Video Game / Wanted: Dead

Wanted: Dead is a single-player third-person action game developed by Soleil (made of former Valhalla Games Studios developers used to work on Ninja Gaiden and Devil's Third, among others) for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S. It was released on February 14 of 2023.

The player takes control of Lt. Hannah Stone (Fee Marie Zimmermann), a cop who's part of the elite "Zombie Unit", a Law Enforcement, Inc. who works in a cyberpunk version of Hong Kong. The story follows Zombie Unit''s involvement as they get caught up in the conspiracies and power struggles of Mega-Corps as they vie for control of Hong Kong.

The game also features the likeness of Stefanie Joosten (best known as Quiet from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain) as Vivienne, the unit's gunsmith, and promotional materials including songs and TV-style shorts featuring her.

The official website is here, while the trailers are here and here.

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Tropes present in Wanted: Dead:

• 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: Some of the anime cutscenes mix the 2D animation with 3D effects, such as the taxi Cinnamon takes in her backstory video.
• Advertised Extra: Cinnamon is featured prominently in the game's marketing, to the point she had an animated music video showcasing her day-to-day life but she's a very minor character that only appears at the intro.
• Alternate History: The takes place in an alternate 2022, where a great war between the east and the west destroyed the world order, allowing the Mega-Corps to take over.
• An Arm and a Leg: Hannah can randomly slice off the limbs of her enemies in battle, which often doesn't immediately stop them from being a threat.
• Animal-Eared Headband: In "Neko-Chan Mode", Hannah dons a cute pair of cat ears.
• Artificial Human: Dauer Synthetics created synthetic humans to serve as blue-collar slaves, with the easiest way to them apart from humans being by the fact they don't have hair. It's later revealed they're not synths at all, just (heavily cyborg-ified) humans who were willingly enslaved and had their memories and bodies heavily altered. Dauer Synthetics merely portrays them as synths to get away with enslaving them.
• Artificial Limbs: Given the Cyberpunk setting, artificial limbs are commonplace, with the protagonist herself having a robotic arm.
• Art Shift: Flashbacks to Hannah's past is seen via anime Cutscenes, in contrast to the realistic art style in the rest of the game.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: All the gangster mooks in the third level are wearing intimidating business suits.
• Battle in the Rain: It starts to rain during the second phase of the Final Boss fight against Richter. It even begins with a Dramatic Thunder synchronized with Richter's battle cry.
• Better than Sex: Herzog enjoys ramen soup so much, he emphasizes by claiming that it's better than sex.
• Big Eater: Hannah eats a lot, to the shock of her teammates. Her long list of food requests is a Running Gag in scenes at the diner. There's even a mini-game where Hannah and Herzog have a competition about eating ramen.
  • Possibly Fridge Brilliance; given the state of her old prison cell, the food can’t be much better, so it makes sense that she’d eat a lot upon being released. Or maybe it’s a by-product of being a cyborg.
• Bland-Name Product: The names of the soft drinks in the universe are parodies of real-life ones, such as Depsi for Pepsi and Vitarade for Gatorade.
• Blood-Splattered Warrior: When fighting in melee, Hannah quickly becomes covered in the blood and guts of the enemies she's slicing apart, to the point she has to shower when she gets to HQ after every mission.
• Bloody Hilarious: Blood gets spilled all over Hannah when she's using melee attacks on enemies, to the point she can look downright comical as if she just dunked over a pool of blood.
• Bolivian Army Ending: The last we see of Stone is that she is cornered by what remains of Engels security troops, as Stone, after speaking out her last words toward the orphaned kid that was part of one of her case before, cocks her handgun. Her survival is most likely guaranteed though considering what remains of Engles security troops shown are just the armed trooper ones.
• Boom, Headshot!: When Mustafa makes a move for his gun, Cortez kills him with a single bullet to the head before he reaches it.
• Chainsaw Good: Hannah can find chainsaws on missions, and temporarily equip them to deal gruesome kills on enemies.
• China Takes Over the World: The story takes place in an Alternate Timeline where China was victorious in a war against America and NATO, and Chinese and Russian Mega-Corps promptly took over the world, turning Hong Kong into a dystopic hellhole where Mega-Corps rule.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Herzog is "the weird one" in Zombie Unit, being a Motor Mouth with bizarre options and often telling awkward stories from his past that nobody wants to hear.
