Video Game / The Consuming Shadow

"Try not to go mad and shoot yourself. This is important."

— Official Webpage

The Consuming Shadow is a Lovecraftian Roguelike by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, inspired by Eternal Darkness, FTL: Faster Than Light, and the board game Arkham Horror. The game was released in July 2015, and is currently available through Yahtzee's website or the Humble Store and Steam.

A shadow is trying to enter our world. One of the Ancients. Its presence is felt all over the country as its looming shade slowly twists, perverts, and poisons the minds of men, and turns the towns it touches into festering breeding grounds for its horrifying minions. It will arrive in three days at Stonehenge where the barrier between the worlds is at its weakest. The good news is that the right ritual will banish it and put a stop to its invasion attempt, the bad news is that you are not sure which of the Ancients is the force behind it all, and performing the wrong ritual will undoubtedly make the already bleak situation much, much worse.

You know what you must do: explore places touched by the Ancients, fight their minions, and assemble enough clues to piece together both the banishment ritual and the identity of the invading god, all while trying to keep your own rapidly deteriorating grasp on reality from slipping too far in the process. But you are not sure how you know all of this. For some reason you can't shake the sensation of deja vu, as if you have done all of this before, over and over and over again...

---

Tropes:

• A Birthday, Not a Break: One of the random text messages you can receive is one of your family members sending you some money for your birthday, so unless they were late in doing so, the events of the game are happening during the main character's birthday, which is the worst and possibly last one they'll ever have.
• Absent-Minded Professor: The Wizard is described as being "blighted by chronic forgetfulness", although it could be supernatural in origin. In gameplay, this translates to each spell rune "degrading" as it gets used, thus they must be refreshed by examining the runes found in the dungeons in order to be used again.
• Advancing Boss of Doom:
  • In some dungeons, after completing the objective, a boss is spawned and the objective becomes "GET OUT" or something along those lines. One such boss is a gradually screen-crossing face that, if it catches you, will wreck your health and sanity and dump you somewhere random.
  • The Ancient final boss' underlying "attack" pattern is to slowly pull itself towards you, should you allow it tether itself to the left wall with its tentacles.
• Alternate Universe: Every playthrough is implied to be this.
  • Now confirmed as being part of Yahtzee's "personal canon".
  • Especially noticeable when playing as the Ministry Man. His starting flavor text implies the point of divergence was the death of the Scholar, the diary pages are implied to be written by an alternative version of him, and one random text message is literally sent to him by an AU version of him (or at least someone/something claiming to be such). They say they are dead, and happy with that fact. Lost sanity. Another possible text message for the Ministry Man, comes from the supposedly dead Scholar, who informs him that he is aware of the existence of alternative dimensions from his dreams, and he fears that the Ministry Man just aren't destined to win in this particular universe.
  • The Warrior's divergence point is also the Scholar's death, which leads him to start following the Scholar's notes.
• All There in the Manual:
  • The diary pages, when put together, explain how T ended up dragged into the events of the game, and why he has only a day to fix things.
  • There are also files describing all the monsters, slowly revealed as the player encounters them.
• And the Adventure Continues: The Golden Ending for all characters:
  • The Scholar gets a text-message from "T", telling him that he has a little job for him.
  • The Warrior gets a similar message, also stating that his boss was Dead All Along.
  • The Wizard loses her magic powers, and gets a text from "T" telling her to drop in at the Ministry offering to restore them.
  • The Ministry Man ends with a less happy version of this: he gets a text message from one of his contacts from the Ministry, informing him that he needs to run because "they know what [he] did to C" and are looking for him.
• Anonymous Benefactor: You sometimes receive random donations, oftentimes from untraceable numbers, and the Warrior's boss is dead, but sometimes sends him money. Some of the clues also come in the form of anonymous notes from someone who tells you that he knows you're reading his note. There's some implication that the enemy of the invader is behind the latter, and possibly the former.
• Badass Bookworm:
  • The Scholar is quite the master of kicking eldritch ass.
  • The Wizard as well, who can kick plenty of ass with her meticulously researched spells.
