Video Game / One Step From Eden

Just make it to Eden.^note Clockwise from bottom: Saffron, Selicy, Hazel, Violette, Serif, Terra, Shiso, Gunner and Reva. In the centre is Shopkeeper.

One Step From Eden is a Roguelike action RPG with Deckbuilding Game-inspired mechanics, developed by Thomas Moon Kang and published by Humble Bundle. It was released for PC via Steam and Nintendo Switch on March 26, 2020, and later released for PlayStation 4 on June 6, 2020 and Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via the Microsoft Store on November 11, 2021.

Set in a war-torn world, your mission is to reach the eponymous Eden, the last beacon of hope in the world. As you venture to Eden, you meet several adversaries that stop you from reaching the promised land, forcing you to fight your way. When you best them in battle, you can choose to spare them and be on your way, or finish them off.

A online multiplayer spin-off titled Duelists of Eden was announced for release in 2022. The game released for PC on March 7th, 2024. The spinoff features the core cast and newcomers Chiretta and Harissa, as well as guest characters Dreadwyrm from Maiden & Spell, Neera from Freedom Planet, Queen from Quantum Protocol, and Maypul from Rivals of Aether.

---

One Step From Eden contains examples of:

• Action Pet: Seven of them! Not invincible though. You can have:
  • A dragon that breathes fire on enemy tiles
  • A fox that holds enemies in place (root)
  • An ice-casting cat
  • A liger that makes enemies hurt more (Fragile)
  • A puppy that attacks when you do.
  • A turtle that grants you shields when hit.
  • A floating gun made by presumably your soul, that's auto-firing and gives Mana on kills.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: Blue Blood's Flavor Text:
  Blue blood burns bluetifully
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: You can unlock alternate costumes by completing runs under certain conditions or earning specific achievements.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Up to two focuses can be set from the deck menu to see cards of that focus more frequently, helping to curb some of the Luck-Based Mission aspects inherent to the deckbuilding aspect of the game.
  • Spells that will have a special effect when cast because of their affinity with Trinity, Fragile, Flow, etc. have a sparkly glow if their special casting condition is sated. Rings have a similar effect to indicate that they shouldn't be cast, since their effects only work while they're in a casting slot.
  • After rooms, you have a chance to breathe and test out how your deck flows without enemy interference.
  • When bosses are defeated, all on-screen projectiles disappear regardless of user and the boss gains temporary invulnerability while also cleansing any effects like Poison. This is present so that it's difficult for a player to accidentally kill a boss.
  • Similar to the above, the Shopkeeper won't engage immediately after you attack her; it'll take some substantial damage before her fight starts.
  • Version 1.5 introduces Easy Mode in the form of "Angel Mode", which decreases enemy damage output and speed by 40%. Dying with Angel Mode active increases the limit by 2%, capping at 50%. You can also adjust both stats individually with sliders if you want.
• Art Evolution: Put the default and alt outfits side-by-side and for most of the characters the alts look noticeably better. An update would later be released that replaces the default art for several characters^note Selicy, Hazel, Gunner, and Shiso to bring up the quality up to match. These sprite updates were included with the release of the Xbox/Microsoft Store versions first on November 11, 2021, with them being added to other platforms in Patch 1.7 on November 30, 2021. Saffron and Reva would eventually follow suit for the game's 3rd anniversary.
• Assist Character: Spare the bosses and they'll return the favor, occasionally showing up to offer their abilities to the player before retreating.
  • Saffron, Selicy, Hazel, Terra and Violette can appear at the start of a battle and perform an action. Saffron casts Ragnarok against a random enemy, Selicy slashes several enemies to apply fragile, Hazel summons a turret in front of one enemy, Terra casts beams on several enemies and cracks panels, and Violette gives the player a spell power buff.
  • Gunner and Shiso only appear on campfires and give you some extra healing or an artifact that you have the choice of taking after your next battle.
  • Reva only appears if you take lethal damage, saving and healing you once for 600 health.
