Video Game / The Breach

The Breach is a browser-based Adobe Flash game made by Berzerk Studio, famous for Homerun in Berzerk Land and Trap Master. It was first released on July 20th, 2010.

The story centers around Sergei, the head of security on a human spaceship, after he is sent over to investigate the suspicious silence of the Hermes, a starship fitted with a prototype SW-JUMP engine. The experimental hardware of the new engine has created a rift into an alternate dimension filled with giant yellow butterflies, mysterious goo and the colour yellow.

Gorn ensues.

Sergei must now fight through a ship infested with zombies, mutated spiders, the aforementioned giant butterflies, horrific mutants and insanely mutated crew members; not to mention a few sojourns into the evil yellow mutant dimensions along the way.

This Flash game provides examples of:

• Action Bomb: One subtype of mutant spider has a massively fat arse, which explodes when it touches you.
  • One type of enemy is a floating mine, which, upon death, launches eight globules of Yellow in a Star-of-Chaos pattern.
• Airborne Mook: The second enemy you encounter are fly-like things that have a huge, humanoid eye at the front and a bunch of purple tentacles sticking out of their back. There's also a weaker version that doesn't have a huge eye and only goes down in a hit instead of four, but it is spawned en-masse during the boss fights to compensate.
• And Then John Was a Zombie: The ending cinematic shows Sergei being turned into one of the abominations he fought during the game while being interrogated after the destruction of the ship.
  • When Sergei "dies" during the game, he partially mutates into one of the butterfly-wasp creatures found in the later stages. Dying for the first time nets you the "Possessed" achievement.
• Apocalyptic Log: From the ship's commander and the chief medical officer.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Sergei will accept that he's been attacked by a zombie. He will not, however, believe that it's the result of anything but a weird space disease, even after seeing a corpse fly around the room. He quickly changes his tune, however.
• The Assimilator: This seems to be what's going on, although it's never entirely explained. Notably, the victims enjoy it right until they lose their minds completely.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: The first (and the most common) enemies are just possessed men looking like slow zombies, but most of the more powerful opponents are insect-like or spider-like creatures. Including the final boss.
• Black Eyes of Evil: Most of the enemies.
• Blessed with Suck: The Prototype Suit gives you a sprint feature, which activates when you double tap forwards or backwards. Which you can do accidentally when navigating tricky platforms, fighting enemies or simply moving forward. The final boss battle takes place over a bottomless pit on a couple of narrow platforms.
• Body Horror: Every single enemy in the game aside from the Elder God Was Once a Man, before being horrifically mutated by the Yellow.
• Boss in Mook's Clothing: Inquisitors (the crest-headed, betentacled mutants wearing yellow tabards) can Dash, jump as high as you can double-jump, and hit like a Mack truck.
• Bottomless Magazines: Your gun never needs reloading. Even when firing three bullets at once.
• Cap: Level 20, no higher.
• Captain Ersatz: The Spread Gun is basically the Spazer/Wide Beam from Metroid.
• Cassandra Truth: Sergei has survived, but he's a nervous wreck locked in an insane asylum, and since he blew up the spaceship to destroy everything on it, he has no way of convincing anyone of what really happened, and no way to prevent the experiment from being replicated. Then he turns into a monster and apparently eats his psychiatrist. On camera. Well, at least that ought to put a stop to the experiment...
• Chest Burster:
  • Wasp Moths are introduced by popping out of a survivor's chest.
  • The Mutant is the result of a zombie failing to become an Inquisitor. It bursts out of his chest, instantly doubling in height and growing a pair of scythe arms. The hapless zombie is still stuck to the things posterior.
• Cosmic Horror Story:
  • From a gameplay perspective, The Breach is closer to Lovecraft Lite, but in narrative terms, it's more like this. At no point is there any hope of permanently defeating the Yellow, just pushing it back where it came from, and Sergei firmly believes that if hyperspace experiments continue, humanity is doomed. In the new ending, the 'Lite' is officially gone.
  • On a forum, the developers even said that the name of the final boss was "Elder God".
