Kindred Aerospace, 4th Best MegaCorp on Earth, is leading a colonization effort after they vastly accelerated global warming by accident. This involves sending a swarm of smallish spaceships all over the galaxy in an effort to find a new world for humanity to call "Home."
That's where you come in. An intrepid man, woman, or dog contracted by the company to explore whatever planet you land on.
Not to be confused with La Planete Sauvage.
This game provides examples of:
- 20 Minutes into the Future: Apparently the game takes place in the year 2041, as indicated by a calendar in the Javelin (showing the Explorer's depature date as 2034, plus 7 years of travel time), and rather optimistically suggests humanity will develop cloning, interstellar travel, jetpacks and ray guns, a life expectancy exceeding 255 years, and technology to massively accelerate climate change in just 14 years. (Alternatively, like Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, the game takes place in an alternate universe where predictions of the future from The '80s came true.)
- Advert-Overloaded Future: When you get back to your ship (either willingly or being rezed), your TV automatically plays an ad, ranging from a food or toy commercial to an infomercial on a phone sex line run by Blob Monsters.
- Acid Attack: Blight Bombs, which grow on a type of pitcher plant. Used to destroy amber.
- Enemies that use acid attacks include the Prime Jellywaft and Teratomo.
- Ain't Too Proud to Beg: Upon defeat, Kronus desperately tries to dissuade the player from disconnecting him.
- Apocalyptic Log: Two collectibles involve finding the diary entries of an alien explorer who visited the Savage Planet before you, and video snippets left behind by the original alien inhabitants of the Savage Planet.
- Attack Its Weak Point: Certain enemies and bosses can only be damaged by shooting the glowing orange spots on their bodies. Some also require a bomb or acid to reveal their weak points. Teratomo has green-yellow pustules that are his weak points.
- Go for the Eye: Sproutlooks have one giant eye, which the player jabs to defeat it. The Floopsnoot Matriarch also has one giant eye that needs to be attacked to initiate its different phases as well as kill it.
- Bandit Mook: The aptly named Burglesnatch will hoover up any unattended elements left on the ground outside their burrows.
- Black Humor: The game thrives on black humor. You are an explorer stranded on an alien planet, working for a Corrupt Corporate Executive, where getting mauled by the wildlife and killed is more of an inconvenience than anything due to the benefits cloning technology. You can kill things with wild abandon and it's even encouraged, with your A.I. companion providing a steady stream of cheery quips about the Death World you're exploring.
- Black Comedy Animal Cruelty: The poor Pufferbirds. When first feeding some to a couple Meat Vortexes, E.K.O will egg you on and laugh about how they're so "cute and juicy."
- Boss in Mook's Clothing: The Pikemanders, Kapyena, and Slamanders are more like minibosses than regular enemies. You only fight a handful of Kapyena and only about 3 Slamanders in a single normal playthrough of the game.
- Bittersweet Ending: Kindred aims to use the World Seed to create a new home for humanity, ignoring how fragile the Savage Planet was when it was created. But with humanity already living on a Crapsack World, it's not the worst possible outcome. And as a bonus for all your hard work, Martin decides you get to push the big red button to play god! Also, by the time you escape the Savage Planet, it's inevitable that you're a clone whose body is made mostly out of space tumors.
- Body Horror:
- Orange Goo increases your health by converting your body into super-dense cancerous tissue.
- The final boss is an alien explorer who got infected by the local bacteria and converted into "a meatball."
- Butt-Monkey: The Pufferbirds can get slapped, kicked, shot at, kicked into the air and then shot at, shredded by Meat Vortexes, be incited to attack each other over Grob, and exploded or dissolved by various environmental hazards. There are even achievements for kicking Pufferbirds.
- Call a Human a "Meatbag": Kronus, the Vyper Tech A.I., refers to the player as a "meatbag" and complains about your "greasy hands".
- The Cameo: South Park writer Kenny Hotz appears as the shady burger joint owner in the Wedgie Burger commercial.
- Capitalism Is Bad: Exaggerated. Earth is now a toxic wasteland with acid rains and other deadly weathers that kill hundreds of people and the blame falls to Kindred Aerospace, the company who has been polluting the planet incredibly bad, forcing countless people to buy their products in order to live in a world destroyed by them. They also plan to find a new planet to colonize it and make a new home, by sending unsuspecting people with minimal training to chart the whole planet alone, not caring if they die through unknown diseases, local fauna or flora or geographic dangers. All of this horrors was caused by one heavily greedy man who sought to gain as much money as he could, not caring if innocent people died. This is even more exaggerated when you see the ads that play in the Javelin ship where there are businesses on Earth that includes: a burger restaurant chain that uses vegan people as their primary meat source and unsanitary conditions are the main course, creating life for trivial simulations of life, cash-grabby DL Cs with barely any new content and under the premise that its new, tissues that makes you forget bad thoughts with the risk of losing memories and a TV program that literally acts as the Big Brother to spy on people. At the end and should you retrieve the seed from Terratomo, Kindred Aerospace plans to use the seed to make new planets, despite the warnings of the Precursor species who also fall to their Greed and failed to warn humanity from repeating their mistakes.
