Video Game / Wizard with a Gun

Wizard with a Gun is an online multi-player Roguelike Survival Sandbox game developed by Galvanic Games and published by Devolver Digital. It is playable on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. It's best described as Don't Starve Together, but with more wizards and guns.

You play as a customizable Gunmancer—a type of wizard who casts spells in the form of magic bullets from a gun of choice—who crash-landed in a procedurally generated post-apocalyptic landscape called the Shatter, destroyed by beings of Chaos. Along your journey, you come across a tower standing outside of time, built by the gods and housing an artifact known as the Chronomancer's Wheel. This wheel is capable of reversing time, and it was used by Hilda Bulla—the creator of gunmancy—along with her band of Riders to perpetually push back the Chaos in a futile effort to prevent the end.

The tower serves as your Player Headquarters, and you're left with complete access to the Chronomancer's Wheel. Unfortunately, the gears powering the wheel have long since been lost, and the Riders carrying them have been stranded in different parts of the tower. Worse yet, the Riders aren't exactly trusting of you, so your only option is to find them and take the gears by force. But luckily, they're not the only ones carrying gears; smaller gears can also be obtained by killing various monsters scattered across the map.

From here on, your objective is to explore the Shatter and hunt down the gears, fix the wheel, and find and defeat all the riders to further rewind the clock and find a way to stop Chaos. All within five minutes before the Apocalypse begins.

The game was released on October 17, 2023^note However, the PC release was pushed back a day early to October 16, to avoid clashing with the Steam release of Diablo IV. The developers plan to continuously update the game with new content via a planned roadmap.

The game's first major update, "Bounty of Guns", released on March 7th, 2024 and added a new bounty hunting mechanic, new enemies and minibosses, quests, events, and most importantly more new gun types and a whole bevy of over 50 unique bounty guns.

See also Enter the Gungeon, another gun-centric Roguelike title, though it's an action roguelike rather than a survival game.

The game is in no way related to Wizards with Guns.

Wizard with a Gun features examples of:

• 20 Bear Asses: If you want or need to, you can set yourself a task to gather the materials needed for crafting something so you can remember what you need to grab while exploring the Shatter. This can of course include the numerous materials gathered by killing the wildlife and locals. On a broader scale, most upgrades and research require Arcana, which can only be obtained by slaying Chaos creatures and closing Rifts, meaning any task you set for yourself that requires the gathering of Arcana will most likely involve this to some degree.
• Ability Mixing: Many of the game's bullets and spells can interact with the environment in unique ways that allow for specific combos. Is that enemy standing in water? Shoot them with Shock bullets to create a deadly chain reaction! Are they boxed in an enclosed space? Use Force bullets to knock them into the walls for big damage! Did you lather them up with Oil bullets? They'll take more damage from Fire bullets! Are they frozen solid thanks to your Ice bullets? Poison them to get unique items! In fact, there are many materials that can only be obtained in the Shatter by combining abilities, such as shooting Mechana with shock bullets to get Charged Metals. There are also innumerable Powders that act in this manner, offering useful synergies such as homing while an enemy is hit by a specific status effect.
• Abnormal Ammo: Bullets are called spells by most text and characters, which makes sense given that they're a stand-in for more traditional magic, with all the effects one would expect a standard wizard to be capable of, including burning, freezing, electrocution, poison, charming enemies, teleportation, and summoning.
• Aerith and Bob: Character names can range from the mundane to the unusual. One notable example of this is a character called Kolanna being the child of another character called Harold.
• After the End: A very unique example. Since the Chronomancer's Wheel can only roll back time to just five minutes before the end of the world and you and all the Riders are trapped inside the Tower, the current state of the world is functionally this despite technically being before the end, since two hundred years have passed since the Stable Time Loop was created by Hilda to ward off the apocalypse.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: After the First Editions rebelled, subsequent Mechana were written with very basic runes to prevent them from rising up once again and keep them performing menial tasks. Despite this, your Gunmancer can befriend several unique friendly Mechana who have mysteriously developed unique personalities, the ability to speak and an affinity for wearing hats.
• All Deserts Have Cacti: Downplayed, as the Barren Sea is much less of a Sea of Sand type desert and more of a place where cacti would accurately grow. However, these cacti are explicitly called sea cacti, implying that they too are remnants from when the Barren Sea was an actual sea even though no known variety of cactus grows underwater.
