""The day of reckoning is at hand."
— The Priest
Divine Intervention is a flash browser game created by Jim Bonacci. Bonacci would later go on to make Happy Wheels.
In the midst of a demonic apocalypse, a lone priest is tasked by God with cleaning things up.
Play it here
. Be warned, it is very much Nintendo Hard, and is even less tolerant of mistakes than his better-known game!
Unrelated to the Pokémon fanfic.
This game provides examples of:
- Badass Preacher: The protagonist is a priest who finds a gun in a Bible and goes on a zombie-killing rampage.
- Beating A Dead Player: Averted by the regular enemies, since their insta-kill attack animations are simply triggered upon reaching the living player, and his mutilated body will be ignored. However, the corrupt priest minibosses and the Final Boss will keep on cycling through their attacks long after your body has crumbled.
- Boom, Headshot!: Downplayed. On one hand, headshots are faster at taking down enemies than body shots, and are the only way of defeating the Final Boss. On the other hand, one headshot is never enough.
- Bottomless Magazines: None of your weapons will ever run out of bullets. Usually, the most reasonable thing to do is to just hold down the left mouse button while keeping the cursor at the edge of the screen.
- Breath Weapon: One of the attacks of the final boss is to breathe fire.
- Critical Existence Failure: Utterly bullet-riddled possessed (adult men and priests can be almost completely stripped to muscle and bone) are still just as deadly as they were when in a pristine condition. Kids are not even slowed down when they get shot at.
- Creepy Child: The demon-possessed children have maniacal expressions on their faces and rush you at high speeds to kill you.
- Crouch and Prone: You can crouch down, as well as jump up. This is useless against the three main possessed varieties; however, it is the only way to dodge attacks from the corrupt priest minibosses and the Final Boss (besides his one attack that can only be countered through pre-emptively shooting him in the head right as he exposes it.)
- Demonic Possession: The cause of the apocalypse is an army of demons possessing the city's population, driving them to madness.
- Depth Perplexion: The game has a unique variation of this, in that your bullets only hit where your cursor is at, which is common in the first-person sniping Flash games like Sift Heads and Anaksha: Female Assassin, but is usually not done in the side-view games. As such, simply shooting forward and expecting it to work will lead to the bullets seemingly passing through each possessed without doing anything.
- Divine Intervention: The opening scene has the Priest praying to God and asking what to do. A light shines on a nearby Bible. The Priest opens it and finds a gun.
- Firing One-Handed: The priest fires all weapons using only his left hand, may it be shotguns or sub-machine guns. Oddly enough, in the Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You title screen (pictured above) he's aiming his gun using his right.
- Fragile Speedster: The roller-skating possessed boys, who are the first enemy of the game, "only" require three body shots or two headshots. However, they're incredibly fast, and aren't slowed down by your bullets at all. Players may well die to the first possessed boy more than to every other enemy in the game.
- Hand Blast: The corrupt priests that act as mini-bosses can attack by blasting a demonic beam from their hand, which you have to crouch to dodge. Their other attack sends a projectile gliding along the ground, which you have to jump over.
- Hell on Earth: Demons have overtaken earth.
- Kaizo Trap:
- The first section of the game ends with you getting an Uzi from an altar boy. The second one also has an identical altar boy holding a shotgun...but as you approach him, a knife-wielding girl will suddenly emerge and head straight for you. Not dying or accidentally shooting the choir-boy alongside the girl can be quite challenging.
- In the next section, you think you have pretty much won, having already tackled several waves of normal possessed and a possessed priest. Then, an old man suddenly pops up from a metal rubbish bin and throws the lid so fast that it'll decapitate you unless you crouch in time. Notably, he is harmless afterwards, and it's implied he's a normal survivor who has gone insane.
- Made of Plasticine: The enemies have little difficulty mutilating the priest if they catch him. The little boy ripping your head off with his bare hands, or the adult zombie tearing off your arm and impaling you through the chest with it could be justified by the demonic possession increasing their strength, but there's no explanation for why a hobo (implied to not actually be possessed) throwing a trashcan lid at you can decapitate you.
- The Many Deaths of You: There's a unique death animation for every single attack your priest can be subjected to. That works out to 10 animations - for a flash game that consists of four levels that can each be cleared in less than a minute if you avoid dying, and a single boss fight to cap it off.
- Mini-Boss: The possessed priests are a recurring enemy type that have higher health and can attack in two different ways compared to the normal enemies who just run at you and die quickly.
