Video Game / Illbleed

Time to get ill!

"You'll vomit with excitement! You'll puke with pleasure! You'll shit with fear!"

— Advertisement for Illbleed

Illbleed is a 2001 tongue-in-cheek Survival Horror game developed by Crazy Games and published by Amusement Interface Associate for the Dreamcast that parodies American horror B-movies. It follows a group of horror movie aficionados (borderline Emotionless Girl Eriko Christy, wannabe psychic Michel Waters, average Joe Kevin Kertsman, and dim-witted Boisterous Bruiser and slasher-movie fan Randy Fairbanks) who receive guest passes to Illbleed, a horror amusement park built by reclusive movie director Michael Reynolds, who has filled his park with six terrifying attractions based on his movies, and promised to give one hundred million dollars to anyone who makes it through all six attractions without chickening out. Kevin, Michel, and Randy are gung-ho, but Eriko smells Hype Backlash in the making and opts out... until her friends fail to come back from their trip to Illbleed, and she's forced to investigate...

Players control Eriko as she travels through the six attractions trying to rescue her friends, facing foes ranging from the horrifying (like the vengeful, flamethrower-toting Gale Banballow in "Homerun of Death") to the ridiculous (the "Cake from Hell" in "Killer Department Store"). Each of the six stages is laden with traps that can harm Eriko, release monsters, or will just attempt to scare her to death. Fortunately, you have a special "horror monitor" that allows you to detect and tag traps (though use of the horror monitor is limited by your character's "adrenaline" level).

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Illbleed contains examples of the following tropes:

• Abusive Parents: Eriko's father put her through scare tests on an incredibly consistent basis when she was five. Though, if the picture after the credits is to be believed, and some of the dialogue, there was a time he cared for her.
• Affably Evil: Most of the staff at the park are pretty friendly, even while they're actively controlling a bunch of giant death traps with the intent of killing you.
• All There in the Manual:
  • Other than Eriko (who is actually given a bit more backstory in the manual), the backstories of the other characters aren't explored in the game at all.
  • The manual also explains the origin of Dummyman and some of the enemies in the game, along with adding a bit more backstory to the attractions in the game (With the exception of Reynold's Museum).
• Amusement Park of Doom: Illbleed is so dangerous that, if Jorg is to be believed, over a hundred visitors die there every day. Unlike most examples, the park is pretty upfront about it and (according to the manual's description of the Visitor's Bank) allows contestants to opt out between attractions. But the lure of a cash prize is enough for folks to attempt to get through it anyway.
• Anti-Frustration Features: A short line traces itself behind your character's icon on the map screen showing the direction you're currently moving in, helping you quickly figure out where you're supposed go in relation to which way you're headed. Pretty helpful in some of the maze-like sections that would otherwise be very easy to get stuck in.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Jimmy Banballow was roasted by a fire caused by careless teens in "Homerun of Death". His father hunts them down to give them a taste of their own medicine.
  • Rachel slaughters the staff of Duranto for screwing her "Papa" out of his business.
  • Director Cunningham, who had been mooching the park's cash and tried to frame and later kill a fellow employee, is slain by the spirits of former Illbleed contestants.
• Bittersweet Ending: In the second playthrough of the game, Eriko mentions at the endgame that, because of her upbringing from her father Michael Reynolds, she had lost her sense of fear and has spent most of her life trying to get that back. After her dad finally manages to scare her, he ends up dying. Eriko says that he may have finally scared her, but he lost himself in the process. The end credits even change from the bombastic "Time to get Ill" theme to a more somber version of the main menu theme to the game. The post-credits scene also reveals that the final confrontation with Michael deeply traumatized Eriko to the point where she's become reliant on Kevin for emotional support, even relinquishing her position as head of the horror club to him.
• Body Horror:
  • The Inside-Out Men enemies are, well, inside-out.
  • The Faceless Women enemies are missing their faces.
