to adulthood in this place.
• Highly Visible Ninja: The Assassin class. Their outfit is very ninja-like, and they openly walk around the City wearing it.
  Assassin: No, I don't think it's silly to continue wearing this mask in this setting, thank you.
• Hillbilly Incest: The backstory of the playable Cannibal mentions inbreeding as one of the reasons for their deranged behavior — the other reasons being toxic waste and the fact that they are morally opposed to eating animal meat, but also think vegan food is disgusting.
• Hollywood Glass Cutter: Window Cutters can be used to, well, remove a window from a building. This is almost silent and only takes a few seconds, though cops and the building's owner won't be happy if they catch you doing this. It seems that all NPC thieves carry one of these, as if you lack a Window Cutter of your own, you can hire a thief to cut away a window for you. As the game averts Soft Glass, doing so will help you sneak into buildings without hurting yourself on the broken glass.
• Hollywood Hacking: The Hacker class naturally engages in this — with a few typing sounds on their laptop, they can make a building's security systems attack its owners, flood the vents with poison gas, unlock safes, and so on, all without even having to set foot in the building. Other characters can do similar things by using single-use "hacking devices" that work on almost any electronic device.
• Hollywood Silencer: Attaching the Silencer item to a gun can make it completely silent.
• Hub Level: The Home Base, where you unlock perks and reward items, as well as buy starting loadout items and unlock shortcuts to later levels. Downplayed in that, once you start your run, you won't see it again until you win the game or die trying.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Foods are healing items, and they will heal you instantly. There's even a button to instantly eat something, which is useful in emergencies.
• I Am a Humanitarian: The Cannibal class, unsurprisingly. They can only heal by eating corpses and refuse to eat standard food items, although they'll still use alcoholic beverages.
• Impersonating an Officer: The Walkie Talkie is implied to be used for this, as it makes nearby cops attack the person you targeted, but also makes cops hostile if they see you use the item, unless you're a law enforcer yourself.
• Improvised Weapon: The Wrestler can pick up almost any object lying around the level (trash cans, lamps, boulders, vending machines...) to throw them at anyone for a fair amount of damage.
• Inhuman Eye Concealers: An accidental variant can come up with shapeshifter-possessed NPCs, as they're supposed to be distinguished by their red eyes. However, both goons and hackers wear sunglasses, thus perfectly hiding the possession from you.
• Insecurity Camera: Zig-Zagged. On one hand, security cameras have a limited field of vision (including a blind spot right under the camera) and you can see exactly what area is in their sight, so sneaking past them is easy enough as long as you don't have any other distractions. On the other hand, destroying them does alert security just as if you were spotted by the camera.
• Instant Ice: Just Add Cold!: A projectile from the Freeze Ray will freeze the victim instantly. A thrown refrigerator will do the same.
• Instant-Win Condition: As long as you get the Mayor's hat and get to the podium to make the speech or kick it down a bottomless pit to get the bad ending and the game ends in a victory. It doesn't matter if the entire City hates your guts, if you've left a trail of carnage in every level, or if you just brained the Mayor and are now outrunning his entourage of supercops, it's over once you hit interact at the podium.
• Instant Sedation: The Doctor's special ability allows him to perform an instant, non-lethal takedown on any unsuspecting NPC by knocking them out with chloroform. He also starts with a Tranquilizer Dart gun, which takes several seconds to take effect, though a second shot makes it take effect immediately.
• Interface Spoiler: With the Many Werewolves mutator, random NPCs will be werewolves, and they're meant to be a surprise for the player. However, since they're always considered guilty, and the Cop can always know who's guilty, the player can be spoiled when an NPC is considered guilty for no good reason.
• Killer Gorilla: Zig-Zagged trope. Gorillas are intelligent and (relatively) peaceful creatures in this game (if you can find a way to talk to them), but once provoked they become ferocious melee fighters with an unique lunge attack ability.
• Killer Robot: Present in several different flavors.
  • Most generally there's the Killer Robot enemy, spawned by a disaster event. It's a Terminator Impersonator who stalks the player across the map (and is always aware of your position unless you're invisible), wields an infinite-ammo rocket launcher, and will only stop once it kills the PC or they escape the level.
