Video Game / Ashes 2063

Ashes 2063 is a post-apocalyptic Total Conversion mod for Doom II created by Vostyok, inspired by post-apocalyptic classics like Mad Max, Escape from New York, Fallout, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Metro 2033. It's made to be run via the GZDoom or LZDoom source ports.

Episode 1^note sometimes called City of Ghosts follows the (mis)adventures of a certain S. Scavenger, or Scav for short, as he tries to eke out a life in the ruined wastes of the post-nuke United States, until he hears a strange transmission in a woman's voice on a radio he found, and is left with a number of questions that only a journey to "the City"^*later revealed to be Atlanta, Georgia can answer. It was announced on January 17th, 2015 and the first public build was released on September 23rd, 2018. It features nine levels in linear order, one of which is secret.

A side mini-campaign, Dead Man Walking, was made by ReformedJoe and first released on November 30th, 2018. Its plot is a "What If?" scenario where Scav is ambushed by a gang, robbed blind and Left for Dead in a ditch; unfortunately for the crooks, Scav is not that easy to kill. It features four levels.

Episode 2, Afterglow, released December 3rd, 2021, takes place after the end of 2063, after Scav is rescued from the ruins of the collapsed Spire. In contrast to Episode 1, Afterglow vastly expands on the setting by using a Hub World system, with settlements to visit, sidequests to complete, and even Multiple Endings based on what choices the player makes.

At the same time as Afterglow, the Enriched version of 2063 was released, featuring Dead Man Walking by default as well as including gameplay and quality-of-life changes introduced in Afterglow. It also includes a second secret level for Episode 1, and new intermission art and redesigned/expanded levels for Dead Man Walking.

Both chapters of Ashes can be found on ModDB, fully standalone^note they're packaged with GZDoom v4.7.1 and a copy of Freedoom: Phase Two for an IWAD (base file) and ready to play out of the box. It can also be found in the ZDoom forums thread, alongside a few extras such as standalone weapons and monsters packs^note similar packs were also made for the legacy version of 2063, and can be found in the archived thread. The full soundtracks for all releases, composed by John S. "PRIMEVAL" Weekley, can be found on his Bandcamp.

Hard Reset, a prequel expansion to Afterglow is in development, and will tell a story of different scavenger, Walker, as he guides a team of soldiers into the city until things go wrong. It will be more linear similarly to 2063, featuring new weapons, enemies and mechanics, some of them as a test of sorts for ideas from also in-development Episode 3.

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The game features the following tropes:

General media tropes

• Action Girl:
  • Female gangsters are just as hostile as the guys, tote machine pistols and are tougher than them by a good margin.
  • Porcelain, a scavver, tends to favor stealth but she can hold her own in a fight just fine.
• A.K.A.-47: Downplayed; none of the guns visibly based on real ones are referred to in-game^note in the game's code, a few are by their names, but instead by generic descriptors. The Smith & Wesson 625 is simply ".45 revolver", the Glock pistol is "9mm autoloader", and so on.
• All There in the Script: The names of many enemies and creatures are never given in-game. The only way of finding them out are by checking the game's code or using the "linetarget" command in GZDoom's console.
  • The plants from the Dome all have names: Boom Berry, Gut Root, Devil's Eggplant, and so on.
  • The Final Boss is called Vinaya, and her master is named Erebus.
  • The feral scavs found in the old nuclear site are referred to as "Laughing Toms".
  • The different Plant Mooks from the Botanical Gardens are Matangos, Spore Mortars, and Gasbag Nurseries.
• Alien Blood:
  • Gasbags bleed bright green, the same color as their spores. Nurseries bleed red due to the corpse inside.
  • The Matangos and Spore Mortars bleed pale brown sap.
• Always a Bigger Fish:
  • Prosperity and the Roamers both decline to attack each other despite their mutual animosity because the battle would likely draw the attention of the Cannibal Mutant army marching through the area. Indeed, if you decide to ignore the warnings from Prosperity and retrieve your bike by wiping out the Roamers, the Mutants will be attracted to the sound of fighting and wipe out Prosperity after you leave.
  • The New Guard is also revealed to a much bigger force than first impressions suggest, being more professional and heavily armed. Which is unsurprising given they're all but stated to be remnants of the US government.
• Apocalypse How: Assumed to be a Class 2 (planet-level societal collapse), but Afterglow reveals that it's possibly only a Class 0 (regional societal collapse) spanning the United States.
• The Apunkalypse: As befitting of its inspirations, Ashes features a heavily broken down society rife with gangs of punk-ish thugs and raiders. Some can be reasoned with (at least at first); others like the Vultures and Rippers, not so much.
• Arc Words: "Protect the seeds" in Afterglow. The "seeds" in question are Hellseed nuclear missiles.
• Ate His Gun: Mummified corpses with handgun pickups right next to them are a common sight around the world. One found in the 1st Sergeant room of the Array seems to be the source of the background despair that forced the New Guard to abandon regular use of the lower levels.
• Badass in Distress: At the end of 2063, the Spire collapses with Scav still inside it. He manages to almost reach the surface through the vents, but he's severely injured and loopy from radiation poisoning. It comes up later that he didn't make it back to civilization on his own — another scav, Walker, rescued him and brought him back.
• Bang, Bang, BANG:
  • After the barrel extension upgrade, the .45 revolver's report goes from "normal firearm" to "Nitro Express monstrosity", despite only dealing 10 more damage per bullet.
  • The Junker Driver sounds even louder than the normal Musket when fully charged.
• Bayonet Ya: The pump shotgun gets one as its first upgrade, as a slightly slower but more damaging melee attack than the boot knife. Using the bayonet thrusts Scav a little forward; this can be exploited to run slightly faster.