• Badass Fingersnap: The spell Ember's Flavor Text:
  A snap of the fingers.
• Battle Amongst the Flames: There is an achievement for having the entire arena set ablaze with flame tiles, including your side of the area. For practical purposes, unless you're packing Artifacts to negate self-damage via fire (like the shield-granting Molten Core and Anvil), you won't survive any deck that tries to do this for every battle.
• Big Damn Heroes: On a pacifist run, the first time you take Terrable down, she knocks you down to one HP and prepares to finish you off. However, the would-be death blow is blocked by Reva (or Saffron if you're playing as Reva). Everyone else then jumps in to take Terrable down once more, and you're given the decision to spare or execute her as usual.
• Blown Across the Room: Kinesys spells are focused around movement, both on yourself and the enemy, and includes spells like Air Slash, Blink, Hyper Beam, and Caltrops.
• The Cameo: Two of them as outfits:
  • One of Saffron's replaces her with Lea from CrossCode
  • Terra's alternate replaces her with the Dreadwyrm Heir from Maiden And Spell.
  • An update gives Hazel a costume that replaces her with Queen from Quantum Protocol.
• Card Cycling: By putting cards back into the deck if the card is the last one cast, then it's immediately redrawn, for a net 0 change for cards in hand:
  • Rock Cycle returns itself to the deck when its caster has Flow, a.k.a Flow Cast, meaning it's immediately redrawn if it's Flow Cast while being the last card.
  • Viruspell puts a copy of itself in the battle's version of the deck when cast. If it's the last card of the deck, then duplication means that it's immediately redrawn, and the deck never runs out for the battle, so long as it keeps being cast.
• Catching Some Z's: When clicking on the pixel art Saffron beside the Run time in the end screen of the demo, she loops through multiple expressions, one of which has slumped over and has blue Z-s coming from her head.
• Coup de Grâce:
  • Invoked by Guillotine, a Slashfik spell which hits a three-tile column four spaces ahead for 80 damage. This seems rather weak given Guillotine's massive mana cost of 4, but if Guillotine hits an enemy that has less than 300 HP — it doesn't matter how much shield they have — it WILL kill them.
  • Other skills whose effects only occur on kill, like Devour, Hired Gun, or Shizo's gun Lynchpin, encourage using them as this trope to reap their benefits; Devour is a consume card, so you'll only get one chance per battle, while Hired Gun and Lynchpin use money when shot, discouraging use whenever there wouldn't be money to be made from shooting either of them.
  • On the enemy side, every boss has a unique attack that they will use to execute you should you lose to them (Though it is possible to survive through either Reva's assist or Saffron's Second Soul). They are as follows:
    • Saffron casts Ragnarok directly on your space.
    • Reva unleashes a shockwave with her shield, which kills you.
    • Gunner puts a time bomb in front of you and sets the square it's on ablaze. The bomb's explosion kills you.
    • Selicy impales you with all four of her icicles.
    • Hazel creates a massive turret which shoots you point-blank.
    • Terra calls an orbital laser down on top of you.
    • Shiso shoots you with his gun.
    • Violette unleashes a barrage of musical notes which home in on your space.
    • Shopkeeper drops an ATM right on your head, causing money to spray out.
    • Terrable shoots a storm of crystals at you.
    • Serif (only in the genocide route) torches you with a ray of holy light.
• Creative Closing Credits: After the normal credits sequence, a second one plays for the Kickstarter backers, which can be blasted through with the deck you have.
• Crosshair Aware: In two forms. Most enemy attacks will highlight which tiles they'll affect in yellow, and some others mark where they'll hit with a red square and '!' symbol.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: The final boss of the neutral route, the Gate to Eden. Its gigantic, 8-tile-spanning hurtbox is counterbalanced by the metric crapton of HP it packs: you can expect a number in the quintuple digits, whereas pacifist boss Terrable and even genocide boss Serif might not have half as much HP as it.