  • The Hacker's class quest involves installing malware on computers; doing so floods special police robots onto the level searching for you. They instantly recognize and attack any Hacker on sight, and on later levels often come equipped with guns and police weaponry.
  • The Cop Bots present in Uptown aren't Rabid Cops like their human counterparts, but they're much tougher than normal police, and just as heavily armed, so submitting to their requests or just running away is usually preferable to attacking.
  • Finally, players who pick the Robot class can play their Robot as psychopathically as they wish.
• Klingon Promotion: The most common way to beat the game: Kill the Mayor, put on the Mayor's Hat, and declare yourself new Mayor. It is possible to get elected as new Mayor, but for most classes, this approach is much harder than a bloody coup.
• Kill It with Fire: The flamethrower, of course. In addition, you can spread oil over the ground and light it (either with the flamethrower or a lighter), and fire can spread over wooden structures, hedges, bushes, and so on. There's also lots of oil, flaming barrels, and fire-spewing traps in the City, especially in the factory area.
• La Résistance: The player works for one of these. They're surprisingly incompetent and blase about collateral damage, unlike most examples of this trope.
• Layered Metropolis: The City is composed of a bunch of stacked floors ("like a lasagna!"); the only way between them is via elevators. Naturally, the lowest ones are slums, then factories, slowly working your way up to the upper class districts.
• Lethal Joke Item: Cyanide Pill. Unsurprisingly, when you swallow it, you die. The "lethal" part comes when you realize that the game treats "Cyanide" as a status effect, and there's a number of ways to use the items with status effects on other people. In particular, combining it with the Water Pistol gives you five instagibbing shots, while sticking it in a building's ventilation system will usually kill everyone inside.
• Level-Up Fill-Up: Gaining a level instantly refills your health. Since this is a roguelite, healing items are a rare and limited commodity, so this takes the sting out of making a few mistakes in the early game.
• Literal Metaphor: One of the unique Hacking abilities available to the Hacker is to make a refrigerator "run", which sends it hurtling straight forward through any breakable wall until hitting the level borders or a more durable building.
• Life Drain:
  • The Vampire's ability allows you to suck the life out of your victims to replenish your health. The downside is that this is the only way the Vampire can heal. Food/medical items can't be used and doctors will tell you "their training doesn't cover the undead".
  • Zombies also have the ability to heal by attacking people, even with melee weapons.
  • The Kill Healthenizer recovers a small portion of your health when you kill somebody. If you have a reliable way to kill somebody without taking injury, you can easily heal yourself with a nice bit of mass murder.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Seeing people explode into meaty chunks isn't an uncommon sight in this game. This happens if the killing blow does heavy damage (this happens even if said damage comes from poison, meaning that shooting someone with a water gun can splatter them if it's tainted with a Cyanide Pill), or if the body keeps getting hit after death. A Cannibal biting into a body too many times will also cause it to be gibbed, and gibbed corpses can't be eaten.
• MacGuffin: Many missions require you to obtain an arbitrary item such as a tooth, hard drive, or will before you can progress. Once you have the item, you get your reward and the object immediately stops being relevant.
• Mad Scientist: Scientist NPCs can often be found experimenting on captive Gorillas (and in some cases, Zombies) for no real reason, and talking to them produces lines like forgetting the order of steps in the scientific method or declaring ethics are for idiots. The player Scientist isn't much better, since their class quest involves exposing random people to status-effect drugs and studying the results.
• The Mafia: Present in the City, where they inhabit Downtown and Uptown. Like many NPCs, they can be unlocked as a playable class.
• Magikarp Power: The Slum Dweller class starts with terrible stats in every category and no immediately-useful abilities or items, but gains XP faster than anyone else, and has a trait called "Potential To Not Suck" which raises his stats as he gains levels. Likewise, doing his quest turns him into the Upper-Cruster, who has similar stats... and the power to use supercop-summoning panic buttons on the upper levels, and they aren't harassed by the security robots in Uptown.
• Mechanically Unusual Class: While each class has its own unique quirks and playstyles, there are a few that are much bigger outliers than most.
  • The Shapeshifter is incredibly fragile, can't buy from most shops, and gets attacked by cops on sight. In exchange, they have the unique ability to Body Surf into almost any NPC, gaining all of that character's abilities and traits as well as any equipment they were wielding. What's more is that they also gain the public status of anyone they possess: a possessed Slavemaster gains control over all of his slaves, a possessed Goon can walk through the building he was guarding without setting off any security, and so on.
