Video Game / Survivalist

"Alright, folks, time to settle some business. Preferably without staining my suit."

"A fort... a community... yeah, that'd be a good idea."

Joe Wheeler.

Survivalist is a Survival Sandbox game with a top-down view, made for PC by Bob The PR Bot and released on Steam on January 31st, 2015, after spending several months in Early Access. It's centered around Joe Wheeler, a sociopathic hedge-fund manager who emerges from his bunker a year after a Zombie Apocalypse.

A sequel, titled Survivalist Invisible Strain was released on Steam on 2020 and is currently in Early Access.

Survivalist contains examples of the following tropes:

• The Ace: The three initial survivors are some of the few characters who are capable of being this.
• Action Survivor: Everyone who is alive at the start of the game qualifies as this, more or less. They DID all manage to survive 1 year into the Zombie Apocalypse, didn't they?
• After the End: The game begins almost exactly one year after the outbreak.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: AI community survivors all have infinite ammunition.
  • Looters don't need to eat or drink until they've joined your community. The developer states that this was because he felt like looters walking around watering crops with a can would look silly.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Subverted. It appears that Alice has a crush on Joe, a sociopathic asshole who doesn't give a shit about anyone but himself. However, the 'Love' ending states that Alice was just trying to get close to Joe in order to manipulate him into commiting bloodshed for her satisfaction.
• Alliance Meter: Not so much of an Alliance Meter as a "getting the general population of each shanty town to like you" meter. In the sequel, you need to either max out the approval and/or respect values of the leader or bribe them to form an alliance with a faction.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Downplayed with looters. Provided you can successfully intimidate them and recruit them all, they'll essentially be under your control. Most of them still have Jerkass personality flags like Detached and Sociopath. One then remembers who exactly is the leader of the Survivalists in this game.
• And Then John Was a Zombie: Any of the Living Infected, when their Blood Knight desires surface. Poor Alice.
  • If a survivor dies after being bit and didn't recieve the antigen they needed, they will get up again as a zombie.
• Anti-Hero: Joe. Regardless of how you play the game, it's stated multiple times by various characters - and even the Brain Scanner you pick up - that he's a detached sociopath who, at the end of the day, only cares about himself. During The Reveal at the end, it's also stated that the outbreak was pretty much his and his company's fault. Downplayed if you complete the "Love" ending, in which he and Isham set out for Canada to find Alice, showing that he truly does care about her.
  • Ida Marchbanks is one, as well. If Wyatt Ingalls remains in charge of Fort Kohai, he is assassinated when confronting the people of Los Ceros about her husband. Word of God states that she was the one who killed Wyatt. Depending on how well you handle the threat, a lot of innocent people die after Wyatt. The only reason she ultimately stays out of Karma Houdini territory is because her husband was revealed to have been a Living Infected. Since he goes into Blood Knight mode when seeing her, she's forced to kill him.
  • Bud Anderson, the alternate choice when Fort Kohai holds an election, wants to go to war against Los Ceros while they still have the element of surprise. A sidequest he'll give you involves recruiting the Fat Neils or Mc-Coys to your community to help fight against Los Ceros, which inevitably results in one of the two groups being annihilated. He also wants to use the Santa Madallena community as a Sacrificial Lamb to divide Los Ceros' forces throughout the wasteland during the fighting. You can go along with this, and perhaps even try to protect Santa Madallena when Los Ceros' forces arrive.
• Anyone Can Die: Downplayed. Everyone except Joe can die. If he dies, you're forced to restart from your last save. Anyone else is fair game, however. Played straight in the sequel, where if the Player Character dies the game will just keep on rolling if there are still remaining survivors in your fort.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Averted. You can easily have your entire fort accompany you on your adventures across the wasteland.
• Army of Thieves and Whores: Played relatively straight if you only recruit looters. You can even recruit them without killing any of them if you do the right things.
• Badass Bookworm: Characters with the 'Nerd' trait can potentially become this.
• Belief Makes You Stupid: Played straight with Amelia. She wants you to kill two "looters" who only took some of their crops because she refused to trade with them. According to the Brain Scanner, said looters are gay lovers.