• Alpha Strike: Lightning Strike bullets deal absolutely insane single-target damage, but have a very long cooldown to balance them out, making them excellent for finishing off a particularly troublesome foe or one-tapping a weaker enemy, as well as taking sizable chunks off of bosses' healthbars.
• Amphibian Assault: Phroggs are massive, monstrous froglike creatures which congest the Fell, and are capable of shooting gobs of poison at your Gunmancer. Their eyes are valuable crafting materials for poisons and other alchemical reagents. A unique one, the Decayed Phrogg, is a Fell miniboss.
• And I Must Scream: Unlocking one of the Tower Gates in the Fell introduces you to The Wizard in Amber, a wizard who has been sealed in amber and is unable to move but is able to still coherently think. Given that he's stuck in the Tower and therefore can't die of natural causes and that you can't rescue him in any which way, he must be completely insane by now, as he tries to offer you teeth and dust as a reward in exchange for saving him.
• Ascended Meme: The frequent memetic comparisons made between the game and the "Shadow Wizard Money Gang" meme have been officially recognized and canonized with the "Shadow Money" free DLC costume, which features blinged-out robes very similar to what the Shadow Wizard Money Gang are commonly depicted wearing.
• BFG: Cannon Wands are about as big as your Gunmancer, who visible struggles to even hold them straight up. They can fire a powerful but slow-moving mortar shot up into the air which can deal devastating damage if it connects with something on the ground, though you can only fire one shot at a time before needing to reload.
• Bomb Throwing Anarchist: Quite literally. Fell Anarchists were once farmers who turned to Anarchism once Hilda gave them the gift of Gunmancy, and now shoot at anything in their sight with their machine wands. One of their attacks is even to throw a bomb which explodes in a wide radius.
• Boring, but Practical: Destruction Bullets apply no fancy status effects and have virtually no Powder synergies, but sometimes, pure unadulterated damage is all you need for collecting materials or killing enemies.
• Boss in Mook Clothing:
  • Construct Mechana are quite strong for where they're encountered, being huge, lumbering robots with a giant health pool which can heal themselves and create structures around them, not to mention how they're armed to the teeth with weaponry.
  • Higher-level Chaos creatures like Chaos Devourers and Emmissaries of Chaos can do disturbingly high damage and destroy a lot of terrain before you can take them down, making fights with Dormant Rifts that much more hectic because of the amount of Chaos goop getting flung everywhere.
  • Koleye's Kingsguard are towering foes who are always accompanied by large Vulfs and have a surprisingly varied moveset, with axe slashes, Shockwave Stomps and ice magic, all of which is deadly at close range while the Kingsguard themself is capable of tanking hits left and right.
  • Mage Hunters are the bane of Alders, and for good reason. They can rapid-fire highly-damaging projectiles at you and close the gap between you and them instantly with a ferocious slash from their dagger. They're also relentless pursuers and will follow you until either you are they are dead. Additionally, they have level 19 armor^note for perspective, that's higher than the Harbinger of Chaos, which is not easy to bypass even at the point in the late-game where you'll encounter them.
• Bounty Hunter: The Bounty of Guns update allows your Gunmancer to become one of these with Bounties, which allow you to track down powerful enemies out in the Shatter with unique modifiers who grant powerful guns with unique abilities once their bounties are turned in to a Bounty Mechana.
• Bringing Back Proof: In order to redeem a collected Bounty, you'll need to bring the bounty the creature in question drops to a Bounty Mechana to receive your reward.
• Bubblegloop Swamp: The Fell was once the noble kingdom of Valyn, but is now nothing more than a poisonous marsh teeming with equally poisonous wildlife. Even the basic wood you can collect there is rotten.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": There are numerous creatures out in the world which have magical, fantastical names but are more or less real-world animals or mythological creatures. Lynxes are called Jynxes, Toads are called Phibbs, Unicorns are Billycorns, etc.
• Cessation of Existence: Hilda's experiments with Soul Tethering eventually led her to find that since the soul doesn't go anywhere when someone dies, there is no afterlife and their soul simply ceases to exist. As such, tethering a person's soul is the only way to bring them back from being dead.