• Benevolent A.I.: Athena is revealed to have played a crucial role behind America nuking itself to save the rest of the world, but arranged for various "safe zones" to be set up in an attempt to protect civilians from the ensuing onslaught. She even went so far as to have Site SIGMA's nuclear payload target itself to deny Erebus' mutant hordes access to it. The New Guard is implied to consider Athena a threat and are actively hunting down all traces of her, such as in the Spire.
• BFG:
  • The result of Project P.I.G. is the Pneumatic Incinerator Gun, a belt-fed machine gun firing the same slugs as the Junker Musket. As in, .70 caliber slugs. It's just as deadly as it sounds.
  • The Junker Musket itself, after its final upgrade, becomes the Junker Driver, a railgun that can charge up each shot to up to double the base damage. This monstrosity is capable of one-shotting almost everything in the game when charged enough and what doesn't fall to one slug will be left reeling, figuratively and literally — slugs fired from the Junker Musket at any upgrade tier are hard-coded to make enemies flinch when hit.
• Bilingual Bonus: The side of the Russian submarine in Anomaly 210 reads "Filadelfiya" in Cyrillic, as a reference to the Philadelphia Experiment.
• Brain Monster: The true form of the Haunts is a large disembodied brain and spine. The humanoid appearance is just a guise, although judging by its hitbox, it's not just an intangible projection.
• Cool Bike: Scav owns a red EZE Tesla-Glide '79 chopper, a highly desired motorcycle from the dialogue of most NPCs. It gets even cooler in the late parts of Afterglow: Clyde, the Roamers' mechanic, changes its engine to run on common biofuel rather than rare gasoline, and links two .30 caliber machine guns to the handlebars.
• The Corruption: Some areas of the old world contain a phenomenon described by New Guard messages as "background despair". It's intimately tied to paranormal occurrences and Haunts, and is only observed in locations with corpses present, in circumstances where it's implied they died alone and in despair^note such as being locked away behind a heavy-duty mechanism that Scav himself struggles to find a way past, or a revolver besides a sitting body. Background despair also seems to have a hand in corrupting scavs into Laughing Toms. By the end of Afterglow, you find out that Athena nuked America to prevent a major paranormal event called "The Blooming", which, from all evidence, would've been background despair on a global scale.
• Creepy Cleanliness: Some underground locations, especially in Afterglow, are still clean and organized when Scav gets to them. That's rarely a good sign, as it often means the place houses dangerous levels of background despair.
• Crowbar Combatant: Scav's melee weapon of choice is a crowbar. It's a stronger option for sustained melee combat than the boot knife. Primary fire is a fast sequence of swings, while Secondary Fire is a stronger whack with a slight windup, perfect for putting down a thug or pit fiend silently. Like other weapons that can be feasibly wielded with one hand, the crowbar can be dual wielded along with the Solar Lantern.
• Destroy the Evidence: Athena implies that this is why the New Guard is so hostile towards the AI, in their attempts to cover up what really happened behind America nuking itself.
• Disaster Scavengers: Scavs, individuals who explore and pilfer the old world's ruins for anything that could be useful — metal pieces, hardware parts, tools, wire, you name it. The Player Character himself is one, and the junk you find even counts as money.
• The Drifter: Scav never seems to stay at any one place for too long. He tends to reside in one settlement for a few months at most, then he hits the road on his bike.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Despite Athena trying her best to set up "safe zones" for civilians even while setting the stage for America to nuke itself, the AI is still labeled by the New Guard as a threat to be destroyed, even if only to keep the truth from ever coming out.
• The End of the World as We Know It: Subverted, surprisingly given the setting. Athena reveals that America nuked itself to prevent one of these. She isn't able to disclose the details, but claims that, whatever it was, the DPRI referred to it as The Blooming.
• Everybody Calls Him "Barkeep": Scav is the only scavenger that's called a scav by everyone, including himself; there are plenty of other scavengers in the world, but they tend to go by nicknames like "Porcelain" or "Silver". At the end of 2063, in an optional interaction with a computer to get a security pass, Scav lists himself in the database as "S. Scavenger", along with some other cheeky credentials.
• Evil Tainted the Place: Locations with corpses that seem to have died in isolation are frequently inhabited by Haunts. Afterglow ties places like this to an effect called "background despair" by the New Guard.
• Fallen States of America: Ashes takes place in the year 2063, 89 years after the US was destroyed by nuclear attacks. Later on, it's revealed that only the US fell, because it nuked itself to prevent a disastrous event named "The Blooming".
• Fantastic Radiation Shielding: Purge is a stim with three effects: negate the damage from radiation poisoning, drain away all radiation in the user's body, and negate any and all radiation absorption. At least for scavs, it's so effective that one can walk into ground zero of a nuclear explosion and suffer zero ill effects. Notably, Purge is the only stim that comes in pill format.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: The Master Blaster is a napalm flamethrower that can either launch exploding gobs of fuel or spray it in a cloud like a typical video game flamethrower. It's mostly seen in the hands of Master cannibals, but there are smaller models fit for use by normal humans. Destroyers also use these, to great effect.
• Future Imperfect: No one knows what sparked the war that ended the world, and most are too busy surviving or fighting to really care to find out. It's heavily implied, however, that this was purposefully invoked to cover up why America nuked itself and the truth behind "The Blooming".
• Forbidden Zone: The former United States is heavily implied to have become a gigantic one as a result of the country nuking itself.
• Gangsta Style: The MAC-10 has this as its Secondary Fire mode. It fires faster but is a lot harder to control even if it's upgraded.
• Gasoline Lasts Forever: Zig-zagged. Gasoline is implied to never go bad (indeed, scavenging for some gas is a plot point in two occasions), but after 70+ years there's barely any left. Most people have switched to biofuel^note NPC dialogue heavily implies it to be ethanol instead.