• Being Good Sucks: During the quest in which you're required to kill Tom and Butch, you can simply befriend and recruit them instead. However, if you don't do the quest and kill them like Amelia wants you to- or just kill the entire Santa Madallena fort - you won't be able to get the insulin that you can get from her, potentially cutting Alice's lifespan down by a few days.
• Big Bad: Initially, it seems that Felipe Espinoso was this, considering he ran a dictatorship. However, it's later revealed to be Clara Allison, the FEMA leader. Alice herself, if you went along with her plotline.
• Big First Choice: After doing the tutorial segment, Alice will ask what you want most in the world. Money, Power, or Love. Whichever you decide will affect your main goal of the game.
• Big Brother Instinct: If you pursue the "Love" path, Joe will have to sit down with Isham to receive a word of caution about dating Alice. Isham will call Joe on his sociopathic attitude towards life and warn him to not do anything to hurt her.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Amelia from Santa Madallena. At first, she seems like a meek old woman just wanting justice to be done against some looters who stole from her group. It's heavily implied she just wants them dead because they're a gay couple.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: It doesn't matter how good you play Joe as; his personality flags are still "Detached" and "Sociopath." Plus, he's kinda the reason the world is what it is now.
• Blood Knight: The Living Infected are these. They get off on bloodshed, not even needing to participate in it.
• Boom, Headshot!: There is an achievement that you get by one-shotting a white-strain infected, which is only doable by delivering a headshot with a Sniper Rifle.
• Break Them by Talking: You can do this as Joe (or any survivor in your group with the "Dominant" personality trait) with any looter that has the "Cowardly" flag in their personality when they try to mug you. It even rewards you by giving bonus points to the "respect" meters with all of the other looters in that group! Fair warning, however - anyone in your group with the Cowardly flag - i.e. Alice - will just submit.
• Bury Your Gays: You can play as this if you really want to. Some of the people in Santa Madallena and seem to have this attitude.
• The Chess Master: Alice. It's implied that she egged Joe to go on one long quest for insulin because she knew that it'd be a huge hassle and require a lot of work and/or bloodshed. And *boy*, does she get her wish. She essentially kindles the flames for igniting a war between the entire wasteland that will always end in at least a quarter of the population dead.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Almost everyone involved with the "El Dorado" questline suffer from this.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: There's a bunch of them scattered throughout the Wasteland.
• The Cuckoo Lander Was Right: Jim Gallagher keeps a red-strain infected caged up as a friend, and claims to talk to her on a regular basis. The only way to progress with him is by having Alice convince him that the infected doesn't really talk to him, and that it's purely PTSD. Then we see a brief shot of the infected girl exclaim "I remember you!" before Alice blows her brains out.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The varying strains of the virus are shown by the color of the infected's eyes after turning.
• Combat, Diplomacy, Stealth: Downplayed. Your options are limited to Combat or Diplomacy. The closest you can get to stealth is getting a Sniper Rifle, which increases your field of vision, and locking onto someone out of their range. Played straight in the sequel, where you can sneak around and try to stealth-kill zombies (Or people!)
• Combat Medic: Any survivor with high levels in Firearms and Medicine is this.
• Crapsack World: In a World…... where zombies can hide amongst the living...
• Crazy-Prepared: Joe had a bunker constructed in the middle of nowhere and stocked it with a year's worth of canned food. The game begins with him running out.
• Critical Existence Failure: Downplayed. If any character is bleeding out of a specific limb, they will get debuffs to their Firearms and/or Fitness stats depending on which limb is damaged, but they can still run around frantically in the hopes of finding bandages when, say, they're almost completely out of health.
• Cruel Mercy: You can leave the Sole Survivor of an enemy group, be they a looter or otherwise, to go free after ordering them to give everything they have to you. You're sending an unarmed, most likely wounded survivor of a group you massacred out into the wasteland to their presumable death. Bonus points if they're bleeding out and don't have any bandages.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Deconstructed. Killing the entire population of a settlement will result in the Sole Survivor surrendering, and, depending on their personality, begging to be spared. If they're begging, they'll join you out of fear and your relationship with them will be as such.