- Captain Ersatz: Copies a couple enemies from Dungeons & Dragons.
- The Osmotic Cube is a non-hostile Gelatinous Cube.
- The Kapneya is based on the Displacer Beast, a puma-like animal with Flash Step abilities and two Combat Tentacles growing out of its back.
- Charge Attack: An upgrade for the Nomad pistol allows you to coax a little more power out of the battery. At higher levels, it can be charged up to a Pinball Projectile and an explosive bullet.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
- Some enemies have regional variants, who have different colors.
- The Nomads charge levels go from blue (charge shot) to purple (bouncing shot) to red (explosive shot).
- For resources, carbon is blue, aluminum is a metallic light blue, and silicon is yellow.
- With proper visor upgrades, pings for collectables also appear color-coded. Orange Goo is orange, Alien Alloy is purple, fuel sources are blue, and alien recordings are teal.
- Cool Gate: The alien teleporters that use wormhole manipulation to move your body wholesale.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Martin Tweed is so corrupt that his indoctrinated AI have to be periodically reformatted to prevent them from describing how big of an asshole he really is. His company intentionally polluted the Earth to force humanity off-world, and has sent thousands of amateur tourists on suicide missions.
- Crapsack World: Earth is a shithole in this game. One weather condition is "Plague Mist," a concentrated haze of Black Death microbes! Not to mention that crippling debt to a MegaCorp is just a fact of life. And to make it worse, even being light years away from Earth isn't enough to get away from spam.
- Cyclops: a large number of the game's creatures, primarily hostile predators, have a single giant eye.
- Deadly Gas: Geysers of poisonous green gas form an occasional environmental hazard. The "Hot Garbage" DLC has an area submerged in deadly gas that requires a suit upgrade to traverse.
- The Infected Pufferbirds and the DLC-introduced Decayed Pufferbirds both use a toxic gas to attack and also explodes into the gas when killed.
- Death from Above: One of the Cragclaw's attack involves firing an incendiary into the air and onto the platform the player is standing on from above, leaving lingering fire on impact. For environmental hazards, Bombodoros drop dangerous red fruits and Dripping Orifices— well.
- Department of Redundancy Department: The Tranquil Crevasse of Tranquility area.
- Destructive Teleportation: The Javelin uses the Star Trek -style disintegrate-transmit-reconstitute. Your A.I. explicitly states that what comes out the other end is a copy that just thinks it's the original, but then realizes she wasn't supposed to actually let you know that.
- Dissonant Serenity: E.K.O, your A.I. companion, speaks in a very chipper tone of voice even when talking about your death(s) and reconstitution, dangerous creatures, and other life-threatening situations. It could be that the way she was programmed prevents her from expressing any other emotion.
- DLC: In-Universe, Moba Moba Moba Mobile FPSMMAIDGAF has nothing but laser beams and explosions until the player shells out for enemy and weapon models. These are temporary Microtransactions, meaning the player has to cough up every time they log in. Out of universe is the Hot Garbage DLC, which adds a new planet to explore.
- Energy Weapon: The Nomad plasma pistol. It uses a manual capacitor charged by pushing a plunger on the back of the weapon instead of a replaceable battery pack to give it functionally endless reloads, but it still has a limited number of shots.
- Featureless Protagonist: Aside from a (possible) photo of your character and the corresponding approximate voice, your character is a gender-neutral space suit apparently filled with tumors. The same goes for Player 2 in co-op, who inside their own spacesuit is apparently a human-shaped homunculus constructed out of meat scraps.
- Flunky Boss: The Floopsnoot Matriarch summons Floopsnoots and Teratomo summons Prime Jellywafts during their fights.
- Flying Seafood Special: The Jellywafts are flying jellyfish creatures. Skippers are flying goldfish.
- Fungus Humongous: Areas in the Itching Fields have big mushroom trees and forests, notably the Festering Chasm and the Fungi of Si'ned VII. Large mushrooms are also evident in other places.
- Future Food Is Artificial: Grob (likely a corruption or Lite Crème-esque copyrightable mutation of "grub") is a completely artificial food. It consists of a meal's worth of synthesized nutrients and some edible Nano Machines that turn it into real (although occasionally gross) food from the purple slop it comes out of the can as. It has four trillion possible flavours, some better than others (it occasionally rolls snake-eyes and turns into deep-fried poo or toilet water, which Kindred is strangely proud of). However, it's 4th best, like all Kindred's products, so there's probably a more expensive kind that never ends up tasting like actual shit.