  • The Gorilla can't speak human language, blocking off many of the options available to other characters (buying items, bribing cops, hiring help, getting medical aid from doctors, and so forth), can't use guns, and gets attacked on sight by any Scientist. In exchange they have sky-high stats across the board (except Firearms), and automatically recruit any fellow Gorilla they save from a cage as a follower, giving a savvy player a steady supply of durable, totally loyal minions.
  • The Zombie is probably the biggest outlier of any class. They're slow as molasses, can't speak human language like the Gorilla, and will be attacked (or fled from) on sight by any NPC. On the other hand, they can drain health with physical attacks, and every NPC they kill returns as an allied Zombie which will go on to make still more Zombies. A careful player can make the difference between the class dying on level 1 and jumpstarting a one-man Zombie Apocalypse.
  • The Robot has a unique-to-it Charge mechanic that gives it levels 4 to 1 of charge. At level 4 the Robot is nigh invulnerable, hits like a truck, shoots like an ace, and runs as fast as a car. Every lower level gradually decreases these stats until level 1 where the Robot is as unimpressive as a Slum Dweller and is constantly taking tics of 1 damage every few seconds. You can reset charge levels and heal HP by sapping the power from anything electronic, but this fries the electronic in the process meaning you can no longer use it.
• Meet the New Boss: Each player character that usurps the Mayor's hat will give a New Era Speech based on their class. They're all hilariously insane.
• Metal Slime: Shapeshifters flee at high speed but drop a large quantity of cash if killed. They can be found by killing an NPC with red eyes.
• Money for Nothing: Chicken nuggets, being the currency to buy new perks and rewards, will eventually become this. The loadout shop, which lets you pay nuggets to start a run with different items, seems to exist solely to avoid this trope in full, just so you have something to spend nuggets on, but even then it has some limited use.
• Money Is Experience Points: In addition to standard experience-based leveling (which allows adding traits or improving attributes), money can be used at augmentation booths in order to alter traits - upgrading positive ones, removing negative ones, and swapping them for a different one.
• More Dakka: The Soldier starts with a machinegun, a high firearms stat and an item that gives him ammo per kills. Hence, the solution to most problems when playing as him is to just shoot his way out of them.
• Mugging the Monster:
  • With the Many Werewolves mutator, a few random NPCs. Nothing gives them away (except being guilty, if you're a Cop), providing a nasty surprise for a player who decides to mess with them.
  • Also, thief NPCs might try to steal from you when you're playing one of the monstrous (or just violence-oriented) classes.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: The best way to improve electability (or get rid of penalties to it) is to kill everybody who dislikes you. Sure, you can also non-lethally neutralize them, but such means aren't always available.
• Night of the Living Mooks: Playing as the Zombie is all about creating a zombie army to cause havoc.
• No Fair Cheating:
  • In a sense. Custom characters have you use points to build up a character, requiring strengths which use pints and flaws which give them to have enough to balance it within 20 points. The game will let you build up a character past 20 points, but you won't be able to get any progress in the game as a whole, such as chicken nuggets, with them if you do.
  • Heavily downplayed with the Mutators. You can have as many of them active as you'd like and still make progress and collect unlockables, with the Sandbox Mutator being the sole exception considering this particular mode gives you an infinite supply of every item at once.
• No OSHA Compliance: None of the buildings with security systems are particularly safe; for some reason, every server in the game has a function to flood its building with poison gas in the hands of a good enough hacker. Floor 2, however, stands head and shoulders above the rest. It's filled with conveyor belts leading into flames and pits, crushers ^note  They are also in the level before, but only as security systems in secured buildings , puddles of easily-flammable oil, no guard rails around the aforementioned Bottomless Pits, explosive poisonous barrels, unguarded sawblades running back and forth across walkways, and so on. Some buildings are full of poisonous gas, requiring both the guards and workers to wear gas masks.
• Not Cheating Unless You Get Caught: As the sign explaining the law states, cops won't intervene if they don't actually see you committing a crime, even if they enter your field of view when you're standing over a corpse with your weapon drawn. Doesn't apply to characters who personally avenge offenses against themselves, however, as they will attack the offending person if they catch them while investigating.