  • Similarly, you can "recruit" someone at gunpoint after successfully mugging them, depending on where they're from^note Most people at Fort Kohai or Los Ceros won't join until after the events of the main questline, for example, but the looter camps with named people are completely fair game for this.
• Developer's Foresight: Each of the characters in the Wasteland has their own specific name and personality type. It's possible to recruit almost everyone.
  • At one point in the game, you need to convince Al Martin from the Santa Maddalena community into revealing Chacon's location in order to proceed with the main quest-line. If Al was already killed before this segment, you can obtain a notebook from his corpse which will tell you what you need to know.
  • If Alice Ivers dies while you are pursuing the 'Love' ending, you can still finish the game with the 'Power' or 'Money' ending by triggering certain dialog while talking to other people.
• Doesn't Like Guns: Inverted for the entirety of the game. There are no melee weapons in existence, seemingly. The only way to fight is either with bullets or your fists. The latter of which is a terrible idea against White Infected.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: In order to successfully finish the "Love" path, you need to find a buttload of insulin for Alice, keep her alive until you infiltrate the FEMA base, and risk heavy losses by undergoing a massive war against the two biggest and most well-armed fortresses in the wasteland. But wait! There's more- Isham needs to be alive and have a high opinion of Joe when you discuss The Reveal about Alice.
• Elite Zombie: The Virus has 5 strains:
  • Green Infected were the first to show up, and are the weakest. If you're bitten by one, you have a week to find the antigen for that infection.
  • Blue Infected soon popped up afterward. They're stronger, and their infection will overtake victims in a little over a day.
  • Red Infected are one of the strongest, and they're responsible for tearing through most of the safe zones that were established after civilization fell. Their bite will turn you within a few minutes.
  • White-Strain infected, throughout the story, are the strongest of all. They are tough as all hell to take down. If you get bitten by one, it's Game Over; there's no antigen for these guys, and their bite turns you into one within a few seconds.
  • Living Infected are usually as strong as White-Strain infected. What's their bonus? They can pretend to be alive, retain all memory of their previous lives, and become extreme Blood Knights.
• The Empire: Los Ceros. The leader was a drug lord who oftentimes resorted to brutal methods to enforce his rule. He runs the place in a standard dictatorship fashion, by having an inner circle to enforce his claim. Wyatt Ingalls even lampshades this when he's given information on Los Ceros' political system. Did we mention that they also have rocket launchers?
  • Your own fort can become this if you pursue the "Power" questline, as opposed to "Money" or "Love." There's even an achievement you can get for it titled "The Great Dictator!"
• The Engineer: Any survivor with a maxed-out Construction skill. May or may not include being able to construct concrete watchtowers.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: The conclusion to the 'Love' route is this. Despite being labeled as the 'Happy Ending' in the Award-ments page, it ends with a devastated Joe discussing the disappearance of Alice with a friend, who tries to convince Joe to let her go as she was most likely just putting on a facade of a Nice Girl, and that she has been manipulating him all along. Joe defends Alice's actions (despite all the evidence to the contrary) and insists on leaving for Vancouver to look for Alice (which is a shot in the dark), either alone or with a single companion.
• Evil All Along: Alice. Throughout the game, she'd almost always been a huge Nice Girl who went out of her way to be civil, polite, and kind to others. She just ended up being one extremely smart living infected playing one long Wounded Gazelle Gambit to cause as much violence and mayhem as possible.
• Face–Monster Turn: Multiple examples.
  • Charlie Cashman goes rabid completely out of nowhere and tries to chew your face off after you help him on his quest.
  • Lou Marchbanks drops the act and lunges at either his wife or the player character, depending on your choice, after it's revealed that he's indeed infected as Felipe stated.
  • Charlie Parkhurst after you reunite her with her old friend Isham. They greet each other warmly, but she tries to bite and infect Isham after letting his guard down.