- Ground Pound: A jetpack upgrade that allows you to break through cracked floors. Ground pounding from significant heights will still hurt you, even if you have the fall damage nullification upgrade.
- Hate Sink: Martin Tweed. He and his company are the reason why Earth is so polluted that acid rains are now a common weather, all to just to profit from people buying their products so that they can live better in the contaminated planet. Looking for new planets to colonize, Kindred Aerospace has started a program where they would send incautious tourists into uncharted and dangerous planets to analyze their resources, not caring if they die. When you leave the planet without retrieving the seed, he will go ballistic on you and promises he will kill you for insubordinance even if said seed would have likely destroyed mankind.
- Health Potion: Literally grows on trees (well, flowers.) Stated to be a mind-altering drug that makes you "hallucinate" that you're less hurt than you really are.
- Heart Container: Orange Goo, which converts your body tissues into super-dense cancer. There are 100 of them hidden throughout the levels, but you only need to find 60 to fully upgrade your health.
- Hummer Dinger: One of the ads in the DLC is for a mansion built on top of a giant all-terrain vehicle.
- I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: The "Hot Garbage" DLC includes an area called the Ravine of Supreme Agony.
- I'm a Humanitarian: One television ad is for Wedgie Burgers, which are Vegan burgers made of 100% Vegans.
- Interface Screw: Getting near Mesmertoxin vapors will cause the screen to blur severely with psychedelic colors for a brief time.
- It's All Upstairs From Here: Inverted with the tower, where your goal is to make your way to the bottom.
- Jump Jet Pack: Used to justify your double (and later triple and quadruple) jump. It can also charge up a single huge jump, which allows for great vertical mobility, but less maneuverability. It can also be used for a Goomba Stomp.
- Kick the Dog: The game delights in making you kill the adorable Pufferbirds.
- Large Ham: Kronus, in his boss fight, complete with evil laughter and maniacally announcing his attacks.
- Lethal Lava Land: The Smoldering Abyss and Infernal Cauldron areas.
- Ludicrous Gibs: Enemies will explode into goo of varying colors when killed, splattering the environment and you. Particularly ludicrous with anything that enters the Meat Vortexes.
- Macross Missile Massacre: Pus Launchers fire a barrage of homing missiles. Sproutlooks, if it catches sight of the player, will do something similar on a smaller, non-homing scale.
- Made from Real Girl Scouts: According to the Wedgie Burger add, their vegan burgers aren't made for vegetarians, they're made out of vegetarians.
- Made of Explodium: Alpha-Pufferbirds will detonate when killed, with a surprising blast radius and a small mushroom cloud.
- Mascot Mook: Pufferbirds, a spherical, flightless bird full of green "juice."
- Matter Replicator: The 3D Printer takes raw materials (including Alien Alloy) and reconfigures it into a new piece of equipment.
- Meat Moss: The Spire's Heart progressively looks meatier the further down you go. The source is Teratomo, described as a "meatball", in the basement.
- Meaningful Name: Teratomo is remarkably similar to "teratoma", a type of rare tumor that can contain different kinds of tissues, including hair, teeth, and muscles. Considering Teratomo's fate, this is appropriate.
- Metal Slime: Inverted with the Osmotic Cube. It moves slowly and doesn't register you as hostile, but to get the rare alien alloy that it ate, you have to push it around and defeat common enemies (or shoot vitality flowers) so that it can gorge on their resources and explode.
- Minimalist Cast: The game's cast is limited to yourself (a Silent Protagonist) and your ship's A.I. that serves as your Mission Control, along with some video mails from your boss (most of which are obviously canned and transmitted in bulk to all of their explorers). The DLC campaign adds a hostile rival A.I. as the DLC's Big Bad.
- Mook Maker: Since he is an A.I. and incapable of doing anything himself, Kronus attacks by sending various Vyper Tech machines.
- Multiple Head Case: The Baboushka. 4 heads, each containing only a quarter of a brain. Making it as stupid as it is annoyingly loud.
- Asteroids Monster: Shooting it somehow divides it into two blue Semi-Baboushkas with two heads each, and shooting one of these results in two yellow Demi-Babouskas with a single head.
- Mundane Utility: Again, incredibly advanced nanotechnology in order to make nutrient paste taste different every time it's eaten. The teleporter description also mentions that building a door in the side of the ship would have been easier.
- Our Wormholes Are Different: Alien teleporters are Cool Gates that use wormhole manipulation to move your body wholesale.
- Plasma Cannon: The Nomad is a plasma pistol. Features a modular charge feature and push-button reload.