• Dark World: Defeating a boss with full health remaining gives you the option to take an alternate path at the bottom of the branch in the next world, which changes it to its dark version; all enemies including that world's boss are raised by one tier, the shopkeeper sells items for HP instead of money, treasure chests are cursed and the background is changed to a more sinister one. Ironically, the background for the dark counterpart of Eden is daytime instead of night.
• Dishing Out Dirt: Hearth spells are oriented around restricting the opponent's movement, either through breaking tiles to prevent them from moving there or locking them in place; as such, many of its spells include rock elements, like Excavate, Flat Earth, and Earthen Armor.
• Double-Edged Buff:
  • Blessing of Susano'o Anchors the user, preventing them from moving, but adds 100 shield and allows them to fire a huge laser.
  • Cold Medicine heals the target but inflicts Frost, which will damage the target if 3 stacks of Frost are inflicted.
  • Corset deals 40 damage to the user, but they gain 100 Shield.
  • Entrench allows the user to gain 80 Shield but also inflicts Root for 2 seconds, which prevents the user from moving.
• Dueling Player Characters: Every boss fight, save for the ones in the final areas, are against the other playable characters.
• Earn Your Bad Ending: The Downer Ending requires that you kill everybody including the Shopkeeper who's a Superboss in difficulty, and then Serif, who's far tougher than pacifist run's Terrable. What happens after that? Eden's destruction.
• Everybody Lives: In full effect if you manage to spare all of the bosses and make it to the end. You can spare Terrable too, even if she tried to destroy you at the last moment. Everyone makes it to Eden in this ending.
• Fight Like a Card Player: Abilities, spells, and some equipment are represented as cards.
• Fire, Ice, Lightning: The basic Anima spells, which use this elemental trio. Pyroblast, Ice Needle, and Thunderstorm are respectively-listed examples of those elements.
• Flash Step: The purpose of Step Slash, to dodge the first wave of beams in the shopkeeper fight, as the description says:
  Often used to dodge DEADLY LASER BEAMS, the first time.
• Flavor Text: Some that instead of being a Shout-Out, just reference the attack:
  • Super Minnie Gun:
    • Demo, referencing bullet sponges:
      Sponges love me
    • Final Game:
      Spray and pray.
  • Breakout: One of the spells that don't have this in the final game, only in the demo?
    When you need some personal space (Bonus SK)
  • Gun Turret's changed between demo and final game:
    • Demo:
      A friend!
    • Final Game:
      Don't walk in front of this.
  • Mini Thunder's changed between demo and final game:
    • Demo:
      Nah, you're thinking of "lightning"
    • Final Game:
      Shock and aww
  • The demo-only Mana Pot, which is immediately used, unlike the Final Game's Mana Potion, which is tossed and caught to use:
    Bottoms up
  • The "I'm too cool to aim" which is on Wildfire in the Final Game, is a pun in the demo, being on the demo-only Frost Volley.
  • The demo-only Burner artifact, which causes the dead to make flame tiles:
    No chill
  • The demo-only Mirror Damage, which shoots a shot that applies Link for 5 seconds:
    Like a stone
  • Stimpack's starts with a "*TSS*", which has been removed in the Final Game.
  • The demo-only Step Spin has "Spin to win".
  • "Step Lacerate" in the Demo is renamed to "Step Pierce":
    When You were partying I studied The Blade
• Flechette Storm: The humble Kunai, a decently weak spell that only hits a couple of tiles away. What makes it powerful is the fact that it costs no mana to use, so the only limit on how fast you can hose down enemies with a flurry of knives is your mashing finger and the number of Kunai in your deck, but cards and artifacts like Collect Ring and Ninjutsu can raise the latter to astronomically high numbers.
• Glass Cannon:
  • A literal and figurative version: Fragile-oriented cards like Knife or Limit Break can deal some serious damage, but those types of cards also require the user to have the Fragile status for maximum efficacy, which multiplies all incoming damage by 1.5x.
