Some of the player's possible forms, up against the recurring enemies.
Freaky Awesome is a top-down 2D Roguelike by Mandragora, a Russian studio that has earlier developed Skyhill. It was released for PC on Steam in 2017, before getting ported to PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch in 2018.
The Excuse Plot here has the nameless protagonist wake up one day discover that his beloved dog went missing. After putting up a bunch of posters, he suddenly gets a paper nailed to a door with a coordinates of an abandoned military base drawn on it.
After driving there (and crashing his car within a few feet of an entrance), he discovers that while the main gate is easily unlocked through pressing a button at the guard booth (which is itself left open), the doors to the building itself are firmly nailed shut. Instead, he drives a truck in reverse to expose an open hatch beneath it, and jumps right in. However, it turned out to lead straight to a pool of mutagenic liquid, which proceeds to turn them right into a chicken-like creature. From them on, there's nothing else to do but to go deeper, fighting other mutants in the hope of eventually finding your dog and a way out.
A further complication is that the healing syringes are extremely rare, and a far more likely way of healing is through consuming pools of the same mutagenic liquid that's left behind after defeating the other mutants. However, doing so will eventually mutate your hapless character into another creature as well - you may get a choice of at least two forms at each point, but you cannot stay in the same form, thus forcing you to adjust strategy on the fly.
Freaky Awesome tropes:
- Airborne Mooks: There are bloated fly things that attack by ejecting orbs of purple goo from their stomachs.
- Artistic Licence – Biology: As expected from the premise, any and all biology is firmly sidelined by the Rule of Fun.
- Asteroids Monster: A Cerberus-like boss splits into two halfway through the fight.
- Blob Monster: An early enemy type is a pretty conventional green slime.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Essentially all of the hostile creatures (besides some bosses) are sickly green in color.
- Crosshair Aware: When the Hornet boss flies towards the ceiling and beyond the scope of your vision, you are shown a large red crosshair travelling along the ground to indicate where he's gonna drop.
- Defeat Equals Explosion: There are fat toad mutants that inflate and blow up upon death, damaging both the player and anyone caught up in the explosion.
- The Hornet boss blows up in a big, pretty explosion upon death.
- Degraded Boss: A Cerberus-like boss in the Factory splits into two smaller versions of itself halfway through the fight. These smaller versions are then fought alone with the other enemies in the lab.
- Exaggerated when you encounter a Furnace boss who is essentially a larger version of that boss, and splits into two versions of the earlier boss upon defeat, which then split into two small ones again.
- Detachment Combat: Your second form, that of a Grub, attacks by launching your character's almost unaltered head from its location at the hump, although it's technically still attached by a tentacle.
- Almost Headless form takes this further, as it looks the closest to a human, but can still have the player rip off his head and throw it. The form is then defenceless until it reconnects with the head, which will be crawling along the ground towards the body whenever you start moving.
- Lastly, the Bumblebee form can leave its stinger in the ground, which causes it to die a few seconds later, and immediately respawn where the stinger was.
- Evil Counterpart: This can occur if you are playing as the Bumblebee form, and are then taking on the Hornet boss.
- Explosive Barrels: Here, many of the rooms will have boxes of dynamite in them. A single hit will open the box and ignite the dynamite sticks, leading them to blow up after a few seconds. If there are several boxes nearby, this can start a chain reaction. However, while such quantities of dynamite were more than enough to blast tunnels through mountains in Real Life, here these explosions has a range of about a meter, not doing any harm beyond that.
- There are barrels in the game too, but they are yellow, have a radiation symbol on them, and actually store upgrades.
- Eye Beams: One of the Lab bosses has an artificial eye that lets it attack with a laser beam.
- Flunky Boss: Hornet boss creates more of the smaller fly things during its battle. Several other bosses, such as the fish-like thing in the Lab regularly has the tongue creatures drop down from the ceiling.
- Friendly Fireproof: Besides the toads' explosions, none of the other attacks of the mutants will ever affect each other. Equally, you can never damage the creatures spawned by some of your forms, or vice versa.
- Gas-Cylinder Rocket: There are cylinders in the lab level that act as these.
- No OSHA Compliance: All of the levels are horrible at basic safety protocols.
