Video Game / Distorted Travesty

Distorted Travesty is a "Fast Paced Satirical Action Platformer" made in Game Maker by Dark Yoshi (aka. Zephyr Burst). It follows the story of two gamers with no clear goals in life. These two are Jerry, the most hardcore of hardcore gamers, and Jeremy, who partakes in some light hacking and playing jokes. You control Jerry, while Jeremy sits on the fourth wall and gives you aid throughout the game.

One day, when they break into the Integrated Electronics Factory to teach its CEO about the greatness of Jerry's favorite game, a mysterious entity known as The Darkness comes and steals him away to another world, one which is composed of all the games the two have played since their youth. Their only hope of returning home is to collect the Seven Magical Flavored Muffins throughout the world and use them to defeat The Darkness once and for all, lest they miss a new episode of the best series ever. The game was completed on November 5, 2010.

A short sequel, Distorted Travesty 2: The Sequel To The Prequel was released on April 7, 2011, and can be downloaded from the same site. In it, you play as Claire, Jerry's ex. Both Jerry and Jeremy make appearances in the game as well.

A third entry in the series, Distorted Travesty 3: Saved Game, was released on October 6th, 2015. This entry in the series revolves around Jerry and Claire, chronicling their struggle to save the world against the threat introduced in the last game. Jeremy and his sister, Chao, return to provide help, guidance and (in Jeremy's case) snarky comments.

A fourth game was annouced on 4/1/2023. Though little has been revealed about it, it appears to star Chao as the primary hero, going dungeon diving with a new friend. It is also reportedly going to be the most difficult game in the series.

You can download the games here. But be warned, they ain't easy.

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This game provides examples of:

• 13 Is Unlucky: Subverted; the thirteenth set of Heart Containers gives you an extra 50 HP.
• Absurdly High Level Cap: Averted. The level cap is 64, and you will likely get close to that if you're shooting for 100% Completion.

• Advancing Wall of Doom: Two of them, both created by Hexor. The first one is in Distortion, the second in Distortion WTF.
  • And of course the multiple advancing instakill spike walls in levels that would already qualify as Platform Hell without the extra time pressure.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Played with. Once you figure out that The Darkness is nothing more than a video game maker, you begin to think this, but then you find out that it's only trying to protect itself. Once a greater threat appears, it actively helps you defeat it, since it would be protecting itself. It is also willing to try cooperation and co-existence, rather than conflict, if the other side offers it.
• Alt Text: A variation. If you're playing in Windowed Mode, the window title is used for short comments from the author about each room.
• Always Accurate Attack: The Aero Scanner's hitscan laser will always hit you if there isn't a wall or object in the way.^note As with most attacks, you can dash through it to avoid taking damage, though.
• Annoying Video Game Helperinvoked: Jeremy really likes to talk during segments that require a lot of concentration. Naturally lampshaded whenever Jerry gets pissed off at him for it. And whenever it happens, he's usually talking about pointless, inane things, and then sometimes keeps going just to piss off Jerry.
• Anti-Frustration Features: A couple of these were included in a later update to the game, most notably being the fact that save rooms fully restore your health and spirit AND have a healing point inside.^note Prior to the update, save rooms wouldn't heal you, but would greatly increase the regen rate of your spirit, meaning the only way to heal without items would be to spam Nature's Gift until full health, at EVERY save point
• Apocalyptic Log: The Artist's notes scattered in the Black Rock Fortress seem to be this at first.
• Arc Words: "Distortion" and its derivatives.
• Artificial Brilliance: The Sentries. Their AI is actually very simple, but they are designed to cover for each other's weaknesses, meaning that fighting a team of them is going to be very difficult.
• Artificial Stupidity: Meta Knight has an AI that's very easy to break. Attack, back dash, run up to him, attack, etc...

• Auto-Scrolling Level: Very few maps are this. Two of them are in Metropolis, and another is a hidden map.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Kudeku, due to its pitifully short range and high cost.
• Awesomeness Is Volatile: The reason for why Jerry can't enter Rave mode during boss battles — Jeremy says that if the boss can enter it too, the game would crash due to an overload of awesomeness.
• Back Tracking: Certain items in some areas become obtainable after learning a new technique improving your mobility.
• Bait-and-Switch Boss: In the Maverick Factory, you see Zero standing before you in the third map. Jerry, however, doesn't want to fight him. Just then, a giant robot comes and squishes him, so you get to fight it instead.
• Barrier Change Boss: The Quick Time Distorter and the Data Collector.
• Big Bad: The Darkness. Subverted. It actually helps you defeat the real Big Bad.
• Big Good: The Artist. Subverted. He's actually the Big Bad.
• Bonus Dungeon: Multiple, unlocked during the game. But the most notable one is the Spire of Forgotten Souls, a 100 floor but not really dungeon.

• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Plenty of times. In the tutorial level, Jeremy complains about text boxes blocking his view, for starters.
• Briar Patching: After The Darkness adapted to Jerry's Bullet Hell weakness by giving many bosses bullet hell abilities, Jeremy tries to do this.
• Bullet Hell: Many of the later bosses, as well as the Unexpected Shmup Levels. Especially the Shroud Lord once it gets down to its final life bar. This screenshot◊ speaks for itself.^note The only videos on YouTube of this boss being defeated are in easy mode. Let that sink in for a moment.
• Checkpoint Starvation: The main source of torment in the Secured Data Segment.
  • Also a constant source of Fake Difficulty throughout the game. Want another try at that pixel-perfect jump? Enjoy replaying the punishing minute of almost as hard jumps before it!
  • Worse still in the bonus dungeon where you have to clear 5 screens at a time without one.