- Really 700 Years Old: According to his Kindex bio, Martin Tweed has undergone life-extension therapies and is really a centuries-old rich corporate asshole.
- Schizo Tech: Star Trek level replicator, cloning machine, and teleporter, but you have a computer from the 1990s to check E-mails on. Which clearly does not have a spam filter, as most of the emails are irrelevent in the context of the quest.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After refueling the Javelin, it's possible to leave the planet immediately without completing further objectives. The achievement for this ending is even called "Screw This Noise".
- Sea Aping: The "Micro-Mills Mall Monkeys Plaza," which, instead of brine shrimp, uses miniature (ie, "stands comfortably on a fingertip") human clones and an Arcology the size of a large coffee table.
- Second Place Is for Winners: Kindred Aerospace is oddly proud of their 4th place ranking. Until a late game message from Tweed reveals it's complete BS, and being fourth is driving him nuts.
- Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: If you toss a can of Grob directly onto a creature, any nearby Pufferbirds will attack them.
- Shock and Awe: Shockfruits can be used to shoot lightning. They grown on hanging vines from a blue and pink mushroom-looking tree. Can be used to immobilize enemies and open special doors.
- Silent Protagonist: Aside from grunting and groaning, you don't talk. Which pisses Kronus off, because he finally has someone to talk to after being dumped at a dump site and you won't even talk back.
- Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Shangtar's Frigid Embrace and Kayn’s Icy Refuge. However, since this is the starting area right outside the Javelin, the difficulties usually encountered in ice areas are absent.
- Spear Counterpart: Kronus, the Vyper Tech A.I. introduced in the "Hot Garbage" DLC, is the male counterpart to your female A.I. companion, E.K.O. However, Kronus acts more abrasively and E.K.O. can't stand him.
- Spectacular Spinning:
- The Nomads battery revolves once with each shot. When charged up, it emits blue lightning and spins constantly. Hit it again to make the shots bounce, and hit it a third time to get a mini-nuke.
- Boomerbang enemies attack by spinning through the air like a boomerang.
- Stationary Boss: The game's three boss monsters are huge, stationary enemies.
- Stealth-Based Mission: Dealing with Sproutlooks requires sneaking around them undetected until the player is close enough to kill it. They are immune to being shot at and will release a volley of missiles if the player is spotted.
- Swallowed Whole: The aftermath of Teratomo's boss fight has him eating you whole and then pooping you out at the entrance of the tower. Like, there is a sphincter in the ceiling that you come out of.
- Throw Down the Bomblet: Bombergranates, which grow on a purple, mushroom-looking plant. Can break open cracked walls.
- Toilet Humor: It is possible to get pooped on by a Skipper (there's even an achievement for it). In one of the logs left behind by an alien explorer who visited the Savage Planet before you, he expresses the desire to find a toilet in the tower.
- When first acquiring Binding Bile, E.K.O will comment about how you just put alien poop in your pockets.
- Too Dumb to Live: Teratomo, an alien explorer whose Apocalyptic Log you find. He pops his helmet off without testing for bacteria harmful to his species because he forgot to pack the required sampler and it was too much of a walk back. He starts getting sick and blames everything from hibernation sickness to the expired can of pasta he had for dinner the night before, but discards harmful alien bacteria as a cause because reasons.
- Toxic, Inc.: Kindred Corp intentionally polluted the earth to profit off of the people getting forced off-planet as a result. The "Hot Garbage" DLC introduces the rival corporation Vyper, whose occupation of DL-C1 has left it covered in toxic sludge.
- Tropical Island Adventure: The "Hot Garbage" DLC introduces the planet DL-C1 and its tropical jungles. Which Kronos, the claim-jumping AI from rival MegaCorp Vyper, is recklessly polluting.
- Twin Maker: Used to justify respawn.
- Underground Monkey: Some animals have a regional variant with different behaviour and abilities. The Pufferbird has the most, sporting plains, tundra, cave, two different types of armor (explosive-vulnerable stone and acid-vulnerable amber), Alpha-Male, and Undead variants.
- Gimmick Level: For sidequests, there's Plork's challenges, and for the main quest, activating the tower. These involve a combination of moving platforms, dodging lasers, and speed to avoid some sort of hazard, which are not found in normal gameplay.
- Was Once a Man: Teratomo is mutated into a giant monster from over-exposure to the alien bacteria on the planet combined with absorbing DNA from the thousands of preserved species samples inside the Tower, and becomes a building-sized blob of flesh that serves as the final boss guarding the World Seed.
- Womb Level: The Spire's Heart, due to Teratomo's... spreading influence. Complete with Meat Moss, Dripping Orifices, and Pus Launchers.
- World in the Sky: Similar to Shattered Planet, the world is fragmented into "planetary flotsam," consisting of floating islands.