• Banishing Ritual: The main plot of the game is to perform the Ritual of Banishment on the correct Ancient that is invading the world.
• Barefisted Monk: The Warrior, who relies solely on his mighty kick for combat.
• Big Damn Heroes: On occasion, the player will get to be this, for the few people you manage to free from being kidnapped while they are alive and untainted by the shadow. You can also be this for the entire world by banishing the Ancient with less than 10 minutes left on the clock, and get the "Screenwriting 101" achievement in the process.
• Bittersweet Ending: It's a horror game, it's to be expected.
  • The two Scholar endings where you cast the Ritual of Banishment successfully and either flub the Final Boss or win with very low sanity.
    • If you seal the correct Ancient One while insane and win the boss fight, your character becomes an institutionalized paranoid schizophrenic, but in the real world the shadow is gone.
    • If you seal the correct Ancient One and lose, your character is either eaten or permanently trapped in the Ancient's world, but it's still lost the war — the seal holds.
  • The Warrior and Wizard's Ending Bs are variants on the Scholar's own; Both are in an insane asylum due to losing their minds sealing the Ancient, with the Wizard's obsessive-compulsion growing worse and the Warrior lost in a Lotus-Eater Machine where he thinks the doctors are angels, so at least he's happy.
  • The ending in which The Ministry Man manages to banish the Ancient and get out alive and sane. He's still wanted for the murder of one of his (partially turned) colleagues he committed when trying to get out of the Ministry.
• Black Magic: Magic in this world draws upon the Ancients, and while you need it, it's not something that human minds have any business messing with. Only the Wizard can use spells without losing sanity — and her mind is already a bit cracked.
• Body Horror: This happened to many of the victims, and at least a few of the monsters. For example, bursting boils in the back of the throat.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: When trying to rescue hostages, some of them have been broken by the shadow's control and pull a gun on you, and there is only a single way to save them.
• Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: Given the genre, it's more surprising that you can avert this. Two endings still qualify, where you banish the Shadow, but are eaten by or trapped with it, or else beat it back but go insane in the process.
• Brutal Honesty: Can be employed by the protagonists, to varying results.
• But Thou Must!: Normally, the game gives you the option to read or ignore text messages. However, if you achieve Ending A, you will receive one final message and, should you click "ignore", the game will simply offer you the same choice again and again until you choose "read".
• Call a Hit Point a "Smeerp": "Birth stars" are basically skill points that provide various permanent bonuses (more health, more sanity, faster car, etc.) at character creation. They're granted at the end of the game from experience gained during the previous playthrough.
• Cast from Sanity: Using magic in this world costs sanity. Justified as the magic comes from the magical runes that are not made for humans in mind, and seem to have come from the amoral Ancients themselves.
• Challenge Run: The Insanity Edition includes 12 Challenge modes that affect your gameplay run. Many of them have to be unlocked using a Birth star and/or getting to a certain level in "The Descent":
  • Daily Challenge
  • Four Character specific challenges
    • Test of Wisdom: The Scholar's challenge, which increases the damage you take by 10% for every clue you have, and you are unable to use the in-game table for making notes.
    • Test of Cunning (Ministry Man): You start with 10 keys and a Locksmith's Kit (making lockpicking always succeed), but you cannot find keys within the dungeons.
    • Test of Skill (Warrior): You cannot use the Medkit, but you restore health every time you successfully evade an attack.
    • Test of Magic (Wizard): The Wizard's challenge, which makes runes degrade slower, but you cannot purchase ammo for your guns, and cannot use the sanity-restoring drugs.
  • Biological Clock: You start the game with an untreatable bleeding wound, forcing you to keep on top of your constantly diminishing health.
  • Amnesiac: No Dungeon map, and the town status isn't shown on the world map.
  • Caution Advised: You start with Body Armour and the Breathing Mask (effectively reducing the damage you take from all combat), but you are unable to refill your medkit.
  • Pistol Whipper: You are unable to find or purchase ammo for your gun.
  • No-One Left Behind: You are unable to enter Stonehenge until you save 10 cursed towns.
  • China Shop: Both you and your opponents die in a single hit.
