Zero Punctuation / Tropes Q to T

Main page | Tropes A-D | Tropes E-H | Tropes I-L | Tropes M-P | Tropes Q-T | Tropes U-Z | List of reviewed games

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• Queer People Are Funny: Quite a lot. His Army of Two review even opened with him discussing his own over-reliance on gay jokes and how he'd been trying to cut down on them but the game he was reviewing that week was just such an obvious target for them. Mostly it's just though low humour: if bums are funny, then bum sex is funnier. invoked
• Quicksand Box: invoked He encounters this problem in Scribblenauts, saying "When told I have everything I just can't think of anything."
• Rage Breaking Point: Yahtzee is usually negative and cynical about the games he reviews and sometimes gets outright angry, but it wasn't until he described how much he loathed the characters in Gears of War 5 that he exceeded his limit and snapped. invoked
  Want to know how to do a Gears of War witticism? Step 1: Say something relevant but completely obvious to stir the players from the latest trance the combat put them into. Step 2: Continue talking uselessly until I hate you. "We need to go over there, and by 'over there', I mean towards that big, scary building full of enemies." "Oh, great; so what's the good news?" "Well, the good news is that I'm very handsome and glib and—" <Yahtzee's voice cracks> SHUT THE FUCK UUUUP!!
• Raging Stiffie:
  • Mentions the trope by name when describing his nostalgic feelings for Silent Hill 2. invoked
  • Apparently, his strategy for survival in DayZ devolved into slowly crawling about using his "raging adrenaline stiffie."
  • He describes the "hardening" mechanic in Mortal Shell as working by quickly thinking of Jenny Agutter to make yourself instantly "rock-hard" so you can deflect attacks with your "invincible stiffy".
• Rake Take: He compared the difficulty wall in Dark Souls to walking into a dark shed and being "blatted in the face with a rake" over and over again. He managed to finally get into the game by just tanking the rakes until he started to like it. He even provides the page quote for Rake Take.
  I've been raking myself every night before bed. I'm at risk of going blind.
• Rapid-Fire Comedy: One of its defining features, helped by Yahtzee's Motor Mouth and the blink-and-you-miss-it speed at which many visual gags flash by.
• A Rare Sentence:
  • Wanna hear something crazy? "Titty-fuck labrador swimming up The Nile." ...Oh yeah, and he liked Driver: San Francisco.
  • "But once I'd mentally adjusted for Batman's underpants..." is captioned with "I bet no one's ever said this before."
  • Yahtzee says this about describing DayZ as "at best, unreasonably cruel".
  • Not to mention this quote from his Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor review:
    "Not only does this keep you invested in not being killed... (blimey, that was a weird sentence)..."
• Readings Are Off the Scale: States this the reason he didn't bring up Ride to Hell: Retribution on his worst games of 2013. He considers the game to be so horrible, it barely even qualifies as a video game.
• Real Is Brown: A particular dislike of Yahtzee's. Mentioned quite a few times, like in the Grand Theft Auto IV review.
• Realism-Induced Horror: In his review of Doki Doki Literature Club!, Yahtzee is actually relieved when the game enters "silly horror town" after Sayori hangs herself, since he found her authentically-depicted depression really uncomfortable and sad. invoked
• Real Men Wear Pink: He mentions dressing up his Tabula Rasa avatar and Shepard from Mass Effect 2 in bright pink.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: The Webcomics is very critical of Ctrl+Alt+Del's "Loss" arc.
  • A quick one aimed at elitist hardcore gamers on Quantum Conundrum.
  • One towards people who've only played modern shooters in the Medal of Honor Warfighter/Doom 3 BFG Edition when they say Yahtzee doesn't like shooters.
  • The last part of his joke Duke Nukem Forever review is essentially one for 3D Realms for dragging out the development of a game that looked to be completely uninspired, for their producers for continuing to indulge the project long after it was obvious that it wasn't going to pay off, and for the fanbase for thinking of the game's fate as "tragic" when it was clearly the result of rank incompetence and the creators had more than enough chances to push out something serviceable.
  • His "review" of The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds was a milder one of these towards Nintendo for constantly banking on nostalgia, their insistence on pushing hardware gimmicks and lack of innovation in their first party titles, but tempered by admitting he was unreservedly on their side due to their focus on dedicated games machines and strong focus on local multiplayer.
• Rebus Bubble: According to Yahtzee, the formula for the cutest thing ever is sum of teddy bear and Powerpuff Girl divided by Pikachu equals Sackboy.
• Record Needle Scratch: In the No More Heroes review, as previously mentioned.
• Refusal of the Call: Steadfastly refused to review Borderlands 3 despite many fan requests, to the point he made it a running gag of ignoring it that culminated in the ending to his 2019 Games I Haven't Reviewed Roundup:
  Yahtzee: "...Oh yeah, I've got tons of things to say about Borderlands 3! Wait there, and I'll go get them."
  (Walks off-screen, followed by the sound of a car's door slamming and driving off)
  • He made a similar point in both various ZP videos and his other projects about Inscryption; while acknowledging that its story may be of intrigue, he was tired of deck-building gameplay and didn't feel the narrative was worth the experience.
• Replacement Scrappy: In-Universe, he gets annoyed whenever a character he liked is absent from the sequel, and given a replacement that doesn't stack up. Midori in Guitar Hero 3, Prophet in Crysis 3, and Ajay Ghale in Far Cry 4 have all received some ire for replacing Clive Winston, Alcatraz, and Jason Brody, respectively.
