Garage (also known as Garage: Bad Trip) is a Retraux top-down shooter with a B-Movie horror aesthetic, developed by Zombie Dynamics and published by tinyBuild. It was released on Nintendo Switch on May 10th, 2018, and on PC in July of that year.
It is about a washed-up drug dealer named Butch, who resigned himself to being a janitor, up until he suddenly awakens in a trunk of a car, and climbs out to find himself in an underground garage of a mall overrun with undead. Now, he must slaughter his way across the game's 13 chapters for a chance at fixing the whole mess.
Not to be confused with the 2010 iOS game Garage Inc.
Garage contains examples of the following tropes:
- Enemy Civil War: You can at times encounter Smith Industries mercs (who are ordered to eliminate you as well) and the zombies fighting each other.
- Everything Fades: Averted. The dead bodies will persist on the floor, splattered in gore.
- Exploding Barrels: These are frequently placed on the levels to help you take out enemies.
- Flunky Boss: The Human Centipede boss will have the basic zombies assisting it at regular intervals.
- Good Old Fisticuffs: Butch starts the game relying on his fists and kicks, though he soon discovers guns and an axe.
- Hollywood Darkness: Averted. Everything not near a light source is properly dark, and the enemies will often ambush Butch from the darkness.
- Hyperactive Metabolism: Food like candy bars will restore some of Butch's health, though they are obviously less effective than the proper medkits.
- Loads and Loads of Loading: The levels take around 30 seconds to load.
- Locked Door: Present. Encountering one forces Butch to scramble in the search for keys, at first. Once he gets an axe, though, he can just break the lock with it.
- MegaCorp: Smith Investments, the corporation that owns Garage and is responsible for all the experiments which occurred within.
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Nintendo Hard: Since the game is inspired by Hotline Miami, difficulty is to be expected. - Our Zombies Are Different: Apparently, the zombification here is the side effect of a new food additive.
- Rat Stomp: Literally - it is impossible to kill the rats with normal weapons, and you have to kick them instead. Ironically, this often makes them harder to deal with than any actual zombies and mutants, because kicking is much slower than shooting and so it'll take a while for Butch to dispatch a whole swarm, while their tiny damage will soon add up. It doesn't help that the rats' small size and the game's dark areas often make it hard to spot a swarm before it hopelessly outnumbers Butch.
- Retraux: The game goes as far in emulating the B-Movie experience as to have a persistent scanline effect, as well as the occasional static crackling and distorting the picture.
- Short-Range Shotgun: Played straight with your shotgun, which becomes increasingly ineffective at any range beyond three meters.
- Shout-Out: One of the bosses is literally The Human Centipede.
- Story Breadcrumbs: Much of the storytelling is to be found in the notes and letters that are either scattered around the levels or contained in the secret areas or password-protected caches.
- Suspiciously Cracked Wall: There are many cracked walls, which are to be destroyed to discover equipment, or at least some notes with backstory.
- Voice with an Internet Connection: Butch's only connection to an outside world is a mysterious woman on the phone who is only known as Anaconda.