  • Scourge of the Ancients: You die in a single hit, and the world is locked at the maximum difficulty possible.
  • Separate from the Challenges is "The Descent" mode, where your goal challenge is to go through as many levels as possible. Most notably, the dungeon is Stonehenge, thus this mode can only unlocked by beating Ending A.
• Chekhov's Gun: A literal one. The Warrior actually does have a gun, but this is only hinted by his inventory, which shows he has six bullets. The gun itself is never mentioned unless he runs out of time, when he will use it to commit suicide.
• Color-Coded Characters: Each playable character is associated with a color: red for the Scholar, blue for the Ministry Man, orange for the Warrior, and green for the Wizard. In addition, each Ancient has an associated color, generated randomly at the start of each game.
• Cosmic Horror Story: A typical Eldritch Abomination invasion scenario. You must assemble the rune to seal away the god that is currently invading Earth; the problem is there are three gods. There is one who is helping the invading god, and the other one is working against the god and potentially your ally. If you seal away the wrong god, well...
• Counterspell: Cultists and the Ancient cast spells in a similar manner to you, by invoking the runes one at a time and then casting the spell. You can counteract this by invoking the same runes, which prevents the spell and harms the original caster, blowing out the shields of Cultists and forcing the Ancient backwards by a significant amount.
• Damsel in Distress: The Wizard character, who starts out as a victim kidnapped by a cult and must be rescued to be unlocked as a playable character. Once unlocked, she becomes an Action Girl.
• Dark Reprise: Two dark variants of the Title Theme Tune exist for two different endings.
  • Ending C, wherein you die after sealing the Ancient away, changes the key of the music to be more tragic and mournful, given that your character is now dead (or worse), but you have still saved the world.
  • Ending B, where you win with little sanity left, uses more aggressive strings, rumbling drums, and off-key piano to accentuate the total collapse of the character's sanity.
• Dead Animal Warning: The Wizard can get the message "Your cat is dead", with the implication that cultists are responsible. It causes a sanity loss.
• Deflector Shields: Cultists and Summoners shroud themselves with an impenetrable barrier, but it can be shattered by countering their spellcasting.
• Degraded Boss: The Birther, a human who's been colonized by spiders, is a weak boss monster early on (though he's actually weaker than most mook monsters). Later in the game, he can be found in ordinary rooms as a regular mook, as the threat level of the Shadow increases.
  • In the Insanity Edition's "The Descent" mode, even the stronger boss-type monsters, such as the Big Birther and Dangler, will eventually begin spawning as regular mooks.
• Demon Slaying: You will find youself doing this, slaying the enemy monsters. You can be called a "demon hunter" in the Results summary if you visited and completed several dungeons. There is even an achivement called Demon Hunter for slaying 1000 enemy minions.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • If you have no more ammo left, the suicide attempt minigame to not shoot yourself will fail for the gun-wielding characters, but that doesn't affect the Warrior (who kills himself with a knife).
  • Several of the achievements are earned for doing things that would rarely come naturally to the average player:
    • "Why The Hell Did I Bring This" is rewarded for bringing the car muffler to Stonehenge, where it is of no use to the player and takes up equipment space that could be used for another, much more useful item. Its icon even shows the Scholar staring at the muffler in bemusement.
    • Randomly casting magic is a bad idea in this game, as a failed spell will cause damage to your character's already limited and fragile sanity... except if you manage to discover a spell this way by blind luck, whereupon you get an achievement, "The Scientific Method."
    • If you spend a birth star point by allocating it in an area of the sky which doesn't give any bonus, you get the achievement "Astrology? Pah!".
• Disappearing Bullets: Normal and Hollowpoint bullets can only ever hit a single target, but Armour-Piercing Bullets avert this trope as they can tear through multiple targets.
• Does Not Like Guns: Even when facing horrific monstrosities, The Warrior will almost never use a gun, instead relying on kicks for combat and a knife for the Press X to Not Die sequences. The only time he uses one is if time runs out and the shadow is upon him, in which case he will use it on himself.
• Downer Ending: Any ending where you fail, essentially.