• Ret-Gone: The final product of Duke Nukem Forever was apparently such a transcendental work of awesomeness that it collapsed reality and ended up being cancelled before completion in the new timeline. Now the new version sadly fails to live up to the "original".
• Revenue-Enhancing Devices: Yahtzee is very critical of publishers who put critical aspects of their games on DLC and has snarked at MMORPGs that pad out their runtime in order to wring more money out of their userbase.
• Rhyming List: In the Resident Evil: Revelations review, he mentions that in Metroid Prime, scans would result in "The name of the monster (Fish McTarse), a hint on how to kill it (blast his arse), and its favorite song from David Bowie's Hunky Dory album ("Life on Mars")."
  • Also appears in the review of Medal of Honor: Airborne, where every subsequent use of "fucking bastard" is replaced with a visual rhyme, like so:
  Fucking bastard
  Flocking bustard
  Sock in mustard
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: The Imp.
• Ridiculous Future Sequelisation: Yahtzee invokes it in his Peggle review:
  Yahtzee: "Once your budget hits seven digits you're supposed to make Gun Battle Slap Fight Thirty-Seven for the Playstation Twelve...!
• Right Way/Wrong Way Pair: Terry and Gonad from the Alone in the Dark (2008) review, with Terry presenting interesting gaming concepts while Gonad finds ways to make those concepts either inconvenient or downright unusable.
• Rock Beats Laser: Invoked in his Medal of Honor Warfighter review, in which he points out that the soldiers in the game have a massive technological advantage against the supposed villains. Upon describing the assault drone sequences, in which the player remotely controls a heavily-armed robot to mow down enemy guerrillas, whose only means of defeating it is to bash it with a rock.
  "We've got killdroids, they've got rocks. We are Imperial Stormtroopers massacring the Ewoks!"
• Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: Mentioned in his Driver: San Francisco review by name.
• The Roleplayer: Yahtzee states that he does roleplay when playing RPGs because it's the entire point of the genre. This ranges from deciding that Hawke should be gay after primarily taking the sarcastic dialog options to not making his Skyrim character a Kleptomaniac Hero by saying that the character has a hatred of success.
• RPG Elements: Interestingly, he actually defined what he considers to be the difference between this trope and a fully-fledged RPG game (or hybrid action-RPG). A game with RPG elements, in Yahtzee's view, merely allows the player to marginally improve skills or weapons that they essentially already know how to use (e.g. improving the reload time on a shotgun they can already aim and fire accurately) and will not force the player to specialize in a particular area (so they can be equally competent at an assortment of different skillsets). A fully-fledged RPG, by contrast, will render the player largely incompetent at any skill they haven't invested experience points in, and will force the player to specialize in particular skills. An example given is Deus Ex versus Deus Ex: Human Revolution; JC Denton is largely useless with guns if he hasn't put points in them and needs to specialize as a combatant, a stealth operative, or a hacker, while Adam Jensen starts off as competent at basically everything and will always end up as an all-around powerhouse by the endgame (to the point that it's hard to have a unique Adam Jensen by the end even if you're actively trying for it).
• Rule of Three: Subverted in the Just Cause 2 review, with regards to the obvious puns.
  • His main complaint of Darksiders II is the fact you always need to find 3 of something to get past every dungeon.
• Rule 34: "I checked and yep, there's already erotic fanart of the FF13 characters."
  • Also, his character from his Age of Conan review ("Thinderella, the Necromantic Naturist") got hit, which he even acknowledged in a later review.
• Running Gag: So many that they have their own page.
• Sand In My Eyes: "I'm not too proud to admit that I was welling up a bit at inFAMOUS 2's good ending. ..A lil' bit... Well, not much at all really. It was more like just stoically nodding my head while doing some pelvic thrusts and grunting."
• Sarcasm Mode: The entire Duke Nukem Forever review. Let's start from the fact that he's reviewing a game that (at the time) was canceled and work from there. The part that qualifies this as this trope is the bit at the end where he points out (because the lawyers made him) that there is no actual game.
• Screamer Trailer: The ending of the LittleBigPlanet review, as an obvious homage to J-horror movies such as The Ring and The Grudge.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: Yahtzee set a rule for himself to not review games that were still on Early Access, since anything he might critique could be patched out before the official release. He outright ignored this rule for Shadows of Doubt, because he felt it shouldn't apply if he was going to end up praising the game overall, presuming that the developers wouldn't patch out anything that is good.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • What he believed the plan to DC Universe to be, claiming if there were enough crazies in the world the Aliens would just go away rather than get involved.
  • He takes the course after just a few minutes of Five Nights at Freddy's.
• Seahorse Steed: In the credits of Yahtzee Croshaw's "review" of Duke Nukem Forever, he's riding a seahorse (with Jimi Hendrix?).
• Self-Deprecation: While his Zero Punctuation persona is obviously an arrogant Caustic Critic, Yahtzee is known for making blunt, humourous digs at himself from time to time.
  • A subtle one is that in his Extra Punctuation on Tomodachi Life, he says that it is very arrogant and behind the times for Nintendo to not allow gay marriage. There isn't anything wrong with that statement, except the country he lived in, Australia, didn't allow gay marriage at the time, although his birth country, Britain, did. Could be him being a Hypocrite, but it can also be a jab to his own country.