• The Federation / The Republic: Fort Kohai. It's a direct democracy that wants to try and rebuild civilization to what pre-apocalypse America was like.
• Fiery Redhead: Subverted and then inverted with Alice. When you first meet her, she's somewhat pushy with her need for insulin, and understandably so. After the hour-long tutorial, she's extremely sweet and gentle, starting out with three levels in only the Medicine skill. She's also possibly the first person Joe meets after exiting his bunker! Shame she's actually a Living Infected.
• Fog of War: Every survivor has a field of vision. Survivors wielding Sniper Rifles get an enhanced field of vision, making preemptive strikes possible.
  • Defog of War
• Foil: Fort Kohai, a democratic shanty town, is this to Los Ceros.
  • Isham is this to Joe. Both are intelligent and cynical people, but unlike Joe, who has a complete lack of concern for anyone but himself, Isham is loyal and compassionate, and willing to help people more than the Sharp-Dressed asshole protagonist.
• Friendly Sniper: Survivors with more friendly personality types can become this with a maxed-out firearms skill and a Sniper Rifle.
• Gasoline Lasts Forever: Downplayed in the sequel. The item descriptions for jerry cans mention most of the gas being expired, but you can still use them in the game nonetheless. Keep in mind that the sequel takes place 10 years into the apocalypse. The developer even lampshades this in a post.
• Glamour: Living Infected are this. They pretend to be alive and retain all the knowledge and memories they had while human, but still go into Ax-Crazy Blood Knight mode when their primal instincts are provoked; for example, waving a hunk of meat in front of a group will definitely separate the men from the infected.
• Grey-and-Grey Morality: The Mc-Coys'-Fat Neils' feud. The Fat Neils believe that the Mc-Coys stole their crops at one point, an accusation the Mc-Coys vehemently deny. It's never really specified if this claim is true, and the Mc-Coys seem fairly open about stealing from the Fat Neils as retribution. On the other hand, the Fat Neils are Not So Above It All, and are just as quick to resort to the same underhanded, dirty moves that they accuse the Mc-Coys of doing.
• Healer Signs On Early: Provided you follow the tutorial questline, the first survivor you'll recruit is Alice, who starts out with a Medicine Skill at level 3 out of 5. You also get Isham, as well; he has a level 3 Medicine skill, and one point in Firearms and Construction.
• Heel–Face Turn: Juanita Baca, a member of Los Ceros, can join your community after you complete her quest line. You can also chose to shoot her instead.
  • After Mike Doolin shoots Em/Elfego, the surviving member of the Arcine family will try to join you to avenge the former's death.
  • You can recruit Felipe Espinosa after The War Sequence between you and Los Ceros. However, letting him join results in Em/Elfego leaving the group.
• Hints Are for Losers: Bob the PR Bot has openly stated that he's still waiting for people to figure out how to get the gold bullion from the bunker without setting off the I.E.D. explosives.
  • Guide Dang It!: You have to have Chris Kane following you when you get to the bunker, which you can only do if you elected Bud Anderson to be the leader of Fort Kohai. Oh, and don't even think about trying to wait until later to do it, either; Chris dies when you're scouting Los Ceros' rear entrance.
• Insane Troll Logic: Clara Allison, AKA the leader of the FEMA encampment, is guilty of institutionally supporting the kidnapping of any people they come across and forcibly experimenting on them to produce antigens for the infection. Which has resulted in even more dangerous Elite Zombies. But that's okay! The now non-existent U.S. Government gave her and FEMA the "authority" to do whatever it took to end the infection, so they're perfectly in the right.
• Insistent Terminology: Joe calls the zombies "zombies" once. From that point onward, everyone refers to them as infected.
  • "Looter" is a term universally used to describe those who steal from the living.
  • Bob the P.R. Bot, the developer, has questionable grammar with most of the game's main menu. "Achievements" are called "Award-ments," for example.
• Instant Militia: Subverted. You can have your farmer character put on guard duty and arm them with a gun. But unless they have a high firearms skill, they're not going to be very effective during an attack.
• In-Universe Game Clock: The game has a regular day/night cycle that's fairly basic and doesn't really have much of an affect on gameplay.