• Dramatic Ammo Depletion: If you are completely out of ammo when failing to prevent your character’s suicide, the scene cuts to black with the click of an empty gun, with them surviving the ordeal.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • The protagonist will attempt to shoot himself if his sanity is too low, but the player can prevent him from doing so. It gets harder the lower his sanity is, and virtually impossible if it is especially low.
  • You can also shoot yourself at the main menu, before even playing the game!
  • If the player fails to get to Stonehenge before the timer expires, the protagonist shoots himself to avoid getting absorbed by the darkness.
  • And if you banish the wrong god, the invading one leaves you alone, possibly seeing you as an ally. Your character considers living through the apocalypse... but decides not to.
  • The journal entry that teaches you the Clairvoyance spell is a suicide note from a person that used it, who ended up seeing many things, including inside the minds of many people around them, and what they saw sent them over the edge.
  • When meeting a priest in your travels, they will ask about what is going on in the world. If you decide to be truthful about it, they may give you their gun loaded with Hollowpoint ammunition to help you on your way, or they may use the same gun to invoke this trope.
• Drugs Are Good: They fill up sanity, although they wear off over time. This is especially noteworthy in the endgame, as even if your sanity is completely shattered by the end, taking a hit before heading into Stonehenge can be the difference between going insane or getting the Golden Ending.
• Dungeon Town: Corrupted towns are full of monsters to battle, and most job offers involve fighting in otherwise-safe towns.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: During the final boss battle, the Wizard gains unlimited use of her runes, which, previously, had to be constantly renewed. This essentially turns the ordinarily challenging final boss into a cakewalk, as you are free to spam healing and damage spells with no adverse consequences.
• Embodiment of Virtue: The Steam achivements, and the Character-specific challenges, seem to point to four positive aspects of the characters:
  • The Scholar: Wisdom
  • The Ministry Man: Cunning
  • The Warrior: Skill
  • The Wizard: Magic
• Endless Game: "The Descent" challenge, which can only be unlocked by getting Ending A. Which is justified as Stonehenge opening up again, leading to the player's curiosity as to what is down there.
• The End of the World as We Know It: The Shadow will engulf the world if you don't manage to stop the god that is invading.
• Enemy Mine: Of the three Ancient ones, the one that is neither the invader or the accomplice is their enemy. It's fighting against the invader for its own reasons, and possibly giving the player some limited assistance here and there. This doesn't mean that he'll tell his monsters to stop eating you, though.
• Extremely Short Timespan: You have 60 hours (24 as the Ministry Man) to stop a god from invading the world.
• Fate Worse than Death: If you successfully banish the Ancient, but "die" in the ensuing confrontation, the post-game wrap-up will note that your character "disappeared into the Ancient's realm" and is now "hopefully deceased", the implication being that s/he may in fact still be alive and undergoing some unimaginable torture.
• Fictional Province: The game takes place in Great Britain, but almost all of the cities within it are fictitious locations, constructed out of randomised, British-sounding prefixes and suffixes that differ in every run. This can occasionally generate a recognisable name, but often located far away from where it's supposed to be, such as Gorton, a location within Manchester in the real world, being located far into Scotland ingame. Stonehenge is a notable exception, as while there is some slight variance from game to game, it's still located roughly in the same location as its real world counterpart.
• Fictional Zodiac: The birth stars chosen at character's creation are selected among a semi-randomized star map.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: The Warrior (better melee attack and dodge, but no gun), the Wizard (no melee, but can cast spells with no sanity loss), and the Ministry Man (no special abilities, but enough money to buy good equipment at the start).
• Genius Bruiser: The Warrior is an ass-kicking murder machine, but he's also smart and educated enough to figure out and follow the Scholar's notes, despite having no real prior experience with the occult.
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: One random encounter involves a woman in a blind panic about a loved one being trapped in a nearby location, and one option to bring her back down to Earth long enough to explain the situation is to slap her. This can work properly, can tip her over the edge and make her run back into the monster-infested town, or your slap tears their face off to reveal a minion of the Shadow.
