Video Game / Remnant: From the Ashes

Evil never dies. Neither do we.

You think it's dead. It's not.

You give it all you've got. It's got more.

You pause to think. It won't.

Prepare to fight the Root of all evil.

A horrid mass of beings known as the Root have taken over the world, wiping out a majority of humanity and forcing the rest to fight to survive. Life, no matter how cozy, is always on the edge. One raid of monsters alone can reduce the most guarded havens into a pile of rubble. Ward 13 is one such haven. While still standing, it has no shortage of troubles. Your character is a stranger that washed up on the shores outside of Ward 13, looking to reach a tower after the champion of their homeland went missing. Hoping to finish what their champion had started, the Stranger assists Ward 13 and other NPCs with survival. And maybe — just maybe — they can drive out the Root for good.

Remnant: From the Ashes is a Third-Person Shooter with procedurally generated levels by Gunfire Games, which can be played with up to 3 people total. It's heavily influenced by FromSoftware's Dark Souls and Bloodborne, from Story Breadcrumbs lore to health being a resource that needs to be managed, to even the weakest enemies being able to punish sloppiness, all while still remaining its own game. One big difference as far as Soulsborne influences go, is that the dungeons you need to go through are procedurally-generated; while the map is shaped to follow a specific questline, it consists of fixed storyline locations mixed with random pathways and dungeons. Events and side-quests in one playthrough may not be present in another, and even entire enemy types may be absent. You will require multiple playthroughs to collect all weapons, armor, accessories, modifications, and even character talents, let alone the materials required to enhance your weapons and armor to +20.

Outside its Soulsborne influences, it is still very much a third-person shooter. Melee combat is punishing if pushed too often, and is more for suppressing a group of small enemies or stun-locking one medium-sized enemy. There seem to be enemies in every area that discourage you from going full melee in one way or another, such as Action Bombs or stun-resistant tanks, while combat zones feature include thick cover and mooks to harvest ammunition from. You get two guns slots to this end, as well as a melee slot to let you choose your flavor of melee, one pistol, and one "long gun" that covers larger guns like rifles or shotguns. 'Magic' comes in the form of ranged weapon mods, which gain power as you deal damage, especially with the weapon it is attached to, and can cast a spell, switch to an alternate firing mode, or automatically activate under specific conditions.

In September 2020, THQ Nordic announced an overhauled version of Chronos named Chronos: Before the Ashes that serves as a Prequel to the game for release in December 2020.

During the Game Awards 2022, Remnant II was announced for a 2023 release.

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Fill out the tropes: Remnant From the Ashes:

• 20 Minutes into the Future: The events of the game take place in 2062, 94 years after the Root invaded in 1968.
• Aborted Arc: Your expedition to Corsus largely ends with no resolution should you choose to kill the Undying King and take the Labyrinth Key early. Despite the Apocalyptic Logs telling you the Iskal are bad news, besides shooting large numbers of their followers, you can't really do anything about the situation on the planet. The Iskal Queen also mentions having plans for the Guardian's Heart, but never reveals to the player what those plans are, and you don't have the option of direct confrontation like you do the Undying King. Averted with the Swamps of Chorus DLC which adds new dungeons and enemies along with making the Iskal Queen a boss. Though the reason for the boss battle doesn't really depend on who you gave the Guardians Heart to.
• Absolute Xenophobe: Nearly everyone the player encounters. Virtually every world has murderous bloodthirsty beasts and eldritch monsters out to kill the player, and the beings that can reason are generally also hostile to outsiders.
  • The Pan of Yaesha are only marginally in danger from the Root, as only Root scouting parties have made incursions on their world, at least until Remnant II. But the Pan are extremely xenophobic and their xenophobia is further fanned as a distraction by their Empress, whose fruits of immortality are going bad. Barring a few individuals like Navun and the Stuck Merchant, the Pan will kill anyone that's not a fellow Pan.
  • The natives of Rhom have descended to extreme savagery after the nuclear apocalypse that ravaged their world. It doesn't matter which side of the civil war the player encounters, they will attack any outsider they see with no mercy.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Large, cavernous sewers are the second set of levels on Earth.
• Achievement System: The game has cosmetic achievements that don't affect gameplay, but it also has a number of traits that are only obtainable by doing particular actions often enough such as smashing items to find scrap.
• Action Bomb: Rot-Warts are an early game one, being pink lumps on legs that will charge you, blow up, deal considerable damage, and try and infect you with a status effect. Others include the radioactive skulls on Rhom and shock trooper Pan on Yaesha, the latter only exploding when they are killed.
• After the End:
  • The game starts on post-apocalyptic Earth where the Root has taken over, which happened somewhere in the 1960s.
  • Rhom was a planet that successfully fought off the Root... at the cost of its entire civilization when the whole world was nuked to hell and back.
  • Corsus has recently had a Zombie Apocalypse that has converted the early-Age-of-Enlightenment inhabitants into mindless zealots in thrall to a colony of sentient parasites known as the Iskal featuring constant Body Horror. By the time you're done, it may also soon fall to the Root after you kill its Guardian.
• A.K.A.-47: The various Earth firearms seems to be Bland-Name Product of real guns, including:
  • Assault Rifle: Ruger Mini-14 (full-auto in-game, even though the real life version is semiauto and would have been initially introduced after the apocalypse started)
  • Chicago Typewriter: Thompson SMG
  • Hunting Pistol: Thompson/Center Contender
  • Hunting Rifle: Winchester rifle
  • Repeater Pistol: Mauser C96
  • Submachine Gun: Micro Uzi
• Alien Kudzu: The Root is an aggressive ecology of tree demons, fully capable of thriving anywhere that can support plant life, and areas in which they dominate are quickly overrun with plant life.
• Aliens Speaking English: The inhabitants of the different worlds all speak English (at least, the ones who are actually willing to talk to you instead of attacking on sight). This is lampshaded in one conversation path with the Akari worshipper, the first outer worlder you encounter in the game, in which she claims to be speaking the ancient tongue of Dru'dar, but you tell her that she's speaking English.
• Alternate Dimension: In addition to Earth, there are three alternate worlds to explore: the scorched desert world of Rhom, the primordial swamp world of Corsus, and the verdant jungle world of Yaesha. The Subject 2923 DLC adds the ice world of Reisum.
  • This is also the basic plot on how this got started, as you can find out in Ward 13 once you get the keycard. A group of special people known as "Dreamers" had the ability to create portals to these dimensions, one of which being where the Root are from. The researchers assigned to investigating these portals realized too late they weren't just observing, but actively maintaining a two-way connection between dimensions, which is how the infectious Root got to Earth. As in-game notes put it, the Dreamers didn't make a window, they made an open door.
• Alternate History: The Root invaded Earth in 1968 and proceeded to conquer the planet, meaning the last fifty years of human history happened very differently in this universe. The story itself takes place in 2062, almost an entire century after the collapse of civilization.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • There are Timed Power-Up items that give you buffs that last for a whole hour. You might consider these a waste since you might not think you can go an hour without dying, but they actually persist beyond death and, critically, they persist even if you quit out and load back in. This is especially important with the Potions of Enlightenment, which you can only get three of per character.
  • Considering how badly the RNG can screw you over, the added Adventure Mode is a godsend. Did you desperately want a certain dungeon or accessory to spawn but didn't get it? So long as it doesn't happen on Corsus you can simply roll up an Adventure and try your luck there. The Swamps of Corsus DLC added the option to play adventure mode on Corsus as well if it was installed.
  • A later update added what the devs call "Bad Luck Protection" so whenever you roll a certain dungeon or event, the chance of it spawning decreases, so you no longer have to reroll certain worlds ten times to get that one event that just refuses to show up.
  • Another patch made it so that resting at a checkpoint fills not just your health and ammo but also your mod power. So if you die to a hard boss you no longer need to equip the Cultist set and go make yourself a sandwich before you can try again with full mod power.
  • Your character will make an exclamation to the tune of, "That was rough!" after a protracted fight. This means that there are no enemies currently aggroed (which is not to say there are no enemies nearby), and you're safe to heal and reload.
  • Unlike virtually every other Souls-like game, currency and experience are not lost when you die, and the minions encountered in nearly every boss fight will grant the same experience they would anywhere else. Since most bosses have complex or large arenas and dungeons tend to be long and dense with enemies, this removes the pressure to get to and reclaim your currency/experience and ensures that even if you get killed repeatedly, you'll have some character progression.
• The Apunkalypse: Averted, the apocalypse took place before punk was conceived so there's no mohawk crowds. The human gangs like the Mud Dogs still have some decency and are mainly territorial or scavenging for survival, though their morals are declining from their days as the Crazy 8, which you learn when you talk to ol' Mud Tooth. The presence of the Root forces keeps humans from building up into any significant threat... so the gangs are more pathetic than fearsome.
• Armor of Invincibility: Leto's set and the Carapace set are the most protective armour suits in the game. Both also give a further damage resistance bonus on top of their first tier armor rating. Leto's ultimately edges out the Carapace as Leto's has stronger protection, can make you somewhat Immune to Flinching with two armor pieces and it becomes even more protective as you take damage, while the Carapace will lose its bonus protection as you take more hits. Having Leto's set makes fighting the upcoming Riphide boss far more survivable as you go close quarters against 8 versions of Riphide.
