Immortal Redneck is a Roguelike First-Person Shooter, developed by Spanish studio Crema. It was originally released on April 25, 2017 for PC through Steam here
. It was then ported to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on February 27th, 2018, and then to Nintendo Switch on May 10th, 2018.
What happens when a redneck goes go-karting in Egypt and runs afoul of some cursed ruins? Why, he gets mummified, thrown back in time, and forced to negotiate a Procedurally Generated pyramid, of course!
Gameplay is similar to other Rogueish FPSes of recent years, such as Tower of Guns or Ziggurat, with the added bonus of persistent progression of a type as seen in Rogue Legacy, where you can use money earned from your last run to purchase permanent upgrades such as new characters and maximum stat increases.
Tropes present in this game:
- Abnormal Ammo: The "Bat's Nest" weapon fires a group of bats that home in on enemies.
- Action Bomb: A flying enemy in the second pyramid is this. The explosion itself isn't the problem- it's the spread of bullets it releases your way.
- A.K.A.-47: Averted in the case of the actual AK and the Uzi- although they're cartoonish versions that are missing several otherwise critical parts.
- Amnesiac Hero: The "Amnesia" scroll turns you into one, at least mechanically. It makes it so that the map will only display the current room and the last one you visited.
- Ancient Artifact: Scrolls and Medallions, most with powerful effects.
- Ancient Egypt: The aesthetic, though its a fancier, magical take... at first. The Pyramids are each a Temple of Doom, are guarded by Non-Human-Headed monsters with powers, and Ancient Artifacts are everywhere. Also, there are guns. A lot of them.
- Amplifier Artifact: Several Scrolls enhance your stats or weapons. Some Medallions also do this.
- Anachronism Stew: An early trailer's tagline sums it up best: "Explore Ancient Egypt... with your shotgun!"
- Attack Drone: The "Good Guy" scroll gives you one, in the form of a small inverted pyramid with rapidly shifting sections. The game calls it an "Illuminati"
- Attack Its Weak Point: The only way to defeat Weryt the Disturber, the second and final boss of the first pyramid, is to destroy the lights under his floating head. Shooting him elsewhere is a waste of time and ammo.
- Audience Participation: The game has a "Twitch mode" for streamers that lets their audience vote for the next scroll the player will receive from three possible choices.
- Automatic Crossbows: The Crossbow Machine Gun is this, fed via 25-bolt drums.
- BFG: Parodied with the Little Fucking Gun 9000. Played straight with some other weapons, such as the Horus' Fate.
- Bling-Bling-BANG!: Some of the guns are decorated a bit, with quasi-Egyptian designs and in the case of the Machine Gun, bronzed parts.
- Bond One-Liner: The Redneck is fond of these.
- Boom, Headshot!: Averted. The game helpfully points out that mummies don't have brains.
- Build Like an Egyptian: But of course. All three major pyramids of Giza are present and accounted for- though their positioning, layout and decor are not exactly standard.
- Came Back Strong: It's sort of implied that the Redneck can't actually be killed, especially considering he's already dead. And, if the player is diligent about purchasing upgrades, every time he dies, he comes back stronger.
- Character Class System: You are always playing the Redneck, but unlocking the favor of the various gods gives you different choices of starting active and passive abilities, and weapon loadouts. The gods also affect your base stats in various ways.
- The Redneck's own loadout, the only one available at the start of a new file, lets you temporarily boost his fire rate and passively find more ammo. He has no stat bonuses or penalties compared the the gods.
- Apis, God of Strength: allows you to temporarily become invulnerable and carry four guns, but limits you to at most a single jump and lower movement speed.
- Seth, God of Storms: lets you emit a damaging lightning field and damage enemies that hit you. He increases your base damage and reduces your defense and health. At low upgrade levels, using Seth will push your defense into the negatives.
- Sekhmet, Goddess of Healing: allows you to turn every visible item into a health steak and gain additional maximum health from each new room entered, but reduces your base damage.