  • Seems to be happening more recently, in blink-and-you'll-miss it fashion. He often makes fun of how old he is when he makes certain references (specifically when he made a The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air reference). Though the way he puts it it's often someone else who's pointing out how old he is. Not to mention he'll point out certain other things again in blink-and-you'll-miss-it fashion e.g. "haha I'm lonely"
    Yahtzee:: *Imitating a commenter* Oh Yahtzee, you old sod, these games move too fast for your old bones to keep up with. *goes back to himself* And sadly I'd have to agree because when a fast section of the game goes by I have an urge to wave my old man cane around.
  • During the webcomic episode, he calls critics "self-important bearded tossers", then goes on to describe himself as one of gaming culture's alpha self-important bearded tossers.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Bioshock Infinite review notes that if people didn't try to kill DeWitt for being the guy who would kill everyone and fuck everything up, DeWitt wouldn't be killing everyone and fucking everything up.
• Serial Numbers Filed Off:invoked Has accused this of plenty of games and recurring creators:
  • He half-jokingly recognizes many games by Remedy Entertainment as being directly based on whatever director/writer Sam Lake happens to be a fan of at any given moment, with Alan Wake being on the works of Stephen King, while Control based off a binge reading of the SCP Foundation.
  • He goes into this attitude harder with Swery65, finding his works to be shameless imitations of what Yahtzee assumes is whatever TV show the man is watching, with Deadly Premonition and its sequel based on Twin Peaks and True Detective, The Good Life on Midsomer Murders, and D4 a drugged-out combination of Quantum Leap, Lost, and "Memento with anime haircuts".
• Shoehorned First Letter:
  • The Stinger for his review of Metroid: Other M was "I'm presuming the M stands for 'Motal Miece Mof Mucking Mank'"^note "Total Piece of Fucking Wank". Notably, not even one word of that actually began with M, but that just goes to show how much Yahtzee hated the game.
  • From his review of Serious Sam 3: BFE:
    "BFE stands for Before First Encounter - not, as I had first believed, Big Fucking Egun..."
  • When talking about how VR games are the way of the future in his review of Boneworks:
    "Time to move on and return our gaze to gaming's future, all two or three years of it that remain before we all die in wars and climate disasters, and to do that, I'm going to review a game that came out a month ago: Boneworks, because it's VR, which stands for "Very Ruturistic"."
• Shoot the TV: Halfway into playing Medal of Honor: Warfighter, he put the controller down. Not content with shutting off the console, Yahtzee puts it in terms the game can understand: Blasting the set to smithereens with a revolver.
• Shout-Out: Lots.
• Shout-Out to Shakespeare:
  • The review of The Last of Us has a random protagonist quoting Hamlet.
  • Similarly he said the characters in Dishonored 2 were so lifeless it was like the Borg put on a production of Hamlet.
    Borg holding a skull: Alas poor Yorick his resistance was futile
  • Speaking of Hamlet, the end credits in the review of BioShock Infinite describe Yahtzee as "A fellow of infinite jest".
  • Another one: in his review of Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3, Yahtzee says, "a sniper, metaphorically speaking, is a ghost warrior, but if you ask me, yon subtitle doth protest too much," which is a parody of Queen Gertrude's line from Hamlet: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."
• Show, Don't Tell: An advocate of this. One of the few negative criticisms he made of Papers, Please was that it relies too heavily on telling over showing, given that most of the narrative is conveyed via disconnected text screens after each chapter.
  • Conversely, he praised Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor for being based on this, but criticized that it perhaps showed a bit too much and told too little; he felt as though the developers thought the target audience would already be familiar with Tolkien's more obscure stories.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: invokedHe claimed he had the most fun in his playthrough of Shenmue was with the forklift driving sections.
• Signature Headgear: "Yahtzee is a British-born, currently Australian-based writer and gamer with a sweet hat and a chip on his shoulder." The hat originally appeared in his own games, Chzo Mythos, worn by the character of Trilby. The hat itself is known as a Trilby hat, and it tends to get him more attention than he really wants. In his ads for his audiobook Existentially Challenged, he even throws in a non-sequitur about how he doesn't wear it in real life anymore.
• Silence Is Golden: Discussed in LEGO City Undercover — Yahtzee enjoyed previous LEGO Adaptation Games as being reliably funny due to their lack of dialogue, instead relying on clever and comical pantomime in order to communicate the plots of their source material, so he found the switch to full voice acting as in LEGO City Undercover to be a significant downgrade, especially as he found the writing to be a lazy cross-section of pop-culture references and self-referential jokes.
• Silent Protagonist: Discussed in his review of Dead Space (Remake), and to a larger extent the accompanying Extra Punctuation "Is the Era of the Silent Protagonist Over?", revolving primarily about former silent protagonist Isaac Clarke becoming Suddenly Voiced in the remake. Yahtzee's conclusion is that while Silent Protagonists are far from extinct, they aren't as compatible with as many forms of modern gaming that don't rely on the Grandfather Clause (such as Mario or Link), and that many triple-A narrative-based games have more or less weaned off the idea of established player characters with in-universe identities and personalities that inexplicably don't talk. He specifically cites Gordon Freeman's treatment in Half-Life 2 where characters simultaneously revere him as a savior of humanity while also snarking about him being silent as an in-universe character trait (as opposed to the previous game where it could be implied he can talk, but the game just prefers not to show it) as a demonstration of the trope causing overt conflicts with the narrative. To that end, Yahtzee considers the choice to update Isaac to actually speak and express his own personality a reasonable one, because him being silent didn't even make much sense in the original either.