• Asshole Victim: Unless you choose to kill the Undying King and skip Corsus, you kill Corsus's Guardian, Ixillis, to give its heart either to the Undying King for the Labyrinth Key or to the Iskal Queen for another reward. This is likely to leave Corsus open to the Root, but the Iskal are extremely hostile and dangerous. The only friendly Iskal is the same one who seeks Ixillis's heart is the Iskal Queen who, underneath her exterior, is believed to be worse than the Undying King.
• Automatic Crossbow: Enemies like the Slayer carry crossbows that fire a volley of powerful bolts at you, which also has the extra pain of causing bleeding. You have your own in the crossbow pistol, Twin Shot which lives up to its name. Your other crossbows are either single-shot or fires a single spread, but all your crossbows are unusually advanced and have a clever loading mechanism that lets you reload quite quickly with a single lever pull.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The Sporebloom, a weapon you can create after defeating The Ent. It's basically a sawed-off shotgun. Its damage is enormous, but with a spread so wide you have to practically be in kissing distance to make sure the entire volley hits. It also has to reload after every single shot. Its mod is just as overblown, launching what is essentially a poison gas grenade that creates a deadly cloud for seven seconds. Amazing if the enemy is stationary... which most enemies aren't. The grenade also has friendly fire and you can hurt yourself with it. It has improved significantly after later patches.
  • Scar of the Jungle God, this set of claws are a stylish hybrid of Wolverine and StarCraft's Templar and can inflict bleed status with a Charge Attack. Unfortunately in a fight, they're rather mediocre. They have one of the lowest base damage in the game and for a dual-wielded weapon, their attack rate is underwhelming - only a bit faster than a sword. And the charged attack that inflicts bleeding... it's an uppercut with very short range so it's not easy to land on a moving enemy.
  • Melee attacks generally. They make for a fine Emergency Weapon, especially against specific hordes of weak enemies or as a Finishing Move, and Utility Weapon for smashing up scenery to collect upgrade materials and currency, but trying to specialize in them to the exclusion of the guns is usually more trouble than it's worth, when considering that most enemies either want to be up close with the player to deploy their own melee-range attacks, want to stand back and shoot at the player with their own guns and have more time to do so if the player tries running up to them first, or have heavy armor and weakpoints that the player will struggle to hit with melee strikes. Most stages are three dimensional mazes designed to create killzones for ranged weapons fire. And that's not even counting flying enemies or bosses who hardly even enter the player's melee reach at all.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: Your very first mission as member of Ward 13 is to meet Ace to turn on the reactor. The ending cutscene has both of you back to back, shooting monsters with your pistols.
• Barbarian Tribe: While the Pan are xenophobes, the Root nihilistically hate all other life and the Iskal want to Take Over the World, the other two worlds Rhom and Reisum are full of warmongering barbaric tribes. This is explicitly why your character is always under attack except from a few individuals.
• Belly Flop Crushing: When at the highest tier of armor weight (ultraheavy such as the Leto's set), your roll is replaced with a belly flop. This belly flop deals damage and there are several ways to buff it to do insane damage.
• BFG: The Urikki Artillerist is so big that he lugs around a breech-loading cannon while Rhom has a enemy that carries a large rifle that fires rockets. The Yaesha Impaler's rotary spear gun isn't More Dakka and it's actually a slow semi-auto weapon but fires a damaging spear instead of a small bullet. The closest thing to BFG weapons are your large and powerful crossbow-type weapons.
• Blocking Stops All Damage: Almost. The Hunter enemy will stop damage from your guns and melee weapons with its dual sword block, but it won't stop attacks such as the Flamethrower mod from the Spitfire boss weapon.
• Body Horror:
  • Scourges are mutants infested with radioactive bee-wasp-parasite things, most of which appear to be living in their heads. From the constant moaning, crying, and pleading they make, this does not seem to be a pleasant experience. The Elite enemies, Hive Skulls, are pretty much the same.
  • Corsus Infected are essentially zombies infected with some kind of fungus. Most have no heads at all and are covered in disgusting yellow growths.
  • One enemy type, the Hollows, are corrupted creatures from a different world, conquered by the Root when one of humanity's Dreamers took control of a Guardian, causing the "Fuzzies" to kill it.
  • The Final Boss of the Subject 2923 campaign, Dr. Urik Harsgaard, Was Once a Man but now looks like a grotesque thing made of what looks like stone, with a horrible Vagina Dentata mouth, multiple arms some of which are stubby and pale and coming out of parts where arms do not belong and multiple eyes on his sides and additional ghostly arms floating around him. And he is so far gone that he apparently considers this a good thing.
• Boom, Headshot!: Played with. Headshots cause extra damage as per standard video game fare, but critical hits are a separate modifier that can occur on any part of the body. There is also a chance to get a critical on a headshot for massive damage.
  • Averted with Scourge, who not only takes no extra damage from headshots, despite their very large heads, but shooting them there enrages the Scourge and the hive, releasing even more angry radioactive bees that home in on you.
  • Inverted with some enemies that wear head armor, which will result in you dealing less damage if you shoot them in the head. Some enemies you can knock their head armor off, but for some others it's built-in.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Smashing crates. They're strewn all over the game world, even around Ward 13. And while taking time out of your schedule to smash them doesn't seem very exciting, you tend to earn fairly decent amounts of scrap, sometimes even crafting materials, from them. In fact, if you're thorough enough, you'll likely get more scrap and iron from them than you will from chests or enemy drops.
  • A lot of set bonuses for your clothing work like that, where the less spectacular, the more useful. The Bandit set makes ammo pickups replenish more and has a chance for your bullets to be recycled back into your mag if they hit an enemy, the Cultist set gives you passive mod charge regen and increases the duration of applicable mods, and then there's the Adventurer set, which increases the amount of scrap you get and makes crates more likely to drop crafting materials (see above for why this is nice).
  • The Hunting Rifle is one of the game's possible starting weapons, and can be bought immediately after you get access to the shop, even if you didn't get it as your starter gun. In a game in which you can find weapons that can shoot superheated plasma, radioactive bees, corrosive acid and even miniature black holes, the Hunting Rifle is an outstanding weapon. Precise, with good damage and range, good ammo capacity and a free weapon mod slot, it is easily feasible (ammo permitting) to use it as your one and only gun for the entire game.
  • The Provisioner's Ring, unlocked by beating an Earth World Boss on Hardcore Mode. It makes the weapon(s) you're currently not holding reload passively. This only sounds like a mild convenience, but it's actually enormously helpful. You don't have to wrestle with reloading in tough boss fights, weapons like the Magnum that take long to reload don't have to go through the annoyingly long animation and in general it cuts down on the downtime between shots, making it a slightly roundabout way to increase your DPS as well.
  • The Stockpile Circlet, found on Earth. It increases your ammo capacity by 50%. Because ammo pick-ups are based on percentage, the increased capacity also makes ammo drops from enemies bigger. Just this thing means you never run out of bullets, which is a huge convenience in the normal game but can break the game in Survival Mode, where ammo is always scarce and Ammo Boxes are very expensive.
• Botanical Abomination: The Root itself, a demonic tree-like Alien Kudzu that caused a Apocalypse How. Some beings, such as the Ent, are examples themselves, with the Ent in particular being a wooden Cthulhu. They're also an extradimensional Eldritch Abomination that has absorbed countless other worlds.
• Brown Note: Most of the researchers exposed to Clawbone's presence during the Dreamer experiments were afflicted with an extreme form of nihilistic depression that causes them to kill themselves. Only Harsgaard was able to survive, though whether this is because he was already so messed up in the head through studying Clawbone's writings, or just having greater mental strength, is left unclear.
• Bullfight Boss: Mangler, a miniboss on Earth, is simply too fast for the game he's in. He rolls around at insane speed and deals a ton of damage if he smacks into you. But bait him to hit a wall and he will bounce back and sit on the floor dazed while you can go to town on his health bar.
• Can't Argue with Elves: The Elf Queen on Corsus is obsessed with something called "Iskal." One of Ford's journal entries mentions his growing frustration with the Queen and Iskal as she won't ever shut up about it.
• Character Customization: You choose your gender, age, voice and colours (for your eyes, hair, and skin tone). There are no sliders, but you do have a preset selection of heads.
• Charged Attack: All melee attacks have a charged attack that do more damage or are a Herd-Hitting Attack and with a number of weapons, there'll be special properties activated such as Smolder will ignite its victims. One particular trait and certain items will specifically increase the power of your charged attack.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Throughout Earth, you'll occasionally find logs and documents talking about Harsgaard, a scientist who was part of the initial Dreamer project who is noted to have had an odd fixation on the Root. Harsgaard would eventually appear in person in Subject 2923 as the Big Bad, having become the Root's new leader after Nightmare's death. He also reveals that he masterminded the events of Chronos.
• Combat Tentacles: The gun, Curse of the Jungle God, can summon up to two electrified tentacles from the ground. These are almost useless against flyers, but devastating against melee ground forces or ground attackers that are fixated on attacking you including World Bosses. Meanwhile a number of enemies, such as the Hive Skull elite in Rhom have extendable tentacles for arms to slap you from outside your melee range.
• Continuing is Painful: Zigzagged. Unlike other Souls-like games where death costs you experience points or money, halves your health or locks off certain features, death has absolutely no negative effect other than sending you back to the last checkpoint with all enemies respawned. But the Rubber-Band A.I. effect over-leveled gear has on enemy Level Scaling and the general confusing opacity of the gear level system that encompasses it can actually put the player in an even worse situation down the road with no way out.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: Played with, Bosses are actually just as vulnerable to the status effects as other enemies (they make up for it with higher health values and summoning other monsters) with any immunities being common to all non-player beings. What Bosses are immune to are abilities that fool enemies such as the clone effect of the Rift Walker mod.