  • Some artifacts also encourage this: one that's literally called Glass Cannon gives the player 4 Spellpower, but also starts them with 1 Fragile at the start of every fight. The ultimate examples, though, are Mirror and Magnifying Glass. The former will make all your attacks inflict Fragile if you also have that status; the latter causes all entities with Fragile — including yourself — to take double damage instead of 50% more.
• Golden Ending: Sparing every boss in the game will lead to an Everyone Lives situation where everyone goes to Eden together. There's also a slightly less happy variant where you give pacifist run final boss Terra a Heel–Face Door-Slam instead, which removes her from the ending.
• Happy Holidays Dress: Since the 1.5 patch was released in December 2020, Selicy's default outfit is replaced with a holiday dress. Even her icicles are replaced with Christmas trees. Unlocking this outfit requires the player to defeat Selicy and reach Eden before New Year's Eve, regardless of any route you've taken and if you've beaten the final boss or not.
• Harder Than Hard: In case the base game wasn't difficult enough for you, the game grants you access to modifiers to make it even tougher, up to and including turning hostages into enemies, ramping up the shop prices and turning you into a One-Hit-Point Wonder.
• Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: Depleting all of Terrable's HP has her heal herself and use an unavoidable attack that sets your HP to One. Then, the rest of the bosses you spared pull a Big Damn Heroes moment to save you.
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: In the pacifist ending, after the other characters save you from Terrable (who betrays you even after being saved), you're given the option to spare her... or finish her off. If the latter is done, she won't be present in the ending scenes and the credits scene.
• Heroic RRoD:
  • The Midnight spell will cast every spell in your deck at the same time. It also consumes every spell in your deck at the same time, so be sure that whatever you're attacking will get killed by the onslaught, else you're spending the rest of the fight with only your basic weapon.
  • The Explosion! spell nukes the entire enemy field and will leave few things standing. It also forces your character to rest for a short while, a status which can potentially be even more debilitating than not having any spells as you're a sitting duck to attacks during this rest period.
• Holiday Mode: Selicy's boss fight uses a Christmas-themed skin for the winter holiday season. Defeating her unlocks the skin.
• Hopeless Boss Fight:
  • In older versions: Being spared by Reva yet still fighting Terrable as the pacifist route boss. Since Reva won't give you assists because you didn't spare her, she won't save you from the final boss' One-Hit Kill barrage that she uses when brought down to no health remaining.
  • Serif in two instances:
    • If the player kills at least one boss and spares at least one, Serif will finish the player off in an unwinnable fight after the barricade to Eden is destroyed. If you somehow survive this, you get sent back in time on a new loop.
    • If the player kills every boss except the Shopkeeper, they will be unable to kill Serif before she turns back time and sends them back to the beginning on a harder loop.
• Hostage Situation: Hostages appear infrequently in the levels, and there are three kinds; nurses that heals 100 HP if saved, one that gives an artifact if saved, and one that lets the player choose one of 3 spells after the fight if saved. Nurse hostages can appear randomly in the levels, while the other two types appear alongside nurses in their own dedicated levels, where you need to take out enemy constructs before they kill the hostages.
• Kill the God: What eventually happens in the Genocide ending, thanks to having the Yami spell.
• Light 'em Up: Glimmer spells, which favor light and lasers. Glimmer brand spells include Diagonal Beam, Solar Beam, Sunshine, and Energizer.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Everything from Phalanx, which focuses around generating shield or other defensive measures. Its spells include Entrench, Steel Skin, Stasis, and Shield Throw.
• Luck Stat: Of the improving your drops variety. There is a catch, however. More luck makes the game harder, as a counterbalance to avoid absolutely steamrolling the game with the most powerful of spells and artifacts and pushing towards taking as much as you can handle.
• Magic Staff: The staff that Hailcasters presumably use, to cast their ice magic.
• Mechanically Unusual Class: The Shopkeeper's starting artifact sets her max HP to be equal to your money count, which overrides every other effect that changes max HP. She can also buy from her own shop anywhere, and all artifacts and spells are totally free.