  • The boss of the first level seems more mutated than burnt, with a permanent snarl, dangling eyeball, and a bulging, exposed brain.
  • Randy has his brain removed, and the player can have it put back in.
  • The Wood Puppets machine subjects people to brutal mutilations in order to turn them into, well, Wood Puppets.
  • Character upgrades take the forms of various organs floating in jars.
• Bottomless Magazines: All ranged weapons have unlimited ammunition, but this is balanced out by how they're rarely available to use against most regular enemies.
• "Brave the Ride" Plot: Pretty much the main plot of the game. Eriko initially isn't interested in going to the park, so her friends head off without her. When they don't return, she's forced to go in to find them and face the dangerous attractions.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: The wall between the characters and the attractions themselves is broken once every level. You beat one of the (animatronic) bosses by killing its operator (who may or may not be animatronic himself). In another level, you enter the boss arena only to meet a pair of maintenance workers who are repairing it. Also, there's an entire level based around the murders of several park employees, ostensibly by the villain of that level's attraction. The player is a potential suspect, and the game suggests that your "abnormality," as evidenced by purchasing Illbleed, is what drove you to commit the murder.
• Brick Joke: Fall-Down Bear appears in the first level when you defuse the TV trap there. Another TV-related trap in Killer Department Store features him again, if you don't defuse the trap. Axes can make him fall down too.
• But Not Too Foreign: Eriko, if her Japanese given name and overall Asian features are any indication.
• Butter Face: The pistol-packing female enemies in stage 2 and 6 are quite comely from the neck down, but their faces have been bloodily torn off.
• Cain and Abel: Bloody Mary, despite the name, is a helpful character who sells items. Cutie Mary is the one out for your blood.
• Call-Forward: There's a cardboard cut-out of Cork in the toy section of Cashman's Department Store.
• The Cameo: Dogs Bower from Blue Stinger, the developers' previous game, appears in the toy store being advertised... and as a corpse in "Killerman".
• Clothing Damage: If, during a New Game Plus, you fail to save an unlockable character, Eriko's clothing gets damaged. If you don't save any of them, she winds up completely naked, which is in fact necessary in order to get the True Ending.
• Combat Exclusive Healing: Inverted Trope. You can't access your item menu when in combat mode, so running into an unexpected fight when any of your stats have you close to death can be a pretty big problem.
• Comically Oversized Butt: Sexydoll's (yes, really) bottom is fully four times the size of her head.
• Crapsack World: So we're talking about some crazy horror movie director who makes an entire theme park dedicated to basically killing people. How does he not get put in jail? Furthermore, events later in the game seem to point towards the fact no one is at all against the concept of the theme park, let alone the number of people who die there. According to Jorg, "more than a hundred visitors die in this park every day," as well as Illbleed's "morgue" in the Killerman level which appears to be one giant pit the size of a warehouse filled with what appears to be rotting bodies. It's said in-game that there's around 50,000 dead bodies in there. In addition, you can bring people back to life by paying $75,000 for a surgical operation to restore them to life, good as new. Not paying to bring the people back to life shows just how much they care.
• Creator's Culture Carryover: On top of the Japanese love of Personality Blood Types, the store prices in the "Killer Department Store" level look like they simply swapped out the yen figures for dollars, leading to the sight of burgers that cost $2,000. (Even then, $20 for a burger is highway robbery by American standards... still unheard of in Japan, but slightly less ridiculous).
• Creepy Doll: The Mary series dolls, of which Cutie Mary is the worst.
• Critical Annoyance: Downplayed. When your pulse reaches very high or low levels (above 175bpm and below 25bpm respectively), your pulse meter will flash "DANGER". Your characters also start gasping or groaning when their stamina falls below 30% of their maximum.