• Combat Breakdown: In the second phase of August's boss battle, he gets so angry he throws away his gun and just starts resorting to Good Old Fisticuffs, forcing Hannah to use the katana more to defend herself against him.
• Company Town: Hong Kong is run by MegaCorp Dauer Synthetics in all but name, with Captain claiming the city's administration basically belongs to the company.
• Cooking Show: A In-Universe example. Before she moved to Hong Kong and became a gunsmith, Vivienne was a celebrity chef who hosted her own cooking show called "Vivienne's Late Night Chow". There are even official episodes of it uploaded to youtube. The show also contains various gags about how the outside world is actually extremely depressing, such as the fact Vivienne only works with synthetic food and cloned meat.
• Crapsack World: After a devastating Great Offscreen War shook the Earth's balance and allowed Mega-Corps to take over all around the world, turning the planet into a Dystopia so horrible that people are willingly selling themselves off as slaves.
• Crazy Cat Lady: Vivienne owns several cats, to the point she ran out of names for them and just started calling them by numbers, and they can be found all over the police station. The rest of Zombie Unit often make jokes about her cat obsession, with Herzog complaining that she always smells like cats' piss and Doc compares her to the The Simpsons Crazy Cat Lady.
• Creepy Monotone: Mr. Holiday speaks with a robotic monotone voice. He was actually The Voiceless before his Robotic Reveal, since his voice would have been a dead giveaway.
• Critical Existence Failure: Hannah can slice her opponents' arms and legs off with her katana, and, while weakened, this doesn't stop them from being able to keep on fighting until they drop dead. This makes sense for cyborg enemies, though (what appears to be) fully flesh-and-blood humans don't get such excuse.
• Cyberpunk: The game is set in a cyberpunk version of Hong Kong, with a mix of advanced weaponry and lo-tech '90s retro.
• Da Chief: After a mission, there's usually a scene where Captain Simmons chews out Hannah for how her reckless Destructive Saviour behavior is putting them all in jeopardy. But despite his attitude, he always lets them off the hook in the end. Vivienne even describes him as "the angry captain who's always angry".
• Deadpan Snarker: Doc is the Zombie Unit's dedicated snarker, usually having some sarcastic remark to any development, and always with a deadpan, sardonic tone.
• Delayed Causality: At the end of Kolchak's boss fight, both she and Hannah slash at each other with their swords. Then there's a Dramatic Pause before Kolchak falls over dead while Hannah sheats her katana.
• Destructive Savior: Zombie Squad is known for getting the job done, but with a huge amount of property damage done in the process. Apparently the Dauer Synthetics insurance agent Madame Wong is often breathing down Captain Simmons's neck due to it.
• Downer Ending: The chief is dead. The Zombie Unit has basically nowhere to go apart from possibly helping the synth uprising. And while the Zombie Unit practically survives apart from the chief, they still have the record of war criminal set up by the multinational Continental Standard.
• Dramatic Gun Cock: When a gangster attempts to stop Hannah from entering a building, she merely cocks her gun and tells him "don't test me". He decides to follow her advice and lets her through without an issue.
• Dual Boss: Mr. Holiday is fought alongside a copy of himself, which also serves as a Robotic Reveal, since before he was just presented as Richter's bodyguard, but the fact there are multiple of him implies he's a mass-produced synth model.
• Dual Wielding: Mr. Holiday fights by either dual-wielding knives or going Guns Akimbo.
• Easy-Mode Mockery: The easiest mode in the game, "Neko-Chan Mode" also has Hannah wearing a cat-themed Animal-Eared Headband.
• Everybody Lives: With the exception of the chief, everybody in the Zombie Unit survives.
• Fanservice with a Smile: Cinnamon, the attractive waitress who works at a diner frequented by Hannah and her unit. She is acutely aware she was hired for her looks, and according to her promotional music video, endures all kinds of sexual harassment with a smile on her face, as long as it gives her better tips.
• A Father to His Men: Captain Simmons treats his subordinates like his own children, which is presumably why he lets Hannah get away with being a rogue cop so often. A file indicates he was this back when he was in the military too.
• Feet-First Introduction: Madame Wong is introduced with a panning-up shot staring from her feet as she walks up to Hannah.
