Prepare to bow before the Holy Lizard!
Terror of Hemasaurus is a Retraux 2D sidescrolling kaiju indie video-game developed by Loren Lemcke using the MonoGame engine and published by Digerati. Gameplay is in the style of Rampage, with players controlling a giant monster, climbing and smashing buildings while trampling and devouring civilians to earn points. It was released on October 17th, 2022 for the PC on Steam; on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S in December of 2022; and the Nintendo Switch in January 2023.
In the year 2030, the melting of the polar ice-caps unleashes a giant monster that rampages around the world, tasked by an ecoterrorist cult with punishing humanity for its reliance on fossil fuels.
Playable monsters include:
- Hemasaurus: A giant spiky green dinosaur with a powerful roar.
- Clocksloth: A colossal sloth capable of stopping time.
- Salamandrah: A giant Fiery Salamander capable of breathing torrents of flames.
- Autonomous Hemasaurus: A Robeast doppelgänger of Hemasaurus capable of firing rockets.
Official Website: https://www.terrorofhemasaurus.com
Terror of Hemasaurus includes examples of:
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: For most of the game, you play as one of four giant monsters. For the second-to-last level you control a tank in Hemasaurus' mind as scientists try to teach it empathy, and in the final level you control Zogglers and Blurp's UFO as they wreak havoc on humanity.
- Apocalypse Cult: The Church of the Holy Lizard is a cannibalistic ecoterrorist cult that created Hemasaurus and the other monsters and sent them back in time, frozen in the polar ice-caps until climate change unleashed them. The Church then commands the monsters to cause as much devastation as possible in an attempt to show humanity the folly of its ways. The cult is revealed to be a scam created by Richie Hoarderson, whereupon the second-in-command tells Hemasaurus to slaughter the rest of the cult to prevent it from causing any more death and destruction.
- Art-Style Dissonance: The Retraux sidescroller starring an adorable Not Zilla happens to also be a downright bleak and very profane comedic skewering of right-wing pundits and political figures.
- Black Comedy: In spades. The game is riddled with satirical political commentary and contains a strong environmentalist message... delivered by a cannibalistic cult that worships a giant monster and intends to fix climate change through mass-murder.
- Breath Weapon: Salamandrah's special ability is to breath blasts of flames.
- But Thou Must!: The player is unable to select the "No" choice when Jimmy Miller asks the giant monster to eat him.
- Cannibalism Superpower: Players can regain health and build their Terror Meter by eating civilians. Obese cultists provide a healing-over-time effect, having been specially fattened to serve as a nutritious meal.
- Comedic Sociopathy: The Shepherd of the Holy Lizard wants to save the planet from being ruined by climate change... by siccing giant monsters on the unsuspecting populace because he enjoys the death and destruction a little too much.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Richie Hoarderson is a stereotypical right-wing oil-baron who knows that climate change is real and will spell the end of human civilization, but is making far too much money off fossil fuels to care, goes out of his way to make the situation worse, and plans to abandon the Earth to go live on the Moon anyways.
- Death of a Child: There are many child citizens in cities, and they die as often as adult counterparts!
- Driven to Suicide: Towards the end of the game, young child Jimmy Miller — whose mother was killed by Hemasaurus in a prior cutscene — asks Hemasaurus to eat him so that he can get it over with.
- Ecocidal Antagonist: Richie Hoarderson, the CEO of PollutaCorp, wants to make as much money off exploiting the environment as possible without having to kowtow to regulations... to the point of starting an ecoterrorist Apocalypse Cult worshipping a bioengineered kaiju in order to sow chaos and discredit environmentalists.
- Engineered Heroics: To counter some of the bad press engendered by their campaign of levelling cities and slaughtering civilians, the Church of the Holy Lizard firebombs an animal hospital and tasks the playable monster with saving some of the cats and dogs.
- Go Mad from the Revelation:
- Inverted in the case of the Assistant to the High Priest. The acolyte begins questioning the Church's increasingly zany methods—like destroying cities by bouncing a giant metal ball across trampolines—and realizes they're actually making the world worse. Being told that the Church of the Holy Lizard was a sham engineered by Richie Hoarderson causes them to decide that the rest of the cult has to be destroyed to prevent them from causing any more chaos.
- The two aliens, Zogglers and Blurp, snap when they learn that humanity has had access to environmentally-friendly alternatives to fossil fuels for decades but chose not to use them despite knowing of the damage they were doing to the planet, deciding to Kill All Humans.
- Grievous Harm with a Body: Players can grab humans and toss them like projectiles, earning bonus points for hitting other people in the process.
- Ground Pound: Players can perform a butt-slam move that, if done from high enough, will generate powerful shockwaves and obliterate things in proximity.
- Heel–Face Turn: In the final stage, consumed by guilt over the destruction it's caused and haunted by the ghosts of those it's killed, Hemasaurus lays waste to PollutaCorp's private army and confronts Richie Hoarderson just before he takes off into space. Presented with one final choice, Hemasaurus can either let him escape — though the rocket crashes on the moon and Richie dies — or take the rocket down at the cost of its own life.
- Heroic Sacrifice: In the final level, if you choose to stop Richie Hoarderson from escaping to the Moon, the playable monster climbs onto his rocket as it takes off and causes it to crash, sacrificing itself in the process. However, PollutaCorp salvages Hemasaurus' head and keeps it alive in order to study.