• Climax Boss: Necrobane. After defeating him the game starts taking a turn for being more serious.
• Corridor Cubby Hole Run: Most rooms in the Secured Data Segment are this. There are various objects in the background which flash different colors. In order to avoid taking a very large amount of damage, you must get into a colored zone which matches the color the objects are currently flashing.

• Crossing The Streams: When The Artist makes himself invincible, the only way to stop him is to enter Rave Mode during the boss fight. Jeremy notes that you'll only get one shot at this (not that it's hard to kill The Artist once you activate it).
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: Cripple temporarily drops the victim's defense.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Try playing the beginning of this game after playing the third game and enjoy all the damage you take from trying to defeat Mario enemies by stomping on them, something that's not possible in this game. We'll wait.
• Deadly Lunge: Both the Shrouds and the ordinary enemy type called "Dark Variant" do this.

• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Zig-Zagged. In short or easy rooms, it's not a big deal, as there's a checkpoint each room and the only thing you lose is Internetz dropped by enemies. But in lengthy rooms where you're certain to die a lot, death is NOT a slap on the wrist, as it forces you to go through the level all over again.
  • The game also mocks you. Mercilessly...

• Disc-One Final Dungeon: Black Rock Fortress. This is also where the story tends to get more serious...
• Disproportionate Retribution: You break into a company and cause thousands of dollars in property damage, all because its CEO said your favorite video game sucked.
• Doing In the Wizard: The Darkness isn't a living being, it's a program designed to make video games.
• Double Jump:
  • Averted. Instead, you get an ability that creates a block for you to jump off of in order to increase your jumping height.
  • ...Then later played straight, however, as there is a fire spell with this effect.
• Down in the Dumps: Not the most literal example, but all the Distortion worlds are supposed to be this. They're more or less a location for worlds which don't have the Muffins in them.
• Dungeon Shop: There's a Yoshi that runs one in the Black Rock Fortress. Lampshaded in that his name is given as "Convenient Store Yoshi".
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Jerry and Jeremy fight an uphill battle against The Darkness for pretty much the entire game.
• Easy-Mode Mockery: Jerry calls easy mode "Wussy mode" after beating the boss of Dark Depths, and there's even two extra game over messages you can get if you play on easy mode, both of which mock the player for being on easy mode.
  You could always try the game on an easier difficulty... oh no, wait, you can't.
• Elemental Powers: The game uses the classical four elements of fire, water, air, and earth.
• Elevator Action Sequence: There is one in the Fright Train.
• Eleventh Hour Super Power: Jeremy obtains the ability to hack just about anything at the end of the game.
• The End of the World as We Know It: What will happen if The Artist accomplishes his goal, only so he can save face.
• Enemy Scan: You can do this at any time by clicking on an enemy.
• Energy Weapon: The Aero Scanners have auto-hitting ones.
• Epic Flail: One obstacle in the Black Rock Fortress is a ton of Super Mario World ball-and-chains tethered together into a massive cat-o-nine-tails.
• Escape Rope: Jerry eventually gains the ability to teleport to the world map from inside a dungeon, though at some points it doesn't work (and when the Shrouds start appearing, they can also block Jerry's ability to teleport if the Shroud Threat Level is high enough).
• Evil Counterpart: Hexor to Jeremy, who supports the final boss similarly to how Jeremy supports Jerry.
• Evil Twin: The Darkness can copy the data of anything it scans and create a near-perfect replica. In particular, Hexor is a copy of Jeremy.
• Fake Longevity: Discussed. invoked
  This is only to make you backtrack a few rooms and lengthen gameplay.
• Final Boss: Subverted with the Shroud Lord, who is set up to be the final battle and is the hardest boss in the game. However, the actual final boss (and Big Bad) is The Artist.
• Final Boss Preview: The Shroud Lord, who attacks you for short periods of time in Distortion WTF before flying off. You don't get to fight him for real until the end of the game, although he isn't the final battle.
• Fission Mailed: At one point during Distortion Windows, the player gets a fake "Distorted Travesty has encountered an error and must close" message.
• Fridge Logic: The material the Metools' indestructible helmets in the Mega Man (Classic) series are made of? Jeremy wonders why Dr. Wily didn't make entire robots out of this stuff. invoked