• Charged Attack: Charge wands are unique in that their bullets can only be shot by holding down the fire button and then releasing them.
• Cool Gate: The largest gate into the Tower that the Godwizards left behind was the Oculus, a huge trapezohedral-shaped gate which can only be found by defeating the Harbinger of Chaos. It's currently unopenable, but is clearly planned to be traversable in a future update.
• Crosshair Aware: Generally, enemies telegraph their non-projectile attacks by showing a reticle of where their attacks will land before attacking.
• Crossover: If you own both Wizard with a Gun and Cult of the Lamb on the same platform, you'll unlock two Cult of the Lamb-inspired items for use in-game: The Scytheman's Outfit, a costume based on that game's Scytheman enemies, and The Red Crown shotgun, based on the crown that the Lamb wears.
• Cruelty Is the Only Option: The farmers of the Fell and the barbarians of Koleye are just some of the few enemies in the game which don't attack you on sight, and are friendly enough that you can talk to them even if you don't understand the cryptic language they speak. You'll still have to kill multiple of them to claim their gears and progress the story, and they don't take kindly to you looting their chests, either.
• Cthulhumanoid: The farmers who live in the Fell are green-skinned octopus-like humanoids. Young Joshua, the smith who can make you upgraded weapons, is among their ranks.
• Damage Over Time: Fire Bullets and Poison Bullets allows you to accumulate levels of damage which slowly deplete over time. Poison levels can be cashed out for different effects with Poison Finisher Bullets, while Fire Damage will stop depleting for a short period if an afflicted enemy has been hit with Oil Bullets.
• Degraded Boss: Each new Chaos creature you encounter is first introduced as a much tougher boss encounter in the wilderness (which you can repeatedly fight in subsequent runs for Arcana and Chaos materials), and will instead be found as a normal enemy summoned by Dormant Rifts in the next biome you unlock.
• Dented Iron: Some of the Mechana you can encounter out in the shatter are in much worse states of disrepair than others, with rusted metal plating and missing machinery, due to the toll time has taken on them. They'll sometimes spontaneously deactivate for a second after doing an attack, unlike their more preserved counterparts.
• Desert Skull: The skulls of large fishlike creatures can be encountered in the Barren Sea.
• Despair Event Horizon: Hilda's final log in the tower suggests she and the Riders are slowly going toward one of these, as the many years they've spent fighting Chaos and trying to stop the end of the world has taken a visible toll on them physically and mentally. She ponders that maybe the only thing left to do is to give up and let Chaos win.
  Hilda: As the Bard says, all things come to an end.
• Disaster Scavengers: The advent of Chaos and the collapse of the Imperium attracted looters from far and wide to plunder the remnants of the Shatter for any lost knowledge, tech or valuables they could find. In-game, Scavengers can be found in every biome of the Shatter and always carry a plethora of that biome's goods with them which they drop when killed.
• Disciplines of Magic: The four magic schools are Alchemist, Sorcerer, Warlock and Magus. Alchemists focus on the magical applications of physics, Sorcerers hone in on destruction magic, Warlocks are adept at creating poisons and hallucinogenic toxins and Magi concern themselves with transmutation and construction magic.
• Drone of Dread: Encountering extremely high-level Chaos creatures is accompanied by a strange and eerie buzzing sound.
• Elemental Powers: The most basic bullets use fire, lightning, ice, poison, and force.
• Eldritch Abomination: The forces of Chaos appear to be entities of raw magic, and have a strong desire to destroy all matter around them. Many Chaos enemies even have tentacles.
• The Empire: The Imperium, up until it collapsed in the wake of the apocalypse. Some holdouts still remain, however, and scavengers can be found amidst the ruins, searching for magical relics.
• Enemy Civil War: The Barbarians of Koleye are in the middle of a bloody feud between two different factions supporting King Harold and his child Kolanna, respectively.
• Enemy Summoner: Approaching a Dormant Chaos Rift will cause it to wake up and start summoning Chaos creatures to defend itself. Killing the creatures it summons is the only way to make it vulnerable to damage.
• Ennio Morricone Pastiche: Appropriately, entering the Barren Sea makes the music go full-on Spaghetti Western, complete with choirlike vocals and electric guitar.