• Simple, yet Awesome: An increasingly common preference that Yahtzee's developed over the years when it comes to game design. He has a palpable disdain towards games that stuff themselves with countless gameplay features that add nothing for the core experience other than bloated admin, and he's conversely much more favorable towards simpler games that have a solid core gameplay loop and stick to it. Portal became a game he genuinely had no criticisms for due to having exactly what it needed (creative portal-based puzzles and sharp writing) and nothing more — even defending the oft-discussed short lengthinvoked as that meant it didn't overstay its welcome. Compare this to Portal 2, which he still enjoyed (and later dubbed his favorite game of 2011), but he rated as lower than its predecessor as ironically, by indulging in Sequel Escalation, it added padding through extended setpieces that served the plot and worldbuilding but added very little to the actual gameplay.
• Sincerest Form of Flattery: In his Resistance 3 review, Yahtzee grows more and more suspicious of the game's marked (if well-executed) similarities to Half-Life 2.
• Sincerity Mode: In his review of the 2020 Battletoads reboot, he noted that his reviewing style makes it easy for fans and developers alike to treat his critiques as jokey nitpicks and his occasional praise as a proud accolade. For that reason, he felt the need to clarify that he wasn't joking when talking about Battletoads, he really did mean every word of what he said about it—going so far as to address the developers to say "I hate your game."
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: To the point that he Lampshades in his review of WET, where he claims Rubi considers swearing to be wit, yelling out, "That's my thing!"
• Sitch Sexuality: Yahtzee's utter adoration of Stephen Fry's voice in the LittleBigPlanet review.
  • He starts his review of Brütal Legend by professing his adoration for Tim Schafer, including stating that if he had a doomsday machine he'd reduce the entire population of the world to himself, Schafer, and one woman if she promised to wear a Schafer mask.
  • It's clear from his review of Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon that he's got some deep sexual feelings for...Luigi. Something about the mustache apparently does it for him. It's a Running Gag throughout the first review, and it briefly returns in the Super Mario 3D World review when recounting the Cat Suit - not Luigi in a Spy Catsuit.
• So Bad, It's Good: In-universe. His opinion on Ride to Hell: Retribution, in which he called it the video game equivalent of Plan 9 from Outer Space.
  It's bad. It's explosively apocalyptically bad and you should totally buy it. I'm serious, you have to see this shit!
  • This is also his view on the plots of the Like a Dragon series, noting that they're so melodramatic and predictable but take themselves so seriously that the whole thing ends up being endearingly high camp (not to mention he actually likes the characters a fair bit).
  • He sees the majority of David Cage games as this, being incredibly poorly written but having just enough high-concept lunacy and good ideas squandered to be a lot of fun to watch.
  • In his Extra Punctuation video "Bad Games Are Better Than Bland Games", he coins the term "Car Crash Fascinating" to describe games so terrible in execution that he wants to break them down to decipher the logic behind them, as with Balan Wonderworld.
• So Bad, It Was Better:
  • invokedHe claimed to find Sacred 3 a lot less fun than the infamous Ride to Hell: Retribution, since while the latter was incompetent drama with completely broken gameplay and therefore hilarious, the other was incompetent comedy with incredibly bland gameplay and therefore painful. He said something similar about Days Gone, which he went so far as to call "Ride To Hell, but actually functional."
  • He ended up giving a lukewarm review of Resident Evil 4 (Remake) in large part for this. Yahtzee speaks highly of the original Resident Evil 4 particularly because of its pitch-perfect balance of campy jank alongside genuinely revolutionary, exciting, and fun gameplay, feeling that its imperfect tone was not only unique, but added a refreshing level of self-awareness to an increasingly ridiculous franchise which started to suffer from taking itself too seriously. As a result, he felt having a remake that intentionally sanded things down to make it more consistently "good" and "sensible" subsequently made the game much less interesting.
• So Long, Suckers!: Warned EA against this in his Next Gen Buyer's Guide episode. With Sony and Microsoft's futures uncertain, now is not the time to burn your bridges with Nintendo.
  If you're going to burn a bridge you might want to wait first to make sure the other two bridges don't spontaneously combust.
• Some of My Best Friends Are X: At the end of his Super Mario Galaxy review.
  Some of his best friends are Italian
  Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw.
  • Later, he remarks that the protagonists of Call of Duty: Ghosts are only mildly annoyed by their sole black member dying, mostly because they can't use this argument on the internet anymore.
• So Okay, It's Average: Starting in 2015, in addition to the five best and worst games of the year, he gave "awards" to the five blandest, "the games that did nothing interesting, took no risks, pushed nothing forward, and which were generally to the year of gaming what Martin O'Malley was to televised debate." invoked
  • Yahtzee will sometimes pass over games for this reason (Metro 2033 for example), feeling that they were alright but didn't have enough worth saying to make a whole video on them or they came out in a swamped release window. He's also said that reviewing a bad game (or a good game, but that's rarer for him) is easier and more interesting than reviewing a merely average one.