• Cool Sword:
  • Smolder, the sword obtained by cutting off Singe's tail. It's permanently on fire.
  • Also the Hero's Sword, obtained through Survival Mode. Charged attacks with it are wreathed in blue energy and it shoots a wave of energy.
  • Finally there's the World's Edge, earned from finally killing Harsgaard. It's similar to the Hero's Sword, except it trades a higher stamina cost for its energy wave being able to penetrate enemies and continue on.
• The Corruption:
  • The Root (otherdimensional plant horrors). It takes over anything it can, and even if it couldn't properly take it over it'll still try to make sure it drives people crazy to try and make it more likely that whatever is keeping it at bay gets new problems to deal with.
  • The Iskal (elves infected with the vyrworm parasite) have effectively lobotomized the population of Corsus and taken over the entire planet, similar to the Root. Their actions (especially the lobotomy) indirectly lead to the death of the planet's guardian, giving the Root an opportunity to invade. Whether they will clash or cooperate is left unknown.
• Death from Above: The alternative kill for the Optional Boss of the Swamps of Corsus DLC involves luring her to stand underneath one of the stalactites in her arena, stunning her and then shooting the stalactite to impale her for a One-Hit Kill.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • The Sporebloom. It's a sawed-off shotgun, single action and with enormous spread. The game updated it to make it more functional. It has the single highest damage per shot weapon in the game. On top of that, its mod shoots a poison gas grenade that now slows enemies down but hurts you as well. You practically need to base your whole build around this gun to make it work. Once you do and once you understand how to use its mod and when to use your handgun instead, the Sporebloom allows you to shred through even the tankiest bosses extremely quickly and kill most elites in two hits tops.
  • Swap strats. If you fire, then swap your weapon you can immediately fire the weapon you just switched to, effectively substituting weapon swap speed for fire rate. Find a handgun and a long gun with roughly similar magazine capacities (the Shotgun and the Defiler, for example) and equip the Provisioner's Ring. By constantly shooting then swapping you can fire the weapons much faster than they are meant to be fired and the Provisioner's Ring will make sure you never have to pause to reload. This is in itself powerful, but it also means you can use the Burden of the Follower or the Empowering Loop, both of which provide strong buffs but lower your fire rate, which doesn't matter because your fire rate is pretty much as fast as your fingers can push the buttons with this setup. It takes a while to learn but it is incredibly strong once you get the hang of it.
  • Status stacking. By utilizing certain gear combinations, you can turn enemies, even bosses, into burning, frozen, corroded, bleeding messes quietly crying on the floor. That means two strong damage over time effects, lowered defenses, lowered movement speed and increased critical damage. For further insanity, you can combine this with gear like the Ring of the Punisher, which increases damage depending on how many status effects the target is suffering from or the Osseous set, which adds a damage modifier as you continue to damage enemies, which your bleeding effects count as. The issue with this? All these effects have their own application methods and tick down in individual countdowns so you'll spend most of your time reapplying the status effects. The other issue is that most bosses will be almost dead by the time you've applied everything.
  • The best armors aren't the tankiest, as re-rolled campaigns will have enemies matched to equipment level and harder difficulties will increase enemy damage to where even the strongest armor won't take more than a few hits from a mook. The best armors are those that give you great offense ability - so Labyrinth and Warlord are often cited as favorites. Getting a drop on enemies, mastering dodge techniques and powerful attack bonuses that end fights quickly are preferred defenses over being able to take a hit.
• Disc-One Final Boss: The Ent and Singe act as this, being the last bosses for Earth in the campaign and allowing you to access the Labyrinth, denoting the Genre Shift from a Post-Apocalyptic game to a more fantastical world. Bonus points goes to Singe, the giant dragon on the game's cover.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • The SMG Handgun can be found in Ward 13 within the first 10 minutes of leaving and returning to Ward 13, by going into a part of Ward 13 below the reactor, finding a fuse, placing the fuse, turning it on, unlocking the electronic door, then turning the power off again to disable the giant fan you need to walk through. It doesn't deal as much damage as the Repeater Pistol you start off with, but is usable at close-to-medium ranges and is more than capable of mowing down groups of weaker enemies or finishing off bigger ones.
  • Not really a nuke, but early-on the Mender's Aura mod that the Ex-Cultist starts with is insanely good. You start the game with only three charges to your healing item, so a full heal you can recharge by killing is extremely useful, and the Ex-Cultist's starting armor causes it to slowly and steadily gain Mod Power. Once you upgrade your Dragon's Heart a few times you will become less and less reliant on it, which just so happens to coincide with the point where you start getting powerful and game-changing combat mods, mostly relegating Mender's Aura to co-op play.
  • Also associated with the Ex-Cultist archetype is the double-whammy of starting with both the Cultist armor set and several levels in the Spirit trait. The Cultist set gives the Blood Pact bonus, which boosts the duration of all mods by up to 100% with the full set bonus, and each piece offers slow, constant mod power generation, while the Spirit trait boosts the rate at which mods gain energy. Combining these together lets the player constantly run with defensive or buffing mods like Mantle of Thorns or Hunter's Eye and rapidly recharge them when they run out, keep swarms of summons ripping through enemies, or just constantly blasting with offensive powers.
  • The Leto Armor set is available on Earth. It's the most protective armor in the game and while it has a huge drawback of the whole set being so heavy, you'll bellyflop instead of roll while dodging - there's a number of items that'll reduce its encumbrance, such as the Twisted Idol amulet or Leto's Amulet. Getting the armour just requires some patience with the teleporter and potentially involves no further danger, assuming the Lab it's found in spawns.
  • The Scrapper Armour set, which you get by choosing Scrapper as your starting class or by buying it from Rigs if you didn't. It's by far the most protective starting set in the game and gives an additional resistance to melee. Its set bonus increases the damage you do from any source provided you're within 5 metres, plus the full set is still medium weight. This gives you a huge edge in melee or short-ranged combat which is great for swarms, melee bosses and occasionally flanking a World boss for close up mayhem.
  • The Spitfire, a weapon you can make after beating Singe. On the surface, it's just like the above-mentioned SMG, only with slightly lower firerate and a slightly smaller magazine but more damage per shot. The great part comes from its Flamethrower mod. Videogame Flamethrowers Suck is entirely averted here. The mod is extremely versatile and allows you to clear out whole groups of weak enemies (like the otherwise annoying Vyr), allows you to melt huge chunks off a boss' health bar and lets you use short bursts of it to set enemies on fire so they take damage over time while you run away or shoot them with something else. Eventually you will find weapons that outclass it, but for most of your first playthrough the Spitfire will be an incredibly useful tool, and it remains one the only weapons that deals Fire damage, which is super effective against both the wooden Root and the iceborne DLC enemies.
  • You can get an attack summons as early as Earth with the Mangler boss fight. Summoned creatures can hit hard and enemies tend to turn their backs to them as they focus on you. A couple of summoned creatures can easily clear an area of enemies without you offering any assistance, and although the Mangler's summons are the weakest, they're still very effective.
  • All Account-bound rewards, as they, once unlocked, are given to every character you have and every character you create from then on, so a brand-new character can end up starting with Nightmare Spiral, Ring of Supremacy and Empowering Loop, granting characters an enormous damage boost and a Life Drain effect to their gunshots and early on, the Nightmare Spiral's downside of making your healing items worthless is irrelevant as you only start with three Dragon Hearts. Exacerbated with the DLC adding another set of account-bound items like one that doubles the amount of upgrade material you find or one that copies your chest armor's ability, allowing you to get a full set bonus with only two pieces.
• Door to Before: Most realms have you go through a mini-dungeon to emerge on the other side of a door that can only be opened from the other side. Given the ability to travel between waypoints and Adventure Mode's relatively short dungeon lengths, this is of limited use.
• Draw Aggro: One of the weapon mods, Rattle Weed, allows you to throw a seed that grows an aggro-drawing plant for ten seconds, which is enough time for you to heal up. The ring Aggressor's Bane, gives the wearer a decent damage reduction but it greatly increases the enemy's aggressiveness to your character as well as the distance before they attack.
• Dual Boss:
  • Shatter & Shade, a pair of Vyr constructs on Rhom.
  • Ixillis XV & XVI, the flying insect-like Guardians of Corsus.
  • Scald & Sear, a Pan Warden accompanied by a flying imp on Yaesha.
  • Brudvaak & Vargr, a Urikki warlord riding his frost breathing mole rat-like mount on Reisum.
• Dual Wielding: The Root Hunters in the Earth sewers carry two large machetes, which they keep crossed in front of their chest as they advance, as all of your shots are automatically reflected off them. Thus, they are only vulnerable when they finally lunge to attack. The Root favour carrying two weapons, the Stalkers carry a pair of sickles while Hollows carry a pair of axes. The Pan Spearmen of Yaesha fight with a spear in each hand, and the Glaive Throwers throw their weapons at you one after another as well. In Reisum, Obryk the Shield Warden uses a pair of spiked shields. If you have the Scar of the Jungle God claws, you can give enemies a taste of their own medicine.
• Dungeon Bypass: If you refuse to work with the Undying King and manage to kill him, you can skip going to Corsus entirely.