• Guide Dang It!:
  • A chest in Black Rock Fortress, which requires you to use an in-game glitch to get. To get it, you have to use Earth Shift to create a stone block on the floating platform next to the moving platform. After that, jump on the moving platform, and run into the block you created underneath it. Since the platform moves according to time and not variable checking, it'll move down eventually and let you get the chest.
  • Also the method for dealing with the Ultimate Phalanx for the first time, if you don't pay too much attention to Jeremy's comments.
• Harder Than Hard: Distorted mode. The game even warns you that it's completely unfair. It's so difficult that even Dark Yoshi himself had severe difficulty beating its final boss!
• Have a Nice Death: The Game Over screens contain mocking one-liners. It's implied that Jeremy is actually the one who says them.
• Healing Factor: There are healing spells and MP regenerates, but they eat MP so take a long time to recharge. Made all the more boring when you realise checkpoints don't restore HP and MP, so you have to hang around save rooms for minutes at a time to fully heal.
• Heart Container:
  • You have to collect four of them before they do you any good, probably as a Shout-Out to how they work in The Legend of Zelda.
  • There are also powerups that increase your Mana, and a rare type of powerup that increases both.
• Heavy Sleeper: Sonic. He's in such a depression after his disappointing games that he just doesn't want to wake up. Even when Abstracity has been practically destroyed.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Samus or Jerry's ex. The game doesn't tell which. According to the sequel, it was Claire, though she survived.
• Hitscan: Aero Scanners track you with laser sights for a second or two before shooting a hitscan laser at you. Fortunately, you can hide behind walls and objects to avoid it.
• Homage: The games' heavy tone of sarcasm aside, it's clear that they were created as a loving tribute to the classic side-scrollers of the creator's youth. Even the overly frustrating segments are something of a reference to the fact that many of those older games had overly frustrating segments of their own, as any gamer of the 90s or older can attest to.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: The first time you fight the Ultimate Phalanx, it's protected by the Muffin it's guarding. In order to progress, you have to kill yourself, return to the room's entry, and try to leave the dungeon. You also cannot kill the Omega Metroid. All you can do is run away from it.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Beginner, Veteran, Hardcore, and Distorted.
• Idiot Ball: Trusting The Artist with the muffins before the Shroud Lord fight, for both Jerry and especially Jeremy. Not only was he the one who gave them the idea to destroy The Darkness in the first place, but they also figured out that he was corrupt as hell. At least we got the most epic final boss ever out of it, though.
• I Know Mortal Kombat: Apparently only hardcore gamers stand a chance of stopping the Darkness, probably because it's an advanced Reality Warper video game program.
• Inner Monologue: At the end of the game, Jerry has one. But then it's quickly subverted when Jeremy says he sucks at monologues.
• Interface Screw: Hexor messes up a lot of things in the final level and boss fight to deter you.
  • Much prior to that, he screws up the Distortion Windows section, booting full-screen players into windowed mode, moving the window around on your screen, and rotating the game.
• It Makes Sense in Context: At the beginning of the Veiled Detritus stage, Jerry asks why they stopped here, and Jeremy replies that "There is a Muffin here." He also warns you that the Darkness is looking for the Muffin as well.

• Killer Game Master: The level comments paint the creator as this, hinting at his amusement at the horrors to come.

• Last Chance Hit Point: The Revenge Bead retaliates Collision Damage, but cannot take an enemy's last HP.
• Last Disc Magic: Wildfire and Hurricane.

• Level Grinding: Mostly subverted: While enemies do respawn after re-entering a room, they give rather low amounts of experience compared to what is needed to level up. However, in the caves you appear inside of after you leave Distortion Reckoning, there is a slime enemy that multiplies itself, and a platform right above where it roams. Sit on this platform for a while, and these slimes will eventually duplicate themselves into game-lagging amounts, giving you tons of experience.
• Like a Duck Takes to Water: Jerry is an avid gamer who gets thrown into the worlds of the games he played.

• Lucky Seven: The seven Muffins. Your seventh set of Heart Containers also gives you an extra 100 HP.
• MacGuffin: Lampshaded, as they're the 7 Magical Flavored Muffins. In reality, they are the seven Data Allocation Segments, specific pieces of code that grant almost total control over the program. Why they look (and apparently smell) like muffins is anyone's guess.

• Mercy Invincibility: Getting hit, dashing, and using Grand Slam all give you invincibility. The second is essential for beating the game.
• Meta Power-Up: Awesome points don't do anything, other than increase the EXP you gain.
• Mission Control: Jeremy, though he starts taking a more active role towards the end of the game. He is also separated from Jerry for the first half of Distortion Reckoning.
• Mission Control Is Off Its Meds: Hexor performs a similar role to Jeremy, except he wants you dead, so he taunts and manipulates levels into death traps.

• Noob Cave: The IEF, which also serves as the game's tutorial level.
• Noodle Incident: At the beginning of the game, Jerry talks about a time when Jeremy's teleportation transformed him into a girl, and Jeremy did something to him because female Jerry was hot.
• No Peripheral Vision: At the end of Dark Depths, The Informant and another antagonist talk, and the other antagonist initially can't see Jerry standing behind The Informant, as if the world was two-dimensional - which, given they are in a videogame, might as well be the case.
• No Warping Zone: Several times in the story, you cannot warp out to the world map because the Shrouds or the Darkness blocked this function.
• Numerical Hard: The only difference between Beginner (easy) and Veteran (normal) difficulties, at least during boss fights, is the amount of damage you take and dish out. Somewhat averted for Distorted, though, which both increases the damage you take and adds back some content that was removed from the normal game because it was just plain unfair.
• Obstructive Foreground: Lampshaded with text boxes. Also a difficulty enhancer in the Shady Woods/Shady Caves.
• One-Hit Kill: The instant death spikes which start at Metropolis and appear throughout the rest of the game.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted, though never drawn attention to. The main characters are Jerry and Jeremy, and you will confuse the two early in the game.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: The Shroud Lord. Before you fight it, The Darkness says that it's absolutely obsessed with defeating Jerry, and must be defeated before The Darkness can come to a peaceful solution with Jeremy.
• Painting the Medium: Due to the different coloring text boxes have, you can generally tell whether or not someone is a good guy or bad guy pretty effortlessly. Jerry even uses this fact once.
  Jeremy: What would he want them for? He's not even with the darkness.
  Flame Instigator: How would you know?
  Jeremy: Your text box isn't red.
• Palette Swap: Parodied. One of the enemies is called a "Palette Swap Sentinel". Jeremy also expresses his hatred of palette swaps if you scan certain enemies.
• People Jars: Found in the Black Rock Fortress containing, among others, Mega Man (Classic), Mario, Link, and Samus Aran.
• Pinball Scoring: Awesome points, not due to attached zeroes or anything, but just because you get them on practically every occasion.
• Platform Battle: Ultimate Phalanx has a number of moving platforms you must remain on, in addition to its own attacks to worry about.