• Friendly Fireproof: To your advantage, considering the difficulty of the game and how any enemy can be distracted by attacking your teammates, and unlike similar games, your teammates can take down enemies well enough.
• Friendly Sniper: Herzog is an ace sniper who's known for his jovial attitude, though his teammates are also often annoyed by his behavior.
• Foul Cafeteria Food: There's a dedicated cutscene showing Hannah's displeasure with the food at the police HQ cafeteria, such as the gelatine being so sticky it gets stuck on her spoon.
• Flunky Boss: August is fought alongside several of the blue-collar synth mooks.
• Gag Censor: If Hannah kills an enemy with the chainsaw, a goofy "censored" sticker appears to cover the gruesome chainsaw kill.
• Genre Mashup: The game's combat is a blend of Third-Person Shooter and Hack and Slash combat with a sword, with the player being able to switch between the two forms of combat to deal enemies, from getting into cover and shooting them up or getting up close and cutting them to pieces.
• Gorn: Severed limbs is a commonplace, and many enemies can survive having their arms or legs severed.
• Great Offscreen War: A big devastating war between East and West occurred in the game's backstory, with several characters being veterans of said conflict.
• Gun Nut: Vivienne, the team's gunsmith, is a total gun nut who can go on long spiels about the advantage and disadvantages of certain firearms, which Hannah listens to dispassionately.
• Guns Are Worthless: Downplayed. Guns aren't worthless, but they're much less lethal than they are in real life, to justify the melee combat and why Hannah wields a katana in battle. Even a normal human can survive several rounds being pumped into them in gameplay.
• Hack and Slash: The melee combat is Hack-'n-slash with a katana, with Hannah cutting up her enemies with her combos.
• Healthcare Motivation: Hannah got involved with Dauer Synthetics due to needing money to pay for her son's treatment.
• Hero Insurance: Since Zombie Unit is basically Law Enforcement, Inc. for Dauer Synthetics, they also have their own dedicated insurance agent in Madame Wong, who's not pleased that their Destructive Savior behavior is costing millions to the company.
• High-Pressure Blood: When enemies get their limbs cut off, it's usually accompanied by a high-pressure stream of blood jutting out of the wound.
• Invisibility Cloak: Kolchak has a high-tech cloak that renders her invisible, which she uses as a gimmick for her boss fight.
• Jack of All Trades: Vivienne is apparently extremely talented at whatever she tries to do. She used to be an athlete that won several Olympic medals (in different categories), then became a celebrity host to a successful Cooking Show, and is now an ace gunsmith that works with the Hong Kong police.
• Katanas Are Better:
  • Hannah might have an arsenal of firearms in her person, but she still wields a samurai sword in melee combat, and it remains her most constantly useful weapon throughout the game.
  • Richter also has his own high-tech katana that he uses to fight Hannah during his boss fight.
• Karaoke Box: There's a karaoke mini-game where Hannah and Vivienne sing karaoke at their dinner hangout.
• Lascivious Beauty Mark: The attractive and flirtatious waitress Cinnamon has several beauty marks on her, including one on her breasts, which a Male Gaze camera shot on her cleavage makes all but impossible to miss.
• Lady in a Power Suit: Madame Wong is a well-dressed woman who wears an impeccable business suit, which obviously contrasts with Hanna's casual wear. Most of the guys find her intimidating just by the way she dresses.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Dauer Synthetics can erase people's memories, which is how they get so many people to believe that they're synths.
• Loss of Identity: "Hannah Stone" is actually Emma Lautner, who subscribed into an ominous deal with Continental Standard as Emma's desperate for her son's medical treatment.
• Lovable Sex Maniac: Herzog is sex obsessed, with most of his wacky stories involving nudity, his ogling of Cinnamon, and him getting rather handsy with Vivienne. His file even says he joined the military because he likes women in uniforms. Despite this, his teammates only see it as an annoying quirk rather than a serious issue.
• Male Gaze: There's a close-up shot of Cinnamon's butt and cleavage when Herzog "accidentally" drops a fork for her to pick up.
• Meaningful Name: It's pretty easy to suspect that Dauer Synthetics isn't on the up-and-up considering Dauer is read like "Dour".