• Earth Is the Center of the Universe: Earth is the literal core of the worlds, as it's where the Labyrinth and the Keeper live. Their power is why there is no Guardian for Earth, and why it was once safe from extraterrestrial invasion. Unfortunately the Keeper was originally unaware of the Dreamers and the contact they made with the Root, which invited the Root past the Keeper's defense.
• Easy Levels, Hard Bosses: Due to the roguelite nature of the game, this can be the case depending on the levels and bosses chosen. Schizophrenic Difficulty is in full effect so it isn't true all the time, but there are a few level configurations where the point to point mooks are easy enough to deal with... but the boss in the level ends up being much, much harder. A good early example are imp levels; once you're familiar with how quickly they crowd you and how to tell a Spore is coming, can be fairly safely done but there's no promise that the boss at the end will be forgiving.
  • Inverted once you get to the higher difficulty settings, where the relative simplicity of the boss patterns is much easier to deal with than ambushes from all sides.
• Eldritch Location: The Labyrinth is a strange dimension filled with floating ruins, paths that appear and disappear at will and contains portals to other planes of reality.
• Elemental Powers: Each faction has a specific element they are associated with, giving them a special damage type and Status Effect.
  • Humans are most associated with Fire damage, which can inflict Damage Over Time.
  • Root enemies use Rot damage, which causes Root Rot.
  • Buri use radiation powers, which cause the Irradiated status effect.
  • The Iskal use Corrosive damage, which can temporarily lower your armor level.
  • The Pan can inflict Lightning damage, which can cause the player to become Shocked.
  • Introduced in the Subject 2923 DLC is Ice Damage, which can slow the player. It is only inflicted by Urikki enemies.
• Expy:
  • The Ent resembles Cthulhu if he was made of wood.
  • The Harrow is heavily reminiscent of Freddy Krueger, from his claws to his entrance to his arena.
  • The Unclean One is reminiscent of Shrek, being a green ogre found in a wooden shack in the middle of a swamp. The devs even made an April Fools joke about it.
  • Totem Father is a regal horned monkey with a staff that closely resembles the Staff of Sacanas, and which shoots lightning. These are similarities to the Storm King in My Little Pony: The Movie (2017). His arena is also called Tempest Court, where the Storm King has a servant named Tempest. If he is killed by shooting him atop a totem pole, he will fall before disintegrating, mirroring the Storm King's death in which he is turned to stone, falls off a balcony, and shatters to pieces.
  • The Urikki from the Subject 2939 are essentially a cross between Horny Vikings and the Skaven. Tian, the Assassin in particular is effectively a Clan Eshin assassin.
  • The World Boss of Reisum is a boisterous rider with a polearm riding a comically oversized mount, heavily reminiscent of a certain boss in Sekiro. Once you beat either the rider or the mount, the other will absorb its power and heal to full, heavily reminiscent of a certain duo in Dark Souls.
  • The main character themselves is reminiscent of Roland Deschain. A gun wielding wanderer across a post-apocalyptic wasteland with a singleminded quest to reach a tower (or an island with a tower on it in any case) while traveling between worlds.
  • The Hero Sword, with its Sword Beam energy arc, is reminiscent of the Master Sword from The Legend of Zelda or some of the Moonlight swords from various FromSoftware games.
• Elite Mook: The Root has a huge variety of these types with all kinds of different powers and abilities that make them far more dangerous than any pissant Devil or Hollow you encounter. If your enemy drops a Lumenite Crystal when killed, then it's a part of the elite forces.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: After you beat the first stage of the final boss of Subject 2939 DLC (which takes place after the main campaign), you get the mighty Fusion Rifle weapon just in time for the 2nd stage.
• Epic Flail: Hitting for heavy damage and surprising speed are flail weapons you can get. There's the Wastelander Flail which is made from a Buri skull and the Butcher's Flail which is earned from an alternate kill of the Unclean One and can corrode enemies as a debuff.
• Evil Pays Better: Played with in that Ezlan the Undying King is also a cruel and arrogant tyrant, but giving him the heart of Corsus's Guardian instead of the Iskal Queen is still probably the better move morally-speaking, since he wants to use it to restore his own world's Guardian as much as to use the legitimacy that would offer to continue his tyrannical rule, while the Iskal Queen has just doomed her own world to the Root's grasp in the pursuit of dominating it completely. But giving it to the Iskal Queen offers a full armor set, two powerful ranged weapons, one of the best Traits in the game, and access to a new questline in Adventure mode that could potentially unlock some of the game's best armor. All siding with Ezlan gets you is a pretty-alright melee weapon and not having to kill him in a boss fight. Mind, on a first playthrough, you might still want to take him up on his offer; his level floor is fourteen, more than three levels higher than Yaesha, the next world you'd visit after Corsus and Rhom, and his boss fight is one of the most chaotic and brutal in the entire game.
• Fake Ultimate Mook: Iskal Bloats on Corsus. They look absolutely horrifying, being twelve feet tall, as broad as they are tall and have a glowing skull lined with tentacles for a face. However, their face takes drastically increased damage to the point where two headshots kill them stone dead. And since they can only attack in melee range, you have more than enough time to shoot them to pieces before they can so much as touch you.
• Fantasy Gun Control: Inverted, unlike the prior Chronos where's it played straight for your character (but not your blunderbuss-wielding dwarven enemies) from modern Earth who just runs around with a sweater, sword/axe and shield, Remnant really does push on getting guns and lots of them, then mulching the hated Root and other foes with enchanted or normal bullets. Your enemies get in the act too, with each world having at least one of their units capable of using a firearm with the Basha of Rhom and Urikki of Reisum (they're primitive but they got a hold of Earth assault rifles and reverse-engineered the basic principles for some of their giant members) being the most advanced in that regards.
• Fantastic Racism: On Reisum, the rat people are divided into Urikki and Emin, who hate each other. The Urikki take Emin as slaves and the World Boss stands on a battlefield with Emin corpses piled high. It's also implied that the Action Bomb rats with explosives strapped to them are Emin pups while the ones without explosives on them are Urikki pups. However, even the most violent Urikki must acknowledge that the Krall, rat people with magic and prescience, are only born of Emin. It's also worth noting that the Emin used to do the exact same thing to the Urikki until they were overthrown by the hero Magir - or so Sebum the merchant claims. Whether Magir was a historical figure or just a legend is left up to the player.
• Fartillery: While going for the Unclean One's alternate kill, if you wait too long to attack him he will fart, which creates a giant poison cloud.
• Fighting Your Friend: Brabus, an optional boss who heads a human gang, invokes this in co-op, saying he'll let you pass if you fight each other to death. If you ignore them, or one of you fails to prevail within a time limit, he'll start up a proper boss battle to kill you himself. Actually fighting and defeating your co-op buddy, however (even if you do it by kicking them from your game) will give you the "Cold as Ice" trait.
• Final Death Mode: Hardcore Mode is the mode where characters stay dead. The game even makes you delete the dead character yourself, for added humiliation. Why would you go through such torture? Because beating the World Bosses here rewards you with special powerful rings, not just for the current character but for every single character on your account, all the ones you've already made and all the ones you start afterwards, even outside of Hardcore Mode.
• Flunky Boss: Almost every single boss in the game is accompanied by an infinite supply of minor enemies. These vary in when and how they spawn and are meant to distract you away from the boss and provide ammo when killed.
• Friendly Fireproof: Zig-zagged; enemies can damage each other (few sights are as delightful as one enemy throwing an axe into the back of the enemy in front just because it was too impatient in trying to get you) but co-op players can also damage each other if careless (although the damage is fortunately highly reduced compared to what you do to enemies). On the other hand, friendly NPCs are immune to your damage. Additionally, if an NPC can be potentially turned hostile (e.g the Undying King), you can't just open fire on them to get the drop on them. There has to be a dialogue option or in-area action that makes them unfriendly first.
• Future Imperfect: The Root invasion of Earth happened nearly a century ago, and the survivors have lost a lot of knowledge. All metal is referred to as "iron," and Forged Iron is clearly steel while Galvanized Iron appears to be titanium or possibly aluminum going by the description of it being used for "flying tanks". Judging by the description of Frenzy Dust, it seems to be Root-altered cocaine, but no one has any context for what it was before the invasion - just that it can be found "in the tallest towers and back alleys."
• Gaia's Vengeance: Subverted; while some characters lampshade how abuse of the natural order led to the root's arrival and the return of trees en-masse, the Root doesn't care about any life that isn't it, and wants to snuff out what it can't corrupt.
• Gatling Good: The Root Juggernaut's arm is one. These guys will purposely dump torrents of ammo into the floors and walls...just because they have that much Dakka they can waste it. The Pan Impaler of Yaesha carry old-fashioned gatling guns that fires spears, interestingly the Impaler guns will rotate their barrels after firing, but it's actually a pretty slow weapon. It launches a single spear for tremendous damage and then the barrel rotates and the Impaler needs to take some time to ready the weapon again. If you the DLC, the fusion rifle is a rotary gun.
• "Get Back Here!" Boss: Shroud, an early game boss, teleports around its maze-like arena of pipes and catwalks, making the encounter more about finding the thing before fighting it.
• The Ghost:
  • The Devourer, a powerful Root who is mentioned by the Keeper to have killed the Guardians (except Ixillis). It is never seen or fought in the game. Unless you've played the prequel Chronos, which reveals that "The Devourer" is the protagonist of that game, a poor sucker who got tricked into killing all those Guardians and ended up as the Dreamer you fight as the Final Boss in this game.