• Golden Ending: Casting the correct Ritual of Banishment and defeating the Ancient One while relatively sane returns your character whole to Earth, and he or she makes a full recovery from the ordeal. Good work, champ.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: The revelation of basically everything relating to the shadows will decrease sanity. Magic burns even more.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: The good ending: The protagonist has managed to seal away the invading god, and didn't go insane from his experiences, but no one other than him and the Ministry of Occult Affairs will ever understand the strange events that plagued the country or know that he saved the world from utter oblivion.
• Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: The Warrior is unable to use a gun and the Wizard can't attack in melee. Averted with the Scholar and the Ministry Man.
• Heroic Sacrifice: One of the endings, if you die while fighting the Ancient after casting the correct sealing spell. Your character dies (or worse), but the Shadow is still sealed.
• I Have Your Wife: "We know where your children sleep. They will be eaten first. Greased and spit roasted alive as they howl for their father."
• Hyperactive Metabolism: You can find snack food and medicinal alcohol (which your character “puts to two uses”), which immediately restore health.
• Inexplicably Preserved Dungeon Meat: While the appearance of snack food and medicinal alcohol makes sense within most of the locations, as they are corrupted homes, parks and businesses, there is very little explanation for their presence within the ancient tunnels of Stonehenge.
• Interface Screw: At low sanity...
  • The screen periodically gets covered in a static effect while an ominous sound plays, lowering your field of vision.
  • The investigation options have a constant chance of randomly turning into a prompt for the player to kill himself.
  • A visual effect similar to vision spots randomly occur, distracting you.
  • The screen can flash repeatedly as you enter a room, obscuring your vision as a monster approaches.
  • There's a chance you'll be shown as having no ammo and won't be able to fire, though the effect leaves and you get your ammo back when you leave the room.
  • When you enter a dungeon, the objective that usually scrolls across the screen can randomly switch to messages like "imsorryimsorryimsorry," "helpmehelpmehelpme," or "it hurts it hurts it hurts."
  • A monster might approach, then disappear the moment you attack, possibly wasting a bullet.
  • You may no longer to be able to see your character, interfering with planning melee attacks.
  • The controls may reverse.
  • While driving, random faces or hands, in complete white, will show up in front of the windscreen out of nowhere, then disappear immediately after.
  • Doorways might move around if you try to enter them.
  • Your hands may begin to shake, making aiming your gun difficult.
• It's All My Fault: The Ministry Man, in some bad endings, explicitly blames himself for not acting earlier. Given that the diary states he needed to fight his way out of the Ministry, outnumbered and without weapons, it's safe to say it wasn't all his fault.
• Jack of All Stats: The Scholar, the default character, is relatively well-rounded when compared to the other PCs.
• Just in Time: Two achievements can be unlocked by deliberately invoking this — "Hospital Drama" requires you to only heal your severe bleeding when you're at 5 health or less, and "Screenwriting 101" is unlocked by banishing the Ancient with less than 10 minutes remaining.
• Laughing Mad: What the Ministry Man becomes in his version of Ending B, convinced that he failed in his mission and that the medical staff around him are minions of the shadow.
  Every day they strap me down and try to convince me that the shadow is gone, that they are human. [...] It's funny to me. It's so funny I can't stop laughing.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Scholar's narration at the beginning of the game can end up as this:
  For some reason, I can't shake the sensation of deja vu. I have memories of assembling a ritual, fleeing through darkened hallways, and firing a gun at something unimaginable. I feel like some distant part of me may have died this way. Hundreds of times. Perhaps thousands.
• Lovecraft Lite: The enemy is an incomprehensible being from outside the universe, who is slowly corrupting all of Britain (and the world, once the stars come right). But he can be beaten and forced back with magic and bullets, and it can even be done without destroying your mind in the process.
• Made of Iron: Your characters can take a massive amount of damage and still keep on going. Even being shot by a disguised cultist in the rescue missions will only take around 6 hit points (you normally start with 50). Averted entirely in the China Shop and Scourge of the Ancients challenge modes, where your character becomes a One-Hit-Point Wonder.
• The Masquerade: Some scenes have the protagonist reinforce this, e.g. telling a man that the monsters who attacked him were actually youths in halloween costumes.