• Not Completely Useless: The cigarettes. Normally, they're Shop Fodder, since they only inflict the "Nicotine" status effect (deals minor damage to whoever is affected) and you need a cigarette lighter to use them. For the Investment Banker, however, cigarettes are a cheap and plentiful way to satisfy their drug addiction mechanic. They can also be given to Office Workers to increase your electability.
• Notice This: The use of light is a major theme to help the player see what's important. Interactable items are always lit up naturally, each unique building has its own lighting to let the player know what counts as what building, characters emit light on their own to help highlight what's a person and what isn't, and a specific mission type will show its cleared by removing the lights from the building it was in.
  • Also, anything the player has an inventory item for, such as glass cutters or lock picks, will glow green to let the player know it has a unique interaction with a consumable item, presumably so the player knows if they have that consumable in their inventory.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: The player is always considered an operative of the Resistance, but the description of many classes indicates that they don't really care about the Resistance's cause, or (at best) are opposing the Mayor for comically petty reasons.
• Nuclear Mutant: The deformed Cannibals are described as being a result of both toxic sludge and inbreeding.
• One-Hit Kill: Present in a couple forms.
  • The Time Bomb item and Overclocked Generators explode for 200 damage, which will gib anything that isn't the Killer Robot.
  • Bottomless Pits will instantly kill any NPC, including the Killer Robot, but will only deal 30 damage to players.
  • The Killer Throw status effect will cause anything the player throws (such as grenades, shurikens, rocks and more) to deal 100 damage upon impact with a target.
  • The Cyanide status effect straight up kills anyone that isn't a robot. Not even having 9999 HP will save an NPC (or you!) from getting killed by it.
• Our Product Sucks: The slogan of Fud, a disgusting, barely-edible substance that can cause cancer, is "It's like food, but worse!"
• Our Zombies Are Different: Player Zombies can eat (and heal from) normal food and also use throwing weapons, which aren't typical zombie tropes. They can also use the Augmentation Booth to get rid of any (or all) of their zombie disadvantages, making them able to communicate, use guns, not have people fear them, and more.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: The game's Tag Line: The World's Only RPG Roguelike Action Stealth Shooter Brawler Co-op Megagame.
• Padded Sumo Gameplay: One of the mutators gives NPCs the same health as the player. Since weapon durability and damage is balanced with default health values in mind, this makes fights extremely drawn out, with gunfights frequently turning into fistfights as weapons break or run out of ammo.
• Pacifist Run: Hard, but possible. Some classes actually reward you for it, such as the Cop (who gains more XP if he arrests criminals instead of killing them) and the Doctor (who gets an XP bonus if he doesn't kill more than 2 people per level).
• Palette Swap: "Gangster (Blahd)" and "Gangster (Crepe)" are two separate unlockable classes, but they have the exact same equipment, the same stats, both of them have the "other gang attacks on sight" trait, and their Big Quest involves killing the other gang. Even the short snippet of backstory for them is essentially the same: they walked in on their parent having sex and somehow mistook that for them getting murdered.
• People Zoo: The Uptown levels have "Zoo" buildings. They contain people like the Vampires, Zombies, Cannibals, Slum Dwellers, or Resistance Leaders.
• Person of Mass Destruction:
  • The Jock class specializes in two things: destroying stuff and beating people to a pulp. If, by the time you leave a level, half of it hasn't been reduced to rubble and a good portion of its population isn't dead, you haven't been playing the Jock right. The game even encourages that by giving the Jock XP for demolishing things.
  • The Demolitionist, natch. His unique skill lets him craft a special block-destroying dynamite that can level a surprisingly large amount of geography and gib most npcs. His big quest requires destroying a certain amount of blocks on a level, meaning by the time you leave a very large amount of walls and fixtures will likely be nonexistant.
• Recurring Riff: Every one of the game's 16 floors has its own theme, but there's a central beat that occurs at some point in almost all of them, most clearly heard in Floor 1-3's Slum Scrum.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: An NPC with red eyes has been possessed by a Shapeshifter. The AI can't tell the difference, but it's a handy visual clue for players looking to make some extra cash.
• Retcon: Shapeshifter's motivation got retconned from "an alien wanting to help take down the Mayor" to "an alien wanting to cause planet-wide mayhem".