  • Also the Pan empress. Let's look at the other enemy races and their leaders: The Buri and Vyr's leader, the Undying King, is encountered at the end of Rhom and will either give you the Labyrinth Key in exchange for Ixillis's heart or be fought and killed for the key; Who the Elves of Corsus used to follow is unclear, but they have now been enthralled by the demagogue Iskal Queen. She can be given the Guardian's Heart and in Adventure Mode she can be fought; and you fight the Root's leader, Nightmare, inside Dreamer's subconscious. While the Pan empress is mentioned in Ford's notes, and by Pan rebels who say she is holding Ford prisoner, she is never seen. The Pan nobles are the enemies of Yaesha, but the world boss, the last thing standing between you and Ford, is either a werewolf called the Ravager or a Pan monkey called Totem Father.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: Although a number of bosses could count, the Thrall is the standout example as even the game sees it as this. The mission to kill it is called "What the Hell are you?"
• Glass Cannon: The Daredevil Charm gives you a massive damage increase for every armor slot you leave empty, maxing out at 90% extra damage for running around in your underwear. It also increases damage taken by 1%. It used to double damage taken but the devs realized that when running around naked you'll pretty much die in one good hit anyway. For the truly suicidal, you can add the Ring of the Admiral for an extra 15% damage but take 300% damage.
  • The Thrall is a boss that qualifies, as it can nuke you in seconds between his powerful Corrosion attacks and the two elites he spawns, but his health pool is abysmally low.
• Gone Horribly Right: Harsgaard, a researcher in Ward 17, was obsessed with the strange Root creatures seen in earlier Dreamer expeditions. He eventually set up a Dreamer to reach out without a specific destination set in hope of making contact with them. This got the Root's attention alright. They used the Dreamer as a portal to invade and overrun the Earth.
  Dreamer's Mana Description: We thought the Dreamers were windows... they were Doors.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: The Dreamers were created to enable the researchers to view parallel worlds entering the minds of each world's guardian. Unfortunately in the case of the Fuzzies' world, this caused subtle changes in the guardian which made the Fuzzies distrust and eventually kill it, leaving their world exposed to invasion by the Root.
• Guide Dang It!: What else did you expect from a Soulslike?
  • Most World bosses have alternate kill methods that allow you to get a different item, but it's not very well telegraphed or explained.
  • Some items can only be found in secret areas in random dungeons, meaning that not only do you have to be super-observant to notice them, you also need to be at the right place and have entered the right dungeon to find it.
  • When finding the Pan Flautist on Yaesha, it is fairly obvious that by shooting the bells next to him so that you recreate the melody the flautist is playing, you will get a reward. It requires some trial and error but is generally doable and for your trouble you get a ring that gives you extra stamina and movement speed. What is not nearly so obvious is that by playing an entirely different melody that is not shown anywhere, you can get the Swiftness trait, which increases your movement speed.
  • Most of the secrets in Swamps of Corsus qualify, as they involve things like wearing a specific charm and crouching in a pool of acid, shooting cocoons on the ceiling of a specific dungeon, letting yourself get infected with a parasite to be able to talk to what would otherwise be a boss, shooting randomly appearing beetles before they run away or taking literal leaps of faith.
  • The Final Boss fight's second phase is actually pretty easy once you know the trick. Figuring it out is an issue, though, when said phase's brutal barrage attack is hard to dodge if you're actually trying to fight it and will basically kill you in one hit if it connects. It's pretty easy to dodge if you just run around the arena though, which you're supposed to do until it sucks you into another dimension where you can slaughter lots of Mooks for a stacking damage buff before returning to the real world through a portal to wreck it hard. While the player's health does drain in the other dimension, a simple use of Bloodwort upon entering can keep ahead of the drain for a pretty long time.
• Gun Accessories: Weapon Mods are gun accessories that are mounted on the barrel or underslung beneath. The origin of the mod will affect how the gun looks like (Root mods are twisted wood, Yaesha mods involve a crystal, Rhom mods are high-tech vacuum tubes and etc.). For guns made from Boss materials, when activating the mod the gun will change form (example, the Devastator's bow arms will rearrange and the channel for the bolt will widen to reveal a much wider bolt to be used).
• Hand Cannon: The Defiler, a boss weapon, is a large shotgun pistol that comes equipped with Radioactive Volley Mod. It is considered by many players to be good enough to even serve as a primary weapon. The Curse of the Jungle God is a large, powerful fully-automatic handgun with a scope and the ability to conjure up electrified tentacles.
• Harder Than Hard: Nightmare difficulty. After a streamer managed to beat Nightmare blind, the devs also added Apocalypse difficulty, the description of which simply reads "TRY. HARD."
• Hell Is That Noise: The "For the Queen!" the Armored Knights on Corsus scream when they notice you. Not only because it signals a very annoying enemy you will now be dealing with, but also because it raises some horrifying questions about the Elf Queen.
• Higher-Tech Species: Before they nuked themselves, the Basha of Rhom were extremely advanced, their Undying King is keeping himself alive with a mishmash of technology including nanotech.
• Hive Mind: The Iskal seems to follow the Borg model, with various drones joined to a central queen.
• Hour of Power: There are items that increase your stats for an actual hour, these include Mud Tooth's tonic which gives +25% maximum life.
• Humans Are Advanced: Interestingly, even though they're using junk and the technology, outside a few secret projects, is nothing beyond what's in the late '60s, humans in this game are one of the most advanced races second only to the Basha before Rhom's nuking. Then there's the weird stuff made by Harsgaard and Leto which rival pre-nuke Rhom level technology.
• Humans Are Special:
  • Earth is the core of the Labyrinth and cannot be threatened by the Root normally, and therefore requires no Guardian. This is actually a weakness, as without a Guardian to resist the Root, Earth can be easily invaded if someone opens a door for the Root to travel through. Humans are the only species that seem to be able to be born as Dreamers and thus able to open said doors to other realities.
  • Additionally human weapons have the greatest variety and they either have strong base damage or extremely high rates of fire, often exceeding the Boss Weapon equivalents and while none of them have a powerful built-in weapon mod or innate magical power, they get a lot of versatility from having that free weapon slot.
• Human Pincushion: The Rhom world boss, Harrow is a gigantic monster with lots of spears buried in its back. To get the "Lost Harpoon" weapon from Harrow, you have to hit Harrow to the point where it's on its knees. You then get behind it and use the interact button to yank that weapon out of its back. Then you must kill Harrow and stay alive while the Lost Harpoon is in your inventory. This is one of the more difficult weapons to get on solo.
• Immune to Flinching: Want to avoid getting staggered? Wear at least two pieces of Leto's armour. Weapon Mods like Flicker Cloak and Mantle of Thorns also offer resistance while active. A benign side-effect of Immune to Flinching is on Corsus. Enemies that can infect or grab you into a One-Hit Kill (might not work for all enemy types) won't be able to get you into the stagger animation that initiates their special attack and so they're forced to use normal strikes instead.
• Just Before the End: Yaesha seems nice on arrival, but not even counting the fact that its Tree of Life had died, but the Root's corruption has already started to take hold.
• Knee-capping:
  • Not quite knee, but against some enemies, shooting them in the legs is one of the surefire way to immobilize them, assuming the damage is above a certain threshold.
  • If you attack The Ent's legs enough, its legs will break which will make it fall to the ground and have different moveset, and drop a different boss loot afterwards.
  • Required to get the alternative boss weapon from The Harrow; you have to shoot it in the legs to force it to kneel, then pull out the Lost Harpoon from its back while its immobilized. Alternatively, when he is kneeling, you can simply keep attacking him while he's helpless, racking up huge damage and killing him extremely quickly.
• King Mook: Many of the bosses are simply upgraded versions of the elite enemies of the area with unique attacks/abilities and one random trait such as regeneration. In particular, the first boss you ever face is either Shroud, an upgraded version of the teleporting Root Archers, or Gorefist, an upgraded Giant Mook with a two-handed sword. In both cases, most of the difficulty comes from their ability to constantly summon basic enemies as a back-up.
• Last Bastion: In the city, Ward 13 is the last remaining sanctuary of note for humanity. What happened to the rest of humanity outside of the city is unclear to the survivors, which is why they're so surprised to find your character coming from across the waters.
• Lethal Joke Character: Flop builds. If you wear heavy enough armour to make your weight class "Ultra Heavy", your dodge roll is replaced with a belly flop that does a bit of damage, which counts as unarmed damage. The Five-Fingered Ring increases unarmed melee damage significantly, the Ring of the Unclean increases unarmed melee damage further and applies another huge multiplier to flop damage. Combine both and your belly flops do high quadruple digits worth of damage. And the best part? Unarmed damage doesn't scale, so the lower your gear score and therefore the lower the enemy's level, the more damage this deals. Sadly this was nerfed quite a bit in a recent patch.
• Lethal Joke Weapon: The Hive Cannon, gained by killing an enraged Ixillis, looks like a bit of a joke. It only has five shots in the magazine and the shots are tiny green bubbles of goo that move slightly slower than other shots, meaning enemies can easily juke the shots. The gun also makes a faintly pathetic fwoomp sound when it fires. But then you actually take it out for a spin and notice that the shots explode and deal more damage than the Magnum. The mod is also absurd, as it fires an arcing explosive that scatters a swarm of insects that will rapidly apply Corrosion stacks (which reduce enemy defense) to any enemy inside it, while also dealing decent damage.