• Garden of Evil: The J.G. Ballard Botanical Gardens, AKA "the Dome" or "Biodome". It was left to stew in the radioactive and poisoned groundwater since the war, and the plant life mutated accordingly. Matangos, Spore Mortars and Gasbags watch over the gardens and are not fond of human visitors as anything other than food or a nestbed for their spores. Curiously, there are also insects and amphibians inside the Dome — they're never seen, but can be heard as ambience — implying that it's a complete ecosystem.
• Genre Shift: At the start, the game seems like your standard Post-Apocalyptic Scavenger World. As you progress, however, and encounter phenomenon that ranges from unusual to questionable to undeniably supernatural, culminating in The Reveal at the end of Episode 2, you realise it's not Post-Apocalypse at all. It's a Cosmic Horror Story.
• Glowing Eyes: According to Doctor Lipski, the practitioner in Michonne Circle, glowing eyes is a characteristic mutation of scavs. You can see for yourself when in front of a mirror: Scav's eyes glow white, even in the dark. In Afterglow, Porcelain's, Walker's and Silver's eyes also glow white.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: A number of hostile mutants such as Pit Fiends and Haunts feature large glowy eyes. Erebus has eyes that glow white.
• Godzilla Threshold: Whatever "The Blooming" was, the DPRI decided that the only viable option to prevent it was for the United States to nuke itself. Judging by the amount of supernatural phenomena around when Ashes takes place, it probably didn't work. Or, more worryingly, maybe it did.
• Great Offscreen War: The War that seemingly ended the world never happened, as in actuality America nuked itself to prevent a global catastrophe.
• The Great Repair: The main mission of the first hub of Afterglow is to repair Scav's bike, which was caught in a flood between episodes, so he can leave Atlanta.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: Zigzagged. When you are planting bombs at the Roamer's ammo and fuel depots, guards will approach you at least twice to ask you what the hell you're doing rooting around their stuff. However, if you reply that you were stealing, the guard will immediately accept this answer, and grumpily tell you to talk to the quartermaster next time.
• Guns Akimbo: Ripper Corporals carry two 9mm autoloaders. When killed, they drop both.
• He Knows Too Much: The New Guard is trying to erase all traces of Athena due to being the only one left who knows what happened during the War and what the DPRI did, thus the last entity who could break The Masquerade.
• Hollywood Silencer: Available as an upgrade for the machine pistol, and played surprisingly realistically — it helps reduce the spread while also making it easier to ambush enemies without alerting their buddies, though within a decent distance enemies will still react when you open fire. In the base 2063 you get it together with an unfolded stock, by forgoing the other two options (of armor and a backpack) that Rigs offers as payment for the briefcase you deliver to him; in Dead Man Walking it's a purchasable upgrade from the Bunker's quartermaster; and in Afterglow, the silencer is the machine pistol's first workbench upgrade.
• Horse of a Different Color: Female pit fiends are big enough to carry a full-grown man on their backs and still run at full speed. Some places even use them for races. After Scav is captured by mutants and escapes, he eventually finds a female pit fiend called Lucy, which he can use through the second hub until he finds his stolen motorcycle.
  "Ride'em, doggy!"
• Idiot Savant: In Afterglow, there's Vic, a refugee in Michonne Circle that has some manner of intellectual disability, but he's exceptional at counting things. Such as the exact numbers of the marching mutant army he saw from the roof of his old station: 1565 of them.
• I'm a Humanitarian:
  • Mutant humans have a penchant for human flesh that they don't try to hide at all. The regular cannibals proclaim upon sight that they're going to eat whoever attracted their attention, often laying claim on their target's liver, and you can tell a location's been taken over by mutants the moment you see mangled, butchered corpses strewn around, hanging from the ceiling like pieces of meat, or being cooked in various ways.
  • In Dead Man Walking, this is implied with the Rippers. The nuclear power plant they use as a base is full of human corpses and bones and piles of gore in the hallways, almost exactly like mutants do.
• Lampshade Hanging:
  • First, you come across a Scavenger asking if you're "crazy". When asked to explain his question, he answers that he heard tales of a Scavenger who went completely psychotic, murdering his way through armies of raiders and mutants, unlike sane Scavs who'd rather avoid fighting. This also serves to foreshadow the introduction of Laughing Toms.
  • Second, you can meet a raider whose group tried to shake down the wrong Scavenger. After a drink to calm his nerves, he'll tell how you how he ended up hiding and witnessing the inhumanly fast way the Scavenger disposed of his gang, showing how frightening and awesome the Doom-style movement of the Scavs appears to regular humans.
• Land Mine Goes "Click!": Pipebombs can be set down as tripwire explosives. When triggered, the last thing the target will hear is the wire going 'click' before dying a very grisly death. Watch out, though, as Scav isn't the only one that has this idea... Thankfully, pipebombs can be defused, and Scav is unable to trip his own traps.
• Large and in Charge: Rule of thumb for cannibals is, the larger a mutant, the higher its authority. Overseers are larger and fatter than the rank-and-file cannibals; Masters are muscular walls of flesh standing twelve feet tall; the Cannibal Warlord stands at least fifteen. The mutant army's leader, Erebus, is so massive he has to duck and kneel to fit inside a stadium hallway.
• Laser Sight: The first upgrade to the 9mm autoloader, aside from cleaning it up, is adding a red laser pointer to the underside of the barrel. This makes the inaccurate stock autoloader almost as precise as the revolver.
• Living Gasbag: The Gasbag mutants are essentially floating sacs full of volatile gas and fungal spores. They don't have the best senses, but when alerted to the smell of fresh organic matter, their first and only plan is to rocket in the direction of it and explode messily and violently.
