Deus Ex Machina, Video game
- Awesome Music: The game's main draw overall. The singing in the first game has an almost hypnotic quality to it, and the second game mixes things up with a variety of styles, both remixing tracks from the first game and adding new songs entirely.
- Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The "Dance" stage in the second game, which lies between the Soldier set and the Justice set. Defect just... runs through a dance floor for no discernible reason.
- Ending Fatigue: The Old Age stage in the original, which lasts for nine minutes—roughly a fifth of the game's total length—and has the most repetitive song in the game. It's even worse in the second game, which splits Old Age up into four stages: Old Age, You Are Senile, Wonder, and Death. In total, these span 14 minutes. But at least it varies the music there.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: This line in the Soldier stage. Violence in video games wouldn’t become a serious conversation until eight years later.”Killing is wrong. Even pretend killing on little screens. The people who sell violent games to children should be put away somewhere safe 'til they get better.”
- Narm:
- "Imagine if this were all just an electronic game."
- The final stage of the first game, when it’s not being depressing, with a dissonantly silly-sounding trombone in the background, and... well, it’s hard to take any song that has the word “farts” in its lyrics seriously. Mercifully, the song is arranged to be much better-paced and better-sounding in the second game.
- The second game's Soldier stage. The plot advancement has all but been removed, and the backing track is just "TERROR TERROR TERROR!!!" in heavy metal growls.
- Multiple reviewers have noted that the plot starting off due to mouse poop, although it Makes Sense In Context, still feels inherently ridiculous.
- The mere existence of the second game's Dance stage. It's one of the shortest stages in the game, has silly-sounding vocals and lyrics, comes right out of nowhere, and has no bearing on anything surrounding it.
- Nightmare Fuel:
- The bizarre, unnatural laughter that backs the Soldier stage of the first game.
- In both games, Defect betrays his lover somehow. It's never stated exactly how. It's strongly implied, however, that it's connected to Defect abusing his powers somehow, and that it all ultimately plays into Kaptain Korg's hands. In the second game, though the surrounding plot context is removed, what was once just a second verse is transformed into a Dark Reprise with backwards instrumentals and an unsettling black-and-white environment.
- Tear Jerker: The final stage, in which The Defect is slowly dying of old age and is in serious pain. Especially bad in the last moments of the game before the epilogue; he desperately calls out for the mother he doesn't remembernote , his voice pitching up until it's that of a child as he succumbs to dementia and dies. The narrator isn't helping, trying to be reassuring about the Downer Ending but giving a very nihilistic speech while doing so.