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: The Resistance is comically violent, often demanding that the player kill people who clearly have no relevance to anything. They even have you beat up another Resistance member in the Tutorial, and he makes it clear he did not agree to this.
  • However, it also averts this very commonly. United under the Revolution any sworn enemies will work together without a problem, such as rival gangs or intelligent gorillas and their former captors. In addition, a common mission is to free people who are locked up, and 3 of the ways a person can be locked up heavily imply that they were worse off without your help. ^note  The slaves with explosive collars, gorillas, and people trapped and a heavily guarded factory all at least imply, but it's outright stated with the gorilla, that they're being abused.
• Revenant Zombie: Player zombies are arguably this, as while certain tools are off the table (guns, diplomacy), you can still use everything else and be just as patient or cunning as when you're playing any other character. Compare this to NPC zombies, who will never use equipment or do anything but wandering around looking for victims to attack.
• Robot Police: Cop Bots will supplement the City's police forces in Uptown.
• Rocket-Tag Gameplay: The Low Health For All mutator will massively decrease everyone's HP, with a single attack often being enough to kill a character. It can be taken to a further level with the Rocket Chaos mutator, as it gives everyone a rocket launcher, making it extremely likely for any fight to turn ugly in a single second.
• Schmuck Bait: The Cyanide Pill item, whose description reads "Maybe don't eat this. Seriously." Older versions of the game actually allowed the player to take the pill, and of course it resulted in instant death.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!:
  • Regular cops can be bribed to gain the "Above the law" perk for the current level, making them ignore crimes the player commits (except attacking cops).
  • Loaded characters can waltz through Mayor's village like a breeze. Bribe the Bouncers at the entrance to keep your weapons, then bribe the Mobsters to rig the election in your favor. Did you lose the election? Bribe the clerk to get a badge, then steal the Record of evidence and play it.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: Making your enemies kill each other is a valid way to solve your problems. There are a number of ways to accomplish this:
  • If an NPC accidentally hits another, they will usually become hostile to each other. You can take advantage of this, for example by moving out of the way of an attack so it hits another enemy, or putting down a Hologram Bigfoot to Draw Aggro and watch your foes beat each other up as they try to kill the illusionary cryptid.
  • Enraging NPCs (for example, with the Haterator, or pouring Rage Potion into an air filtration system) will make them blindly attack anyone in sight, whether friend or foe.
  • The Hypnotizer Mark II will turn an NPC into your ally, making them attack anyone who attacks you. The obvious way to use it is on an enemy during combat to make them turn against their former friends.
• Shop Fodder: Certain classes will render entire categories of items useless. For instance, the Cannibal can only eat a specific kind of meat, so other food is off limits; the Doctor is a pacifist who won't touch any lethal weaponry; the Gorilla's hands are too big and stubby to make use of guns built for humans, Zombies are also unable to use guns, and so on, and so forth.
• Shoplift and Die: Most businesses have a locked backroom with a chest or safe inside. If the owners see you stealing, they'll usually respond by gunning you down.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: The shotgun fires 3 bullets in a spread, making it easier to score at least one hit with it, compared to the pistol and revolver. It's also a pretty common gun, as it's often wielded by bartenders and shopkeepers way before you get to the Park, making it easier to keep yourself stocked with ammo when compared to the stronger guns.
• Shrink Ray: A starting weapon for the Scientist, and something others can find at random. It lets you shrink people down and stomp on them.
• Skewed Priorities: The citizens of Mayor's village don't give a hoot about anything that happens in the City's lower levels, but once you find and play the Mayor's Confession, exposing the Mayor's absolutely horrendous embezzlement of their campaign funds to buy socks, everybody who hears it (including the incorruptible Supercops) will tear the Mayor apart.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: When playing as the Slavemaster, civilians will randomly turn hostile, implying slavery is (at least for some people) a Moral Event Horizon In-Universe. On the other hand, buying slaves is completely acceptable, even if you intentionally trigger their Explosive Leash in plain view of the police.
• Slipping a Mickey: The Bartender class starts with an item that lets him turn any drug item into a cocktail he can then give to any NPC. This means you can neutralize/weaken people you want to eliminate by giving them a cocktail with a negative effect, such as poison, weak or cyanide.