• Minimalism: Every character and monster are rendered as silhouettes. This rather helps to give the monsters an air of mystery, as you get a general idea of how they look, but at same time you don't know exactly how they look.
• Mental Time Travel: It's implied your character is doing this each time you restart, serving as the explanation for why you retain your levels.
• Menu Time Lockout: Of a sort. Time freezes when you bring up the Spellbook, and you are only time-constrained when you start incanting a spell. This is especially noticeable when you are invoking the runes to counteract another caster’s spell, as while an unanswered spell of endgame enemies can be cast in less than a second, opening the Spellbook will make the spell simply hang in stasis for as long as it takes for you to start speaking the runes.
• Multiple Endings:
  • Ending A (Victory): You successfully banish the invading Ancient and win the subsequent Boss Battle, while maintaining a high level of Sanity. The Player Character monologues about how the world is saved without anyone truly knowing, before receiving a text from either "T" or (if playing as him) "E" implying their story isn't yet done.
  • Ending B (Tainted Victory): As above, but with a low level of Sanity. While the apocalypse is averted, the player character is Driven to Madness by their experiences and is sent to an insane asylum.
  • Ending C (Ultimate Sacrifice): Banish the invading Ancient, but lose the Boss Battle by running out of health or walking into the Ancient's shadow. The apocalypse is averted, but the player character is either stranded in the Ancient's realm or (hopefully) dead.
  • Ending D (Mistaken Identity): Banish the wrong god. The invading Ancient is unleashed at its full power and begins to consume the world. The player character briefly delivers a regretful monologue on their failure, then kills themself rather than live in a world consumed by the Shadow.
  • Ending E (Deadline - Town): Time runs out while in a town or a dungeon. The Shadow begins to consume the world, the player character expresses regret at their failure, and then kills themself before the Shadow can take them.
  • Ending F (Deadline - Car): Time runs out while in the car or between locations. Essentially identical to the above ending, though the character commits suicide in the car rather than in a town and the narration is different.
  • Ending G (Dead): The player character runs out of health and dies, with an animation of their hand lying on the ground while blood spreads out around it playing.
• Mythology Gag: References to Chzo Mythos are scattered all over the place.
  • Chzo is one of the possible Ancients, with his servant, The Tall Man, as an end-of-dungeon pursuer. Although, he is not necessarily the god of pain in this game, nor is the Tall Man necessarily his minion.
  • You work for the Ministry of Occultism, same as Trilby had been recruited to.
  • Some messages are sent by "T", who may well be Trilby. He's unlocked as a playable character after beating the game for the first time, and the silhouette definitely looks the part. One of the random text messages he can get references the events of the series.
  • The Ministry Man's challenge, Test of Cunning, gives you the item Locksmith's Kit and 10 lockpicks, but no keys in the dungeons. This seems to reference Trilby's background as a Phantom Thief and his amazing lockpicking skills.
  • "Objective: pain pain pain pain pain pain pain" (a reference to "it hurts", which is another possible "objective"). The repeated "it hurts it hurts it hurts" Madness Mantra also happens in Ending B for The Scholar, who repeats this until this text goes off of the screen as his sanity implodes.
  • If you successfully banish Chzo when his randomized aspect is Pain as the Ministry Man, you unlock the hidden achievement "This Seems Familiar".
• The Needs of the Many: Sometimes deliberately letting a town fall to the Shadow can be to the player's advantage — the town will become a dungeon, potentially containing a crucial clue — and, after all, sacrificing a town's population is a lesser evil compared to having the Shadow consume the whole world. "T" will even point this out in one of his messages.
• Never My Fault: The Warrior and Wizard in ending D, where you banish the wrong god. The Warrior states that the Scholar's notes that he followed must have been wrong, while the Wizard blames the universe itself for altering its rules in such a way that forced her to fail.
• New Game Plus: XP is earned at the end of a game, after you've either stopped the Ancient or failed to. It's carried over to your next game, allowing you to buy perks like health, sanity, ammo capacity, and car speed.
• Nintendo Hard: A given; it's a roguelike, after all.