• Load-Bearing Boss: 2063 ends with the Spire collapsing onto Scav immediately after defeating the final boss.
• Lovable Rogue: The Roamers land somewhere between this and Noble Demons, depending on who you ask. Despite their undeniable militarism and raiding, they have a code of honor that they actually adhere to, even towards outsiders.
• Magnetic Weapons: The final upgrade for the Junker Musket is an electromagnetic drive that, when charged enough, doubles the firepower of each slug up to 300 damage. That's potent enough to one-shot the majority of common enemies, with very few exceptions.
• MacGuffin: In 2063, Smiley asks Scav to deliver a locked briefcase to Rigs in Michonne Circle. Later, in Afterglow, Rigs asks Scav to take it to Prosperity, as the briefcase turns out to contain a locked military computer. It's not quite that easy, as mutants waylay Scav specifically to get this computer. Inverted much later on when the true nature of it is revealed: it's a terminal essential to launch the Hellseed missiles in site SIGMA.
• Make an Example of Them: After Scav has been ambushed by mutants and brought to a stadium used as their base of operations, their leader, Erebus, declares he must serve as an example for killing the amount of cannibals that he did. The example turns out to be being forced to fight in an arena against ever-increasing waves of cannibals and pit fiends, with only the crowbar. During the final wave, Scav escapes into the stadium's vents.
• The Masquerade: The old world DPRI^note Department of Parascience Research and Intelligence believed that having the United States nuke itself was the only viable solution to save the world from "The Blooming", though it's implied that these details were kept only to itself and and high-ranking members of the government. The New Guard's efforts to track down and purge Athena are also implied to be an attempt to make sure the truth remains covered up long after the fact.
• Mutants: One of the hallmarks of the wastelands of Ashes is mutants, which vary from scavs (mostly normal humans with enhanced physiology and glowing eyes) to cannibal savages towering several feet in height. Strangely, according to Doctor Lipski in Michonne Circle, the old world knew of these mutations before the bombs fell^note you can even find evidence of Pit Fiends being spoken of in Old World newspapers, and scav mutation is not genetic.
• Night-Vision Goggles: You can find these in Afterglow. When activated, they colormap the player's view in a uniform shade of green, with slight distortion at the edges. They last 120 seconds and cannot be recharged — the only way to refill it is by finding or buying another set — but you can turn them on and off at will, and they're your only way to see in the dark from afar or while holding a larger weapon, as Scav's rechargeable solar lantern has limited range and can only be wielded alongside the crowbar, one of the handguns, or the machine pistol.
• No Bikes in the Apocalypse: You see plenty of motor vehicles, both wrecked and functional, but never a bicycle. A random NPC lampshades this, claiming he tried to leave the settlement of The Wall on a bike, but he failed and the guards laughed at him.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The games make use of this in several ways:
  • Since details about background despair are scarce, this trope is a big aspect of it. Pre-War posters seen in Atlanta which presumably relate to the early spread treat it like a disease and only serve as vague Noodle Implements: One tells people to report symptons like sweating or a vacant stare, one in front a fortified gate warns drivers that they are leaving a safe area, and that they need to turn their car lights off and not remove any objects from the zone outside the gate.
  • In the Array, you descend into the lower levels of a bunker described by text logs as near-unusable due to background despair. It becomes increasingly creepy, with dead soldiers everywhere, no sounds but the base machinery and, occasionally, what sounds like distant laughter. You expect something to appear at any moment... But nothing happens inside the bunker. It's in the well-lit, spacious control tower you return to that a boss appears.
  • The last secret level of Afterglow ( Anomaly 210), plays out similarly, giving you a lot of time to just soak up the creepy atmosphere and claustrophobic environments of a Soviet nuclear submarine, with the Phantoms only appearing towards the end of the level.
• Numbers Stations: Nosing around in Afterglow can lead you to what's left of the Spire, where you can find a message with an unknown radio broadcast, which a player with keen ears can tell is from a numbers station. That's your key to Anomaly 210, where you find out what's broadcasting the signal are the ghosts of the crew.
• Offscreen Teleportation: Laughing Toms are agile and crafty — they'll take any opportunity to go around behind you and plant a musket slug in your back. This is coded as them teleporting silently behind the player if you ignore them for too long.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Haunts are corpse-like apparitions that inhabit secluded old world locations, where you can find long-dead mummified corpses. They emit a long, distorted wail upon seeing the player, and attack by launching some form of purple energy ball that, for lack of a better term, emits darkness. Subverted in that they're not actual ghosts, as they're tangible and can be hurt by any weapon; when killed, the Haunt's corpse visage is revealed to be just a projection — the real thing is a somehow-animated disembodied brain and spine.
• Pile Bunker: After one upgrade, the Jackhammer (now called "Smackhammer") becomes this. It deals significantly higher damage than the flat-head stock version.
• Plant Mooks:
  • Gasbags are mutants that look and move similarly to an airborne man-o-war. They reproduce through spores, which they spread by exploding, and infecting other animals nearby. Animals (including humans) sufficiently infected become Gasbag Nurseries.
  • Spore Mortars are a type of flower in the Botanical Gardens that unveil their inflorescence and launch bursting balls of pollen at any nearby threats. Fortunately, they're sessile, have limited range, and don't need to be exposed to be damaged.
  • The Matango is a fully mobile carnivorous bush that can either spit acid sprays at high velocity or rush in at high speed to mangle their prey with their tentacle-like vines. They have high health but are very weak to fire.
• Psychic Powers:
  • Haunts fire a Psi Blast in the shape of a purple energy ball that sucks all the light around it. Their guise is also a psychic projection for the disembodied brain and spine that they really are. Phantoms are similar, but they also have a lunge attack and fire red energy balls instead of purple.