• Sniper Pistol: Since all non-shotgun weapons are perfectly accurate at sufficient Firearms level, it's entirely possible to hit someone from halfway across the map with a pistol, so long as you know where they are. The revolver is even better at this, since its bullets are faster than usual.
• Soft Glass: Averted. While you can break a window, then crawl through it, the glass shards will inflict heavy damage in the process, meaning this should only be used as a last resort. The safer option is to use a Hollywood Glass Cutter (or hire a thief to do it for you); you can also completely destroy windows with explosives.
• Static Stun Gun: With the Taser gun you can electrocute an enemy and they will be stunned for awhile. It's a non-lethal weapon, but it deals heavy damage against enemies on or in a body of water.
• Status Effects: By the crapload. Syringes and pills can cause various effects, and outside of that there's Freeze Ray doing what is says on the tin, and a few perks allow you to inflict status effects on hit.
• Stock Ninja Weaponry: The Shuriken is a throwing weapon, and it deals moderate damage against enemies. It's also the Assassin's starting item.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Items like rocket launcher, grenades, landmines cause an explosion, and it deals good damage against people and destroys walls. You can also use a purchased slave as a living bomb. The Time Bomb is the strongest bomb players can use, which generates a huge explosion and destroys anything.
• Swap Teleportation: The description of the Body Swapper item has to clarify that it swaps places with someone in the sense of physically changing positions, rather than a "Freaky Friday" Flip.
• Technical Pacifist: The Doctor's "Pacifist" trait prevents them from using most weapons. While they do have non-lethal ways to take down enemies, and nothing technically stops the player from playing them as an Actual Pacifist, in practice this generally just means you're going to be killing people indirectly instead. Lampshaded by their Big Quest, which requires that you play them as something sort of vaguely akin to an Actual Pacifist... by killing no more than two people per level.
• Teleport Gun: Warp grenades which teleport anything in their blast range unharmed to elsewhere on the level.
• Terminator Impersonator: Some disaster levels may have the Killer Robot, a mechanical hunter with red eyes who is armed with a rocket launcher and near-infinite ammo, and has ludicrous amounts of health. It may be slow, but it will not stop stalking you until you either complete the level, die, or somehow manage to defeat it (which is no easy task unless you have the right setup).
• Thieves' Guild: The Thief can talk to other thieves to purchase thief gear (any of the items the thief starts with), which is useful since normal shopkeepers won't sell things to Thieves.
• Thou Shall Not Kill: Although it is possible to finish a level without killing anyone with most characters, this is enforced with the Doctor, as they can't use weapons of any kind, rely on knocking out enemies with chloroform from behind, their big quest requires that they kill a maximum of two people per floor.
• Utility Party Member: Hired Slum Dwellers aren't typically useful in a fight but can be sent to cause a ruckus outside of a key location, either drawing targets out into the open where you can engage them on your terms or distracting them long enough to sneak in and complete a mission without anyone knowing. Can also come into play when rescuing people that offer services, although you'll still need to pay which limits the utility somewhat.
• Utility Weapon:
  • High-damage weapons can be used to break down walls, although it makes a lot of noise, and melee weapons will lose durability. This makes explosives and the sledgehammer pretty useful even if you want to avoid violence.
  • Switches can be activated by hitting them, which makes ranged weapons pretty useful if you can't approach the switch.
  • A projectile impacting an object will make a small amount of noise, briefly making everybody nearby turn around and become vulnerable to a Back Stab ability. Shurikens and rocks excel at this because you don't lose if they impact a wall.
  • Any item or projectile passing through a laser will activate it, allowing you to disable the explosive red lasers at range. You can even drop items and bat them through the laser with a melee attack.
• Video Game Caring Potential: While you can't do actions that randomly help people in mass, you can still free slaves, who have explosive collars on controlled by slavers, and caged gorillas, held by scientists and proven to be intelligent but unable to communicate, or even just play favorites and save people getting attacked.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: In spades. Every level is filled with innocent (and not-so-innocent, but irrelevant to your mission) people wandering around doing their own thing. Nothing stops you from stealing from them, assaulting them, murdering them for whatever spare change they have in their pockets, flooding their home with poison gas, shrinking them and stomping on them, and so on (and, unless you're the Cop or have a character with The Law trait, you'll even be rewarded with some EXP for doing so).