• No Name Given: According to Word of God, the characters have no names (besides generic titles) for immersion purposes. And in one case, to avoid a Continuity Lockout.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: Implied to be the reason The Ministry Man is given only 24 hours to stop the shadow, rather than the other characters' usual 60. The diary reveals it wasn't the case — the shadow took over the Ministry building, and he barely managed to escape.
• Occult Detective: The Ministry Man actually works for the British "Ministry of Occultism", making him one who is officially employed by the government. The Scholar and the Wizard are specialists in occult investigation, but they don't directly work for the government. And the Warrior is more of an ordinary criminal who Jumped at the Call and is following the Scholar's notes.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: When playing the China Shop or Scourge of the Ancients challenges, your character dies in one hit.
• Optional Boss: An interesting case in which it's technically the final boss. You've already won if you're fighting the Ancient directly; it's just trying to kill you out of spite. Since it's been massively weakened, though, you can make it seriously regret trying.
• Out with a Bang: Victims of a lust god are sometimes described as having died from "exhaustion". All damage to the body coming post-mortem.
• Papa Wolf: One of these can be encountered on the road, and may direct this towards you if you use Brutal Honesty on his daughter.
• Paranormal Investigation: A cosmic horror variant. You play as an occult investigator who has a limited amount of time to accurately identify who is the invading god, how to banish it, then perform the ritual.
• Plot-Triggering Death: The Scholar's death inspires the Warrior or the Ministry Man to continue his mission.
• Police Are Useless: Some of them have been replaced by minions of the Enemy. Even for the legit ones, though, you're still a guy with a handgun (in the UK, with its strict anti-gun laws), and you're probably certifiably insane, with a syringe full of illegal drugs in your car. You're lucky if you can bluff your way past them, let alone get any help. The Warrior in particular has difficulty with them due to his criminal past.
• Press Start to Game Over: You can commit suicide at the "start game" screen.
• Press X to Not Die: Rapidly click the mouse to pull your gun away from your head!
• Previous Player-Character Cameo: It's all but outright said that "T" from the Ministry of Occult Affairs is Trilby, some time after 5 Days a Stranger/Trilby's Notes. The Consuming Shadow fanmade wiki actually refers to him as that, and the creator states that they are mostly referred to as this pseudonym to avoid a confusion for those who haven't played the aformentioned games.
• Puppeteer Parasite: The birther is a guy colonized by the small, Spider-like enemies who crawls slowly towards you. Kill the host and a horde of them jumps off his corpse.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: The game, being a game with a cosmic horror theme, has its logo and menus designed around this colour scheme to enhance the sense of fear.
• Redemption Quest: The unlockable character "The Warrior" takes up the quest to fight the shadow to atone for his life of crime.
• Reduced to Dust: The Ministry Man's Golden Ending notes that upon your victory, the bodies of the Shadow's minions simply turned to dust and blew away, leaving nothing behind.
• Resources Management Gameplay: You have only so much time, money, health, and sanity. The trade-offs become important; for example, to get money, you either find it in a dungeon or get it from a job, both of which take up time and risk damage to health and sanity. Similarly, filling your medical kit costs money, and you also have the tough choice of using precious bullets to terminate minions or going into hand-to-hand with them and risking your health. And spells cost sanity to use... but they can also save your hide, or be "I win" buttons under the right circumstances.
• Roguelike: A core part of the game - each playthrough's Big Bad, dungeons, runes and similar are all randomised; permadeath is also a major factor, with each failed run giving you experience for later ones.
• Sanity Meter: Sanity is generally easy to lose and hard to recover. The only thing that permanently restores it is a small number of random events or one of the more helpful runes you may find inscribed on walls.
• Sanity Slippage:
  • The protagonist is already doubting from the beginning if everything he experiences is truly real. It only gets worse from there.
  • Also happens to "T" from the Ministry.
  "Been rolling my cyanide pill around my mouth all morning, wondering if I should bite it. Tastes like one of those chewable vitamins. -T"
• Sequence Breaking: The Ministry Man's specific quirks include already knowing the banishment incantation and only having 24 hours to complete the game, only lacking the identity of the invading god. A possible way of winning the game is to head straight to Stonehenge: since the final dungeon is long and contains lots of clues, its content alone may be enough to identify the right god (that'll require a bit of luck, though).