• Poor Communication Kills:
  • The only reason you get into a fight with Blazing the Bat is because Jerry fails to mention that he isn't allied with The Darkness.
  • Also, the only reason people are resisting The Darkness in the first place is because it doesn't mention that it just wants to preserve itself, and is not actively malicious.
• Power Fist: Jerry's weapon, which is powered by gemstones.

• The Power of Friendship: Jeremy tries to attribute their victory to this. Jerry will have none of it.
• Press X to Not Die: Played for Laughs and used word for word; everyone drops what they're doing and rushes to stop the Quick Time Distorter once they see a single quicktime event. The quicktime events themselves are subverted (they don't really kill you; you can take as long as you want), and parodied (like being used for jumping across a small gap or climbing up stairs).
• Puzzle Boss: The initial fight with the Ultimate Phalanx. Jerry tells you that you should just quit the fight, and he's right. You have to get yourself killed and reload to before the fight, and then try to leave the stage.

• Reality-Breaking Paradox: How the Artist intends to destroy the Darkness: cause a divide by zero error. Jerry remarks on how strange it is that dividing by zero will actually destroy the world in this case.
• Recurring Boss: The Shrouds, who will appear randomly in certain areas.
• Recursive Ammo: The Shrouds' Danmaku Diamonds, as well as the fireballs of the Blazing Robot.
• Red Sky, Take Warning: At the end of the Black Rock Fortress.
• Re Stabilization: You can air dash while flinching.
• The Reveal: What the Darkness is and who created it.

• Rewarding Vandalism: Slightly; destroying random objects only gives you tiny amounts of experience, counts into kill chains, and sometimes drops items.
• RPG Elements: Levelling up skills, equipping accessories and equipment, and switching between equipped skills and spells.
• Scratch Damage: Played straight for you, and averted with enemies. The player always takes at least one point of damage, while the damage you deal to your enemies can be reduced to zero.

• Shout-Out:
  • The Ribbon Bead protects you from status ailments. "Definitely not a reference to any fantasy."
  • The Triforce Bead is even more blatant.
  • At one point, Jeremy tells Jerry to believe in the heart of the cards... to help him make jumps onto tiny platforms in the Super Mario Land-themed Distortion.
• Skill Point Reset:
  • Firebrand the demon does this for a small amount of money.
• Smashing Hallway Traps of Doom: Those spike blocks.
• Snowy Screen of Death: When your health falls below 20%, the screen starts displaying static (accompanied by all sound effects and music becoming more low-pitched). Once you die, this is how you go out.
  • This is also used as a build-up to the Wham Episode prior to entering Distortion Reckoning.
• Some Dexterity Required: For crippling certain enemies or casting spells in rapid sequence to master certain segments or obtain powerups. There's the three basic buttons for moving and ducking, an up button for examining and opening things, a button for jumping and dashing, a button for standard attacks, two buttons for physical and spiritual techs, two buttons for cycling between elements, a pause button, a button for cycling through the spell list for your current element and a button for activating Rave Mode. That's more buttons then you can map on a 360 controller. No annoying combos, though. Dark Yoshi has since admitted that the control system was a mistake and unnecessarily complex, and focused on simplifying combat greatly in later installments.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Rose At Twilight, which was created as final boss music, is used as the Giant Space Flea from Nowhere filler boss theme. The result is largely unimportant boss fights with hilariously inappropriately epic music.

• Stalked by the Bell: A variation of this: The chance for the Shrouds to appear increases over time, so if you run through rooms quickly with only few deaths (or if you reload instead of retrying), you have to deal with them less often.

• Stat-O-Vision: Jeremy's ability due to sitting on the Fourth Wall.

• Suspicious Videogame Generosity: Lampshaded.
  Because I'm nice, you can have a restore point here.

• Talking Is a Free Action: Lampshaded heavily, parodied, and invoked in the cutscene prior to the Arrghus battle, where Jeremy purposefully keeps talking so that the boss won't attack, and also goes off on a tangent to chat about Jerry's preference in video game genres while doing so. It's also Deconstructed for humor: Jerry, and by extension the player, keeps getting distracted by the textboxes, which of course impairs his skills, and he has to repeatedly remind people of that fact during hard platforming sections.