• The Ditz: Randy; it's made even worse if you fail to find his brain before turning him back from being a woodpuppet. Could classify as Body Horror, but adds as a gameplay bonus. He's got fewer points to deactivate traps, making him ideal for a Self-Imposed Challenge. His dialog is also turned into hilarious gibberish.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: Played with in the "Killerman" event. Midway through, you're asked to finger a suspect for the role of Killerman (if you're right, you win more money). Besides the proper suspects you've encountered, the choices for who may be the murderous Killerman includes... Killerman, and the player. The latter is explained that playing Illbleed drove you insane and made you go on a killing spree.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: Similar to Eternal Darkness, playing perfectly through each stage deprives you of seeing the various wacky, spooky and/or dangerous traps in the game. Fortunately, it doesn't take long to pull in enough money that you can buy extra recovery items and start setting traps off for the hell of it.
• Engrish:
  • It's all over the place, really, from poorly constructed phrases to grammatically mangled signs, like the "Smart Grass" in the Mary Goods section of Killer Department Store. The fact of the matter is that Crazy Games' grasp of the English language was always pretty tenuous, and the localization didn't really help much.
  • In the "Revenge of the Queen Worm" stage, there are billboard advertisements for fake movies. Most of their taglines are in poorly-written English, including such gems as "GODLLA: Size is problem."
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Everything. If it's in the level, it can probably come to life and menace you. The Killer Department Store is particularly terrible about this, as about half of the stuff that can kill you can steal your money as well (of which you need plenty to progress in this level).
• Fan Disservice: Getting Eriko's friends killed so you can get her nude skin. Seriously. Also her father during the final boss fight comments on how much she's grown.
• Fanservice:
  • If the player lets Eriko's friends die, her clothes get ripped to the point of nudity. Also one scene in the second level may count depending on what character the player chose.
  • The billboards advertising Hassy in level 2 feature a bikini girl.
• Final Boss: In the "bad" and "good" endings, you get to choose one final boss from a list of three. They are listed here in order of difficulty:
  • Dollanchura (likely intended to be "Dollantula"), the boss of "Killer Department Store" that you originally defeated by stealing his controls and making him jump into walls until he died.
  • OHNOMAN (yes, in all caps), a headless fellow with jaunty striped pants who attacks you with a pair of sickles.
  • Bullstinger, a mutated and more powerful version of an enemy from one of Crazy Games/Climax Graphics's earlier Dreamcast games, Blue Stinger.
  • And in the "true" ending, you have to fight Eriko's deranged father, Michael Reynolds, first as a giant zombie head that randomly rises from and submerges into a giant pool of gray liquid and shoots rainbows out of the cut in his head, and again as a bat-winged, demon-faced, wiggly-arm-tentacled brain that emerges from the giant zombie head after you kill it.
• Fright Deathtrap: All the levels are positively covered in traps. They are not immediately fatal with each one varying in how scary it is, but running into too many in a row will cause your character to die of a heart attack. To prevent their layout from being too predictable, each trap is not guaranteed to be active/inactive during a run of a level.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • Eriko's "fearlessness" translates into her being the only character to recover immediately upon knockdown, while all other characters need a Shock Bracer to do that. She doesn't recover immediately at the start of the Final Boss fight, a sign that she's gotten her fear back.
  • The traps in "Killer Department Store" all steal your money. The boss of the area, Cashman, is stated to have lured people in, killed, and subsequently robbed them.
• Gimmick Level: Every level past the first seems to have a gimmick: There are no traps in Level 2, Level 3 has a long section where your character becomes a woodpuppet, Level 4 has traps that can steal money and a series of minigames, Level 5 has a whodunit-style mystery, and Level 6... Well, Level 6 just has to be seen to be believed.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • "Homerun of Death" starts off in a small area enclosed by a brick wall, where the only way out is via a dilapidated gate that has a trap you must get hit by to proceed. The seemingly-featureless brick wall has some traps of its own, but most players' first instinct is to immediately go through the gate into the Hotel's front yard.