• Shout-Out:
  • Many of the equippable items reference other Survival Horror games, such as the flashlight (Silent Hill 2) and gun stock (Resident Evil).
  • The "YOU DIED" text is similar to the equivalent text in Dark Souls.
  • The cougher and puker enemies are slightly similar to the lying figure enemies from Silent Hill 2; the cougher in particular also has a similar method of attack (sprays acid mist).
  • The Tall Man's description alludes to the Slender Man mythos, and, of course, Chzo Mythos.
  • One of the text messages calls the Ministry Man "pawn of prophecy". This may be a reference to The Belgariad.
• The Sleepless: The only time Sleep Deprivation is brought up is a random encounter where your character begins to feel their fatigue, and requires either a nap or a strong coffee to avoid the risk of nodding off at the wheel and damaging the car. Apart from this encounter (which is not guaranteed to occur in your playthrough), this trope is played completely straight, with the player character forging through up to 60 hours of constant driving and battle with no ill effects.
• Sliding Scale of Video Game World Size and Scale: "Visit parts of map" variant. You speed across the British Isles by car, from town to town, fighting monsters, finding clues and buying drugs to keep up your Sanity Meter. Actual interactive gameplay is limited to realistic-scaled Dungeons, which are buildings or parks taken over by minions of the various Eldritch Abomination in action. Between each town and dungeon, you get a first-person view of your Player Character driving their car along a highway.
• The Smurfette Principle: Three male player characters (The Scholar, The Ministry Man, The Warrior) and a single female one (The Wizard).
• Spell Book: Here it is where all spells discovered are recorded in. The Wizard already has a completed list of spells.
• Squishy Wizard:
  • Appropriately enough, The Wizard. She gives up her ability to melee attack in exchange for not losing sanity when casting spells (though she still needs to check the runes to keep them in her memory).
  • Cultist enemies are the Wizard's Evil Counterpart; they're surrounded by a shield that lasts until you counter a spell of theirs, at which point they fall apart after a single hit.
• Sound-Only Death: Ending F, where the player runs out of time while on the road. We see the character raise the gun to his head, but unlike the Press X to Not Die minigame, the shot isn’t seen, with it cutting to black and then very quickly transitioning to the game over screen.
• Take Up My Sword: The Warrior's mission begins when he finds the dead Scholar's notes.
• Take Your Time: Averted. Time runs even as you complete sidequests and main objectives. And it is quite possible for you to run out out of time in the Stonehenge.
• Timed Mission:
  • The whole game is one. You have 60 hours (24 if you play as the Ministry Man) to stop the invading god. There's a timer when the player characters travels on the UK's map, a real-time one when you explore a dungeon, and some events (looking for a merchant in town, random events when travelling) consumes time as well.
  • There also are timed missions inside the main game. The Ministry occasionally sends texts asking you to go to a specific place before a timer expires, typically to deliver information to someone or help the locals to defend against the Shadow. Failing to reach the place in time results in the town being corrupted (technically, it turns it into a dungeon instead of a safe area with a merchant and a hospital).
• Triumphant Reprise: The music that plays during the Golden Ending is an alternate version of the Title Theme Tune, which moves the string instruments to a major key and replaces the piano with an electric guitar.
• Who You Gonna Call?: The author of the diary is from a team of three of the best paranormal investigators from the Ministry of Occultism. After one of the team gets possessed by the Shadow and kills the other one, the author notices that they themselves are, or for the most part were, the ones people are supposed to call in such a situation as the world is facing right now, and he is none too happy with realizing that his survival means it all falls on him alone now.
• Wound That Will Not Heal: Damage can sometimes result in a continually bleeding wound, and it will not go away on its own – the only way to get it patched up is by visiting a hospital, as your medkit is unable to remedy the situation. The trope is played completely straight with the Biological Clock challenge, wherein you start the game with a bleeding wound and the hospitals are completely unable to treat it, requiring you to keep on top of your constantly falling health.
• You Have No Chance to Survive: Some text messages from unknown numbers will turn out to be cultists threatening to kill you or your family members in some cruel way.

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