• It's Up to You: You can play through the entire game's questlines with only Joe, if you want. Some players do it for the Self-Imposed Challenge, considering he is the one exception to Anyone Can Die.
• Jerkass: Joe, without a doubt. Every single thing he does, regardless of what you have him do, is stated at the end of the day to just be a calculated move made ultimately for his own benefit. Even the brain scanner you pick up will tell you he's a detached sociopath.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: If Joe pursues the Love path, at first it seems like he's simply looking for someone to care about him. His cynical comments when Isham's Big Brother Instinct starts tingling show how little he actually cares about Alice. On top of this, he might not even care about The Reveal of Alice having been a Living Infected.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Felipe Espinoso was a monster and did not feel bad at all about all the innocent people he's killed (some more brutally than others) throughout his life, he did, in fact, have legitimate reasons for keeping Lou Marchbanks captive. It's revealed that the latter was one of the Living Infected and Felipe wanted to figure out what exactly was wrong with him.
• Jump Scare: When you talk to Charlie Cashman after finishing his quest on killing looters, instead of giving you payment he will proceed to talk about how killing 'gets your blood pumping' before suddenly lunging on top of you as an infected would. This can catch players off guard and startle them if they are playing for the first time.
• Karma Houdini: This can happen to a lot of characters depending on your actions.
  • The biggest example would have to be Alice. It's revealed that she's responsible for not only releasing what could be an entire horde of zombies that can pretend to be people, but also, at that point in her questline, she's indirectly caused a full-scale war that resulted in at least a quarter to a third of the Wasteland dead. Even if, say, she's running out in the open in the center of the FEMA base, the large number of armed guards don't even fire at her for some reason.
  • Coming in second for this is Joe Wheeler. Even if you went out of your way to perform the most moral actions in the Wasteland and never allow anyone to get away with injustice, the simple fact of the matter is Joe got to spend a year sitting comfy in a bunker while the world fell apart... which only happened because of his company's shady business practices. To elaborate, Joe's company, Wheeler Capital Management, drove down the price of the cure-all for erectile dysfunction made by Erekto-Tec, causing the company to go out of business. This allowed the test subjects that were given the doses of Erekto-Tec's serum - with the lovely side effects of increased aggression, were sent home without any further screening.
  • Clara Allison, If you don't put a stop to the FEMA base's operations. Her Well-Intentioned Extremist methods of abducting innocent people and forcibly experimenting on them is the entire reason Living Infected exist. And she will continue to abduct people if you leave the FEMA base alone after The Reveal.
  • Amelia Murphy of Santa Madallena If you choose to kill Tom and Butch, and she somehow survives the conflict with Los Ceros.
  • The "Path of the Righteous Man" Awardment is all about averting this trope. You have to keep Alice alive to the end of the game, kill anyone that has done wrong in the wasteland, and not kill any innocent people. (E.G. Tom and Butch.)
  • Bud Anderson. He could potentially get an entire settlement of survivors killed on purpose with no comeuppance whatsoever. He even eventually becomes the leader of Fort Kohai!
• Killed Mid-Sentence: Wyatt Ingall's fate, if he wins the election. He tries to negotiate with Los Ceros to get Lou back without starting a war, but Ida shoots him in the head, believing that his diplomatic methods won't help save her husband.
• The Lancer:
  • Rachel Scully is this to Wyatt Ingalls. She's a combat-ready, tough pragmatist on top of being an ex-police officer, whereas Wyatt is tactful, partial to negotiation, and was a former politician.
  • Isham Seely is this to Joe provided the latter isn't an outright Villain Protagonist.
• Lovable Coward: Alice. You'd never be able to figure it out by using the Brain Scanner on her, but she's a huge Nice Girl that will gladly surrender if someone tries to mug her.
• Lovable Sex Maniac: Sarah Slaughter. Brain scanning her will reveal that she's a sex addict (You can gain approval from her by gifting her porn books) but it also shows that she has the 'Compassionate' and 'Friendly' traits.