• The Corruption: The Yellow.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: The numbers of lives is unlimited. Each death sends Sergei back to the beginning of the level, but he retains all the gained experience, all his upgrades, and any key he found. The enemies are all back, but it isn't specific to the player's death: the monsters systematically reappers when leaving an area.
• Deflector Shield: You have one, but it's next to useless at the start of the game. As you gain levels, however, the shield becomes a lot more important, since the health pickups are very rare.
• Denial of Diagonal Attack: Played straight until you get the spread shot upgrade from the second level.
• Double Jump: Justified, your second and third suits have short-burn jetpacks.
• Downer Ending: Although the Yellow Dimension's link to our universe is severed with the ship's destruction, the endgame stinger reveals that Sergei received the full blame for the slaughter of the ship's crew and was sent to an asylum when his tale (natually) fell on deaf ears, and to top it all off, it turns out he was infected by The Corruption after all. The game ends with an alien parasite graphically clawing its way out of Sergei's mouth while his interrogator flees in terror.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Yellow is a terrible, interdimensional, madness-inducing godlike being that takes the form of a giant moth made up of brilliant yellow light with tendrils where its mouth should be.
• Eldritch Location: Towards the end of the game, The Yellow dimension (which resembles an ominous mountain range covered in yellow mist and strange golden hieroglyphs floating in the sky) begins to merge with the ship.
• Expy:
  • The eyeball-covered, betentacled floating creatures are roughly similar to Castlevania's Medusa heads
  • There's a worm-like monster attached to the walls that flails about shooting globs of Yellow, similar to the ones from Super Metroid.
• Face–Heel Turn: The chief medical officer goes insane, kills one of the crew members, and joins the yellow cult.
• Flash of Pain: The enemies flash white when they are hit by your gun. Sergei flashes blue when he receives damage to his shields; if the shields are depleted, then he simply screams.
• Giant Flyer: The first and last boss. The first boss resembles the flying, eyeball-raddled Medusa Head expy enemies, while the final boss is a giant moth made of Hard Light.
• A God Am I: The first cultist that Sergei encounters states that "now gods will merge with me". And indeed, the cultists are stronger and faster than the normal mooks.
• The Goomba: The normal crewmember zombies are slow and get stunned so easily by your gun that any threat they represent is mostly theoretical.
• Gorn: Oh sooo much. Enemies and environments are liberally splattered with blood and goo, and death animations for some enemies and bosses include being torn apart by the tension in their own muscles, exploding, vomiting blood and goo, being ripped in half and occasionally simply falling down dead.
• Happiness in Slavery: According to some Apocalyptic Logs, the victims begin to feel happy to join the Yellow just before losing their mind.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: It is called "the Yellow".
• Informed Equipment: Averted. The auto-trigger (a receiver with a yellow bar on it), Spread Device (a mitrailleuse barrel), and each successive suit, actually appear on Sergei's sprite.
• Journey to the Center of the Mind: You have weird, hallucinogenic trips into the Yellow dimension every now and then. Usually, it's because there are recently corrupted humans trying to help you. Later, the Yellow sends it's own messages through these dream sequences, leading to...
  • Battle in the Center of the Mind: The final boss breaks into your thoughts and attempts to mentally kill/corrupt you.
• Level-Up Fill-Up: Subverted: going up a level increases your maximum health, but not your current health, meaning you can be at full health then damaged after levelling up.
• Light Is Not Good: The creatures have a thing for yellow light, and the final boss seems to be made entirely out of it. They're rather forceful with those who refuse to join them.
• Metroid Vania: Platforming, side-scroller Survival Horror game with RPG Elements. The game is broken up into levels, but you get a mission select screen between each one.
• Mini-Boss: The Mutant.
• Mook Maker: The unfortunately shaped pile of guts regularly churns out butterflies.
  • Several bosses have Mook-producing organs nearby.