  • The mutant female that ambushes Scav and takes him to the mutant army's leader has access to telepathy, telekinesis and energy manipulation. She also has access to the same Psi Blast balls that Haunts do.
• Radiation-Immune Mutants: Zig-zagged depending on species.
  • Downplayed with Scavengers. Being Mutants themselves, they are immune to the long-term effects of radiation, but still get fried if they're exposed to high enough concentrations. In-game this is represented by how the lower (green) third of the radiation gauge is harmless.
  • Also downplayed with Cannibal Mutants. They are better at handling it than scavengers, but are implied to still be unable to handle extreme hotspots like at Atlanta's ground zero.
  • Played straight with Matangos, that seem to be attracted to high doses of radiation, if the encounter at the Nuclear Waste Site is any indication.
• Ragnarök Proofing: Zig-zagged constantly.
  • Gasoline and batteries seem to have decayed very little since the end of the old world, and many pieces of infrastructure and computers still work in more sheltered locations. Even medicine decades past its expiration date can be used, provided the labeling is intact, and printer ink still prints like new without any feeding issues or color decay.
  • However, if something like a stim has been sitting near a radiation source for almost a century like the TITAN stim you can find in The Gap, it's better not to use it.
  • Subverted with food. You can pick up baked beans, cereal and other junk food lying around in ruins and even radiation hotspots, and they all give 2 health a pop. If you ask the doctor at Michonne Circle about mutations, he'll remark that only scavengers can eat said food, often left lying around in derelict buildings picking up radiation; Scav responds that he never thought of it, and it all tastes just fine to him.
• Red Sky, Take Warning:
  • Clouds during radiation storms are scarlet red and thunderous. In the Enriched version of 2063, you can see the transition from regular daylight to the red sky at the same time you start hearing thunderclaps in the mall Secret Level.
  • The sky is also cloudy and vivid red when Scav visits Anomaly 210, though it does not seem to be a radstorm. At least not at first...
• The Remnant: The New Guard are revealed to be the New United States Guard, the last organized remnant of the old world American government. Athena, however, doesn't recogonize its claims and treats the New Guard as terrorists, though this might have something to do with it trying its hardest to destroy any trace of the AI.
• Resurrect the Wreck: The first act of Afterglow centers around Scav finding the parts to rebuild his motorcycle after it was swept away in a flood after the storm in Episode One. Downplayed in that it's still mostly intact thanks to Rigs; it's just missing a battery (which was irreparably damaged by water in the flood) and gasoline (which is extremely rare after so many years).
• Revolvers Are Just Better: Scav's standard firearm is a .45 revolver based on the Smith & Wesson 625. It fires "heavy bullets" that pack a good punch, capable of downing most humans in three shots or less and a pit-fiend in two; it only pales against particularly sturdy enemies, as it takes a good while to reload. It can be upgraded with a heavier barrel for more powerful shots with no downsides, and later you can add a quick-fire mechanism for fanning the hammer cowboy-style, but at the cost of recoil control. Some bandits also use mainly revolvers, and to compensate for the higher power, they fire less bullets per attack than autoloader wielders.
• Running on All Fours: Laughing Toms scuttle around on three legs, holding a Junker Musket with the fourth. It's a good indication of how far they've degenerated from the scavs they once were.
• Saharan Shipwreck: Anomaly 210, the Secret Level, is a Russian submarine beached in the middle of the Georgian countryside.
• Sawed-Off Shotgun: Both shotguns have sawed-off stocks, but the specifically named sawed-off shotgun also had its barrels shortened. This is reflected in gameplay — primary fire with it, where it fires each barrel individually, deals less damage per shell than the pump shotgun. Secondary fire shoots both barrels at once and deals more damage per shell, and it's capable of putting down cannibals and trash hags with one reload. Later it can be upgraded to have three barrels, with a corresponding increase in secondary fire's firepower; the second upgrade is, curiously, a stock, which helps control its monstrous recoil.
• Sickly Green Glow: Zig-zagged as to radiation. Radioactive runoff is bright glowy lime green, but radstorms have a scarlet red tint, and in Afterglow, the cooling pools in the nuclear waste site and in the Secret Level (which are not quite so radioactive) glow the more realistic blue of Cherenkov radiation.
• Sniper Rifle: The Junker Musket is a scoped rifle that fires slugs about the size of a 10-gauge shotgun shell, and is by far the most accurate bullet weapon in Scav's arsenal — every shot will hit exactly at the center of the crosshair. One shot from it can put down a mutant cannibal, and if the target's too tough to die in one shot, it's guaranteed to flinch from it. It starts off as a single-shot breechloader, but it can be upgraded to a lever-action with a 3-round magazine^*called the "Junker Repeater", and later have a magnetic inductor coil attached to the barrel that can be charged to accelerate the round^*known as the "Junker Driver". Laughing Toms are fond of this weapon.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Toward the end of Afterglow, when you get out of the Sigma Base, you see the Hellseed missiles launching, and as "The Star-Spangled Banner" starts playing (sung by women, no less), that's your cue to run like hell, get on a motorcycle, and head for the bomb shelter as fast as possible. While the song is playing, you can gun down the remaining cannibals with your motorcycle while you're zipping on down the road. As soon as you're near the shelter, the song will get to the "O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave...?" part, which means you'd better hurry up as you open the door and get inside before closing the door, because if you don't do it soon by the time the song ends, the nukes will explode^note which gives new meaning to the "rockets' red glare" and "bombs bursting in air" part and vaporize you.
• Spawn Broodling: Gasbags reproduce by infesting other beings with their spores, either from singular Gasbags exploding on the victim or by a Nursery launching clusters of spores at it.
• Standard Post-Apocalyptic Setting: Zig-zagged.