• This Is the Final Battle: A variant said right before you fight the Shroud Lord. So, subverted.
• Timed Mission: Each set of floors in The Spire. Also, the escape sequence at the end of the game.
• Took a Shortcut: The Convenient Store Yoshi that runs the Dungeon Shop in Black Rock Fortress "snuck in and followed you. Nevermind the fact that I beat you to this point. I AM a Yoshi, afterall."
• Trailers: A trailer for the first game can be found here.
• Trippy Finale Syndrome: The final level, to an extent. Averted by the final boss, however.
• Turns Red: Although often not visible, most bosses tend to start off pretty easy. After you do enough damage their attacks get more threatening, or they gain whole new ones. Happens multiple times, in some cases.
• Unblockable Attack: Those red "death rings" in the last few dungeons, as well as the element surges of the colour wheels, cannot be nullified by dashing.

• Unexpected Shmup Level: Two of them. As already stated, they're of the Bullet Hell variety, but they're not too bad.
• The Unreveal: We never did learn what happened with Jerry's ex... Not until the next game, at least.

• Voodoo Shark: Jerry's excuse for being Allen Walker: He was cosplaying as him just before the events of the game. Though that doesn't explain how he can use the Crown Clown.
• The Walls Are Closing In: The Artist tries this to kill Jerry after he sides with The Darkness.
• Warp Whistle: You can teleport to the world map by pressing M in the pause menu, although the Darkness sometimes blocks that ability.
• Wham Line:
  Jeremy (garbled): The Darkness has tricked us all.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: If the Syrus that Jerry and Jeremy rescued from Black Rock Fortress was a clone...what happened to the real Syrus? The third game reveals that He was freed, much like everyone else the Darkness captured, and is now working on taking down the virus.

• You Can't Go Home Again:
  • At the beginning of the game, Jerry and Jeremy's only motivation is to get back home, though of course, they soon find that there is more to the world than that...
  • Subverted once you do reach Jerry and Jeremy's home and find that they can't go home because it's already been caught by The Darkness.

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Tropes provided in the sequel:

• Advancing Wall of Doom: The second world, and the semifinal level. Also the final level, when you're being chased by the virus.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Almost, anyway...presumably... Claire and company still think they have a chance, at least.
• Barrier Change Boss: The Garbage Tracker (in that its elemental weakness when it's knocked down changes each time) and the Virus Core.
• Batman Gambit: The virus pulls one of these — it lured Jerry and Claire to the island to distract them while it launched its main attack elsewhere.
• Bullet Hell: Claire says she's actually good at these, in contrast to Jerry.
• Cliffhanger: The game ends with the main conflict unresolved. You'll have to play the third game to finish the fight.
• Department of Redundancy Department: The title.
• Downer Ending: The Virus is assaulting the entire world, Claire has lost all her abilities, and the same will soon happen to Jerry. Jeremy and Jerry are about ready to give up, until Claire encourages them to keep fighting.

• Elemental Powers: Like Jerry, Claire has Blow You Away, Playing with Fire, Making a Splash, and Dishing Out Dirt, though her repertoire is smaller than Jerry's.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: Every single boss, except for the final one.
• Have a Nice Death: Subverted; unlike her brother, Chao will give you encouragement instead of snarkiness.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: The Chaser Virus can be repelled, but not killed. Then it turns into a demon-like Eldritch Abomination and takes your abilities away, one by one. Fortunately, Jerry shows up and one-shots it before Claire can be killed.

• Lighter and Softer: The game over screens, which actually encourage you this time!
• Mission Control: Jeremy's sister, Chao, takes his place in this one. Jeremy does, however, help out Claire for the final level as well.
• Mood Whiplash: This game is much Lighter and Softer than the first for the most part. Then you encounter the Virus in the final level, and everything takes a sharp turn for the dark. Very, very dark.

• RPG Elements: Have been cut. Feeling the first game was way too complex, DarkYoshi focused on simplifying gameplay. This met with mixed reactions from the fans.
• Squishy Wizard: Claire, compared to Jerry. She can't even use physical attacks.
• The Virus: Since the world is virtual, it's an actual computer virus, trying to take down The Darkness. And, judging from the ending, it is very close to succeeding.
• Wall Jump: Claire's special ability. You'll be using it very often.

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Tropes provided in the third game, Saved Game:

• Alt Text: As with the first game, the window title is a variation of this. There's also a menu option that allows you to set it to display at the bottom of the screen when you enter a room, in case you're playing in full-screen mode.
• Apocalyptic Log: The end of every Nightmare Gate brings you to a secret chamber that provides an apocalyptic message and one of eight mysterious instruments.
• Bag of Spilling:
  • The player characters lose EVERY ability they once had right at the start of the game. Jeremy unlocks their ability to move early on, but everything else, including jumping and attacking, has to be earned later.
  • Hexor once again removes all of their abilities except for the Mario-related ones during his boss fight, and while Jeremy is able to exploit a one-time loophole involving Kirby's Copy ability to get them back for the final battle, afterward they're gone for good.
• Bilingual Bonus: If you can decipher binary code, you'll find a few hidden messages here and there:
  • In the trailer for the game, The Stinger has an image of Hexor in the Vault, with a long string of binary which reads "You didn't forget about me, did you?"
  • When Jeremy is locked out of scanning enemies, his analysis will spew binary that spells "RESTRICTED".
  • In the Vault, long strings of binary text occasionally scroll by, saying such things as "THIS WILL BE YOUR PRISON", "NO ESCAPE", and simply "DIE". They're implied to have been written by Hexor.