• Limited Wardrobe: None of the survivors ever change their clothing. Averted in the sequel, where characters try to find different things to wear as the seasons change.
• The Medic: Any survivor with a maxed-out Medicine skill. Alice and Isham both start out at Level 3 out of 5 of this skill, giving more reason to do the tutorial first.
• Mind Screw: After invading The FEMA encampment, Big Bad Clara Allison reveals that the Living Infected are zombies intelligent enough to masquerade as humans, and that the Brain Scanner you picked up doesn't work on them. And to top it all off, Alice is, in fact, one of them and implied to be the smartest of them all.
• More Dakka: Your possible arsenal of weapons goes from Pistols to Shotguns to Assault Rifles, to Sniper Rifles, to Rocket-Propelled Grenades.
• Multiple Endings: There are three possible endings you can get: Power, Money and Love. The one you get depends on the dialog option you chose while discussing your life goals with Alice.
• Multiple Persuasion Modes: You can attempt to convince most people either by persuasion or intimidation. Persuasion's success chances are indicated by the "Friendship" rating with that person, and Intimidation success is determined by their Respect.
• Mutually Exclusive Party Members: If you want to recruit any of the McCoys or the Fat Neils, you have to first kill off everyone in the other group.
  • Em/Elfego will try to join your group towards the end of the 'Missing' quest line, but only after one of them gets shot dead by Mike Doolin.
  • You can recruit Felipe Espinosa after defeating Los Ceros, but doing so results in Em/Eflego leaving out of spite.
• Never Mess with Granny: Connie Reed is an elderly woman who has a shotgun and knows how to use it. Her firearms skill is maxed out from the start.
• Never My Fault: Joe delivers a pretty big one when outright told that his company triggered the infection:
  Joe: Hey, come on... you can't blame me for that! How was I supposed to know what would happen? And besides, if we hadn't done it, one of our competitors would have. We were just good at our jobs!
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: It's revealed that Joe himself is indirectly responsible for starting the outbreak, since his business bankrupted the company that was developing the virus.
  • It's revealed that FEMA is still operating in the wasteland, kidnapping people they come across to forcibly use them as test subjects for curing the virus. While that's all well and good, the virus evolves every time they create an antigen for the latest strain.
  • If you decide to do the "revenge" segments of the Fat Neils/Mc-Coys feud questline before trying to stage a peace conference, the game will remember how you made things worse for them. And at that point, it's best to just sit back and let them duke it out by themselves, and take the survivors of the fight into your base.
  • If you decide to execute Clara Allison after invading the FEMA encampment, it can be disturbing once you remember who was most likely the only group of people who knew how to recreate the antigens that have undoubtedly saved your butt countless times...
• Nobody Poops: Downplayed. While you need to build lots of outhouses so people won't start complaining about the fort getting all stinky, nobody actually uses them to go for a number 1 or 2 in the game.
• No Experience Points for Medic: Averted. Every time you patch yourself or another survivor up, the survivor you used for the healing gains experience in their Medicine skill.
• No Healthcare in the Apocalypse: Alice is a diabetic and needs insulin, which isn’t being produced anymore and expires without refrigeration. A lot of it needs to be found or bartered to keep her alive, since she uses up the medicine fairly quickly. Her survival is enough of a challenge that there's an ending dedicated to it.
• Number Two: Rachel Scully is this to Wyatt Ingalls.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: Most characters refuse to call the infected 'zombies' because it's 'tacky'. You can have Joe defy this trope by insisting on using the word anyways.
• Omnicidal Neutral: Downplayed. You can play as this, but since this game is part Role-Playing Game, a lot of it revolves around questing. So it's understandable as to why this playstyle wouldn't be very doable.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The zombies-er, infected all maintain a human shape and don't seem to rot as much as other forms of zombies in pop culture. They have varying strains of The Virus, and are Color-Coded for Your Convenience. Except for Living Infected.
• Pet the Dog: Upon your arrival in Santa Madallena, talk to their doctor and mention Alice's need for Insulin. The doctor will make several comments indicating a mission was about to come up... when he actually just decides to give you some insulin, no strings attached.