  • This is also his view, historically, on the Halo franchise - the gameplay lacks the grievous errors of most modern military shooters but isn't cathartically fun or visceral like the his favorites, the characters are functional but lack any kind of interest, and the story is tolerable but entirely too full of itself and unwilling to take real risks. Halo 5: Guardians topped the aforementioned list in its debut.
  • He described Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order as perfectly adequate (because it used ideas from good games like Dark Souls and Metroid Prime), despite being produced by EA and therefore having no soul.
  • One of his windmills to tilt against was the series Uncharted, noting that while the games are technically well-done and refined, they use cliches already trod on by Indiana Jones and its influences and ripoffs with merely competent and short gameplay that results in a work he likens to chewing on gum while waiting for your next meal.
  • Yahtzee actually argued against this trope in an Extra Punctuation video called "Bad Games Are Better Than Bland Games", making the case that a bad game can at least make you feel something, even if that something is only disgusted contempt, while a bland game makes you feel nothing and is consequently infinitely less worthwhile.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Many examples over the years.
• Spiritual Adaptation: A lot of comparisons are drawn between L.A. Confidential and L.A. Noire. invoked
  • He referred to Painkiller as "The unofficial Doom 3".
• Spoof Aesop: The lesson of Catherine seems to be "men are all directionless tidal waves, and women are all dikes built in the path of their raging floods."
  "...Blimey, what a badly-worded metaphor."''
• Spoofed with Their Own Words: The review of Medal of Honor: Warfighter opens with Yahtzee stating that normally, he makes fun of a game by increasingly altering the title through the review until it gradually becomes ridiculous. In this case, he says that he can't do that, because there's nothing more silly than simply using its actual name. He maintained that the title was absolutely ridiculous even after learning that "warfighter" is in fact a term used by the American military.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: Complains about this in Aliens vs. Predator (2010) where despite the title, the Colonial Marine campaign is by far the longest of the three, and it's just a generic FPS game.
• Starbucks Skin Scale: A mixed character is dismissed as "dipped in tea".
• Stating the Simple Solution: Yahtzee has satirically called out the evil organizations in various games and their unreliable Super-Soldier programs ([PROTOTYPE] and Resident Evil in particular), saying how anything with such a wide margin of error that inevitably leads to rogue agents at best and horrifying outbreaks at worst, can easily be substituted more effectively with a really big bomb.
• Stealth Insult: His Modern Warfare review features "Killing in the Name" (which contains the repeated line "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me") by Rage Against the Machine playing over the end credits, which becomes hilarious when you consider that he has spent most of the review telling people who suggest things to him to get fucked.
  • One that was notable for coming in the middle of a barrage of very unstealthy insults and for flying by so fast and with so little attention drawn to it that it's actually very easy to miss during his review of Metroid: Other M: he criticises it with "the gameworld is a lot smaller and more linear than, say, Metroid Fusion", and the deliberate choice of Fusion (highlighted by the very small pause) combined with the fact that Fusion was criticised at the time of its release for being one of the most linear Metroid games means he's actually accusing Other M of being very, very small and linear indeed!
• Stealth Pun: a corker in his Hyrule Warriors review: "Greasy baps are Team Ninja's bread and butter..."
  • But it only remains a Stealth Pun for about a second before he lampshades it: "...if you see what I did there."
• The Stoic: At least when it comes to laughing. He will seldom laugh, with exceptions being The Eye of Argon and his and Jack Packard's debate on Mario and Sonic.
• Storybook Opening: Red Faction: Guerrilla.
• Story to Gameplay Ratio: Yahtzee's a bit hard to pin down on this one, but the important things are that the amount of story must fit the game and that Story and Gameplay Segregation must not intrude. Silent Hill 2 is his definitive example of getting the balance right. He observed in a column once that he once thought Adventure Games were intellectually superior to First-Person Shooters before realizing that the two genres were effectively two sides of the same coin - one all story at the expense of gameplay, the other all gameplay at the expense of story. Over time he became more interested in combining gameplay and story in interesting ways.
• Stout Strength: An odd example, he refers to any large muscular character as fat even if they have an impossibly fit and overmuscled build.
• Strictly Formula: Historically one of his biggest Pet Peeve Tropes; he's willing to praise sequels but rarely these games. It's one of his biggest issues with Nintendo, with him going so far as to sum up Mario games as "grasslands, desert, forest, jungle, ice world, fire world, boss." It's also one of the main reasons he lost faith in Assassin's Creed, and Ubisoft sandbox games as a whole, as so many of them seemed to be working from the same framework. He also tends to say "yearly franchise" in the same tone as one would say "bloated corpse", taking the view that any franchise with yearly installments is either just the same thing over and over with slightly better graphics and tweaked mechanics, or pretending very badly not to be.
• Stupid Sexy Flanders: He naturally identifies more with Luigi than his brother, Mario. Yahtzee being Yahtzee, this later became a repressed crush on the character.
  "So, the new feature is Cat Suits. Meaning suits made to look like cats, not Luigi running around in skintight — sorry, lost my train of thought."
• Sturgeon's Law: Applied frequently, with an even more negative twist: "Everything is shit until proven otherwise", a.k.a. "the Guantanamo Bay approach".
• Stylistic Suck: An example of a nameless, professional webcomic reacting to one of his critiques: a crude stick figure wearing a hat.