• Boss in Mook Clothing: The "Elite" enemies, which usually attack one-on-one (very rarely two at once). They are very capable of killing the player if they don't learn how to dodge effectively.
• Brick Joke:
  • In one of the Brutal Bonus Levels, you get this window title:
    "Our electrical bills were getting too high, so we replaced most of ther currents with spikes. We apologise for the inconvenience."

    Two screens later, there's a room with electrical currents, with this window title:

    "We ran out of spikes. We apologise for the convenience."
  • In the Construction Site, at one point a CHAOS Spiderbot attacks you... but when it tries to use its antigravity maneuver to crawl on the ceiling, it apparently forgot that there is no ceiling and falls into the sky. The characters shrug, have a laugh, and move on. Many, many, many screens later, the Spiderbot falls from the sky in front of you at the entrance to the Magical Castle, instantly destroying itself.
  • Way back in the first game, Jerry and Jeremy's motivation to go back home was to catch the last episode of the best show ever. Jerry brings it back during a conversation in the Mario segment, understandably upsetting Jeremy.
• Checkpoint Starvation:
  • You thought some rooms in the first game were bad? This game features several large, sometimes maze-like rooms that require you to go on switch hunts. If you die at any time during one of these rooms, you'll have to restart, with all your progress in the room being lost. Notable examples include a fair amount of Nightmare Gate 2 and the Mountain Temple, to name a couple.
  • Gate 5, being based on Metroid, employs its own checkpoint system so you don't even get a checkpoint at the start of each room. Better not forget to make use of those checkpoints often, or you'll have a LOT to redo.
• Chekhov's Gun: The key to getting the True Ending is a gun that remained unfired since the first game. Jeremy had been told that he had the ability to perform a one-time "undo", forcing a system reset to an unspecified point back in time. He never got around to using this ability, and in fact forgot he even had it. Performing some actions leading to him remembering he can do this allows him to "undo" the events leading to the Standard ending and crush Hex's plans once and for all.
• Dark and Troubled Past: The final Nightmare Gate reveals that Claire was threatened, beaten, and even had her arm broken by an extremely abusive mother.
• Darker and Edgier: Previous games were pretty light-hearted for the most part, and the worst that could happen (outside of the world-ending threat at the very end of the first game) was getting "quarantined", a fate that could always be reversed. Saved Game, while certainly not grimdark, has some darker themes to it, including actual and permanent character deaths and a war motivated by Fantastic Racism.
• A Day in the Limelight: Both Chao and Jeremy get brief sections of the game where they get to control the main action, instead of sitting on the sidelines providing support.
• Death of the Old Gods: A conversation late in the game reveals that thanks to destroying the Data Allocation Segments in the first game, and the ravages of the Virus in the second and third, the Darkness is never going to reclaim control of the world. The world still functions just fine, but it's running automatically now, there's no longer a Reality Warper in charge of everything.
• Designated Girl Fight:
  • Between Claire and the High Heels Girl in Gate 6. Enforced, even: Not only does Claire offer to fight her, Jerry can't damage her at all.^* She's immune to every damage type except Normal. At this point in the gate, Jerry only has a Shot attack, and Claire only has a Normal attack.
  • The boss fight against Cackletta in Gate 1 as well, due to Jerry refusing to fight her, leaving Claire to take care of it.
• Developer's Room: One is unlocked upon clearing the True Ending. It contains a few test levels, a few joke levels, and a couple of boss ideas that never got used (such as fighting all four of Warmaster's forms at once). Said unused bosses are not properly balanced and as a result may not actually be legitimately beatable.
• Downer Ending: Both the Bad and Standard endings: In the bad ending: The Bad Guy Wins and the world is ended. In the standard, the heroes are successful in saving the world, but due to a few Diabolus ex Machina events right at the end, Jeremy, Jerry, and Claire are all killed in the Warship's explosion. Chao is the only survivor, left heartbroken at the loss of her brother and best friends, and she disappears shortly afterward, wandering the world without telling anyone where she's going.
• Dream Apocalypse: The Subconscious Filter's appearance is based on the minds of those within it. As a result, when one of the three people within it leaves, the world it constructed begins falling apart. Bad news for anyone still in there.
• Early Game Hell: The early game is more difficult than that of its predecessors, thanks in no small part to the absence of weapons for the first few chapters of the game and the loss of the dash until Gate 3.
• Eldritch Abomination: Quite literally with the fittingly named Abomination, from the Vault. Some of the bosses could definitely qualify as well, with their appearance.
• Evil Overlord: Subverted hilariously by the Trivia Lord.
• Fantastic Racism: The Warmaster and his army, CHAOS, claim to be creating a utopia for bots. Humans, on the other hand, can go die. It's not really stated why they don't like humans, Warmaster merely says that "humans can't be trusted".
• Finishing Move: Some bosses end with an on-screen prompt to "Mash Buttons!!" Doing so causes Jerry and Claire to unleash a flurry of attacks with comic-book style onomatopoeia in order to finish off the boss.
• Foreshadowing: A good deal of it in gate 6, although some is only obvious in retrospect:
  • NPCs can't hear Jeremy or Chao talking, yet the first one you encounter seems to reply to Jeremy. He's the Evil Overlord. And he can hear Jeremy.