• The Medic: The appropriately named Doc is the Zombie's squad medical expert, being also able to do autopsies. In gameplay, he can also revive Hannah once in case she falls during battle.
• MegaCorp:
  • Dauer Synthetics is an absurdly powerful corporation due to developing the best robotic technology and is basically at fault for the world turning into Cyberpunk. After the first mission, they went bankrupt, and after the second mission, the Zombie Unit discovers an Awful Truth about Dauer's finest product.
  • Engel Security is a major PMC corporation that focuses on the military and is aiming seems to want to take over Dauer Synthetics' spot as the top company in Hong Kong, especially after Dauer went bankrupt and words leak about the aforementioned Awful Truth.
  • Continental Standard is the top dog, the multinational corporation that's basically behind everything that's happening in the story, including Stone's Loss of Identity.
• Mission Control: Vivienne often serves as this to the Zombie Unit, giving them advice during missions and providing them with upgrades via her mobile drone.
• Mook Chivalry: Some of Hannah's finishers can be lengthy, but the enemies will just wait without attack as Hannah kills their colleague.
• Naked People Are Funny: Herzog's wacky stories often involve him dealing with naked people in bizarre situations. Vivienne lampshades this, saying there's an absurd amount of male nudity in his stories.
• One-Hit Kill: The chainsaw kills every enemy in one hit, including the Juggernauts.
• One-Man Army: Hannah and her Zombie unit teammates can mow down hundreds of enemies by themselves, despite them technically being nothing more than well-trained war veterans.
• Parental Abandonment: Hannah says the father of her child bailed on her the moment she found out she was pregnant, turning her into a Struggling Single Mother.
• Private Military Contractors:
  • Dauer Synthetics has the Manu Military program that the protagonists belong to which is basically PMC that seems to primarily work with past criminals and do mercenary work, such as serving as Law Enforcement, Inc. in Hong Kong.
  • Engel Security, is another much bigger PMC that is hoping to replace Dauer Synthetics place as the top MegaCorp Hong Kong government, and they serve as a major antagonistic force.
• Red Right Hand: Hannah's right hand has been replaced with a robotic limb. When we first see it in prison, it looks obviously mechanical, but once she's recruited, she paints it in order for it to look more human-like.
• Replacement Goldfish: Hannah's desire to adopt Timothy is revealed to be tied to her forgotten past, where she gave up herself so her son could get the treatment he needed.
• Retraux:
  • The UI has a noticeably 16-bit looking font straight out of EarthBound (1994).
  • Space Runaway, a full-featured, playable 16-bit arcade Shoot 'Em Up.
• Rugged Scar: Herzog's most noticeable facial feature is the two scars running across his face.
• Rule of Sexy: Hannah only wears outfits that leave her midriff bared. This includes her Bulletproof Vest, even though it's nonsensical to leave her midriff bare in a combat situation.
• See the Invisible: During Kolchak's boss fight, the player has to figure out where the invisible Kolchak is by watching her footsteps in the water. She becomes briefly visible upon being hit.
• Sequel Hook: So many. From what happens for the Zombie Unit afterwards into whatever the "war criminal" records of the Zombie Unit members were true or not.
• Servant Race: The synths were specifically created as Artificial Humans to be used for blue-collar work, being basically a slave race. It's later revealed they're not even Artificial Humans, they're just desperate people who had to sell themselves off as slaves, and they're only assigned as synths so people will accept them basically being enslaved.
• Shoulders-Up Nudity: During the Shower Scenes, the camera always stays above Hannah's shoulders.
• Shout-Out:
  • Vivienne refers to Hannah and Doc as "Agent Mulder and Agent Scully".
  • Doc calls Vivienne "Eleanor Abernathy", as a reference to The Simpsons Crazy Cat Lady.
  • Madame Wong and her bodyguard Mr. X are based on the Resident Evil characters Ada Wong and Mr. X.
  • Vivienne throwing a rocket launcher to Hannah near the end of the game so she can kill the boss is also a Resident Evil reference, as it's basically a series tradition.
  • Space Runaway combines Gradius and Macross.
  • The flashes of civilization that happens after the Final Boss death in Space Runaway brings into mind the "flashes of civilization" that happens in the final boss fight of Metal Black. Fortunately, the hero of Space Runaway got away safely and the only planet that is destroyed are the antagonists'.