  • 2063 takes place in an Outback-like barren wasteland of dusty ruins with little to no vegetation and muddy water, but the further north you head, the more greenery is on display. The area around Site SIGMA is particularly lush.
  • The area north of Atlanta is outright referred to as "The Badlands", and has unusually toxic groundwater from a derelict nuclear waste disposal site and the Biodome. Even so, there's still enough plant life for Prosperity to maintain a modest wood-based biofuel industry; the roads in the area are sided by tree thickets and you can see spots of grass here and there.
  • The Biodome itself is a Pripyat-style vibrant but radioactive wasteground, with not only abundant plant life but a fully functioning ecosystem (judging by the amphibians and insects heard in the ambience). Of course, a decent amount of that plant life wants to kill you, or worse.
• Super Serum: Stims in general are powerful medicinal serums and injections with various effects such as health regeneration, an adrenaline overdrive, or in the case of Russian stock, Nigh-Invulnerability for a very limited time. Doctor Lipski at Michonne Circle remarks that these stims have nasty side-effects, but scavs, being a type of mutant, seem to be immune to those.
• Super Spit:
  • Pit fiends, heavily mutated dogs with bug features, attack at range by spitting gobs of acidic bile.
  • Matangos attack at range by spitting lengthy sprays of acid.
• Taking You with Me: Upon reaching the end of the Anomaly 210 mission, Scav finds a message on a computer in the heart of the submarine written in English; it's a message from the captain of the submarine, addressed to any (presumed) American forces responsible for taking his ship after it was teleported from the ocean into the middle of Georgia. Upon Scav opening and reading the message, the submarine initiates a Self-Destruct Mechanism, and Scav must take the escape pod to the surface and run like hell.
  "Well done, American. You have killed us, my ship, and most of my crew. I know of no branch of science that allows for this, to take a ship such as mine and translocate it in such a manner. I sincerely hope you have control of the forces you so callously unleashed.
  "Now listen to this: I may not know what weapon you have used to disable my vessel, but you will not profit from your limitless perfidy. In accordance with my Leninist principles, I inform you that you may go fuck your mother. Get off my ship or die." -Captain, 1st rank I. Zateyev.
  Scav: Uh oh.
• Tiny Guy, Huge Girl: Pit fiend females are much bigger and tougher than the males. They're also naturally more docile (unless they're defending their pups, according to the Prosperity Beastmaster) and easier to train.
• Trashcan Bonfire: Old steel drums are commonly used as fire pits throughout the wastelands.
• The Unfought: Erebus, the mutant leader is seen in a cutscene but never encountered otherwise. His fate is ultimately unaddressed, though he may have been killed in the Hellseed missile bombardment that Athena launches to render site Sigma inaccessible.
• Unnaturally Looping Location: In the tutorial level of Afterglow, you can hear footsteps and see the light of a lantern fade behind a corner on a side path. If you chase after it, you'll see the same thing happen over and over and over again until you stop, turn around, and see you're right back at the entrance of the side path. Justified in the level being a Nightmare Sequence. If you find a way back to the Spire, you can revisit this location, sans looping this time; all it leads to is a security checkpoint that unlocks the way forward.
• Vagueness Is Coming: At a certain point in Afterglow, you find out that the old world's DPRI (Department of Parascience Research and Intelligence) predicted a major paranormal event codenamed The Blooming. Whatever it was/is, Athena decided it was worth America nuking itself to try and prevent it. And if this event is related to background despair and the horrors it creates, they had good reason to do it.
• The Virus: Old logs in military computers indicate some contagious effect was going on in the urban centers of the old world, bad enough that evacuation was considered. Subverted in that it wasn't transmitted by contact, but rather by proximity and population density. Connecting the dots with info given by Athena in Sigma, it seems to be related to The Blooming.
• Was Once a Man:
  • Gasbag Nurseries, the result of a human being severely infected by Gasbag spores. The skeleton is still visible within the fungal mass, and unlike Gasbags that bleed green, the Nursery bleeds red when shot because of the corpse inside.
  • Laughing Toms are former scavs that were affected by background despair of old world locations and became "feral", cackling constantly and Running on All Fours.
• Water Is Blue: Played straight in the Legacy version of 2063, but averted in later installments. Water in maps can be muddy brown or green from algae growth; you can purchase potable water in bars, but the water itself is never seen by the player.
• Weaponized Offspring: Gasbag Nurseries launch volleys of homing spores as a means of attack.
• Wham Episode: There are three major revelations in the cutscene ending the map "Escape from Atlanta":
  • First, a cannibal mutant levitates towards you and psychically throws you through a window, a type of power so far only seen by the Haunts.
  • Then you see mutants and raiders standing together gloating over your body, having made a pact to work together.
  • Finally, while Scav is being interrogated, the leader of the mutant army reveals himself, and he's huge and intelligent. To top things off, he's flanked by a new type of mutant, holding a shotgun and riot shield, showing a level of organization beyond the near-feral tribal hordes of cannibals fought so far.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: Afterglow ends with this, with the leader of the New Guard reporting on the fates of the various areas and some of the people encountered throughout the game, most of which can vary depending upon player choices.
• Your Head Asplode: If you give the Shady Dealer a heavily irradiated TITAN stim to apply on Mojo, he lives through the fight but his head quickly swells in spots until it bursts with a ceiling-high spray of blood and innards. As Scav puts it in dialogue, he finds it "pretty fucking dope", and the pit fight's owner himself is impressed.

Gameplay tropes

• Action Bomb: Gasbags attack by zooming towards the enemy/prey and exploding, which deals damage and releases a cascade of spores that also deal damage if they hit. They also explode the same way when killed.
• Air-Vent Passageway: Much of the old world's ruins can only be accessed through vent shafts.