  • The Pride of the Iskal. It's a big firefly with a pistol grip, wings and glowy bumps and all. Looking at its specs and doing some math tells you that it has the same number of shots as the Magnum but only about half the damage and the shots, like those of the Hive Cannon, make a faintly pathetic fwoomp noise. Then you take it out for a spin and find out that its shots are tiny plasma balls that explode after a second for twice the initial damage, so suddenly it does fifty percent more damage than the Magnum and the delayed explosions have a couple useful properties on top. Then, the slightly ridiculous reload animation where you shake the gun until it glows again hides an impressively quick reload speed and its mod shoots blood-sucking insects that drain enemies of health and then give that health to you.
• Level Scaling: Done somewhat differently in Remnant, the game can't accurately read how tough your character is based on the level of their traits. So instead the game looks at the highest level equipment in the categories of melee weapon, handgun, long gun, head armor, chest armor, and leg armor, then it averages these (which is why some players only improve their armour a few levels) and then scales the enemy to match (if your weapons are strong, then the enemy health is improved and if your armour is strong, they get their damage increased. Because each level difference means 20% effectiveness). So if all you had at the time was poorly performing equipment, it's better not to upgrade them and look for something better instead before upgrading. Note the game doesn't scale immediately, only when the current campaign is rerolled and each World and individual World Boss has a minimum level (Earth is level 1, but Ent or Singe is minimum Level 5), so in that campaign if you went to a World which was minimum level 5 and had your equipment improved to match and then went back to Earth in the same campaign to farm Lumenite Crystals, you'd mop the floor with Earth enemies.
• Load-Bearing Boss: Killing the final boss also destroys the area the boss is housed in, namely Ward 17 and the Lighthouse.
• Long Song, Short Scene: The Title screen/main menu theme is over 3 minutes long and builds up to quite a swell, but most players won't end up hearing more than the first 20-30 seconds unless they intentionally spend a lot of time idling on the menu before they start playing.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Averted; while your character starts out the game equipped with the same iron sword (now called the Blade of Adventure) as their predecessor from Chronos, they don't carry a shield like the hero of Chronos did, and you can't find one at any point on your journey. Justified as the game is primarily a Third-Person Shooter rather than a straightforward melee-based Souls-like RPG like Chronos was and while melee is a significant part of combat, the emphasis is still mostly on ranged weapons.
• MacGyvering: Human weapons and armour are cobbled together (the coach gun and shotgun are little more than well-made zip guns while something like the scrap axe is a repurposed buzzsaw blade mounted on a sturdy handle) by merchants such as Rigs and Whispers. That said, they're still quite effective until you get your hands on something better.
• Mad Scientist: Dr. Harsgaard and Leto have a dangerous fascination with the Root and/or Dreamers and have engaged in very immoral experiments regarding them. They also have the resulting hyper-advanced technology such as Leto's "teleporter" and Harsgaard's mind-link device at a time when computer's were still monochrome! Harsgaard's technology resulted in such things as the Repulsor which is so futuristic that they rival Rhom's level of tech.
• Magitek: Even before the Root invasion, humans in the 1960s began delving into working the supernatural with the technology of the day. This started when lumenite veins and the "glowing red stones" were discovered. The Root invasion just gave humans more material to work with. The Basha of Rhom also had generations of experimenting with strange phenomenon, so their extremely advanced technology is at times Magitek and other times just "mundane" Magic from Technology.
• Mage Marksman: Although melee is an option, the focus is heavily weighted towards guns, meaning all playable characters quickly end up being gunfighters who use mystical mods or special abilities.
• Malevolent Mutilation: The mutated Buri of Rhom have developed a culture of extreme body modification that has gone into the horrific. Their Berserkers have their arms removed and bone blades inserted while the Shamen had radioactive crystals jammed into their heads. The friendly Wasteland Merchant got hosed, the only thing his grafted faceplate did was make him go blind.
• Manipulative Bastard: The Root in general. Each planet's Guardian serves as a defensive barricade to prevent the Root from invading the planet. However, when a planet's technology reaches far enough that they can view into other worlds, the Root is able to reach out and manipulate those who are exploring other realities, tempting them with knowledge and power. This can lead to them turning on their Guardians or otherwise "inviting" the Root. Once they have an opening, the Root will begin a direct invasion. During the events of Chronos, Clawbone manipulated the hero into killing multiple Guardians to let the Root invade other worlds, including Yaesha. On Earth, Clawbone manipulated Haarsgard into betraying humanity, and on Rhom, the Root somehow convinced the Undying King to let them invade. Meanwhile, on Corsus the Iskal Queen wants the Root to invade so she can attempt to defeat and integrate them into her Hive Mind, leading to her to direct the player to kill Corsus' Guardian.
• Master of All: The game is unique among Action-RPGs in that there's no escalation in how many experience points to "level up", nor is there an experience cap a la Baldur's Gate. It only ever takes 1500 xp to gain a trait point, no matter how many trait points you've earned, and there are Tomes of Knowledge which immediately give you a trait point when picked up. So it's possible for the hero to master every trait in the game.
• Monster Lord: Some of the Bosses are powered up from being monster royalty. The strongest examples are the two optional bosses, Undying King and Iskal Queen who are the respective rulers of their worlds.
• More Dakka: There's plenty of rapid-fire weapons for you to find including the Machine Pistol, SMG, Assault Rifle, Alternator, Curse of the Jungle God, Spitfire, Fusion Rifle, Chicago Typewriter and etc.
• Multiplayer Difficulty Spike: Due to the way multiplayer currently works it's generally agreed that the more people you have the harder it is. It spawns in more enemies or makes bosses tougher depending on what you're doing. If you're going solo things will be easier, but you won't have any backup, but if you're fighting bosses then the bosses usually don't want to give you room to take advantage of your team reviving you. It can depend on the enemy or boss type, even with the boost it can still be easier to fight boosted enemies with allies.
• Multiversal Conqueror: It quickly turns out that Earth is far from the only world the Root has tried to conquer. While we only visit a single other realm that was invaded by the Root, it required the previous civilization to reduce their world to a radioactive wasteland. Another world is in the early stages of infiltration. One optional dungeon on Yaesha shows that the Root is also in the beginning stages of corrupting that world, too and by the events of Remnant II, its undergoing a full-scale invasion.
• Necromancer: The Basha of Rhom have some elements of this in their Magitek. Whatever the Black Sun did to the planet, it resulted in several creatures resembling the undead, like the flying skulls and the Harrow, which aren't technically alive in the biological sense. The descriptions for the Void Tear armor set indicate that the studying the Black Sun itself gives one insights into the power of life and death.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: Some enemies can temporarily make themselves invulnerable by going out of synch with reality, hitting them with a single-shot weapon that inflicts high base damage is a waste. You will bring them back to the real world by hitting them often enough, so a rapid-fire weapon like the Chicago Typewriter is the best choice. Your own character can become invulnerable by using the Veil of the Black Tear mod.
• Nintendo Hard: Just when you think you've improved your gear and gotten the hang of things, the game introduces yet another curveball to kick you and hard. Most boss fights devolve into dealing with a metric ton of mooks and trying to get in damage where you can before your resources just can't keep up anymore, and without sufficient upgrades you'll die. Fast. Thankfully, Death Is a Slap on the Wrist and only resets you back to your last checkpoint with no penalties.
• No "Arc" in "Archery": Crossbows are used by both enemies and players, and their bolts fire in perfectly straight lines at very high speeds. May be justified by the Science Fantasy setting - many of the bolts are clearly magical, and many of the crossbows are clearly high-tech and highly powerful.
• No Cutscene Inventory Inertia: Whenever you go into a cutscene (such as when you meet the Undying King for the first time), you're always portrayed wielding the default weapon that all classes start with- the Repeater Pistol. This isn't just a cutscene convenience either, the game actually changes your equipment to the Repeater, which is really annoying when the cutscene leads directly into a fight if the Repeater wasn't the weapon you wanted to have equipped, as you have to either make do with it or change equipment mid-battle (which also causes you to lose all stored mod charge).
• Not in This for Your Revolution: Several times over. How the PC handles their quest paints the picture of a person who doesn't care at all about the problems of other people, even if the player chooses the comparatively diplomatic responses. The only time they help is either by happenstance or when someone offers to trade something they want for the job. They never go out of their way to aid anyone they meet and the moment their job is done, they leave without telling anyone. Just to drive it home, there is always a conversation option that can tell people offering you quests to shove it.
  • This is the reason so many interesting plots pop up and disappear without being mentioned. Your character doesn't care to help the Pan with their revolution, dealing with the zombie outbreak on Corsus, or restoring Rhom and freeing it from its tyrannical ruler. That isn't their problem so they don't even acknowledge it beyond passing curiosity.
• Nuke 'em: The Undying King successfully managed to drive the Root from Rhom by nuking his entire planet, turning it into a radioactive hellscape whose people have been literally sent back to the stone age.
• One-Hit Kill: A number of enemies (such as the World Boss Harrow) can kill your character instantly regardless of armour and health level with a special attack. Iskal gets special note as a number of its elite and normal enemies can instantly kill you if you lose a button mashing event.
• Optional Boss:
  • Any dungeon boss can be optional depending on your current playthrough's configuration; some dungeons are only blocking side quests rather than the main route.