- The Factory has easily ignitable crates of explosives laying near the center of the rooms for no reason. Often, they are present next to buzzsaws, and are sometimes placed straight in their path. These explosives can also border barrels of straight-up nuclear waste, which are so fragile as to be easily broken by any of the mutant forms, let alone explosions - a far cry from how durable they are supposed to be in reality.
- The Lab has large, fragile beakers placed all around its rooms, which easily shatter and leave damaging glass shards behind. It also has plenty of gas cylinders, which are again standing near the middle of the room, and are so fragile that hitting them causes them to shoot off in a direction and explode upon hitting something. And that's not to mention the glass tubes with creatures inside, which are again easily broken to set said creatures loose.
- Furnace has large grates set in the floor, which are sometimes safe to walk on, but will regularly heat up and burn anyone standing on them at the time.
- Freezers again have the explosive crates, and also feature large cylinders of liquid nitrogen that are not fully closed, and so have gusts of it regularly escape. Moreover, it's so cold there, that large icicles will regularly drop down from the ceiling, to the horror of anyone below them.
- Meat Moss: It may or may not meat, as its sickly green in color rather than red or flesh-colored, but then again, so is every other mutant. Otherwise, though, it very much fits the trope, having the same shape and regularly pulsing. Some growths have eyes on them as well.
- [[spoiler: The Organism has
- Mook Maker: The green larvae creatures are very slow, but will regularly spawn tiny, but much faster, grey "children".
- Oil Slick: The "oil" form is a tiny, toddler-sized humanoid who can create these, and then ignite them with fireballs.
- Overly-Long Tongue: One of the creature types attacks with its long blue tongue. You'll do the same when playing as the form.
- Playing with Fire: The "Oil" form attacks with fireballs.
- Shock and Awe: The fish form is essentially a really large anglerfish
that can shoot electricity from its esca. It could also be a reference to a very similar enemy in Serious Sam. - Shockwave Stomp: The one-eyed mutants attack by slamming both fists into the ground to create a shockwave.
- Shoot the Shaggy Dog Story: By the time you reach the dog for whom you started the whole quest anyway, it's long been mutated into a Final Boss, and your only option is to kill it.
- Smash Mook: Bulky, one-eyed mutants with oversized fists begin to appear from the Stoves onwards.
- Spike Shooter: The Bumblebee form attacks in such manner. This attack has a decent range, speed and damage, and makes Bumblebee by far the best form when combined with its ability to go over obstacles. A speedrun showing the entire game completed with a Bumblebee without ever needing to switch is a good testament to its power.
- Spikes of Doom: A version that pops up and down, usually in the center of the rooms.
- Stripped to the Bone: When you get the health of the fish boss in the Lab to 0, all of its flesh suddenly liquefies and drips into the grimy pool it was in, leaving only its grey skeleton behind.
- Super Spit: The toad creatures not so much spit, as straight-up vomit a thick stream of black bile.
- The spider-like boss in the Freezer spits globs of spider silk that slow you down if they hit.
- The Boss of the Organism level spits a stream of purple at your character.
- Swiss-Cheese Security: The base where everything occurs is completely abandoned by the time you arrive there, to the point you can just walk into the guard booth through an unlocked door and push a button to open the gate itself.
- Unnecessary Combat Roll: The weakest Chicken form can dodge attacks in this manner.
- Weaponized Offspring: You can do this in the Grub form, laying eggs that soon burst into tiny grubs that'll attack your enemies. The hostile grubs can do the same thing, though. This trope also seems to apply to the Hornet boss.
- Womb Level: The Organism, which has every wall covered in the resident Meat Moss, which has become advanced enough there to grow multiple eyes and tentacles that'll regularly lash out at you. There are also numerous mouths on the floor of every room, all-too-eager to bite the intruder. Eyes can be present on the floor of some rooms as well, but you can thankfully crush these.
- The Insides is an even more literal version of this, as every wall is literally meat, with lymphatic nodes and such being present everywhere.
- Your Head Asplode: Upon defeat, the top of spider boss' head explodes in orange, leaving only the lower half behind.
- This also happens to the boss of the Organism. You then enter through the resultant hole to reach the final level, the Insides.