- Amunet, The Hidden One: Lets you drop a distracting Ninja Log and sprint backwards, but lowers your base movement speed.
- Neith, Goddess of Hunting: Lets you summon a falcon to attack enemies and get increased damage at long range. She raises your base damage, critical chance and critical damage bonus but reduces your movement speed considerably.
- Ammit, Devourer of the Dead: Lets you sacrifice maximum health to increase health recovered, and get health from kills- but not from steaks, as with the "Dracula" Scroll. She lowers your maximum health and defense.
- Hathor, Goddess of Mining: Lets you use a Grappling-Hook Pistol to pull yourself to objects and increases the amount of gold you find.
- Thoth, God of Wisdom: Lets you teleport a short distance in the direction of your current movement and grants an extra jump. He reduces your defense to the same degree as Seth but also raises your movement speed.
- Charged Attack: The "Horus' Fate" weapon must charged before it can fire, by holding down the fire button.
- The Chosen One: One Medallion is called this exactly, which grants you increased damage and defense.
- Cluster F-Bomb: Rather unusually for a Rogue Like protagonist, the Redneck is not only talkative, but very foul-mouthed.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Some of the starting weapon sets share similar colors.
- The Redneck: Tan.
- Seth: Blue.
- Neith: Teal.
- Ammit: Red.
- Apis and Thoth: Black.
- Hathor: Bronze.
- Critical Hit: You have a chance to inflict these with any regular shot. Your base chance to crit as well as the damage bonus can both be upgraded, and certain Scrolls affect it: The "Lucky Shot" Scroll doubles your chance, while the "Critigold", "Critihealth" and "Critiammo" scrolls give you bonuses for landing them- the latter is particularly effective with high-damage weapons.
- Death from Above: Possible and often a good idea. The "Acrobat" scroll encourages this by giving you a damage bonus while airborne.
- Discard and Draw: The "What Are You Buying?" scroll does this with one of your weapons at random.
- Disc-One Final Boss: Weryt, the Disturber. A floating stone head with a pair of floating stone hands to go with it. Defeating him concludes a run of the first pyramid... and opens the way to the second, where the game stops screwing around.
- Double Jump: Possible if you find the right Scroll, and finding more of them can get you at least a quad-jump. You can purchase an upgrade that enables this for every run- except if you've chosen Apis.
- Dungeon Bypass: Upon beating the first boss of each pyramid for the first time, you'll be able to collect their medallions. Once purchased in the shop, these medallions make the run start on the flor after the respective boss, saving you time to reach the apex.
- Eagleland: The Redneck exhibits signs of Type 2, specifically Deep South. He'll occasionally exclaim he's from Kansas, hence the page quote.
- Easter Egg: A very minor one. Turning around from the start of the hub level and walking towards the horizon, one can eventually come across the wreck of the dune buggy the Redneck was driving when he got into this mess.
- Energy Weapon: Choosing Thoth starts you out with a bunch of them, but special mention goes to the "Horus' Fate", a high-damage beam cannon.
- Enemy-Detecting Radar: The "Radionic Glasses" Scroll displays enemies on your minimap.
- Expy: The swarming yellow cobra enemies behave very similarly to the animated carrots from Ziggurat. There's also flying skulls that are dead ringers for the Lost Souls of Doom.
- Fackler Scale of FPS Realism: Firmly on the classic end.
- Fatal Fireworks: The "Fourth of July" weapon is a pair of firework launchers.
- Forced Transformation: A certain scroll with give any of your weapon attacks a small chance to instantly turn an enemy into a harmless chicken. It counts as a kill for gameplay purposes.
- Four-Fingered Hands: Suy, the friendly merchant has these.
- Four-Leaf Clover: The "Clover" scroll is marked with one. It makes you more likely to find positive scrolls.
- Futuristic Pyramid: The third pyramid looks more like an alien spaceship than an ancient Egyptian tomb on the inside.