  • The Undying King is a key character on Rhom who holds the Labyrinth Key needed in order to get to the Final Boss, but will only give it in exchange for the Guardian Heart that's needed to restore his world. Choosing to give the Heart to the Corsus' Elf Queen or even keep it for yourself will force you to fight him in order to get the Key.
  • While Earth, Rhom, and Yaesha will each have an optional second dungeon containing one of the main dungeon bosses, Rhom also has Ancient Construct, whom you can fight on the overworld if you get the Control Rod from getting Maul to kill the Houndmaster (thus requiring you to get Maul as one of your dungeon bosses if you want to fight Ancient Construct) and install it in the unit outside Wud's shop, and Yaesha has bonus dungeons which contain Blink Thief, Root Horror, and the Re-Animators.
• Organic Technology: The Root's equipment and some guns you can use like the Particle Accelerator does look like this, although in some cases, it's less muscle and organ and more living wood-looking, while played straight in others. The Iskal to a lesser extent also use organic technology in weapons such as the Pride of the Iskal and the Scythe the Iskal Queen will sell you, though the Crossbow she can give you has no organic bits though and it's strictly Gear Punk.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Singe resembles a typical fantasy dragon, the main difference being it's made entirely of wood.
• Outside-the-Box Tactic: Shatter and Shade, a Dual Boss on Rhom, can summon a barrier around them that takes enormous amounts of damage to break. Or you could just use the Hive Cannon, whose shots pass through the barrier unmolested. Even better, the two of them stand very close inside their barrier and the Hive Cannon has an area effect, letting you shred through their health very rapidly while they're all but helpless. Or you could use the Flicker Cloak mod, which absorbs damage and prevents stagger, to literally stand inside their death sphere and slap them to death with a melee weapon.
• Planet of Hats: The different worlds pretty much have a singular theme, including Earth. The Earth is rather Cold-War era Fallout but with the jokes, nukes, mutants or retro-future technology replaced with angry plants and morose yet kindly survivors. Otherwise you can take everything from Remnant's Earth and drop them in Fallout without noticing a difference. Rhom is a Star Trek: The Original Series episode where radioactive Mutant post-apocalypse tribes of Advanced Ancient Humans are busy being primitive and there's still some tech artifacts in forgotten ruins, Corsus is a big stinky swamp with bughunts and hasbeen steampunk elves, Yaesha is Mayincatec xenophobic Beastmen with lightning Magitek and Reisum is Siberia with barbarian Rat Men packing crossbows and automatic rifles.
• Permanently Missable Content: Well, permanent without restarting your whole campaign again anyway. This trope is to encourage players to play through the campaign multiple times. Refusing to get the Guardian Heart will provoke the Undying King into attacking you, but upon respawning he will be passive until provoked again. But once you give him the Heart he cannot be fought, denying you access to his Boss Equipment. Also, giving the heart to him means you can't give it to the Elf Queen, denying access to her gears, and unlike the Undying King, she can't be fought. A number of optional quests can also end in failure, resulting in you getting nothing, these include the Tale of two Lizzes and the Blink Thief.
• Post-Apunkalyptic Armor: The armour that humans make is less ramshackle than the stuff you usually find in a post-apocalypse but there's still more than a few instances where something's been repurposed in, including the Drifter armour set that makes use of a welder's mask for a helmet.
• Post-Apocalyptic Dog: Very Good Boy. In Rhom, the Wasteland Merchant has a pet stinkhound. It's friendly and if you pet it, you get a Weapon Mod that lets you summon it. Very Good Boy is actually a very good summon; it's fast and extremely aggressive plus it hits harder than most of your other Summons and you can increase that damage by petting it. However, this is balanced by only allowing you to summon one at a time, while all other summons let you summon two at once.
• Power Up Letdown:
  • The Ring of the Admiral is the first magic ring available and it can be bought from Reggie for only 2 scrap. It gives a nice 15% bonus to inflicting damage but in exchange you take 300% more damage than normal. The ring's description mention that it truly should be only 2 scrap.
  • The Blood Bond trait reduces damage you take by splitting some of it with every summoned monster you bring on the screen, on normal this is great but on higher difficulty levels this means your summoned monsters will die when you get hit once or twice.
  • The Last Resort trait you get for defeating Haarsgard, Root Harbinger gives you a Critical Status Buff. Unfortunately it's way, way undertuned, not activating until you're under 15% of your maximum HP (when enemy damage will frequently finish you off from well above that threshhold), yet despite being so hard to trigger only increases your damage by a piddling 1% per rank. Some reward for beating the True Final Boss!
• Powers via Weapon: Your character is not an innate spell-caster. They get their powers from enchanted rings and amulets and weapons including Magitek Weapon Mods. This can be important as each time you swap out a modded gun from your Hyperspace Arsenal, the Weapon Mod is empty while your prior weapon will be discharged if it previously had a full charge.
• Puny Humans: The Final Boss's pre-fight banter shows that the Root have a very lowly view of humanity, dismissively referring to them as "children" and seeming almost amused by their desperate attempts to combat them.
  The Dreamer: Once again, the children of the Core think to change the inevitable. They do not see the truth, the futility of their actions. We bring purity to chaos, serenity to bedlam. All will be consumed. this is necessary and good. The children do not understand. The children believe their lives worth living. The children are wrong. The worlds and the core of the worlds live in pain, agony, discord. We bring peace. Equality. Silence. All are one within our embrace. The children resist what cannot be resisted. They fight a battle that cannot be won. Their actions are ultimately irrelevant. No matter how many times they rise, they will be destroyed. Their time is over. We will consume all.
• Purposely Overpowered: The Nightmare Spiral amulet. It decreases the effectiveness of healing items by 95% but in exchange adds a Life Drain to your ranged attacks. This is insane, since usually you have to balance shooting and healing but with this item you heal by shooting. What do you need to do to unlock it? Beat the Final Boss on Hardcore Mode.
• The Quisling: There's a random quest on Earth where you find a dungeon called Marrow Pass. In it somewhere is a human cultist who worships the Root and is encouraging their spread by taking care of two giant Root structures. To get two rings out of the cultist rather one, first avoid damaging those Root structures. Find the cultist and talk to him to convince him that you're also a fan of the Root. He'll give you the Root Circlet, then go and attack the structures. This will piss him off and when you kill him you get the Braided Thorns.
• Rare Random Drop: It can be a chore finding certain items such as the Drifter's Mask or Leto's Amulet as those appearances are rare. There's also variation of this trope that appears because of the Random Number Generator. Certain random events are linked and without all of these linked events appearing on the map then the reward won't show up. For example the Ring of the Unclean can only be had if both the Iskal Queen and the Swamp Elf are there. In addition, somewhere there must be an Infector to implant your character with the vyxworm parasite - it's possible that there are no Infectors in that rolled world so you can't get the ring even if the Iskal Queen and Swamp Elf are both there.
• Raygun: After seeing the crossbows and janky WW2/Cold War-era firearms, it can be a bit jarring when you get weapons like the Beam Rifle which fires a beam of radiation.
• Resurrective Immortality: In a case of Gameplay and Story Integration, both the player and John Ford are outright stated to have this, with Ford confirming in his journal in the Labyrinth that he's died at least twice and that he's well over a century old. Mud Tooth also is implied to have this, as he claims he was a child when the Root invasion started over a century ago and seems to be alive despite being surrounded by Root in the middle of the city. Ford has no idea how he gained the ability, and guesses the Root Mother is responsible, but can't confirm it.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: Ace will give you a magnum revolver if you recover her strange coin. It hits harder than quite a few longarms and it holds six shots but reloads fairly quickly. This is a great sidearm if you have a full-auto longarm of some sort.
• Ridiculously Potent Explosive: The Explosive Shot and Wildfire Shot mods are alternate fire modes that make your guns fire grenades. Thing is, the explosion is always the same, no matter how big the gun you attached the mod to, so your tiny little semi-automatic handgun can end up lighting a whole room of enemies up.
• Roguelike: The base game already has slight shades of this, but the newly added Survival Mode is a full on Roguelike re-imagining of the core game where you start off naked with a pistol and a bit of scrap and then go through random worlds and dungeons.
• Schizo Tech: Combining weapons and mods from different worlds. A cowboy double-barreled shotgun that can shoot bee grenades is one of the sanest combinations.
• Scavenger World: The Earth got hammered by the Root so heavy industry and other mass production ended shortly after 1968. Ward 13 has Ace who's the only one left willing to enter into the city to recover goods and material for everyone inside. That said technology hasn't come to a standstill, humans such as McCabe have taken to creating new Magitek inventions with the presence of the supernatural in the world.
• Schmuck Bait: Hive Skull elite enemies on Rhom and their boss variant, the Scourge, have giant, swollen heads infested with radioactive wasps that are just crying out for you to put a few shots into them. Don't do this. Not only is the head not a weakpoint, every time you hit it an angry wasp will come flying out and home in on you. Unload an automatic weapon into their noggins and it'll probably be you who's in a world of hurt, not them.
• Science Fantasy: Everyone uses magic and tech to varying ratios, humans not the least among them. In one log entry on a computer in Ward 13, it mentions that these other worlds have "magic spells" but the writer believes them to just be a previously unknown aspect of physics.
• Serial Escalation: This game is designed for a lot more fighting compared to Chronos. In that game you only fight very few enemies at a time, while in Remnant, hordes of enemies aren't that uncommon. Chronos also only has melee weapons, while Remnant has whole host of guns for you to choose from in conjunction with melee weapons.