  Blah blah blah look at me i'm a big foreign dipshit who isn't funny anymore
  Also my hat is stupid and there are too many ads at the ends of my videos
  Balls go in my mouth now
• Subliminal Seduction: In his 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand review, this◊ Image Macro quickly pops up several times during the video.
• Superdickery: Conversed in his review of Resident Evil Village, where he directly compares the game's opening sequence where Chris Redfield shoots Mia and kidnaps Ethan's baby to the classic Superman comics.
  This, boys and girls, is what we call a "hook", but don't worry; it's like what they used to do with superhero comics where the cover shows Superman about to drop-kick a baby into a volcano or something to force you to buy the comic and discover, oh! Turns out, all along, it was a volcano-shaped sweet shop and it's the baby's birthday.
• Suicide as Comedy: A Running Gag where he will try to kill himself.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: See Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?.
  • In the review for Batman: Arkham City, Bruce Wayne is represented with a man wearing a t-shirt saying "Not Batman".
• Sweeping Ashes: Following hours of arduous work in Starbound, building a "distress beacon" as instructed, his house gets obliterated by UFO — which immediately turns its sights on Yahtzee himself, reducing him to a skid mark wearing a hat.
  Game: Guess you'd better build another Distress Beacon, then.
  Yahtzee: I've got a better idea, Starbound. Why don't you see if you can find one at the bottom of this bin?
• Take a Fourth Option: Invoked at the end of the "Next Gen Buyer's Guide" to answer the overarching question "Should I go with the Wii U, PS4, or Xbox One?"
  So to summarize this buyer's guide to next gen consoles, DON'T.
• Take That!: Many targets, many times.
  • "I do point out every little thing there's bad about a game. But then again, I'm a critic! It would be weird if I didn't. If I put people's balls in my mouth for a living, I'd be a prostitute, or possibly a GameSpot employee."
  • For his "Best, Worst, and Blandest Games of 2017" video, Yahtzee has objects represent different tiers on the good/bad/bland scale, like delicious foodstuffs for the good tiers and increasing amounts of white bread for the bland tiers. The object that represents Yahtzee's worst game of 2017 is an image of Ajit Pai, the FCC chairman who repealed Net Neutrality in late 2017.
  • In his review of Red Dead Redemption II, Yahtzee says that the game's immersive world in Story Mode with NPCs is "not forcing you to enter missions, but you can only drink in the scenery and hogtie suffragettes for so long"; this is in light of the news that Shirrako's YouTube channel had been temporarily suspended in November 2018 for showing the game's protagonist killing a female suffragette in many different ways.
  • The review of Indivisible includes a graphic showing how the quality of its storytelling compares to reference points such as "bottom-tier anime" and "first-time web comic". The lowest reference point visible on the graphic is the final season of Game of Thrones.
  • Yahtzee mocked Sony in his Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart review, noting the marketing team at Sony had the balls to tell him, quote, "Given the tone of that coverage, we'd prefer you secure your own code."
    Yahtzee: From where, Sony?! The fucking dumpster outside your office?! I don't normally give you these cheeky little glances behind the beef curtains, but, I mean, really? I guess we all knew publishers want to dictate the content of reviews, hence those review guides they keep sending us that read like a timid schoolchild asking to please not be kicked in these specific sensitive areas, but I didn't expect them to just come out and admit it! What's your problem with my "tone", Sony? You didn’t know I’d make the "Snatchet" joke!
  • While Yahtzee commits to dedicating his review of Hogwarts Legacy to just the game itself, he doesn't dodge around how the influence of Harry Potter franchise creator J. K. Rowling and her transphobic views loom over the whole thing, dedicating a portion of the intro to express his disgust for them before sticking to the game.
• Take That, Audience!:
  • In his Kingdom Come: Deliverance review, he throws shade at the "PC master race shitheads" who praise the game for its obnoxious qualities, before wishing he had named them something more insulting.
  • The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) "review" simultaneously insults both COD fanboys watching his vid for indulging in the same "evil Russian brown terrorist bad guy" plot and the anti-COD fanboys eagerly hoping to apply his usual takedowns, comparing the latter expecting him to shred the game apart for their gratification like expecting someone to get mad at baseball for involving balls being hit by sticks.
• Talks Like a Simile: For humorous effect, given the nature of the similes, Yahtzee generally likes to compare elements of the games he reviews to things that produce funny or disturbingly funny mental images.
  • As an example, one of them involved the voice acting in a game being comparable to being raped in the ear by a man wearing a sandpaper condom. Though technically it wasn't him who said it, it was his roommate. And "Not in those exact words, of course." Said roommate maintains he actually described it as like driving a corkscrew into his ears.
    "I wonder if the Geneva Convention covers torturing metaphors?"
  • One particularly long barrage of similes comes in the review of Cruelty Squad, where he rapid-fires all the Stylistic Suck the game employs:
    "It's all clashing colors and PS1-era 3D models with worse animation than the little dudes on a foosball table. And environments that look like someone opened the level editor and then threw their laptop out the window of a speeding bus. And texture work that looks like the brooms from The Sorcerer's Apprentice got set loose in a water-damaged gift wrap shop. And an interface that looks like it got molested inside a crowded novelty photo booth at a Juggalo convention. Complete with a health meter that takes up an entire quarter of the active screen and looks like an untreated hernia. Et cetera, et cetera."