- Mistaken for Undead: On the fourth screen, there's a hobo hiding in a trashcan. When you approach him, he'll pop out and throw the trashcan's lid at you (taking your head off if you don't crouch). Whether or not he kills you, he'll immediately exclaim "Oh my God..." and won't attack you if you walk past him afterwards, suggesting that he only attacked you because he thought you were one of the demons.
- No Body Left Behind: Enemies, whether the undead or corrupt priests, burns up in flames after they're killed leaving no traces of their existance, while the demon boss vanishes in a Pillar of Light once his head blows up. On the other hand, human victims (the altar-boys) remains after their deaths.
- Off with His Head!: Lots of The Many Deaths of You involve decapitation.
- The little boy enemy rips your head off if he catches you.
- Not crouching in time for either the flame breath of the boss, or hand beam of the corrupt priest will irrevocably damage the head and shoulders, leaving charred remains in the former case, and a reddened skull in the latter.
- The trashcan hobo attacks by throwing the trashcan lid at you. If you don't duck under it, it'll hit the priest right in the neck and take his head off.
- If you get too close to the boss, or don't crouch when he flies at you, you'll end up with him grabbing the priest and biting his head off.
- One Hitpoint Wonder: As soon as your priest is hit by any one attack, it's all over, and your only consolation prize is staring at the unique death animation that accompanies each attack.
- The altar boys that give you new weapons will also die as soon as you shoot them, whether accidentally or intentionally. Meanwhile, even the possessed children take 2-3 shots to put down.
- Don't forget than on "Normal", you have just 3 lives, and have to restart the entire game once you run out. Easy gives you infinite continues, so you are only knocked back to the start of each section; Hard is an Iron Man mode with 1 life for the entire game.
- Power Floats: The possessed priests float above their pentagrams.
- Psycho Knife Nut: The possessed little girl enemy wields two kitchen knives. If she gets you, she pins you to the ground and stabs you over and over like a maniac.
- Scenery Gorn: The area you traverse is filled with wrecked vehicles, destroyed storefronts, and savagely mutilated corpses.
- Shockwave Stomp: One of the possessed priests' attacks is to send a bright red energy orb running along the ground, which you dodge by jumping. If you fail, it'll burn all the flesh off the priest, leaving only a skeleton behind.
- Shotguns Are Just Better: Zig-zagged. After you first get the shotgun, you are still much better off sticking with the Uzi, since the shotgun is simply too slow to take on multiple enemies effectively. Once you get to the final boss, though, shotgun is the only weapon that can even harm him at all.
- Sinister Minister: A demonic priest floating above a pentagram is a miniboss that appears once per section, with the exception of the first one, and the final boss fight.
- Sinister Subway: The game ends with the priest killing the demon and entering an undead-infested subway, at which point the game was Left Hanging.
- Stripped to the Bone: Energy blasts from the corrupt priest strip away all flesh and leave behind a skull and the shoulders (hand blast) or the entire skeleton (ground projectile). In both cases, the bones will be thoroughly reddened.
- Swallowed Whole: Trying to fight the demon from up close (what were you even thinking?) and the demon swallows the priest in a single swoop. There's also an attack where the demon vomits out a slug-like creature at the priest, which is invincible and swallows him on contact.
- Tactical Suicide Boss: The enormously fat, winged boss of the episode can seemingly only be hurt effectively through shooting him in the head multiple times. (Shooting him in the belly first exposes muscle, and then his guts, but this may be purely cosmetic, and it's unclear if you can actually win this way.) He normally keeps a rubbish bin lid up as a shield, and only drops it when he's about to attack. His flying charge is the one attack that doesn't expose his head, though it is useless if you are crouching.
- To Be Continued: The game ends on this, but as of now there have been no sequels.
- Undead Child: Zombie children are among the most recurring enemies in the game; the zombie boy comes at the priest while on roller-skates, while the girl hops on him with small knives.
- Unique Enemy: There's only one trashcan hobo in the game, found right at the end of the fourth screen just before the Final Boss.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: An altar boy will appear with a new weapon upgrade. You can blow him away afterwards.
- Winged Soul Flies Off at Death: Touching the corrupt priest enemies results in the priest's soul flying off as he keels over lifelessly.
- Would Hurt a Child: It's completely justified, since they're possessed. Although there's also Video Game Cruelty Potential as seen above.
- Your Head Asplode: One of the attacks used by the Final Boss is to just point at you, which immediately causes lighting to strike the preacher and blow up his cranium. This is the one attack that cannot be either crouched under or jumped over; you just have to shoot the boss in the head immediately before he does it to interrupt the attack.
- Zombie Apocalypse: The possessed act very much like the zombies.