  • The Horror Monitor can be used to "disarm" enemy encounters, by tagging the spot near where said encounters are triggered; you'll still have to fight the enemies, but it's not treated as a shock trap so you won't get knocked down nor gain pulse. However, the Monitor's tutorial in-game doesn't really explain this.
  • The in-game tutorial for how to use the Horror Monitor is found in the the cemetery hidden off to the side of the central hub's clinic. What isn't obvious at all even from the hints provided is that you can find an (expensive) adrenaline hypo in here for free, which is a huge help since you start with very little money and can't afford to get one of those and enough of the stamina, pulse and bleeding remedies you'll also undoubtedly need to tackle the first stage.
• Haunted Technology: The answer to the "Killerman" mystery is this. The ghosts of those who have died trying to complete the park's challenge have possessed a Killerman suit and are using it to murder the park's employees in revenge.
• High-Pressure Blood: Any injuries to player characters or enemies result in huge geysers of blood spraying out. Crossed with Bloody Hilarious, as this includes even relatively minor injuries.
• Hub Level: Contains shops, entrances to the various levels, and a graveyard with a tutorial and some free items.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Downplayed. Sure, food will heal your health, but won't stop your bleeding, restore your adrenaline, adjust your heart rate or fix any other body function beside your health. You will need specific other items to heal specific ailments of your character (i.e. get bandages to stop your bleeding, adrenaline shots to regenerate it, drugs to calm your nerves and so on).
• Informed Ability:
  • Eriko is said to have no sense of fear, but that just means she isn't disabled by monster ambushes; she can die of fright from traps just as easily as any other playable character.
  • Jorg is supposed to be an ace reporter and sleuth, even though players will likely be poking holes in his Bat Deduction the entire time he's trying to unravel the mystery at hand (e.g. Former gymnast or not, no regular human can leap 60 feet in the air, dude).
• Insult Backfire: Even lampshaded.
  Eriko: You took away my fun, and now you try and pull this stunt? How dare you! You're a maniac. Out of your mind!
  Michael Reynolds: Aha, music to my ears! I consider that a compliment, you know.
• Interface Spoiler: Jump scares lose a bit of their impact when you can clearly hear the Dreamcast loading them up.
• Invincible Minor Minion: The zombies in "Killerman," who are, it's suggested, not part of the attraction, but the real deal.
• I Want My Mommy!: If you're playing as Randy and die in an attraction, he has a chance of calling out for his mother.
  Randy, dying: Mommy...!
• Joke Character: Brainless Randy lacks any adrenaline needed to mark possible traps. Bear in mind that Randy's adrenaline count will drop to zero each time you rescue him without getting his brain, so any adrenal upgrades you may have bought for him will go to waste.
• Kill It with Fire:
  • Gale Banballow in "Home Run of Death." He's horribly burned, and lugs around a flamethrower with an attached tank of fuel.
  • Fire is also the prescribed method of killing Rachel, The Queen Worm.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: The sixth level is filled with these, from main hero Cork Inda being a cross between Woody from Toy Story and Indiana Jones to the boss, Zodick the Hellhog, being an obvious Shout-Out to Sonic the Hedgehog.
• Life Meter: Three of them: in addition to the traditional health gauge, you also have a bleeding gauge and a heart rate monitor. If the bleeding gauge becomes full, you will bleed to death. If your heart rate exceeds 250, you will die of a fear-induced heart attack. If your heart rate reaches 0, you will flatline.
• Loners Are Freaks: Exaggerated in the opening to "Woodpuppets."
  1\He was presumed lost in the wilderness or eaten by a bear. No one cared because he was a loner anyway.
• Lost in Translation: The "Heavy Condaller" graffiti in Banballow's Room Full of Crazy has baffled many a player. It's a reference to a common mondegreen in the theme song of the baseball-themed anime Kyojin No Hoshi.
• Luck-Based Mission: Mary's hiding spot in the Hide-and-Seek section of Stage 4 is random, though there are places she favors more than others (e.g. She's usually in the glasses display).