• Mercy Rewarded: Choosing to spare the bosses you defeat heals you for 400 HP, and makes them an ally on your journey to Eden. Conversely, inverting this will net you fancy rewards, granting rare spells and artifacts.
• Metropolis Level: Players near the end of the genocide route gain access to a final zone that is Eden, which is filled with unique, deadly enemies that act as obstacles to halt them from reaching the final boss itself.
• Modular Difficulty: The Hell Passes are this game's Harder Than Hard mode where beating the game on your highest level Hell Pass unlocks the next one up to 14. Hell Passes can be toggled individually for effects like giving enemies artifacts, higher tier bosses, giving enemies regeneration, and lowering your max health all the way down to 1 at the start of your run.
• Mook Maker: The Factory enemies found in the Arctic area, which spawn weak drone mooks but do nothing by themselves. Higher levels of the enemy can spam the drones in large groups, so be wary of them.
• Multi-Melee Master: Any card classified under Slashfik focus is a bladed weapon of some kind. It ranges from the standard Knife and Step Slash to the less conventional Guillotine and Bladeskrieg.
• Multiple Endings: How you deal with the bosses influences the ending of your adventure.
  • Neutral: Killing at least one but not all of the bosses enforces a Non-Standard Game Over, getting killed by Serif just One Step From Eden.
  • Pacifist: Sparing everyone saves you from the scripted death in the Neutral ending. Instead, you face Terrable, and at the end, the other bosses you spared will come to save you via Big Damn Heroes. Here, you have the choice to spare Terrable, letting her come to Eden with everyone else... or not.
  • Genocide: Killing every boss leads to the fight against Serif. This counts Shopkeeper, as she holds the key to finishing off Serif, lest you get sent back to the beginning. After Serif is killed off, the chosen character destroys Eden.
• Mythology Gag: The tooltip of Step Slash reads "Some say you can dodge lasers." This is a reference to the Demo, where, after defeating Shopkeeper, she would unleash a One-Hit Kill laser barrage on your entire field. Dodging it by using Step Slash would let you fight Selicy.
• New Eden: Presumably, this is what Eden is, considering every other stage is a wilderness or ruins.
• No Plot? No Problem!: The extent of the game's story is basically that it takes place in a war-torn world and that the goal is to reach Eden, which is seemingly the last beacon of hope for humanity. Even lore is very minimal in this game.
• Not Completely Useless: Pinch, a zero-mana spell which deals a single point of damage to its user. Sounds useless by itself, but it's great for triggering artifacts like Thornmail or Reactive Shields, or to clear the Fragile status for free.
• One Bullet Left: Enforced with Last Letter's primary effect. Normally, it's a pithy 2-tile strike, but if it's the last card in your deck, the spell will carve out a giant letter Z in the enemy's field.
• Poisonous Person: The primary trait of Miseri spells, with healing, self-damage, and other debuffs coming second. Branded under it are spells such as Acid Rain, Backstab, Venoshock, and Booster Shot.
• Power at a Price: Certain artifacts give you a substantial benefit, but take from something from you in return. For example, Double Edge gives you four Spell Power at the cost of four Defense.
• Pun: The "Soul Food", artifact, allowing Soul Eating, a.k.a "Gain 20 Max HP when you kill a Hostage", and its Flavor Text references the type of food called "Soul food":
  High in starch, fat, sodium, cholesterol, and calories
• Regenerating Shield, Static Health: Health is a bit trickier to restore than shield is, being primarily available through campfires, post-boss health restores, nurse hostages, and the medkit artifact. Shield, on the other hand, is easy to obtain with how lots of cards and artifacts give you it, but all built-up shield disappears after every encounter, so you can't entirely rely on it to avoid damage.