- Gatling Good: You can find a Gatling gun, or start with one if you choose Apis.
- Ghost Butler: Upon entering a room, the doors will remain closed until all enemies inside are killed.
- Gratuitous Latin: Upon getting a kill with the rocket launcher, the Redneck may utter "ad astra per espera, fuckers". It can mean "through hardships, to the stars" and is the state motto of Kansas, from whence our hero hails.
- Grenade Launcher: A possible weapon that holds three grenades at one time. You can begin with one if you choose Apis.
- Grenade Spam: The Redneck begins with a stack of ten dynamite bundles. Being that ammo boxes drop fairly often, there is nothing stopping you from using these as your main weapon.
- Guns Akimbo: You can do this if you find a paired weapon, such as the Double Pistol, which is not to be confused with the Double-Barreled Pistol.
- Hub Level: Between runs, the Redneck emerges from his sarcophagus in an open desert area just outside the three pyramids. From here you can access the skill tree, test your weapons on a Training Dummy to see their damage, and, once you've purchased their services, speak with Suy the merchant to purchase scrolls, lock the pyramid's layout, or change your selected medallion. Attempting to leave the area will get you blown back in by strong winds. It also gives you the "No Way Out" achievement.
- Infinite Ammo: One scroll gives you infinite ammo. The catch is: (A) It only works for the weapon you happened to have equipped, (B) Your loadout maximum decreases to 1, and (C) you lose the infinite ammo if you swap.
- Alternatively, playing with the randomized weapon medallion gives you infinite ammo for a single weapon that can be swapped. The problem is, not only is your loadout maximum 1 again, but your weapon is swapped with a random weapon every time you enter a new room.
- Kicking Ass and Taking Names: Not in the spirit of the trope, but misquoted by the Redneck. He says he's going to kick names and catches himself before he finishes the sentence.
- Lampshade Hanging: The Redneck will occasionally complain about game mechanics like having to pay gold to enter the Pyramid, or about having to do the same Pyramid again.
- Laser Floor: Maaty's arena turns into this partway through his fight.
- Level Grinding: Possible, and may be necessary to progress. The only caveat is that there is an achievement for completeing all three pyramids in twenty runs or less called "
Insane" note . - Life Drain: The Dracula Scroll allows you to recover health for each kill, but makes it so steaks no longer heal you.
- Limited Loadout: You are normally limited to three weapons out of fifty-one in the game... unless you choose Apis as your god. Then you can carry four. The "Heavy Duty" Scroll will also let you carry an additional gun. Beware a certain scroll that will reduce you to only a single weapon slot, but will increase your damage.
- Lizard Folk: Lizardmen armed with maces start appearing in the second pyramid.
- Malevolent Architecture: Very present in the "skill rooms". Other rooms may still have things like lava or acid pools.
- Magical Accessory: You can equip one of several medallions that provide passive bonuses. However, you must first find the blueprints for them in the Pyramid, and then purchase them from the merchant.
- Magic Staff: The Staff of Ra is one. Or least functions as such.
- Macrogame: Money earned from runs can be used to purchase skill upgrades and gods' favor, the latter of which also unlocks new weapons that can appear in subsequent runs.
- Magic Missile: Some of the weapons seem to fire these, such as the Energy Gloves, Ankh and The Phoenix. Notably, the Gloves and Ankh do not consume any ammo when fired but deal much less damage as a tradeoff.
- Magitek: Some of the weapons look like they might be this. It's hard to tell.
- McNinja: Amunet is portrayed as an Egyptian Ninja Goddess, with one of her Favored weapons being a kunai and her Active Skill is a Ninja Log that draws enemy fire to it.
- Mercy Invincibility: The "Let Me Breathe" Scroll provides this.
- Money Spider: Any enemy may yield gold, ammo, steaks or, more rarely, weapons and scrolls.
- Mummy: A rare player-controlled example. Being that he emerges from a chained sarcophagus at the beginning of a run, the guardians of the pyramid were presumably trying to imprison him forever in death. All it did was piss him off.