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Eriko's dad is Michael Reynolds, the mad genius behind Illbleed.
• Menu Time Lockout: Downplayed. There's no immediate danger to worry about while you're checking your map or using items, but the in-game clock will keep right on ticking, so pausing the game for too long will cost you some prize money.
• Mind Screw:
  • Remember how strange and confusing Panic! was? Well, Illbleed makes it look as clear and sensible as the "DO NOT EAT" directions on a silica packet. No kidding, this game technically qualifies as Dada art.
  • The "Killerman" stage and the final "boss" of stage 1, as far as in-game examples go. Did you really go backstage, stop a possessed Killerman costume and tangle with real zombies, or was it All Part of the Show? Were you meant to find Banballow's operator and kill him? If not, why did you need his ID card to open the Goal pathway, and why was there a metal spring jutting out from his severed neck?
• Multiple Endings:
  • Good Ending: Eriko and her friends go on vacation to a tropical island but she decides to go back to tie up some loose ends.
  • Bad Ending: Eriko wins the $100 million Illbleed challenge but lives the rest of her life in regret for losing all of her friends.
  • True Ending: Eriko defeats the owner of Illbleed, Michael Reynolds. However, the event brings her fear back to traumatic levels, leaving Kevin to look after her.
• New Game Plus: Playing the game a second time through allows you to keep all your upgrades and unlock the True Ending by letting all of Eriko's friends die.
• Nipple and Dimed: Nude Eriko has only shredded scraps of strategically-placed underwear covering her naughty bits, keeping the game at a respectable M rating.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The Morgue in Stage 5 has no background music in the Japanese version, leaving it up to your HUD's pulse meter to provide a Heartbeat Soundtrack instead.
• Off the Rails: "Killerman" is set up as a murder mystery in New York, but then the attraction fails to start, leaving the player character to find out that somebody has adopted the Killerman identity and is killing staff members of Illbleed, and the player character and Jorg have to figure out who it is, while fighting off enemies from previous and later attractions.
• Offscreen Teleportation: In true horror movie style, any enemies pursuing you in a level segment will pull this off so they can pop out and ambush you from around corners. It's especially obvious with Mr. Banballow, who can round a corner to your left, suddenly start coming around the right corner when you try to run away, and then be back to closing in from the left again once you turn back around.
• One-Winged Angel: The True Ending's final boss Michael Reynolds, after being defeated as a giant zombie head, transforms into a demonic tentacled brain with bat wings.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Eriko's lack of any sense of fear translates in gameplay to her instantly recovering when ambushed by a monster whereas all her friends will helplessly crawl along the ground for varying lengths of time before standing back up to fight. When she first sees the true final boss, she is knocked down and stays down for longer than any other character, indicating that for the first time in years, she's utterly terrified of what she's seeing.
• Panacea: "Amazon" fully restores all the meters of your current character, but you can only ever find one per stage (with the odd exception of "Killerman", that has two despite being one of the easier chapters).
• Plotline Death: Failing to rescue Eriko's friends (as opposed to getting killed while playing as them) is treated this way. Uniquely, they can still be brought back to life if this happens, but it requires a trip to the Visitor Bank and carries a steep price tag compared to reviving them at an E.R. station. In other words, Death Is Cheap in Illbleed, but it's not necessarily affordable.
• Power-Up Letdown: The "Gaboie" item replenishes a lot of stamina when used, but also causes your pulse to spike very high. Seeing how heart rate is each character's biggest Achilles' Heel (every harmful thing in the game causes it to rise), you're better off letting them go unconsumed. It is, however, useful if you've been bleeding too much and your heart rate has gone dangerously low.
• Punch-Clock Villain:
  • The crewmen controlling the park are (or at least act like) basically normal human beings; some of them can be found talking about what to have for dinner or chatting with their girlfriends over the phone while operating the park's machinery.