• Tank Goodness: In Halo Wars.
  "There's no reason to build any troops, really. Tanks don't move any slower, they just take longer to build and, well, they're fucking tanks!"
• Tempting Fate: Whenever a developer claims that their multiplayer-focused game is capable of being enjoyed in single-player, Yahtzee (who generally hates multiplayer) will take that as a bulletproof license to review and judge it entirely as a single-player game (almost always resulting in him damning the developer as a liar). After he finished ripping Outriders to shreds over this, he called the games industry out for trying to impossibly please everyone.
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: The female imps have red bows on their heads.
  • He once used an imp wearing half a bow to represent a transgender person.
• Testosterone Poisoning: A common topic of jokes, but he doesn't like seeing it played straight.
• The Thing That Would Not Leave: After RE6 netted the 5th Worst of 2012 spot, Yahtzee realized that the franchise's title is apropos.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Says this happened when playing the Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, that Drake is now coming after him.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: invoked Discussed several times.
  • He begins his review on Darkest of Days by noting that he felt drawn to the game by its interesting premise, but he thought the game itself completely mishandled it due to limited time periods and a weak plot.
  • The review on Sonic Forces has Yahtzee praising the idea of of the player created Avatar and the story they set up, noting that he found the idea of having Sonic being indisposed, and having the player take the role as someone who looks up to Sonic and tries to prove themselves a hero in their own right to be a pretty good and genuinely compelling basic premise (not to mention one with a lot of appeal for the established fanbase). He then laments how the game squanders this potential by failing to commit to that idea, having the first mission involving your avatar being about saving Sonic, after which he is unlocked as a major playable character.
    Sonic Forces is a combination of all Sonic Team's bugaboos, the biggest and hairiest of them being their indecisiveness. Unable to have faith in any of their new ideas, they crowd them out of sight with old ones, 'cos they're afraid of disappointing established fans.
  • His review of Haze claimed that the core plot twist - the character starts as a Super-Soldier fighting podunk insurgents but quickly realizes he's on the wrong side - is actually a pretty interesting one, and offers commentary or even the possibility of a Genre Deconstruction by turning the usual power fantasy on its head. However, he said it was ruined by both the Black-and-White Morality of the situation and the complete lack of gameplay difference between the outgunned and underarmed rebels and the power-armored troopers.
  • He said while reviewing Neverdead that "I guarantee the next few things I say are going to make you want to play it", before describing in detail the game's unique and intricate mechanics dealing with an immortal protagonist, then explaining in equal detail how every single one of those mechanics got bungled by the game's miserable combat system.
  • He believes the premise of Detroit: Become Human could have worked well had it focused on the idea of income inequality and automation in a futuristic society, rather than the Fantastic Racism angle the game went with, which he found contrived and clumsy.
  • The core concept of Inversion - a protagonist capable of manipulating gravity - fascinated him, which was why most of his review focused on complaints that, rather than do interesting things with the mechanic, the gameplay is mostly bog-standard cover shooting with a handful of gimmicky tricks.
  • He believed that Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 had three interesting ideas - a game about exploring Dracula's psyche through the castle, a game about Dracula in the modern day and out of his element as a Fish out of Temporal Water, and a game where you play as Castlevania Dracula (well, the original, that is; Soma Cruz isn't quite the same thing). However, he believed that the former two ideas were bungled by having to share the same game and therefore not having enough room to be properly realized (in particular, he'd have liked to see some Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home-style antics, which the game completely skips over by having Dracula adjust almost instantly), and the latter was bungled by the game being a God of War ripoff and therefore having a very standard growly grizzled Anti-Hero as its lead, who therefore never really feels like the grandiose and gloriously camp archvillain that Dracula is remembered as.
  • He listed Watch Dogs: Legion as having a technically ambitious and interesting gameplay gimmick in the ability to recruit any random NPC with their own distinct abilities and agendas into the revolution, but ultimately felt it was underutilized for both story and gameplayinvoked. With regards to the plot, Yahtzee felt it absolutely should resonate with the "everyone has the power to resist oppression" theme, but the need for the game to accommodate for this free-form structure left things feeling detached as there's no central characters with arcs to get invested in.
  • Yahtzee felt Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart introducing Rivet, a Distaff Counterpart to Ratchet, could have been a great opportunity to make her a Foil. Instead, she's basically a gender Palette Swap.
• This Is Gonna Suck: At the start of his Ride to Hell: Retribution review, he mentions having this reaction after responses to his The Last of Us began coming in.
  "When the game started to lose me, I wasn't sitting there, rubbing my fingerless-gloved hands in glee. No, I was sitting there thinking, 'Ugh, I am definitely getting some fucking stimulating e-mails after this one."
• This Loser Is You: Yahtzee's hatred for this trope is made plain in his Transformers: War for Cybertron review, where he derides Shia LeBeouf's various characters in ways like, "Indiana Jones is over thirty? No one can relate to that!"
  • Suggested in his Final Fantasy XIII review:
  "This 'Hope' guy has been established from the start as a whiney, weak, inept, cowardly, socially-retarded, mummy’s boy, so presumably he’s the character most of the audience is meant to project onto."
• Tickle Torture: The way he illustrates the aforementioned torture sessions in Black Ops.
• Title Confusion: Comments that Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon should be called "Luigi's Mansions" since Luigi goes through multiple mansions in the game.