  • In the second town, one of the NPCs says that the aforementioned NPC "used to ask a lot of questions". Trivia questions.
  • Another NPC in the second town doesn't want to think about what would happen if Great Evil Overlord were to come back, because they "simply don't have the answers!!" Literally.
• Formula-Breaking Episode: The different Gates are based off of different games, so each Gate has a different playstyle and theme. Different gimmicks will also pop up in the Mainland as well, including some stealth segments and even Tower Defense.
• Have a Nice Death:
  • Jeremy gets his seat back in this game, and as merciless as ever.
  • Hex hijacks the death messages during his boss fight, replacing them with taunts.
  • In the following fight against the Warmaster, Jeremy actually encourages you.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • It is not realized until Gate 4 that The heroes of the respective worlds give their bodies and souls to the player characters to grant them their abilities. Whether they are actually dead or just taking up space in Jerry and Claire's somewhat sub-conscious minds is unknown at this point. Jerry doesn't take it too well.
  • At the end of the game, this happens with not just Jeremy, but also Jerry and Claire in order to prevent the Warship from overloading and destroying the Mainland, leaving Chao as the sole survivor.
• Hidden Elf Village: The, um, Hidden Bot Village. It's a place for bots who don't want to interact with humans to live, and is almost completely inaccessible from the outside, unless one gets permission from the inhabitants to enter. It should be noted that while the bots who live there don't particularly like humans, they are not hostile to humans; they just want to be left alone. Indeed, many of those bots choose to assist the heroes in battling against CHAOS, an army of bots who are hostile to humans.
• I Know What You Fear: Fittingly, Final Nightmare uses this tactic as it gets close to death: it declares that it knows what Jerry fears most, and transforms into the Shroud Lord. Fortunately the Nightmare version isn't even a quarter as powerful as the original.
• Living Shadow:
  • Played around with in Extra Gate C. While enemy shadows are just plain shadows, Claire's shadow and the shadows of traps and switches act just like their solid counterparts, meaning even if you don't get hit by the trap itself, if a trap shadow hits your shadow, you still take damage. The flames also shift your shadow based on the angle, which is necessary for solving various puzzles.
  • Inverted with the Wall Master in map 3, whose physical(?) body doesn't hurt you, but it's shadow does. This gets very annoying VERY FAST especially if you had trouble speeding through the previous maps out of careful timing.
  • Darkmoor subverts this rule by his physical body AND his shadow doing damage, giving him extended attack range, as your attacks only hurt the main body.
  • A few of the other Nightmare bosses could also qualify, such as Final Nightmare and Jerry's Shadow, an expy of the Shadow Link from Zelda 2.
• Metroidvania: More so than the previous games, as it is now very necessary to go back to previous areas with upgraded abilities to get all the items. And, naturally, the Metroid-themed Gate 5 throws this trope into overdrive. "Hope you're ready for some backtracking", indeed.
• Mood Whiplash: Chapter 9: Heading through nice green pastures, with cute enemies, flowers cuddling in the landscape, some Bubble Bobble NPCs, and some simple, non-threatening platforming challenges for extra collectibles. Then you get near the Vault, which is heavily distorting the area around it, and get sucked into the Vault itself, one of the bleakest, darkest levels in the game.
• Multiple Endings: The game originally had only one ending... an ending that caused a stir among the fans, to put it mildly. A later update added a "True" ending that can only be accessed by solving a rather obtuse puzzle (the game gives significant hints if you get the Standard ending), causing the endgame to go very differently.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • As it turns out, breaking Hexor's chains was exactly what he needed to escape.
  • It's discovered that Jeremy was the one who originally created The Virus, which Hex managed to get a hold of from The Vault.
• No-Damage Run: Spoofed and discussed at the beginning of the game, where a virus hits Jerry when he has no way to dodge it. Chao laughs that "There goes any chance of a perfect run!", while Jeremy claims he can hack things so that hit didn't count, in case someone out there really does want to try such a run.
• Non-Standard Game Over: Of a sort. If you fail to defeat The Abomination before your first real fight with Hex, then it will appear out of nowhere and abruptly end the game, forcing you to restart and defeat it before continuing.
• Nostalgia Level: In the True Ending: the Distortion World Hexor hides out in is identical in layout to the first Distortion World in DT 1.
• Optional Boss: In one specific, hidden room, you can fight and kill that Sand Crawler that's been chomping you whenever you touch sand. As Zephyr lampshades, this is VERY satisfying. And once it's dead, you never have to worry about it attacking you again.
• Oxygen Meter: It can be extended by finding upgrades.
• Playing Tennis with the Boss: Invoked in the True Final Boss, since he's made himself invincible and only his own attacks can harm him.
• Plot Armor: A piece of armor actually named as such can be found after defeating The Abomination. It decreases all damage you take, but also decreases all damage you deal.
• Poor Communication Kills: Happens a couple times:
  • If you had told Bubblun that you were the humans that were working with the Darkness, or had mentioned Jeremy, he wouldn't have made you fight his robot.
  • If you had told him that you needed the Program Chip to stop the Virus, the Trivia Lord would've just given it to you, no questions asked.