• Everything Breaks: Not only can you destroy every single object and deconstruct every floor tile in the game that isn't made out of Godsmarble, but Chaos creatures constantly secrete fluid which breaks down and destroys everything around it, meaning you'll need to watch your step when fighting large numbers of them to avoid falling and taking damage or getting inadvertently boxed in.
• Familiar: Jynxes and phibbs, two types of enemies, are noted to have been familiars for alchemists and warlocks, respectively, before the world broke and they were forced into feral lifestyles to survive.
• Fate Worse than Death: In several of the Alchemist Tomes in the Tower, Hilda posits that being trapped in the Tower would be one of these, as the prisoner could never die from hunger, thirst or age and would slowly go mad over the millennia.
• Field of Blades: Downplayed, but it's possible to find numerous giant weapons strewn across Koleye, remnants of the ongoing Enemy Civil War between the barbarians.
• Gang Up on the Human: Averted. Monsters will attack anything that aggros them, whether it's the pandemonium from your own fight spilling into their territory or because Chaos creatures are killing everything in the area.
• Gas Mask Mooks: The Cult of Lead and Swamp Scavengers wear protective respiratory masks to allow themselves to breathe while surrounded by the Fell's toxicity, though it doesn't stop any Sanity Slippage that living deep in the Fell can cause, as Molybdos the Mad can attest to.
• Gatling Good: Miniguns are extremely powerful weapons which can shred anything in their path to pieces, but are balanced out by their low accuracy, high ammo consumption and relatively long reload time.
• The Ghost: There are several characters mentioned in enemy descriptions and other Story Breadcrumbs that never appear in actual gameplay:
  • Multiple lore entries make reference to a "mainland" that all the inhabitants of the Shatter (including you, as you're shown crash-landing an airship in the intro cinematic) once came from, which is where the Gladwell family that Isa belongs to hails from. While this seems to be foreshadowing further content updates, currently the Gladwells and any kind of mainland invasion force that Hilda is worried about are nowhere to be seen.
  • Old Joshua and his High Road Tavern are never encountered in the Fell, despite the fact that the Tavern is supposed to be the Local Hangout for the descendants of the Magi and Old Joshua is implicitly linked to Young Joshua.
  • King Harold of Koleye has disappeared for some time now, leaving behind only his Kingsguard to combat Kolanna's tribe, even though he's their father and is crucial to the political situation in the region. These Kingsguard are instead commanded by General Magna, his great-granddaughter, and Harold himself never shows up.
  • Isaac Bulla is Hilda's brother and is actively chasing her with his militias, but neither he nor they ever appear and the only remnant of his legacy are the Always Chaotic Evil Cult of Steel who only seek power and the means to amass it.
• Giant Enemy Crab: Alders is home to many different varieties of gigantic, dangerous crabs who attack you on sight, but the one that best exemplifies this trope is the Gallows Crustacean, as it's three times bigger than any other crab and is basically a full-fledged boss in its own right with level 20 armor and a powerful Breath Weapon.
• Great Offscreen War: Long before the events of the game, the Imperium waged a brutal war against its neighbors—but especially brutal against Koleye, deploying vicious and dangerous War Constructs to pacify the region which can still be found roaming around the frozen north. There was a second war overlapping this time period where the First Editions rose up against their creators, forcing the Imperium to divert some of its forces away from the Koleye Front.
• Grim Up North: Koleye is to the Northwest of the Imperium, and is a frozen wasteland inhabited by bloodthirsty barbarians, vulfs and worse. Bring Temperature-increasing potions to ward off the cold or your Gunmancer will be tremendously slowed.
• Gun Porn: As to be expected from a game called Wizard with a Gun:
  • The numerous different types of guns that you can create/find combined with the extremely modular spell bullet system and Powder upgrades means that the game outright encourages you to mix-and-match different bullets, gun types and abilities until you create a gun that perfectly fits your playstyle. You could have a wanderbuss that instantly freezes enemies at close quarters before poisoning them, a machine wand that can rapidly raise damaging thorns and cover for you to hide behind, a charge wand which fires deadly One-Hit Kill Lightning Strike bullets, a pistol which immobilizes enemies in stasis and then builds momentum onto them with Force Bullets, etc. The possibilities are almost limitless.