• Token Black Friend: He invokes this in his Call of Duty: Ghosts review, suggesting that the main characters only cared about Alex's death because they couldn't claim to have a black person on their side any more.
• To Make a Long Story Short: Joked about on the Spore review.
• Too Awesome to Use: Brought up in his Mercenaries 2 video, with him calling it the "But I might need it later" thought.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring:invoked
  • A big irk for Yahtzee is games where protagonists are just as (if not more) unlikable than the antagonist, citing WET, Kane & Lynch: Dog Days and the God of War sequels as major examples. However The Last of Us Part II is probably his new gold standard for this, as he found the game to consist entirely of nothing but horrible, miserable people doing shitty things to each other, declaring it the worst game of 2020 as a result.
    Ellie has no character development. Villain Lady does, a little bit, for stupid reasons, along the lines of suddenly realizing that the enemy faction she's been genociding unquestioned for months are also human beings with families and would rather not be genocided, thanks, but Ellie just sets out to do something shitty and remains a shitty person; in fact, the game keeps droning on for about two hours after you think it's finally ending just to continue establishing Ellie's shittiness!
  • He also stated that he found Max Payne's constant self-loathing and pessimism in Max Payne 3 to be tiring and off-putting.
  • On the other hand, he still considers Spec Ops: The Line to be the perfect example of using bleakness and moral ambiguity properly to tell a deep story about good intentions gone awry, rather than just assholes being assholes to tell an "edgy" story.
  • Discussed in his Extra Punctuation "Do Games Have to be Fun?", which was written partly in response to Scorn, a very gross, unsettling, uninviting horror game that was bleak as a deliberate part of the horror experience, an approach that polarized critics and audiences. Contrary to the title, Yahtzee makes the claim that expecting games to be "fun" as a sign of quality is focusing on the wrong thing — the bigger point should be whether or not the game is "engaging", enabling the player to explore the furthest possible regions of the human experience, with fear and disgust being valid in their own right as such. Yahtzee defines what counts as "engaging" as less being about resisting the urge to be "bleak" at risk of alienating audiences, and more about actively commanding player interest through well-developed context (effective storytelling and theme), fair challenge, and catharsis that rewards players for their investment.
• Took a Level in Kindness: He's mellowed out a lot over the years. It's all relative, of course, and he's still a Caustic Critic, but these days he seems more grumpy and perpetually displeased than genuinely outraged. For one thing, he's gone from mocking the very idea of Video Game Caring Potential to admitting to, sometimes and much to his surprise, growing fond of the characters in the games he plays.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: invokedOne of the reasons he enjoyed the plot of Resident Evil 4 - despite the terrible dialogue and the patently stupid plot (rescuing the President's daughter from an evil midget Napoleon lookalike), the voice actors never break character or treat the whole thing anything less than completely seriously aside from some action-movie wisecracks. He felt it just enhanced the B-movie feel of the whole production.
• Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup: He brings this up frequently about the large-name corporations running the big-budget titles, and even brings up how such lack of discipline ruined Dead Space 2.
  • He takes this metaphor to extraordinary lengths in Extra Punctuation.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Branston Pickle, Cadbury's Creme eggs, and pies. In later seasons, he develops a liking for kebabs (donairs) and jaffa (chocolate-covered orange jam) cakes. He seems to have developed a taste for risotto (stewed rice) since getting married. The imps like Pedigree dog food.
• Tranquil Fury:
  • Yahtzee uses it in his "The Reason You Suck" Speech on his Medal of Honor: Warfighter and Doom 3 BFG Edition review, where he calls out people who claim he doesn't like shooters.
  • He remains very deliberately calm and level-voiced, even going out of his way not to swear, to emphasise to any of the developers of Battletoads (2020) who may be watching that he's not trying to be funny or exaggerating for comedic effect when he says "I hate your game."
• Troll: Yahtzee once reflects that he's seen as a "professional troll," which he imagines as a hulking creature lurking under a bridge, handing out business cards.
• Troperiffic: Many of the entrance quotes of the Trope pages are from him.
• 20 Bear Asses: One of his reasons for hating MMORPGs is because most quests are variants of this. A sight gag from his Red Dead Redemption video is him running from a cougar holding a pile of otter noses while the caption "7/8 OTTER NOSES" floats over him.
• T-Word Euphemism:
  • Used in the "Acclaim Entertainment Hall of Shame" episode:
    So far, the Zero Punctuation Occasional Guide to R-word Moments in G-word H-word has covered publishers with bad ideas, developers with bad hairdos, exclusivity deals, graphical quantum leaps, and moral panics. But how could I have overlooked the one aspect of the games industry that is the most prodigious seam of R-word-ation of them all: marketing?
  • And in his review of Hogwarts Legacy:
    So, as I'm sure you know, Hogwarts Legacy is based on the work of J. K. Rowling, who is a massive TERF-y C-word; as such, reviewing it puts one in an awkward position online, as the feeling in some circles is that even acknowledging it is giving oxygen to her and her horrible C-word opinions. But damnit, I have a job to do, and I feel bad for the no-doubt hundreds of ground-level people on the dev team who probably think she's a C-word as much as any of us at this point. So how about this? I'll review the game strictly on its own merits, but start out by affirming as clearly as possible that I think J. K. Rowling is a... we're past thirty seconds now, right? Cunt. Does that offset things enough?

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