• Permadeath: If a survivor dies, they stay dead. Unless they were infected before they died, which results in them turning into an unplayable and brain-hungry zombie.
• Press X to Not Die: If a zombie grabs you, you need to press space in time to kick them off (depleting your stamina bar in the progress) or you will get bit.
• Really Gets Around: One of the dialog options has Joe admitting that he hasn't "exactly been a 'one-woman guy'", saying that it's 'normally more like three or four'.
• Renaissance Man: Any survivors you recruit can become this if you max out all their skills. Averted for characters who are limited in what they can learn.
• Required Party Member: Played with and justified. Joe is definitely the guy you want taking lead if you want to intimidate that looter trying to mug you, but Alice is way more suited to making people happy. When your powers combine...
• Rock Beats Laser: Defeating Los Ceros' superior firepower and superior numbers is definitely this.
• Sacrificial Lamb: In order to get the gold from the bunker, you have to either find a way to disarm the IED explosives or allow one of your survivors to die from them.
  • Bud Anderson gives you a quest in which you can recruit the Fat Neils'/Mc-Coys and fundamentalist shantytown Santa Madallena into your war effort against Los Ceros. He's fully aware that Santa Madallena isn't really going to be that much use for combat; he just intends on using them as decoys so Los Ceros' forces don't swarm Fort Kohai.
• Sadistic Choice: If you want to recruit either the Fat Neils or McCoys group, you need to annihilate the other group first. It's far easier to do this by increasing tensions between them before setting up a meeting. Especially if you choose to go the neutral route.
  • If you want either Connie or her husband to join your community, one of them has to die. Her husband can have a heart attack if you get the photo of his daughter for him, which will mean that one of your survivors will have to become an enemy to Connie.
  • During a quest given to you by Amelia in Santa Madallena, she will ask you to kill two "looters" who stole crops from their field. After confronting them, Tom and Butch are revealed to just be two survivors who wanted to trade with that fort, only to be turned away by Amelia. When returning to Amelia to inquire, she explains that they were "heathens" and begins bargaining with insulin - something she previously said she had none of - for you to do the deed. Your options are: not do her bidding and leave Tom and Butch alone at the price of the precious insulin, kill her (and in the process, murdering innocent people that had nothing to do with the situation, or murdering two helpful and mostly innocent men.
• The Sociopath: Any character with the 'sociopathic' trait (which disables certain dialog options and prevents you from healing someone not in your faction for free) counts as one. Notable examples include Felipe Espinosa, Mike Doolin, Joe Wheeler, Kate Barlow, and Clara Allison.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: Characters with the 'Nervous' trait might flee during combat. A character you recruited might leave the group if their respect and/or approval rating of you drops too low.
  • Alice runs away after it's revealed that she was infected all along.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The entire Fat Neils/Mc-Coys plotline if you don't kill off either of the groups. If you don't make the tensions between them worse by sabotaging them before you get them to meet face-to-face to discuss a truce, the best possible outcome you can get is both groups eventually agreeing that while the Mc-Coys are most likely innocent in stealing the Fat Neils' crops, their mutual hatred for one another is their only reason for existing anymore. Reasonable Authority Figure Wyatt Ingalls is understandably frustrated by this.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: Joe. The people you meet throughout the wasteland will have varying comments on it, but it does make Joe stick out.
• Shoot Everything That Moves: Looters can be pacified if you intimidate the first one to come up to you successfully, but if you raise your gun at all while near their camp, they will turn hostile.
• Shout-Out: The character Kate Barlow from the El Dorado questline is probably one to the character from the novel Holes. Both are blond female outlaws who have a huge secret stash of money hidden somewhere in a desert. They even have the exact same names!
  • Joe utters the 'Zombies... man they creep me out' line from Land Of The Dead after his first zombie encounter.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The entire soundtrack consists of techno music that is relatively fast-paced and upbeat. This is a game with zombies, drug lords that used to mutilate people with Hollywood Acid, and where you are essentially the entire reason that the world is what it is now.