• More Dakka: Sergei's rifle starts as a relatively slow firing semi-auto gun but, after several level-ups and a power-up, it ends like a machine-gun which has not only an increasingly fast firing-rate, but also has each shot firing three bullet in different directions (one in a straight line from the muzzle of the rifle, one to the floor, one to the ceiling). Any enemy close enough is hit by three bullets.
• Moth Menace: One of the more annoying enemies are human heads that fly with giant butterfly wings at just the right angle to avoid being shot before hitting you. The Big Bad also uses a lot of butterfly imagery, resembling Cthulhu with butterfly wings.
• No OSHA Compliance: There's, inexplicably, pools of Hollywood Acid everywhere in the ship.
• Ominous Visual Glitch: Zombies occasionally flicker in and out, as if being projected from a faulty computer.
• One-Way Visor: The starting and ending armors appear, to have this, but the cutscenes show Sergei's expressions.
• Our Monsters Are Weird: The entity that the yellow cultists worship. It resembles a massive flying insect made of shining golden light with tentacles for a face.
  • The fact that such a surreal, angelic being could be behind the horrors on board the ship just makes it all the more worse.
• Our Zombies Are Different / Parasite Zombie: It is unspecified if they are actually infected by a parasite or are just possessed by the Yellow, but the first met (and most common) enemies are slow walking men with a outlook similar to a standard zombie.
• Place Beyond Time: The scientists think that the Yellow dimension is one of these, although they die too quickly to find out for sure.
• Press X to Not Die: Halfway through, you are confronted by the former Chief Medical Officer in a Yellow-induced vision, who encourages you to stand perfectly still while spectral monsters slowly close in around you. In order to escape, you have to shoot her, though you get an achievement if you let yourself become possessed.
• Pupating Peril: A recurring cutscene features the ship's medic begging the protagonist for help inside his head, transporting the protagonist into an endless void containing only a cocoon. The medic's pleas fade with time as the thing in the cocoon grows, and by the final scene she emerges as a fully mutated convert of the Eldritch Abomination that's taken over the ship.
• Regenerating Shields, Static Health: Played straight with your suit's shields and health. To compensate for this power, the health pickups are very rare.
• RPG Elements: The game has a level up mechanic, each level increases Sergei's Rate of Fire and damage by 8%, and his health bar and shield regeneration by 5%.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: The Spread upgrade turns your machine gun into a fully automatic shotgun. Completely averts the short-range part, it fires three machine gun rounds in a 90 degree angle (one down the middle, one up, one down), which continue until they hit a wall, the edge of the screen, or a monster, dealing triple damage to very short range shots. Due to the RPG Elements, it gets more damage and more ROF with each level up. Once you hit level 15, it fires about five shots per second and three bullets per shot. Bosses go down pretty easily, and mooks go down like popcorn.
• Shout-Out: The achievement for allowing Sergei to be possessed is called "One of Us!"
• Space Isolation Horror: The game apparently takes inspiration from every space horror franchise from Event Horizon to Space Hulk, so naturally it takes place on a derelict space ship whose crew are either dead, zombified, or fused with insectoid lifeforms. And as the game progresses the ship starts merging with the alternate dimension responsible for everything.
• Survival Horror: Zig-Zagged, your gun never needs to be reloaded, but health pickups are a once-per-level occurrence.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: You unlock an upgrade for an infinite-ammo-automatic-shotgun. Which is your standard weapon from then on. And it doesn't need reloading. You get damage and fire rate upgrades when you level up too, making this even more powerful.
  • Subverted in that a lot of enemies have high health and take forever to die, even from this.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: The weaker enemies (the zombies-like former crew members) sometimes vomit when dying.
• You Will Be Assimilated: Standard Yellow procedure. The victims seem to enjoy it right until they lose their minds completely. Your death animation is to sink to your knees, groaning in agony, and then have your hideously mutated head erupt from your helmet and a wasp's abdomen, complete with stinger, from your tailbone.
• Was Once a Man: All the monsters, with the exception of the butterflies and the final boss.

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