  • The hub world has several enemies who try to kill you in the attractions tending to shops. A faceless woman runs the Visitor's bank, while Dummyman mans the photo booth and his many minions staff the hospital. The hospital dummies will even help you during the attractions. Bloody Mary is the odd one out, as she never appears as an enemy ("Cutie" Mary, however, serves a miniboss in stage 4).
• Recurring Boss: Dummyman takes a swing at you every now and again. One of his most egregious examples being attacking you in the ticketing area for Cork Goes to Hell.
• Rewatch Bonus: In the intro, Eriko is being chased by a monster. If you play through the game again after getting the true ending, you realize what the monster is: It's Eriko's dad, Michael Reynolds!
• Sanity Meter: Your adrenaline meter, in a few ways. It's used to work the Horror Monitor, which marks traps and items. It's refilled by defusing traps and killing monsters; basically, proving to yourself that the frightening things can be overcome restores your will to go on. Notably, it's the only character meter that doesn't cause your death when you run out (or when it gets completely filled), but being out of Adrenaline means you cannot tag traps anymore.
• Scare Chord: A chord accompanies every "scare" effect. There's also an unintentional Scare Chord from the controller; each "scare effect" will be preceded by a "whirr" from the VMU.
• Sequel Hook: The True Ending has one, involving another horror land called "The Arcade", which, if you look closely, not only bears a suspicious resemblance to the Illbleed tickets, but also has Michael Reynolds' name on it...
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: Dangerous as they are, the denizens of Illbleed aren't exactly the brightest bulbs on the tree, and pose nearly as much a threat to themselves as they do to you. The lone exception to this are the Killer Worms, which becomes very frustrating when you're forced to fight three of them simultaneously in Stage 4.
• Shaped Like Itself: In stage five, one of the possible suspects for the Killerman murders is... well, Killerman. It's considered the correct answer, if only by virtue of every other answer being unambiguously wrong.
• Shout-Out:
  • Cork from "Toy Hunter" looks like a cross between Woody from Toy Story and Indiana Jones, with William Riker's beard thrown in for good measure. His robotic companion, Potedon, also has the same markings and color scheme as Buzz Lightyear's chest, buttons and all.
  • Also, the boss of the next-to-last level is a demonic Sonic the Hedgehog, complete with rings. Sometimes he'll even do Sonic's old "uh-uh-uh" finger waggle.
  • "The Revenge of Queen Worm" seems to be a big shout out to Tremors, due to worms being able to detect you if you're on dirt.
  • Killerman is a violent riff on Pepsiman, the old Japanese mascot for Pepsi Cola.
  • The physical appearance of Michael Reynolds is based on Alien Zetton from Ultraman.
  • The description for the axe weapon mentions that it used to belong to someone named Jason.
  • The Hassy Cola item, as well as one of the potential enemies in the final boss fight, are both from the developer's previous project, Blue Stinger.
• Shows Damage: Should your health run low - at 30% of their maximum, your character will clutch at their shoulder when moving, occasionally gasping or groaning. Once it becomes critically low at 10% of their maximum, they'll also begin to limp as they now clutch at their torso. Both poses slow your character down. When idle at critically low stamina, the character's animation shows them acting paranoid compared to just looking around. (Eriko and Michel clutch at their heads like they're panicking whilst Kevin, Randy and Jorg will bring their guard up as if ready to strike at an unknown threat.)
• Stripperiffic:
  • On a second playthrough, do not save any of Eriko's friends. As Eriko advances through each stage, she loses progressively more clothing with each one. By the time she hits the "true" final stage, she's dressed in bandages, bloodstains, and extremely tattered undergarments. It's related to the plot, disturbingly enough - the game's announcer is so turned on by her that he jumps down and starts the final battle. Which is made a lot worse when it's revealed that he's her father.
  • And then there's Sexy Doll in "Toy Hunter", who is clad in a tiny bikini and has a major case of camel toe on top of it all.