- Mundane Fantastic: The Redneck does not act in the least bit phased by any of the weirdness going on.
- Nerf Arm: You can find a Potato Gun.
- Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: McNinja Mummy Redneck Gunslinger in Ancient Egypt!
- Non-Human Head: Several enemies have this going on, such as the Anubis-like archer enemies and the swarming cobras.
- No Name Given: The Redneck, in true 90s FPS tradition.
- Noodle Incident: The Dynamite reminds the Redneck of his fishing trips with his uncle Jake. And the Ankh weapon reminds him of a girl that had said symbol tattooed "by her... whatever".
- One Bullet Clips: Several weapons don't even require reloading. The ones that do run on this.
- Permadeath: As per standard, dying once ends your run- but you keep your gold. You can forestall this with the "Second Chance" Scroll, which gives you an extra life. However, any gold you don't spend on upgrades is lost when you reenter the pyramid, taken as "tribute to the gods."
- The Phoenix: Appears in the form of both a a weapon that fires a swarm of seeking projectiles, and a scroll that gives any weapons fire a chance to spawn one. The Redneck knows enough about the myth to make a crack about enemies not coming back from being hit by one.
- Pillar of Light: When you defeat a pyramid's last boss, one of these appears as an exit. A much bigger one can be seen emerging from the pyramid's apex when viewed from outside.
- Poison Mushroom: Some scrolls have negative effects. The "Itchy Trigger Finger" scroll, for example, makes each shot cost 2 ammo. The "Blessing" scroll removes all the negative scrolls you have as a one-time effect, and the "No Thanks" scroll allows you to choose not to take them in the first place.
- Pop-Cultured Badass: Maybe not as much as Duke Nukem or Serious Sam, but The Redneck is at least familiar with X-Men and Back to the Future, and will quote Mad Dog Tannen's taunt from Part 3 of the latter upon turning an enemy into a chicken.
- Power-Up Food: The Redneck can eat steaks to restore his health. Unusually, they look a bit like they were cut from a reptile. Meat haunches appear when you have the "Damn OMS" scroll, which replaces gold drops with them.
- Procedural Generation: Floor layouts and loot are randomized. However, enemy composition depends on the room, so you can learn whats coming if you encounter the same room again.
- Red Baron: The Redneck gets his own title to go with that of the gods: Lord of Mayhem.
- Resurrective Immortality: The main character has this, respawning at the pyramid whenever killed with all their prior items and equipment.
- Revolvers Are Just Better: Zig-zagged. While the Rusty Revolver does considerably more damage then the basic pistol, it is also far less accurate.
- Rewarding Vandalism: Oddly, this is normally averted. However, acquiring the "Lucky Vessel" scroll enables this, allowing pots to occasionally yield gold, ammo or health.
- Run, Don't Walk: There's a scroll that forces you to move at run speed all the time.
- Scooby-Dooby Doors: Pharaoh's arena is filled with sarcophagi that he can fly into one of and out of another.
- Schizo Tech: Some of the guns are made to look like they're ancient Egyptian artifacts... except that they're guns.
- Steampunk: The decor of the second pyramid has shades of this.
- Skill Scores and Perks: Most of your gold will go to your skill tree. Upgrades include more health, damage, damage resistance, critical chance, critical damage, an extra jump, more value from pickups, and so on. It's a literal tree.
- Shout-Out: The rocket launcher looks very much like the one from Quake 3, red casing and all.
- The Crowbar should ring a bell for a Half-Life player.
- The Explosive Bow is the Torque Bow in all but name. Picking it and the above two weapons up at least once grants the "Nostalgia" achievement.
- The Hellsing Pistol, which is suitably lengthy.
- The Gambit weapon lets you throw exploding playing cards.
- The Quill Gun is the Needler from Halo.
- The Wololo Staff is a weapon that makes enemies fight for you.