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Cause a little bit too much property damage and kill a few too many innocents and later in a run Assassins will appear at random to try to murder you.
• Violation of Common Sense:
  • Playing the Vampire to the fullest often requires deliberately getting hurt (or at least putting yourself in situations where you expect to take damage), as their Life Drain ability, while very potent, only functions when not at full health unless you possess a special class trait.
  • Having a trait that makes certain groups always hostile is actually great for your electability. This is because characters who are hostile to you at the start of the level will not count against it, but neutralizing them will increase it. Meanwhile, without these traits, you won't have a violent way to increase your electability, and will often have to rely on bribery and special items to gain it.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting:
  • The Werewolf can turn into a lycanthrope at any time by using his special ability.
  • Averted with the Shapeshifter, ironically. He has to possess someone's body to change forms.
• Vote Early, Vote Often: At the start of a run, your electability will be negative, making it impossible to win the election. Fortunately, you can use many dirty tricks to improve it:
  • You can pay mobsters to tamper with the elections, increasing your global electability by 2.
  • Gaining positive relations with an NPC, paying somebody to become a follower (even if you don't use them for anything), or creating a follower (such as via the friend phone or cloning machine) will improve your electability on the current level. The ability to give cigarettes and food to office drones seems to exist mainly for this purpose.
  • In an inverted variant, you can also engage in voter suppression by neutralizing people who don't like you, making it so that they don't count against your electability.
• Vulnerable Civilians: Various civilian NPCs tend to populate the levels, and aren't exempt from attack, with the game even giving you experience and loot for killing them. Due to Collateral Damage, it's also extremely common for big fights to result in numerous deaths of people who weren't initially involved.
• Weapon of X-Slaying: The Ghost Gibber is a rare energy weapon. It doesn't deal any damage to ordinary things and creatures, but it's insanely effective against supernatural beings like Vampires, Zombies, Werewolves, and of course Ghosts. It can be used as a weapon against anyone in water as well, be it a lake in the Park, a pool in Uptown, or a tiny puddle left over from a destroyed fire hydrant.
• We Have Reserves: A playstyle encouraged with the Slavemaster, since the longer your slaves are alive, the more likely it is for them to rebel against you.
• Weird Currency: To unlock traits and mission rewards, as well as buying starting loadout items in the Home Base, you use chicken nuggets as currency. Somewhat explained as the current Mayor outlawed them after choking on one.
• Welcome to Corneria: Talking to any character that doesn't have an assigned function in the home base, such as unlocking new skills and items, will earn the same message over and over, and if they are a class that can randomly be found in game, they'll say their line from the actual maps, such as the police officer asking you to do crime where they can see it.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The Shapeshifter's entire gimmick comes from Messiah, with a diminutive angel on a Mission from God possessing NPCs to do their dirty work.
• Wretched Hive: The City where the game takes place is swarming with gangs and drug dealers, and the police employ lethal force without question, immediately siding with property owners to beat you to death (unless you pay them to look the other way, of course.) And all of this led by a completely corrupt Mayor, opposed by a violent and unstable Resistance.
• You Killed My Father: The reason why the Gangsters joined their respective gangs is that their father (for the Blahd) and their mother (for the Crepe) were killed by members of the opposite gang. Except it actually was respectively a woman covered in blueberry juice (formerly a Na'vi cosplayer, removed for copyright reasons) and a man with a bad case of rosacea. And they weren't killing them, but doing "something else".
• Zombie Apocalypse:
  • Zombie Invasion disaster spawns multiple Zombies in the level. They will attack anyone who are not Zombies, and they increase their number by infecting people and turning them Zombies.
  • The game actively encourages player Zombies to cause this, as their Big Quest is to convert a certain percentage of the population into Zombies (who will then, of course, go on to try to zombify the rest of the floor!).
• Zombie Infectee: Any NPC that gets hit by a Zombie will turn into a one upon death, even if that death was caused by something else. Unlike most examples of that trope, the death still needs to be caused by something — a NPC who takes one hit from a zombie but then escapes will not get any worse.
• Zombie Puke Attack: The Zombie Phlegm active ability. Anyone hit by it not only will turn into a zombie when they die, but they'll join forces with you instead of roaming randomly through the map.

Thaaaaaaaanks!