• Stupidity Is the Only Option: In "Woodpuppets", you encounter the area where people are turned into the eponymous creatures, and reach a point where you're standing right on the machine that does it. The owner of the mill even warns his "wood-cutting slaves" in the area that they need to be careful, otherwise they'll fall into it and become woodpuppets. You have to jump into it and become a Woodpuppet to progress in the level.
• Stylistic Suck: Give the general tone of the game, it's arguable that things like the less-than-stellar voice acting and occasional spot of Engrish were deliberate (the former, at least, was confirmed by AIA's former producer and development director Ken Gratz, who handled the localization).
• Surreal Humor: What the game basically runs on, mixed in with Surreal Horror.
• This Loser Is You: The game's reasoning for listing the player as a suspect in "Killerman" is that anybody who actually purchased Illbleed can't be right in the head.
• Together in Death: Non-romantically, but Old David and his pet worm Rachel can be seen as this. A strange mixture of creepy, darkly amusing and sad.
• Tomboyish Name: Michel Waters is a girl, but Michel is the French form of "Michael". Probably they wanted it to be Michelle (her name is pronounced as such, anyway), but the translators screwed up.
• Too Awesome to Use: Averted - your inventory is emptied at the end of every level, so you have no reason to sit on your items. As for individual items, the Caution Bomb (marks every possible trap location in a 45-foot radius) tends to go unused just because there aren't many "perfect" spots to deploy one and get the most use out of it.
• Too Dumb to Live: The park makes no effort to hide how dangerous it is and even has an official disclaimer on the matter as shown in "Toyhunter", yet people constantly throw themselves to their doom trying to win the prize.
• Totally Radical: Randy's dialogue is pretty much full of this, if you manage to get his brain.
  Randy, upon being selected as the player character: Yeah, dude!
  Randy, disarming a trap or winning a fight: Right on!
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior:
  "Here's your favorite Sexydoll. She'll comfort you!"
• Tyop on the Cover: "Woodpuppets" is misspelled as "Woodpupppets" on the sign in front of its entrance.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: Twice in the game, the player character comes across a boss that's literally invulnerable, then remembers that he or she is in a theme park, defeating them by going into the control room and disabling them from there.
• Unexplained Recovery: Randy still counts as saved even if he's brainless, so he'll be back to normal in the game's ending cutscene.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Randy is somehow still alive despite the fact that he lost his brain. You can turn him back to normal by putting his brain back in... or don't and have him with you as a living, walking vegetable for the rest of the game. Complete with incomprehensible dialogue for additional comedic effect.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment:
  • Rescuing your friends is optional, and you get the bad ending if you intentionally leave them behind.
  • As funny as it is to unlock and play as Brainless Randy, his lack of adrenaline rolls over from game to game, so the next time you play as regular, Brained Randy, you'll have to re-upgrade his adrenal levels from scratch.
• Violation of Common Sense: In "Woodpuppets", after proceeding through the level and finding out the titular puppets are made by processing humans (alive or dead), the player eventually finds the machine that makes them. A video from the mill's master explicitly warns his "wood-cutting slaves" that if you slip into the machine, you'll be turned into a puppet. While common sense would dictate you'd look for a way around it, the required course of action is to throw yourself into the machine and become a puppet, which lets you proceed through the level.
• What the Hell Is That Accent?: Potedon's VA seems to have been going for The Ahnold with his accent, but it ends up sounding more like an Austrian doing an impression of a guy from Brooklyn. Who's mocking a Bostonian. And just got back from the dentist. The accent's kind of hard to pin down, is the point.
• When Trees Attack: Well, it would have if the animatronics hadn't broken down before the boss fight. You still end up fighting the tree.
• Who Even Needs a Brain?: Randy loses his brain in the Woodpuppets attraction. He can still live and walk even if the player doesn't bring it back to him, although he starts communicating in grunts.
• Zombie Advocate: Dummyman's Kayfabe backstory is that he brought the crash test dummies to life to fight back against those who have "mistreated" them by "forcing" them to constantly crash into walls.

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