  • The multinational MegaCorp behind many of the in-game incidents and events are called the Continental Standard.
  • "More male nudity than a Joaquin Phoenix movie" is most likely a reference to I'm Still Here. Could also retroactively apply to Beau Is Afraid.
• Shower Scene: Whenever Hannah gets back to HQ after a mission, there's always a sene where she showers in the locker room, to wash away all the gore she accumulated.
• Smoking Is Cool: Hannah's constantly smoking, and some cutscenes make a show of animating her lighting up a cigarette and smoking, in order to invoke the "coolness" factor of smoking.
• Someone Has to Do It: It's highly implied that society as a whole is more or less aware that Daur Synthetics' synth technology is just one big lie, and that synths are actual humans. However, they quietly ignore it because somebody has to perform all of the dirty, dangerous, hard labor to support modern society and it's just easier to fool yourselves into believing it's all being done by entities that aren't alive to begin with.
• Sound-Only Death: When Richter kills Captain Simmons in his office, the scene cuts to the hallway outside while we hear the gunshot.
• The Speechless: Cortez is mute and can only communicate via sign language, which is conveniently translated to the viewer via subtitles.
• Spider Tank: The first boss in the game is a spider-like tank appropriately named "Spider Tank", and stomps around the arena on its agile mechanical legs while firing a barrage of guns at Hannah. Hannah doesn't have the firepower to take it out by herself, so she has to destroy its jammer so it can be destroyed via an artillery strike. The other two at the end of the game require Vivienne's rocket launcher.
• Struggling Single Mother:
  • Cinnamon works three jobs as diner waitress, a bartender, and an erotic dancer, to support her children.
  • Hannah's backstory is that she got pregnant as a teen and soon got abandoned by the father, leaving her to care for her infant child by herself. When her son gets sick, she makes a deal with Continental Standard, essentially selling herself into slavery and becoming their memory-wiped soldier.
• The Reveal:
  • The 'synths' are actually not synths at all, but regular desperate people who sold themselves off to Dauer Synthetics, having had their memory wiped and body heavily modified with their robotics. Dauer only claims their synths to justify slaving them.
  • Hannah's real name is Emma Lauthner and she was a teenage mother who also sold herself to Dauer Synthetics and ended up being mind-wiped. But instead of being made a synth worker, she was made into a war criminal to be "enslaved" by the Trading Bars for Stripes program instead.
• Sword and Gun: Hannah can quickly switch from slicing up enemies with one hand, then riddling them with bullets with the other. A lot of her special attacks even have her finishing off enemies with a point-blank shot.
• Take Cover!: The game allows Hannah to take cover behind objects. This is often the case when the enemies use overwhelming ranged attacks.
• Tattoo as Character Type: Hannah is covered in colored tattoos, to illustrate to her rebellious tendencies and her past as a criminal. It even makes her stand out as a cop, since as Timothy points out, a normal police officer isn't covered in ink.
• Teen Pregnancy: Hannah's backstory is that she became pregnant when she was only 15 years old, and she soon became a Struggling Single Mother trying to support her son alone, which is how she got involved with Dauer Synthetics.
• Toplessness from the Back. One of the Shower Scenes has Hannah with the back to the camera as she bathes, which puts emphasis on the numbered tattoos on her back.
• Trading Bars for Stripes: The Manu Military has a "rehabilitation program" for convicted war criminals, meaning they're basically recruiting prisoners as mercenaries. Hannah and her Zombie Unit are one such group, and they even work as Hong Kong's Law Enforcement, Inc..
• Turned Against Their Masters: After Dauer Synthetics files for bankruptcy, all their synthetic workers are sentenced to being recalled and having their memories wiped. The synths don't like the idea, so several of them become rebels, led by August. The messed-up part is that they're not even Artifical Humans. They're modified flesh-and-blood humans who sold themselves into slavery and had their minds wiped once already.
• Unintelligible Accent: Hannah has a thick Swiss accent that Vivienne claims she and the rest of the Zombie unit can't always understand what she's saying.
• Unnecessary Combat Roll: Hannah's primary means of evading damage when out in the open is to roll out of the way of attacks.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: August escapes Hannah after his first boss fights via a helicopter ride, though it requires October to sacrifice herself for him.

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