• Static Role, Exchangeable Character: You can have any survivalist in your fort go out and do missions. However, what you can and can't do ends up varying a bit with the character your using's personality flags.
• Take Your Time: Zigzagged. There's no time limit for most of the missions in the wasteland, however, the longest you can keep Alice alive is 68 in-game days without cheating. There's only 62 doses of Insulin you can obtain in-game, and she can only survive about 7 days without it before succumbing.
• Token Trio: Alice, Joe, and Isham.
• Tomboy: Sarah Slaughter, Rachel Scull, and most named female looters.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: Think you can broker peace between McCoys and Fat Neils' After completing their respective revenge quests? Think again.
  • That said, You can do it after brokering "peace".
• Undying Loyalty: Maxing out someone's friendship and respect ratings with Joe leads to this from them.
• Video Game Caring Potential: Plenty. The game seems to reward it, as well, provided you can feed all the people you can recruit.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Alternatively, you can play as a murderous psycho who just butchers his way through everything. Anyone Can Die in this game, after all.
  • Similarly, you can hold someone at gunpoint as the Sole Survivor of said gunfight when their entire group was killed. If they've been wounded, they will hold their hands up in the air as long as you don't advance the dialogue, meaning that they'll bleed out. So not only are they surrounded by the corpses of people they've been living with for awhile, but they're most likely bleeding heavily and terrified they're about to have their heads blown off in cold blood. Bonus points if they're not looters, but instead members of the shanty towns.
• Villain Shoes: At the end of the Los Ceros war, you can recruit Felipe Espinoso.
  • You can recruit Alice within the first 10 minutes of the game.
• Violation of Common Sense: Some people would normally assume that being a Nice Guy is the way to go to get what you want in most cases. However, the game demands that you sometimes do harsh things to get peoples' respect. This is especially true if you're playing as Joe:
  • With Joe, you can easily recruit an entire fort of looters by simply mugging the most cowardly one - or the one who's most afraid of him - and then demanding said victim to work for him. Your respect rating skyrockets with the rest of the looters, and most will follow suit.
  • When helping Rachel Scully search a police station for a truck full of gold bullion, you end up meeting a patsy that she arrested pre-apocalypse, who tries to threaten you by saying he'll shoot her. Normally, most people would show concern for their new friend, and ask politely not to do anything. He's bluffing, hoping you won't use your advantage in numbers against him. Rachel will be relatively annoyed that you fell for it so easily. Instead, you're supposed to choose the more callous statement, that both offends and impresses Rachel. On top of this, you gain a boatload of respect with the criminal, and can recruit him later on.
• You Wouldn't Shoot Me: This is step 1 to peacefully subduing any looter gangs that you meet^note They will always send someone out to mug you, and depending on which character is being mugged, you can intimidate them to back off.
• The War Sequence: The events of the war with Los Ceros and the storming of the FEMA encampment.
• We Cannot Go On Without You: Anyone Can Die in this game... except for Joe.
• Wham Line: Delivered oh-so-pungently by Clara Allison:
  Clara: There is one thing that could help identify Subject 66-F... one side effect of the strain we had given her damaged her internal organs, namely her Pancreas... meaning that her body wouldn't be able to produce it's own insulin.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Alice after she runs away at the end of the story.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: Alice gives a downplayed version during her questline. When she and Joe go on another date, they decide to gather some flower seeds to make a garden. Turns out the seeds they managed to gather are Safflower seeds, which can be used to make Insulin. Joe immediately realizes this and beams with hope, suggesting they move north into Canada to find more and start making Insulin, but Alice shoots the suggestion down, justifying it by saying she feels more fulfilment by making the most of what time she has left. Then we discover the real reason.
• Wizard Needs Insulin Badly: All survivors have their own hunger, thirst, and sleep meters. Alice has a Blood Sugar meter, as well. Depending on how much the player cares about keeping her alive, finding Insulin is half, if not two-thirds of the game. There's also Cancer meters for characters that start smoking. Go ahead, just try binge-smoking and see how well that goes for you.
• Zombie Gait: Crippled zombies do this.

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