• Airborne Mook: Gasbags, Gasbag Nurseries and Haunts float in the air.
• Ambushing Enemy: Trash hags are mutants that disguise themselves as scrap metal piles and sit in ambush. When they spot a victim or hear a loud sound, the whole pack springs up at once.
• Ammo-Using Melee Weapon: The Jackhammer uses up its biofuel tank when attacking, but not when at the ready. If you run out of fuel, it's completely unusable until you get more.
• Bag of Spilling: Between 2063 and Afterglow, Scav loses all of his gear except his revolver, crowbar, knife and lantern. He can ask about it to his savior, Walker, who will reveal that everything was missing when he found Scav in the ruins; what he had, Walker left with him.
• Blackout Basement:
  • The subway tunnels under Atlanta have very little available light, natural or otherwise, even in populated or traversed sections, as Michonne Circle's citizens sometimes remark. This can be first noticed in Map 5 of 2063, "The Sub-Caverns", and extends to the other areas visited in Afterglow in the map "Undercity".
  • The utility tunnel system under Prosperity in Afterglow, justified by Patch, the settlement's repairman, never venturing beyond the water purification machinery. Tunnels and passages outside of his maintenance route tend to be very murky, and even sections in his route have some spots best explored with lantern in hand.
• Charged Attack: The tier 3 Junker Musket, the Junker Driver, has an electromagnetic inductor that can be charged to give each shot up to double the power of the standard slug. The firing sound is increased accordingly.
• Cosmetic Award: Winning the Pit Fiend race in first place unlocks a pickup that turns the crowbar gold.
• Degraded Boss: The first Master mutant fought by Scav in 2063 is treated as a (skippable) boss fight. Later on they appear more frequently leading smaller posses of mutants, with no changes to their stats or behavior. In Afterglow they go back to leading large groups, with lesser squads being led by Overseers.
• Door to Before: The levels, being more labyrinthine than even Doom's, have a lot of these to make backtracking easier.
• Dual Wielding:
  • Scav can carry his crowbar, revolver, 9mm autoloader or machine pistol in one hand and his solar lantern in the other. The performance of the handguns is unaffected but the machine pistol becomes very hard to control even when fully upgraded, and for some reason, the light turns off while swinging the crowbar.
  • Ripper corporals dual-wield 9mm autoloaders.
  • Cannibal Manslayers carry a shotgun on their right hand and a huge heavy-duty police shield on their left arm.
• Deadly Lunge:
  • Cannibals do a short straight lunge with their pipes to get close to their prey.
  • Lucy the pit fiend matriarch has a quick dive forward with her claws out. This deals a lot of damage, and can also be used to jump over gaps.
  • After attaching the bayonet to the pump shotgun, the Secondary Fire melee drags the player forward. Constantly repeating this makes you move almost as fast as straferunning.
• Elite Mooks: Destroyers are the absolute elite of the mutant forces. They have the firepower of Masters and around the same health, but have access to more varied attacks, are fast and very aggressive.
• Exploding Barrels: Fire extinguishers, gas canisters and the small red bushes in the Dome all explode when shot, with varying degrees of violence.
• Friendly Fireproof: Zig-zagged. Solid projectiles like bullets or bolts can cause infighting among enemies of the same type, but chemical attacks like pit fiends' Super Spit don't. Scav is also immune to tripping his own pipebomb traps, but not to their explosions if they're triggered by other means.
• Gateless Ghetto: Averted. In all cases the maps have realistically sized and proportioned urban roadways or railways, but they're mostly collapsed or blocked by rubble and junk or locked by gates.
• Glass Cannon: Some of the human enemies are armed with pretty powerful guns, including the shotgun and machine pistol, and if you waltz past one of their hidey-holes without noticing they're perfectly capable of dealing crippling damage before you can react. They're still wearing plain unarmored clothing, though, and will go down with a couple shots from your basic peashooter.
• Kill It with Fire: Matangos, mutant plants which can tank several direct shotgun blasts and musket slugs, are extremely vulnerable to fire-based weapons and go up almost instantly when hit with one. The NPCs at Prosperity even warn you to not go near the Botanical Gardens without a flamethrower.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: When scavenging you can find breakfast cereal, canned meat, baked beans and other food products that give you 2 Hit Points when consumed, and can go above the normal 100 health threshold. Talk to the doctor in Michonne Circle after a sidequest and you'll find out that only scavengers can stomach food that's been lying around collecting dust and radiation for over 70 years, because all scavengers are Mutants.
• Homing Projectile: The spores launched by Gasbag Nurseries home on on their target, though they don't regard walls and obstacles.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Modified from the basic Doom to make them harder. Each gets a confirmation like the base game's "Nightmare!" difficulty, which describes what you should expect.
  • Relaxed: For beginner players or story over combat. Enemies are less common and supplies are more plentiful.
  • Standard: Regular difficulty. For experienced players, with an emphasis on action.
  • Arcade: Hard difficulty. Plenty of enemies and stuff to shoot them with. Ultra-Violence equivalent.
  • Survival: A true survivor makes the most of what he has. Ammo is more scarce and you take more damage — but so do your enemies.^detailsEnemy distribution is the same as on Standard, and they have 25% less health, but they also deal extra damage to you. Ammunition pickups are shaved by half.
  • Apocalypse: Every mistake hurts. Every enemy wants you dead. Every fight could be your last. The ultimate challenge.^detailsSame enemy distribution as on Arcade, they deal the same extra damage as Survival, and have no health reduction. Ammo pickups are normal.
• Invincibility Power-Up: Downplayed with the TITAN Stim. It makes you unkillable, but that only goes as far as not letting your Hit Points fall below 1; you'll still take damage if it's above that and armor is completely unaffected. It's even lampshaded in NPC dialogue, as the stim dealer can tell: during testing of TITAN, the test subject jumped out of a window and fell to the floor many stories below, suffering tons of injuries but surviving, only to be bumped by a bus going at low speed and dying on the spot.