- Humans Are Flawed: The aliens Zogglers and Blurp are very condescending towards humankind, mockingly referring to humans as "monkeymen" and being disgusted by humanity's apathy towards the degradation of the environment and continued use of fossil fuels. Despite this, they do attempt to offer them an environment-friendly technology in the hopes of enabling their planet to recover. This crosses over to Humans Are Bastards when they learn that humanity does have the tech to do so, but are too lazy and apathetic to even implement it. Zogglers and Blurp are understandably enraged at this revelation, snap, and go on to Kill All Humans in a fit of anger over their negligence.
- Pet the Dog: Immediately after the level where the Church of the Holy Lizard firebombs an animal hospital, Loren Lemcke is shown being ordered by the head of Cash Grabber Studios to include a level where the player snuggles the cats and dogs instead to counter backlash from animal-rights activists, begrudgingly obliging.
- Monster in the Ice: At the start of the campaign, the playable monster is shown frozen in a glacier that crumbles due to global warming — the Church of the Holy Lizard having sent it back in time specifically to set this up.
- My God, What Have I Done?: One of the late-game cutscenes shows Hemasaurus suffering a nightmare where it's confronted by the ghosts of all the people it killed, flashing to a ruined cityscape where it sits atop a mountain of skulls. Awakening, it then weeps over all the death and destruction it's caused.
- Not Zilla: Hemasaurus is a giant green reptilian monster with a row of dorsal spines running down its back, making its sprite resemble a bipedal cartoony crocodile.
- Playing Both Sides: It's revealed late into the game that Richie Hoarderson created the Church of the Holy Lizard in order to trick left-wing environmentalists into becoming a cult of cannibalistic sociopaths rather than working towards any meaningful change, while also profiting off the degradation of the earth through PollutaCorp. When revealing his identity, he mockingly tells the cult's second-in-command that he's disappointed it took him so long to figure out that the Church of the Holy Lizard was a scam.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
- When the Shepherd of the Holy Lizard reveals himself to be Richie Hoarderson, he mocks the Assistant to the High Priest for taking so long to figure out the Church of the Holy Lizard's increasingly zany schemes aren't doing anything to fix the environment, and that the cult is a scam to discredit left-wing environmentalists and prevent them from making meaningful change.
- When confronted in the final level, Richie Hoarderson freely admits to being a greedy, hedonistic sociopath... but accuses Hemasaurus — and by extension, the player — of being just as bad as he is, if not worse; and notes that killing him out of petty vengeance isn't going to fix anything.
- Zogglers and Blurp spend the entirety of their screen-time lambasting "monkeymen" for their collective shortcomings, mocking them for wasting time with petty conflicts instead of banding together to face genuine threats to civilization, and enjoying killing each other so much they spend inordinate amounts of time playing video-games involving simulated mass-murder. When they discover that humanity has continued to exploit and pollute the planet through the use of fossil fuels despite environmentally-friendly alternatives having been available for decades, they decide that the apathetic masses are better off dead and opt to wipe out what's left of humanity themselves.
- Recursive Canon: One of the subplots involves a fictional version of Loren Lemcke making a video-game based on the ongoing giant monster attack to cash in on the crisis — which is mocked by the Shepherd of the Holy Lizard, as well as Zogglers and Blurp in the bad endings.Shepherd of the Holy Lizard: Do you really think this Terror of Hemasaurus game is going to accomplish anything? [...] Besides, this game of yours doesn't even make sense! How can a video game universe contain the video game itself?!
- Robeast: Autonomous Hemasaurus is a parody of Mechagodzilla, being a robotic doppelgänger of Hemasaurus. Despite being a robot, it can still regain health by eating people.
- Self-Deprecation: Several cutscenes show a fictional version of Loren Lemcke pitching the concept for Terror of Hemasaurus to Cash Grabber Studios, having to deal with Executive Meddling from the studio heads and backlash from Moral Guardians, and ultimately being captured and eaten by the Church of the Holy Lizard for having profited off the world's devastation instead of actually doing something to change it.
- Straw Character: Numerous characters spoof right-wing politicians, news media, wealthy industrialists, and climate-change deniers — with Richie Hoarderson being the top of the heap.
- Straw Nihilist: In the final confrontation, Richie Hoarderson espouses the nihilistic belief that humanity both cannot and is not willing to commit to saving the planet, and is only capable of destroying itself through war and pollution.
- Super-Scream: Hemasaurus' special ability is a Mighty Roar that shatters buildings and can deflect missiles.
- Take That!:
- Aside from being a middle-finger to right-wingers in general, the game ends with Richie Hoarderson attempting to escape the Earth to live on a yet-to-be-built moon-colony, a pastiche of Elon Musk's suggestion that the wealthy elite abandon Earth to establish colonies on the Moon and Mars.
- The Cash Grabber Studios subplot gives a middle finger to microtransaction-riddled mobile games, overly sensitive Moral Guardians, and PETA.
- Toxic, Inc.: PollutaCorp is an industrial conglomerate run by Richie Hoarderson, making most of its money off fossil fuels and being wealthy enough to field a private military.
- Think of the Children!: When conservative-minded Mrs. Miller sees her impressionable young son Jimmy playing Terror of Hemasaurus, she is horrified and goes on a rant about how violence in video-games is poisoning the minds of the youth. Hemasaurus promptly rips through her living room wall, eats her alive, and then vomits her half-digested corpse right in front of her son.