• Set Bonus: Armor pieces come with passive abilities that scale depending on how many pieces you are wearing. While it's possible to mix and match and have severely downgraded versions of up to three abilities at once, the full set confers a bonus several times more potent than the sum of its parts.
• Shot in the Ass: The Unclean One's weak point used to be his head, despite the fact he wore a massive helmet. After an update this weakness was removed. His new weak point is right in the middle of his ass.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: The shotgun is by far the most damaging gun you can start with and its range is only a little less than the coach gun. The shotgun carries 7 shots compared to 2 for the coach. While the Hunting Rifle can get you far, you'll encounter your first roadblock with it when taking on melee bosses like Gorefist. Against any boss or Elite Mook you can get close to, a shotgun will be one of your best friends. With the Subject 2923 DLC, you can also buy a powerful sawed-off shotgun (counts as a handgun) in an encounter in Reisum.
• Single-Biome Planet: Played straight. The only thing we see of Earth is the city of Ward 13 overrun by The Root, while the world of Rhom is a radioactive desert, though it's justified by The Undying King literally being forced to nuke everything to ensure The Root wouldn't find a fertile soil to spread itself in. Corsus is a world-spanning swamp, after all the snows and ice that the planet had in the original ice planet configuration melted. And all of Yaesha is a rainforest because Yaesha isn't a whole planet but a single continent that the Pan fled to after the rest of their world was overrun by the Root. With the DLC, there's Reisum which is locked in perpetual winter.
• Sniper Pistol: The Hunting Pistol is this, a single-shot pistol capable of doing massive damage per shot and possessing a longer range than all other pistols and even several rifles. However, it is often Awesome, but Impractical due to the game's propensity for sending lots of comparatively weak enemies at you as opposed to a few stronger ones.
• Sniper Rifle: You can find a sniper rifle in the church basement after you save the Root Mother. It'll be your first weapon with a telescopic sight and devastating when combined with items that give a damage bonus against unsuspecting enemies.
• Souls-like RPG: A Downplayed example, especially compared to Chronos, which was a fairly transparent take on the genre; while Remnant uses many of the genre tropes such as a stamina system, dodge rolling, high enemy threat levels, limited healing that only refills at checkpoints which also respawn all enemies and equipment weight affecting your mobility, it averts some of the other common ones, such as dropping your resources when you die and having to recover them, and a stat-based level-up system.
• Status Effects: There are unusual conditions as Overcharged, Rot or Radiation, but otherwise you have the standard Burning and Bleeding, etc. All enemies are immune to many of these (often due to a lack of appropriate programmed animation) - except Overcharged, Burning and Bleeding. With later updates, enemies are affected by Frostbite and Corrosion as well. Combining items that give status effect with a charged melee attack and the Hero's Sword, makes that weapon a Game-Breaker as you can inflict heavy damage and give several status ailments to any enemy from long range.
• Stealth Sequel: The game is a sequel to Gunfire Games' previous VR game, Chronos. In fact, the hero of that game is implied to be the missing previous champion, is responsible for depriving Earth of its guardian due to the Root's manipulation, and is turned into the current Dreamer that is used to power the Gate for the Root, and whom you fight as the Final Boss.
• Steampunk: Of the grungy grimey sort. Corsus is festooned with crude steam-powered machinery and they're advanced enough to have electric lights for their dungeons, though the power sounds like it's flickering. The Graveyard Elf laments that her world was on the cusp of a number of technological breakthroughs, when the Iskal takeover happened.
• Summon Magic: Your character can summon two pairs of creatures at a time (one pair per modded gun), so that's 4 summons of anything from floating skulls with energy bolts to giant electrified tentacles and machine gun turrets, provided you find the appropriate guns or weapon mods. These are gamebreakers on Normal and make even higher difficulty levels significantly easier even though your monsters don't scale with the difficulty.
• Superboss: The Iskal Queen in the DLC is entirely optional and is possibly the hardest boss in the game, both with a brutal boss fight and an alternate kill that, while not requiring as long a fight, requires very precise positioning.
• Super-Senses: The Hunter's Mark mod allows your character to see enemies through objects in the way. Enemies show up as outlined in a glowing red aura. While the mod is on, enemies will also be a lot easier to score critical hits on.
• Sword Beam: The Hero's Sword and World's Edge are swords that can fire an energy wave when charged.
• Take Cover!: Severely Downplayed compared to the majority of other Third-Person Shooter games- while you can occasionally duck down behind terrain objects (like concrete barricades on Earth) to shield yourself from the attacks of ranged enemies and then vault over it to move on, there is frequently no cover to hide behind, forcing you to actively evade enemy fire by dodge rolling. It is also not a hard-coded gameplay mechanic, as you take cover simply by moving behind an object and crouching down, rather than interacting with an object to make your character press themselves up against it and popping up to return fire. Most of the time you're simply expected to take your enemies head-on rather than ducking for cover and exchanging shots, and trying to play Remnant like it's Gears of War or Uncharted will get you killed.
• Take a Third Option: In Yaesha, if the World Boss is the Ravager then there's another way to deal with it besides killing. In the portal where you start from, look for a book of songs. Find it and you can see several songs including the Song of Lullaby. When you enter the area where the Ravager lurks, there'll be an area with bells. Shoot the bells in the right order to play the Song of Lullaby and you can talk to the Ravager, who will give you an item and leave you in peace so you can continue your quest. In Rhom, if you give the Undying King the Guardian Heart than he'll leave you in peace and you get an item from him (though if you do kill him, you get a different item from him and you'll get another item from the Iskal Queen if you give her the Guardian Heart).
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: The Hunting Pistol and Sniper Rifle are both niche weapons that do massive damage but only hold a single shot before reloading. They're overkill on most enemies and there are better alternatives for bosses, but they really shine when fighting the Barbed Terror. Reloading isn't interrupted by rolling (which you will be doing a lot of) and the pinpoint accuracy means you can keep your distance and maintain peripheral vision of the wall spikes. If using items that boost weakspot damage (Hunter armor is a good example), then the Hunting Pistol in particular can do up to 4,000 damage per head shot, and when used in concert with the Shotgun when it's staggered, will melt the boss's health bar.
• Thunderbolts and Lightning: Shooting ball lightning is the thing for certain Pan units in Yaesha.
• Title Drop: The game has one in the description of the 'Last Resort' trait you earn for defeating Harsgaard, Root Harbinger at the end of the Subject 2923 DLC:
  "The Root nearly claimed the Earth and all other worlds with it. But when folks are getting killed, you can always count on the remnant that's left to rise from the ashes and fight."
• Time Skip: The Subject 2923 DLC takes place one year after the main story.
• Touched by Vorlons: Beings such as the Root Mother, the Wailing Tree and Keeper of the Labyrinth etc. can imbue you with power which gives you inhuman traits such as being resistant to ranged weapons and having armoured skin.
• Wave-Motion Gun: The Fusion Cannon mod for the Fusion Rifle. The weapon can store up to 5 charges. On only one charge Fusion Cannon does respectable damage, with 5 charges it's the hardest hitting attack for your character. And regardless of how many charges, the fusion beam will go through enemies in its path.
• Weak to Fire: Except for Flame Devils and Singe, Root enemies take extra damage from fire. On the other hand, they take greatly reduced damage from rot. Enemy species from other worlds have their own resistance and weaknesses such as the Vyr of Rhom being resistant to radiation but weak against electrical.
• We Have Reserves: The Root's primary tactic, and why it is on the verge of victory after decades of conflict. The Root has an effectively infinite number of soldiers to throw at any world it attempts to conquer. Its basic troops aren't especially strong, tough, or accurate. However, an infinite number of soldiers attacking over and over against will wear out any defending force eventually.
• Weird Currency: Scrap is the universal currency. Even on alien worlds, merchants will be happy to take the pieces of a chair you smashed with your hammer and give you weapons, armor, or items in return.
• Welcome to Corneria: After you find the Labyrinth, the important members of Ward 13 will go from Dialogue Tree to dialogue that's even more basic - either a greeting or asking to trade. Nothing more comes up in their dialogue even if you defeated the Dreamer.
• Wolverine Claws: If you succeed in pacifying the Ravager with the Song of Lullaby, it'll give you an item used to make the Scar of the Jungle God. This set of glowing mystical blades are mounted on each hand and can cause bleeding in enemies. Stylish and satisfying for those X-Men cravings, unfortunately it's also one of the hardest weapons earn, and even more unfortunately it's frankly just not very good.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Due to the Roguelite nature of the game characters whose appearances are Foreshadowed might end up not appearing at all in your current playthrough. Most worlds have two Dungeon Bosses selected from a pool of four and one World Boss chosen from two options, leading to this. Examples include:
  • The Root Mother's journal mentions a Root "behemoth" that she was desperate to stop. This is The Ent boss, who may not be met if Singe is fought instead.
  • Mud Tooth gives you a pocket watch that belonged to his son Brabus. Brabus is a rare boss encounter who can be placated if given his father's watch.
  • Wud tells you about a Buri outcast that went to live with hounds and has a Vyr control rod in his head. This is Maul's handler, one of four possible dungeon boss encounters on Rhom.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: The game is vague as to where the atoll, Ward 13, and the city are geographically located, outside of Mud Tooth confirming that the Earth sections of the game take place in the United States. Ford and the rest of the Ward projects appear to be American military operations as well, and Ford is explicitly an American.
• Wolfpack Boss: Or Giant Mutant Rat-pack Boss in the case of Maul.

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