• Lightning Bruiser: Matangos are mobile carnivorous plants that shoot wads of corrosive spit at their target. But if they get too close, they'll unfurl a cluster of tentacles and bum-rush you for very high continuous damage. They're also very difficult to shake off unless you use the Master Blaster.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Deal enough damage to an enemy with an explosive or the P.I.G. and it will go splat, flying body parts included. Notably, if the target dies to a pipebomb, it is guaranteed to gib, no matter by how little damage.
• Monster Closet: It's so ubiquitous it gets predictable after a while, enabling savvy players to pipebomb-trap the exit points and thin out the herd of bad guys before having to engage them.
  • Monsters, especially mutant cannibals, tend to lie in ambush behind locked doors on hallways, waiting for a victim to pass before all of them open and mob their target from all directions. One such instance in the tutorial for the Enriched version of 2063 even calls it "pretty standard ambush.
  • At one point in 2063, an elevator serves as a Vulture closet, coming down after you pick up a key and disgorging a whole crew of gangsters and pit fiends.
  • In Afterglow, an out-of-the-way area in the final level features a Haunt inside a wardrobe, making it a literal monster closet.
• No "Arc" in "Archery": Played straight for all projectiles except the Master Blaster's primary fire, whose napalm gobs arc significantly with distance. Upgrading it to MkIII reduces their flight arc, making it easier to score long-distance shots.
• No-Gear Level: In Afterglow, after Scav is ambushed by mutants at the northern Atlanta checkpoint, he's left with only the crowbar, knife, lantern and his inventory items, and the player has to face multiple waves of mutants using just that. Luckily all of your stuff is stashed in a nearby locker room.
• One Bullet Clips: Firearms need to be reloaded after a set number of bullets, but as with most video games, reloads simply pull more ammo from the appropriate pool. That said, magazine-fed weapons which fire from a closed bolt, like the 9mm autoloader, keep an extra round if they're reloaded halfway, while weapons which wouldn't work that way, like the .45 revolver or open-bolt machine pistol, don't.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: In an odd twist, the TITAN stim found in Anomaly 210 makes you completely unkillable, but your hitpoints can still drop all the way to one. Once it wears off, if you're so much as spat on, you're dead.
• Practical Currency: Salvaged scrap can be used as money or in workbenches to upgrade Scav's weapons and build pipebombs. In rarer cases it can be used to repair stuff like machinery.
• Punch-Packing Pistol: Both handguns count. The revolver is powerful from the start and can hit even harder when upgraded, enough to two-shot any human enemy short of a mini-boss; the 9mm autoloader's light bullets pack less of a punch, but bullets fired from the autoloader still deal more damage than ones fired off the machine pistol, and the burst-fire feature (added after two upgrades) can down a pit fiend in one solid 3-round burst.
• Quick Melee:
  • The boot knife is a melee option when wielding anything but the crowbar and the jackhammer. It's quick to swing and deals good damage, but the downtime between swinging, bringing the gun back up and then swinging again is very slow.
  • The stock pump shotgun has a butt stroke as its Secondary Fire, replaced by a bayonet attachment as its first upgrade. Its windup is slightly longer than using the knife, but it deals more damage, especially with the bayonet.
• Secret Level:
  • 2063 has a standard Doom-style secret level found by locating an alternate exit in one level. The Enriched edition adds a second secret level as an optional sidequest, taking place in The Wall's dam.
  • Afterglow has two secret zones: The Spire's basements, accessed through a secret area in the Atlanta Hub Level, which contains an item used later to open up the second secret level, Anomaly 210.
• Shield-Bearing Mook: Cannibal Manslayers, mid-tier mutants, carry a shotgun and a ginormous police shield. The shield can take a serious beating, but if your aim is good you can hit the Manslayer in spots where he's not covered. After the shield is destroyed or the Manslayer is killed and drops it, it'll bounce on the ground a bit and shatter, leaving behind a piece of scrap worth 2 armor points.
• Short-Range Shotgun:
  • The sawed-off shotgun has the usual accuracy you'd expect of a video game shotgun, being hard-pressed to land a perfect meatshot on a pit fiend unless you're within spitting distance of it. Luckily enemies that warrant pulling out the sawed-off are either hard to miss or are restricted to melee.
  • Averted with the regular pump shotgun, which has a narrow pellet spread even at medium distances.
• Skippable Boss: In the second level of 2063, "The Boneyard", you can run to the switch that opens the exit gate and run away from the mutant Master and his posse.
• Ten-Second Flashlight: The solar lantern lasts less than three minutes on a full charge in episode 1, and it's even shorter-lived in Afterglow, but it recharges when under daylight or strong enough UV light such as from powerful fluorescent lamps. Completing the "find Porcelain" sidequest early on in Afterglow nets you a new battery with far better capacity, at the cost of taking a mite longer to charge.
• Underground Monkey: Phantoms, found exclusively in the Anomaly 210 mission, are essentially more aggressive Haunts with cloaks on. They sound like broken radio broadcasts, and fire much faster red balls of energy and with less warning. They also have a Deadly Lunge melee attack if you get close enough.
• Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: Downplayed, then averted. The Master Blaster has range issues, especially the Secondary Fire flame spray, but deals phenomenal damage. Averted after the second workbench upgrade (the "Master Blaster MkIII"), which adds a high-pressure nozzle that dramatically increases its range.
• Video Game Tutorial: Both episodes feature an optional tutorial level. Episode 1's takes place before the first level and can net you the solar lantern and some ammunition earlier than normal, and Afterglow's is a Nightmare Sequence.

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