  • The Bounty of Guns update adds over 50 unique guns which can be collected from Bounties, all of which have unique abilities and properties. You could forgo making your own guns entirely and focus solely on just trying to craft the perfect synergies for these unique guns if you wanted to.
• Have You Seen My God?: The trio of gods, each representing a different facet of magic, left the world long ago after imparting their wisdom to mankind, leaving the mortals to fend for themselves. There are hints of a fourth god, but no details of them, or what they'd done to be purged from history, are forthcoming.
• Healing Shiv: Healing bullets, as the name implies, heal whatever they hit rather than harm. A more expensive variant can even revive dead allies, be they another player or a charmed enemy.
• I Call It "Vera": You have the option of renaming any of your guns at a Loading Bench, either to differentiate them from each other or just to give them cool-sounding and badass names.
• Interface Spoiler: The fact that on the main menu there are five Rider pips to be completed but only four Rider entries in the First Edition spoils the fact that the Final Boss is the Harbinger of Chaos, made even more apparent by the fact that you can't scan the unnamed weaker versions of it that you face in each biome, leaving its First Edition entry suspiciously blanked out.
• An Interior Designer Is You: Resources can be used to fix up the Tower and decorate it. Specific furnishings have to be learned by scanning them in the world before they can be crafted, however.
• In-Universe Game Clock: The Shatter follows a day-night cycle and keeps track of how many days you've spent in it without the world ending in the top right corner.
• Item Crafting: Using raw materials gathered from the world, the player can craft various tiers of weapons, ammunition, gunpowder, crafting and research stations, and furniture to decorate the Tower with.
• Limit Break: Creating a Disease Research Station allows you to research Poison Finisher Bullets, a specific category of bullets that allows you to turn accumulated poison levels on an enemy into a different effect, whether it be a cloud of poison gas, stunning them momentarily or just converting the poison into raw damage.
• Made of Indestructium: Objects made out of Godsmarble are said to have been created by the gods themselves, including the immensely powerful and indestructible Godsmachines like the Chronomancer's Wheel. Tellingly, these are they only items you can't destroy or deconstruct.
• Mage Marksman: Of the Magic Gunman variety. In-universe, this is known as Gunmancy, and it entails channeling magic through special guns and bullets.
• Mage Killer: The people of Alders don't take kindly to magic, so any Gunslingers or scavengers trying to plumb the Barren Sea for loot would take care to avoid getting riddled full of bullets by Talia Stareyes and her Mage Hunters. Not only are Mage Hunters some of the strongest enemies in the game, but they're capable of two-shotting your Gunmancer if you're not careful.
• Magitek: Magical machines called mechana are a common sight throughout the game's areas. Powered by magic and given intelligence by special books, they performed many basic tasks before the end of the world. Now they roam free, most serving as little more than cannon fodder and a source of arcane tomes, but some larger, more hostile specimens make players work for the loot.
• Mana: Called arcana, it's a primary resource for researching and upgrading bullets and gunpowders alongside arcane tomes. It's also the most essential building block of matter, a fact which is essential to the three phases of magic - creation (turning arcana into matter and energy), transformation (changing matter and energy into different forms), and destruction (turning matter and energy into arcana) - as well as allowing the player to break down excess resources into arcana.
• Monster Compendium: By scanning enemies with the First Edition, the player can unlock lore about them, as well as new wardrobe enchantments.
• Non-Malicious Monster: There are a precious select few enemies who will not attack you on sight, such as garden-variety Mechana who mostly wander around peacefully chirping to themselves. Of course, you may still need to kill these monsters for materials.
• Noob Cave: The first tutorial island is a short little mini-expedition where you learn how to craft bullets and build things using the Worldbuilder, and the most dangerous things in it are Mechana Guardians and Chaos Mites.
• One Bullet Clips: All guns function in this manner, but the game doesn't penalize you for reloading a magazine by keeping track of your total bullets and the capacity of your mag separately^note probably since you have a limited number of bullets and you have to craft more when you run out, so it would be annoying to constantly be wasting precious bullets by reloading too early, meaning it actively encourages you to reload as much as possible and always have a full mag since there's no ammo wasted by reloading early.
• Order Versus Chaos: Order bullets can be used to repair objects and mechana, and deal massive damage to Chaos enemies.