• Pop Quiz: The Trivia Lord "boss fight" consists of a quiz on SNES-era games. You don't even have to get all the questions right. You can later take the quiz as a minigame, with new questions.
• The Power of Friendship: Heals Jerry during the fight against Sigma.
• Random Encounters: Played with in Gate 2, where walking around in the overworld invokes this, but after obtaining the bow and arrow, Jeremy figures out how to alter the random encounters to how they worked in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. This doesn't make avoiding battle too much easier, but it's at least an improvement to Jerry.
• Recurring Boss: In Gate 5, Ridley just will... not... die. He comes back again and again... rather like he does in the main series. Hexor made him unkillable, but fortunately Jeremy was able to find an exploit to kill Ridley in the end.
• RPG Elements: They're back, but more subdued than in the first game — Skill Points obtained from enemies can only be used to make specific, minor improvements, and there are fewer collectibles. Played with a bit more in Gate 6, which is supposed to be a prototype game within the Darkness' program, designed as an RPG.
• Running Gag: Birds. Zephyr seemingly took up birdwatching while creating the game, and his development blog was often filled with pictures of birds. The game itself contains many non-interactive birds flying around its environments, there's a gratuitous Shout-Out to The Birds, Jerry and Claire can both wear birds as hats, and updates to the game often included "More birds" among their features.
• Scrappy Mechanicinvoked: None of the characters are happy when stealth sections pop up in the game, except for Chao, who likes that kind of gameplay. Fortunately, there's only two and they're rather brief.
• Shared Life-Meter: Both Jerry and Claire share the same life meter.
• Shout-Out:
  • In the main city of the game, two people by the names of Phil and Ned are conversing about the events of the game. Wonder if one of them is a weatherman.
  • Also in Central City, there's a not-so-subtle shoutout to Hitchcock's The Birds in the alleyway.
  • There are fair few shout outs to the Let's Player raocow, probably due to his LPs of the first two games greatly increasing people's awareness of them.
    • One of the Enemy Scans mentions an LPer who says 'Podobo' a lot and plays a lot of Super Mario World hacks.
    • One of the sarcastic death screens asks "That was a demo, wasn't it?", which is a Catchphrase of raocow's.
    • One of the messages that appears when Claire is swapped in is "Angel on the warpath!", which was one of raocow's video titles for his Distorted Travesty 2 LP.
    • One area of the game has music taken from raocow's own romhack, A Super Mario Thing, which surprised him greatly when he ran into it.
    • An update to DT3 was called 'The "Ze-Fire" Edition', poking fun at how he pronounced ZephyrBurst's name.
    • A secret area in Gate 3 of DT3 references a Running Gag of his in its Flavor Text: "Science can reward you sometimes."
      raocow: Can you be any more explicit?
    • Amusingly, a later area's Flavor Text actually is more explicit, outright mentioning him by name.
    • One of the messages when you swap Jerry in, "Jerry, let's get hairy!", was jokingly suggested by raocow himself during a nonsensical ramble after seeing the silly messages that were already in. Zephyr obliged in the following update.
    • One out-of-the-way NPC conversation just before a level with lots of wind namedrops raocow directly, saying he's going to fall a lot in that level. Wind is one of raocow's least favorite game mechanics, as it tends to mess up jumps. raocow wondered what someone playing the game who had never heard of him would make of that statement.
  • One area's window title has a twofer: "Video games on motorcycles, final lap. Are you a bad enough dude to push the buttons?!"
  • One area's window title is "Let's play a game of ice and fire."
• Stylistic Suck:
  • "The Island of Paradise" in Gate 6, which is a barely-playable hodgepodge of bad graphics and nonsensical enemies. Naturally, Lampshaded up and down by the heroes.
  • One corridor of "The Castle of Doom" in Gate 6 is a hastily-thrown together group of obstacles with no rhyme or reason to their design. Jeremy claims that whoever made that section was either really tired or really angry.
  • Another Gate 6 example, before "fighting" the Trivia Lord, there is a hilariously Narmy bit of voice-acted dialog (provided by the real-life Jeremy) to serve as his introduction. It's as bad as you'd expect from an RPG game.
• Surprisingly Creepy Moment: The game has some moments throughout, but special mention goes to the final Nightmare Gate.
• Unblockable Attack: In addition to the ones from earlier games in the series, anything outlined in red can't be dashed through without taking a hit.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: In addition to each Gate changing your ability set to be based on the protagonists from the appropriate game, the boss fight of Gate 6 is a Pop Quiz.
• Unexpected Shmup Level: One occurs near the tail end of the game.
• The Unfought: There's a few examples throughout the game.
  • Shadow Jerry appears in Gate 2, before promptly being sent off to the Vault. But guess who shows up in the Nightmare Vault, should you choose to go there?
  • Pete in the Magical Castle appears, before being blasted out of the sky by a huge laser courtesy of Decimator 10000, the true boss of the area.
• Wall Jump: Unlike the DT2, the wall jump mechanic is exclusive to Gate 4. Though it does reappear briefly much later on in the Subconscious Filter.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: Did you learn how to access the True ending before you got the Standard ending? Well, if you try, the game tells you that you aren't ready and locks you out of it anyway.
• You Have Researched Breathing: You start the game unable to do anything except duck after the Virus locks you out of all your abilities. Even after Jeremy gives you back your ability to move, you still need to find a power-up to be able to jump.