- Din's Fire makes an appearance as a scroll that emits a dome of fire whenever the player takes damage.
- The SFG 9000 is a strange cross between the Little Cricket and the [1].
- The Crossbow Machine Gun is a simplified improvement of the movie version.
- The Farsight is a sniper rifle that can detect enemies and shoot them through walls.
- Shockwave Stomp: Weryt will occasionally pound the floor of his arena, sending out a sandy shockwave in all directions. Unless you've got a lot of jumps, the only way to avoid getting hit by it is to use the Floating Platforms in each corner.
- Short-Range Shotgun: The double-shotgun you begin the game with has a notably wide spread and inflicts minimal damage beyond point-blank range. Downplayed by "Grandpa's Blunderbuss", which is more effective at mid-range, as is the basic Crossbow, which fires its entire load of bolts at once in a spread.
- Slow Laser: The Energy Rifle fires noticeably slow-moving blue laser bolts.
- Sniper Pistol: The various pistols, with the exception of the Rusty Revolver, are very accurate, and every class starts with one of the many types. They are especially useful against the first pyramid's second boss.
- Standard FPS Guns: All accounted for, with many permutations thereof. There are also some more unusual guns.
- Status Infliction Attack: The "Poisoner" scroll gives you a chance to apply poison Damage Over Time with any attack. The Tranquilizer Gun will stun enemies on hit. The "Froyo" scroll will give you a chance to freeze enemies. The Photo Camera will stun all enemies in the frame.
- Sticky Bomb: The Sticky Grenade. It even looks a bit like the ones from the original Shadow Warrior (1997).
- Stock Ninja Weaponry: For some reason, Kunai are available as throwing weapons. They deal very high damage and obviously do not need to be reloaded, but the time between throws is long.
- Sword Beam: The Taser Sword projects these when swung.
- Trash Talk: The Redneck frequently insults the bosses, usually mixing in a Badass Boast. Not that they pay him much mind.
- The Unintelligible: Suy the merchant. It's easy enough to tell what they mean, however, as they're very animated.
- Universal Ammunition: Blue ammo box items replenish all your currently equipped weapons.
- Unorthodox Reload: The "Smart Pocket" scroll will automatically reload any weapon you aren't currently holding.
- Upgrade Artifact: Present in the form of ancient scrolls which provide a perk when picked up for the rest of that run, similarly to the upgrade items found in other Rogue-ish games. A few of them are negative however.
- Useless Item: The "Shit" scroll. It's... well. It mentions you should watch your language.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: After turning an enemy into a chicken, you can then kill the chicken. Doing so rewards you with the "Why?" achievement.
- Visual Pun: The game's skill tree is represented by an actual tree! It grows upward and outward as you purchase new types of upgrades.
- Weapon-Based Characterization: The Redneck has his own: the basic Pistol, the Shotgun, and Dynamite. Choosing one of the gods' favor gives you a different set of starting weapons.
- Apis gives you the Rusty Revolver, Uzi, Gatling and Grenade Launcher.
- Sekhmet gives you the Ankh, Double Pistols and The Phoenix.
- Seth gives you the Taser Sword, Tesla Coil and Electric Flamethrower.
- Amunet gives you the Kunai, Machine Gun and Gunpowder Bomb.
- Neith gives you the Tranquilizer Gun, Burst Machine Gun and Sniper Rifle.
- Ammit gives you the Hellsing Pistol, the Crossbow and the Bat's Nest.
- Hathor gives you Double Pistol, Fourth of July and Sticky Grenade.
- Thoth gives you the Energy Gloves, Energy Rifle and Energy Ball.
- X-Ray Vision: The "Wall-Ray Vision" Scroll allows you to see enemies through walls and objects and highlights them in bright red. This happens automatically if you've been in a room for a certain length of time.
- You Have Researched Breathing: Most FPSes let you interrupt a reload by switching to another weapon. Not this one- you need the "Not Now" scroll first.