• Piñata Enemy: Scavengers are reasonably tough enemies who carry a ton of random materials with them in their sacks. They will still try to fight you on sight, but once you get their health low enough they will try to run away.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Played for Laughs; Barnaby is a mechana who wants to become a pirate like the corsairs of the old Aldern Sea, but his knowledge of what pirates are extends about to "guys who wear cool hats", and all that it takes to "join" his "crew" is to wear a Corsair Hat near him. His "reward" for joining his crew is to give you his treasure chest, which is just filled with 50-stacks of Fine Sand.
• Place Beyond Time: The Tower, the highly customizable main hub of the game, where resources are stored, research is performed, and the world is reset after its total destruction.
• Random Event: The Bounty of guns update adds Surprise Events, which cause interesting altercations for your Gunmancer to run into, such as an airship full of Cult of Steel Gunslingers descending upon you to do battle.
• The Remnant: All the Gunslingers you can encounter out in the Shatter consist of of renegade splinter factions of a group called the Society of Armed Wizards, which was once a powerful institution in the Imperium but is not nothing more than said groups of bandits.
• Resurrective Immortality: Aligning your Gunmancer's soul to a Soul Tether as you do at the beginning of the game allows you to transplant their soul into a new body with all of their memories when they die, effectively making them unkillable.
• Revive Kills Zombie: Order bullets are normally supposed to be used for repairing structures that have been damaged, but they are also extremely damaging against Chaos creatures. Thus, there's nothing stopping you from constructing and attuning a specialized gun just for killing Chaos using Order bullets.
• Sand Is Water: The Barren Sea is the dried-up ocean that was once Alders, and it's home to myriad sea life such as Anglers, terrestrial predatory fish which have somehow managed to sustain a living population even after the sea disappeared.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: Charm bullets do no real damage, but gradually fill up a charmed status meter on an enemy they hit, with the number of bullets required varying depending on the bullet level, enemy level, and enemy type. Once it's filled up, you have an ally that will fight for you until it dies. There are even different types of gunpowder specifically designed to be used for charm bullets that increase the strength of charmed enemies.
• Shadowed Face, Glowing Eyes: The game's artstyle means that all humanoid characters have faces obscured by blackness with their only discernible features being their colored eyes.
• Shifting Sand Land: The Barren Sea is an extremely hostile desert filled to them brim with terrifying monsters and mage hunters all too eager to gun you down. It used to be a vast ocean before something happened to make all the water dry up, which is why you can still find shipwrecks of corsair vessels, sandstone fossils in the shape of coral and the skulls of huge sea monsters dotted around the landscape. It also has sand patches which increase your temperature and start damaging you if you stand on them for too long.
• Shout-Out: The achievement gained for collecting 100 bounties is called "Just A Humble Bounty Hunter".
• Songs in the Key of Panic: If you stay out long enough in the Shatter that the world begins to end, the background music will become "Chaos Reigns", an incredibly tense rising track that keys you in that you need to get back into the Tower now lest you become overwhelmed by Chaos creatures.
• Spell Book: Arcane tomes are a crucial resource used primarily for research and dropped by several types of enemies and parts of the environment.
• Spell Crafting: Of a sort. While bullets have well-defined traits and can't be directly modified, they can be improved by powders applied to guns to give them new abilities, such as faster speed, trails of fire or poison, homing on targets, and various forms of synergy with other bullet types.
• Sprite/Polygon Mix: In the vein of the artstyle of Don't Starve, the game uses a combination of 2.5D sprites and an isometric 3D background to give the illusion of a fully 3D environment.
• Stalked by the Bell: After you leave the tower, you've only got five minutes to explore the Shatter, though you can extend that time by killing Chaos creatures and drinking Chaos Absorber potions. Once time runs out, the world will end and the map will be overrun by Chaos, making the odds of survival more difficult but vastly increasing opportunities to collect Arcana. This mechanic forms the core Roguelike loop of the game, as no matter how long you stay out in the Shatter, you'll have to return to the tower and reset everything eventually.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Koleye, being a Grim Up North location, has patches of snow which slowly decrease the temperature of your Gunmancer and slow them down, as well as frozen bodies of water that you can quickly slide across.