• Reliably Unreliable Guns:
  • The Jam card, spawned into one's deck as a drawback incurred by other cards or from certain artifacts. Jams in and of themselves aren't entirely detrimental, though; consider cards like Jam Slam that deal extra damage based on how many times you've casted Jam, or artifacts like Icing that effectively turns Jams into a slightly costlier Frostbolt, or Gelatin which grants you shield whenever you cast a Jam. They also synergize with Artifacts that use the Consume effect like Meat Shield (Gain shield when a card is consumed) or Card Thrower (Deal damage to a random enemy when a card is consumed).
  • A more straightforward detrimental effect is backfire, which destroys the spell in your other slot until the end of the battle.
• Science Fantasy: The setting as a whole. Priestesses and knights in shining armor stand alongside gun-toting mercenaries and military spell scientists, taking on monsters of shapes and sizes ranging from shadow-like beasts to robotic gun-turrets.
• Secret A.I. Moves: Most of the bosses' spells are available as normal cards which replicate the effects of that attack fairly accurately.^Examples Shizo's beartraps, Reva's diagonal beam, and Saffron's doll (which mimics a self-defense turret). Others, not so much.^Example Hazel's flamethrower turrets, Reva's knight summons, pretty much anything Violette does.
• Shoplift and Die: In full effect here. You want to try a Ballistic Discount on the Shopkeeper? Have fun facing what is essentially one of the hardest bosses in the game. Actually beating her is required to earn one of the endings, although... considering she's the Only Shop in Town, you might wanna make sure you've bought everything you wanted beforehand — a dilemma made harder because the longer you wait to fight her, the more HP she'll have.
• Short-Range Shotgun: The self-explanatory Shotgun spell. High damage to the tile directly in front of the user, but won't hit outside the 2x3 cone it fires in. It's classified as a Hexawan spell because it's most useful for getting rid of your own buildings, since they won't try to dodge and will typically be in range for maximum damage.
• Shout-Out: Oh, so many of them. It has its own page!
• Situational Sword: The Sleight card, which triggers the effects of any artifacts that are normally set off by shuffling; the artifact Bolt Action is similar, its effect taking place when enemies are killed. There are a lot of artifacts that have their effects only occur on shuffling, like Pocket Sand's short invincibility or 3D Printer adding a Kunai to the deck, but if you don't have any artifacts of that nature, these two items won't do anything.
• Spam Attack: Viruspell, a spell which adds a copy of itself to your deck every time it is cast. If a fight goes on for long enough, you'll soon have a deck filled with Viruspells and comparatively little else.
• Stationary Enemy: There's multiple enemies that just stay in place and attack things in their row:
  • Spintails are plant-like enemies that fling leaves across their row and then stop for a few seconds before attacking again.
  • Hostages can be threatened by ChargeCannons, RapidCannons, or Exploders, where the cannons shoot like their name, Charged Attack or rapid fire, and Exploders are bombs that take up a tile and start near the Hostage.
• Status Effects: Surprisingly non-standard in this game, for the most part:
  • Poison deals Damage Over Time equal to the number of its stacks to the afflicted, then halves its intensity.
  • Frost can be applied to a target three times; enemies that have two Frost stacks when they receive their third will take additional damage as well.
  • Fragile causes the next hit to deal 1.5 times as much damage, rounded down, and subtracts a stack after.
  • Rooted entities are unable to move, but they can still attack.
  • Targets with Link will take damage whenever any of their allies take damage.
  • Flow causes certain spells to power up when cast, indicated in their spell descriptions with the keyword "On Flow", but depletes a stack every time a spell is cast.
  • Similar to Flow is Trinity, which enhances its own set of spells. Unlike Flow, Trinity only disappears when a spell is Trinity Cast, but individual Trinities won't have any effect; you'll need three before you can Trinity Cast.
• Stealth Pun: The artifact Delta grants Flow when performing a Trinity Cast. Real-world deltas are wetlands that form from flowing water, a connection that's obvious from the artifact's icon. The less-obvious connection is that delta is also the name of a Greek letter, whose uppercase version is a triangle; just like the Trinity symbol.