• Summon Magic: Five types of bullets can summon useful items to serve as barriers or deal damage to enemies, including boulders, metal balls, thorny vines, temporary ground, and ice walls.
• The Spymaster: The Cryptomancy Guild was this for the Imperium, with its Cryptomancers traveling far and wide across the shatter to retrieve and uncover information for the ruling wizards, even decoding the entire Library of Alchemi at the Imperium's height. Only one such Cryptomancer remains now just before the end of the world, acting as a mysterious guide for your Gunmancer.
• Terrestrial Sea Life: Whatever wildlife is left from the Aldern Sea has now become heavily adapted to life in the inhospitable desert. This includes Anglers, aggressive giant anglerfish which have evolved legs, and various different types of giant Fiddler Crabs.
• Theme Naming: All the friendly mechana you can encounter have names ending in "-naby".
• Time Travel: The in-universe justification for the game's Roguelike nature is a machine, located outside of standard spacetime, which can turn back time to a point before the world is completely destroyed, allowing the player to go back out and try again to prevent it.
• Turned Against Their Masters: When mechana were first invented, they were much smarter than they are now, and were capable of learning. These mechana, called the First Editions, eventually rebelled against the magi. After this revolution was put down, laws were enacted to restrict the intelligence and learning ability of future mechana books. These days, only one First Edition is known to still exist, wielded by the player.
• Underground Monkey: Several enemy types have recurring, stronger variations of themselves in the various regions of the shatter, most prominently Mechana, Gunslingers and Scavengers.
• Unnecessary Combat Roll: The dodge animation always has your Gunmancer perform a little flip and roll, no matter the circumstances.
• Unperson: Flora, a goddess of life believed to be equal in power to the Godwizards, was labeled as heresy by the Imperium, which attempted to have her cult hunted down and stamped out. They were unsuccessful, and though Flora is still worshipped slightly amongst the people of the Shatter, much of the information surrounding her has been lost thanks to the Imperium's efforts to erase her from existence.
• Variable Mix:
  • The music in each region will change depending on whether or not it's day or night, whether your Gunmancer is in combat and whether or not it's day or night while your Gunmancer is in combat.
  • In Koleye, the music will become more quiet and distorted the colder your Gunmancer gets.
• Victor Gains Loser's Powers: Each of the Riders drops a Bounty that allows you to grab their signature weapon for yourself.
• Video Game Caring Potential: While you will still have to kill a few of them, you can choose to spare the vast majority of Kolanna's barbarians since they don't immediately attack you and even opt to pet their domesticated vulfs.
• "Wanted!" Poster: A Bounty board can be found next to all the Tower entrances in the Shatter, and will give you information on the local Bounties in that region in the form of these. You can choose to use some Arcana to pinpoint them on the map or try to track them down yourself.
• Water Source Tampering: The Fell's Dark Secret is that the Magi who uplifted the Valyn farmers by giving them magic also wanted to unlock the secrets of immortality, but their experiments (either accidentally or intentionally) turned Valyn's primary source of infinite water into an infinite source of poison, corrupting the region into a Bubblegloop Swamp. Orion set out to uncover the mystery surrounding the event, which is what you find him working on when you confront him.
• Weaponized Offspring: Emissaries of Chaos are Chaos Mites grown to an astounding size, and contain a clutch of eggs with gestating smaller mites inside of them. They are capable of reaching into themselves and throwing these smaller mites at you, both dealing damage and adding new combatants to the fight.
• Whatevermancy: Most of the forms of magic the player has access to are forms of Gunmancy, a somewhat clunky term for all gun-related magic and the bullets that are imbued with Gunmantic power^note The developers likely didn't use the more natural-sounding "Ammomancy" due to another, previously existing game snapping that word up.
• World Tree: Downplayed, but the local inhabitants of Koleye seem to regard to the Kolbara Tree as one of these, as it's the seat of power of King Harold and where his throne is located.
• Year Outside, Hour Inside: One of the alchemist books reveals that for every second which passes inside the Tower, 216 seconds pass outside in the Shatter, meaning the two hundred years since the end of the world turned into over 40,000 for anyone unlucky enough to be trapped inside. Worst of all, since the Tower is a Place Beyond Time, they wouldn't need to worry about eating or sleeping for any of it and the author posits that it would drive them mad.