• Tenuously Connected Flavor Text: The flavor text that exists for certain artifacts or spells, are majority Shout-Out, meme, or One-Liner. The game has almost no lore. For example:
  • Steven Universe Shout Outs, from artifacts only:
    • Amethyst: A reference to the origins of the show's Amethyst, which could be the in-universe location of manufacture, but not really intended as such:
      "Made in the prime kindergarten"
    • Bismuth: A reference to the episode of the same name, where the show's Bismuth joins the main team, which could be a more literal description, being made of the concept of "honor", but not really intended as such:
      "Made of honor"
  • Ragnarok, a Pre-Mortem One-Liner, referencing Norse Mythology, where fallen warriors go to Warrior Heaven Valhalla, and the game VA-11 HALL-A:
    See u at VA-11 Hall-A.
  • The spell, Wobble, referencing the technique of the same name, in Super Smash Bros. Melee and its controversial status amongst competitive players, has:
    why isn't this banned yet?
  • The "Jam [x]" spells that quote Space Jam by the Quad City DJs, while most reference the "Jam" part of the name, it's not being used to mean a "dance":
    • Jam:
      We got a real jam goin' down
    • Jam Slam: This a play on this trope for being the most directly connected "Jam" spell, out of the themed descriptions, as it's basically a request to use said spell, which more a name being made to suit the reference / description than the other way around:
      C'mon and slam
    • Jam Cannon:
      And welcome to the jam
• Title Drop: Fall to the final boss and the results screen informs you that you were just one step from Eden.
• The Turret Master:
  • Hexawan-centric decks focus heavily around placing buildings to deal damage, and include spells like Gun Turret, Minefield, and Volley.
  • Hazel's primary kit is focused entirely around Hexawan cards. She can create Gun Turrets by default, and her basic attack shields constructs and gives them an attack buff.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: Downplayed, as one rule is changed if you confront the final boss of the Genocide route. Serif eliminates the colors on the battlefield, allowing you and her to move around the entire arena.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: It's entirely possible to create an unwinnable fight under the right conditions. You need to: 1) remove spells so that you only have ones with limited range or don't deal damage, 2) play a character whose weapon also has limited range or doesn't deal damage, 3) have a Stationary Enemy become unreachable due to being too far away or have an obstacle in the way which neither you nor the enemy can break.
• Unlockable Difficulty Levels: The Hell Passes, which add extra effects on top of your normal playthrough. Each level of Hell stacks as you ascend higher, effects including, but not limited to, giving enemies artifacts, extra hazards, lowered defenses, no aiming reticle, evil hostages, upgraded bosses, and most severe of all, turning you into a One-Hit-Point Wonder.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: For genocide routes, the final world of the game will be Eden itself, which is the only time you get to visit it in actual gameplay. It's host to some enemy types that never appear elsewhere in the game, so it's worthwhile to keep on your toes when venturing there for the first time.
• Video Game Caring Potential: Spare the bosses, and they'll heal you for 400 HP to help you keep going in the upcoming levels. They can also reappear in subsequent stages to provide you with benefits, whether they be pre-emptive attacks or restorative items at campfires. Spare everyone and you get the Golden Ending.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Execute bosses, and your battle rewards will include powerful artifacts or upgraded spells. Also, you'll find yourself on the track to the Bad Ending where you destroy Eden.
• Wingding Eyes: When clicking on the pixel art Saffron beside the Run time in the end screen of the demo, she loops through multiple expressions, one of which is Heart Symbol eyes, and the loop goes into changing into multiple characters before returning to Saffron.
• World of Action Girls: There are only two named male characters in the game compared to at least 7 female ones.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Evil Hostages, only appearing in Hell Pass 11 and above. Since they're classified as hostages, they'll spawn on Distress Call zones, adding a level of paranoia when you think there's someone to save for a nice reward.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Hostages drop a small amount of money when killed. After saving them and receiving the reward for doing so, there is a short period of time where they can still be killed, so optimal play would be to kill them the moment they drop their item. It's further encouraged with on-kill effects like Soul Fire or Lynchpin.

---