Funny / BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm

"We're so besties now."

WARNING: All spoilers on this page are unmarked, as per wiki policy.

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Main Game

• Right off the bat, BoxxyQuest lets us know exactly what kind of game it’s gonna be:
  Are you a boy or a girl? Yes/No

  Yes: ...Er, which one?
  No: ...Gee, genders sure are hard.
• At the start, you get asked to name your future party members. It all seems normal, until you get to Tyalie, who flatly refuses whatever name you put in.
• Our introduction to Anonymous: Catie says she trusts him to guard her, but her steward Adromelk is skeptical of sending her off with a lunatic. Cue Anon testing his powers by lighting a random passerby on fire and watching him burn to a crisp, then looking at Catie for approval like a cat who just brought a dead bird into the house. Judging by Catie’s non-reaction, this may have happened before.
• Just the fact that one of the tourists in Shrimp’s group is a signpost. A talking sign that apparently needed a vacation from being a sign.
• Catie wanders into a ship cabin occupied by some kind of winged demon man. He immediately starts spouting all this deep lore and trying to thrust his ancient burdens on her, while Catie is just standing there utterly baffled by the whole thing. He’s one of seven siblings, so this process repeats itself six more times later on.
• When the ship sails into an unexpected storm, the sailors all blame Anonymous and his weather modifying script. The helmsman approaches Catie and tells her to call off her manservant.
  Anonymous: It wasn't me, you jerks! I keep telling you tha… wait, "manservant?"
  • Also, Shrimp and Cornelia’s halfhearted effort to defend him, which just makes him look guiltier.
• During his combat tutorial, Anonymous justifies the turn-based battle system by saying, “here on the Internet, we’re all about politeness and respect.”
• In Reddit, there’s a snack bar that serves various treats, including soft serve ice cream. If you try and buy any, it melts as soon as you leave the shop menu. Trying again has the game admonish you for not learning your lesson about soft serve.
• The ship wrecks, so you get sent to comb the beach for survivors. The first guy you find is the sailor from Minecraft. He wakes up and launches straight into the survival mode routine, complete with punching out the base of a tree to make a crafting bench. He runs off to join the other survivors when Catie explains the situation, but in true Minecraft fashion, the top of that tree remains floating in midair for the rest of the game.
• If you don’t have enough karma to stay at the Reddit inn, the innkeeper tells you to go crosspost memes for some quick cash.
• Some of the reasons people give for being in the Reddit slums are pretty funny.
  NPC: I didn't mean to triple post... It was my phone, I swear!
• The chest in the tavern contains Reddit Gold… which Catie just puts back, because it’s worthless.
• Anonymous trying his best to keep Til from joining the party by calling her a Tsundere.
  Anonymous: Catie, no. I don't travel with tsunderes. Remember the ground rules we laid out?
  Catie: i never agreed to those rules, anon.
• In the Lake of Fanfiction temple, you may encounter a weird little enemy called Hans von Hozel. He starts the battle flanked by two normal monsters... who promptly flee at the first opportunity.
  You have been left alone with Hans von Hozel.
  • If you're familiar with the real Hans' work, it's easy to see why they ran away.
• Arianna’s bewilderment at the idea of shipping, and Anon's total lack of patience with fanfiction in general.
• Til can't believe her eyes when she meets Cornelia for the first time. After an awkward greeting, she asks if Anonymous booked a Character Breakfast with some kind of DeviantART mascot.
  Anonymous: Nah, that's Cornelia. She's always been like that.
  Til: ...I have several questions, mainly involving her spine.
  • Becomes Harsher in Hindsight when you realize just how Cornelia feels about remarks like that.
• No enemies spawn on Artistry Highway. A lady NPC is curious to know why, but the caretakers will only tell her that it's a "trade secret." A bit farther up the path, there’s a trail tender who gives you the same exact answer.
• There's a guard who helpfully gives directions, posted right next to a sign that gives the exact same directions. He knows his job sucks, but tells the party thanks for saying hi, because it gets him through the day.
• The guy on the Great Wikian Bridge who’s trying to face his fear of heights, and his girlfriend who’s planning to take him mountain climbing next weekend.
• The first time you visit Wikipedia, the path east is blocked by a crime scene and several bystanders. They mostly talk about the grisliness of the scene, but one of them just says this:
  Bystander: It's fun to bystand!
• An old lady in one apartment immediately asks if you’re there to finish her lunch, and then gives you her uneaten cereal.
• There's an apartment that can't be entered, with a sign by the door saying it's been condemned due to ghosts. Nothing else comes of this, unless you play the game in debug mode and use the walk-through-walls cheat. Turns out there really are ghosts in there, and they're not pleased with your trespassing.
  Ghost 1: OoOooOoooOoooh! Keep out means keep ooout!
  Ghost 2: Wow, did you actually disrespect the sign so much that you cheated your way in here? Look, we ghosts are just trying to make our way in the world.
• One guest in the inn’s pool says he just learned that you’re not supposed to swim after eating. He then proceeds to give you the soggy pizza he was carrying.
• Over in the inn’s restaurant, we get this insightful comment from a 4chan user sitting at an empty table:
  4chan Anon: LOL, there's no food on this table. What am I even doing here?
• As he takes you up to the Summit’s meeting room, Jimmy Wales pauses the elevator to show off his true life’s work. Surprisingly, it’s not Wikipedia, it’s…
  Jimmy Wales: Welcome to Jurassic Park.
  • After several seconds of bewildered silence, he sheepishly ushers the party back into the lift, and the incident is never mentioned again.
• The Summit starts, and Anon keeps making comments under his breath like he’s trying to play Mystery Science Theater. Then he gets unceremoniously muted by the chat moderator for the rest of the event.
• A guard near the eastern gate is anxious to meet Catie, but has no idea what she looks like and is afraid he’ll make a fool of himself. Remember that he’s saying all of this out loud, to Catie.
• In Google, one enterprising Anon has set up a toll bridge… on a flat map screen, where you can easily just walk around the “bridge” he’s guarding.
• The girl from Vine who asks you why everyone is freaking out, but then cuts you off because she’s “reached the end of [her] extremely limited attention span.”
• According to a lady in the eBuy Superstore, the life of a shop NPC is suffering because there’s only so many ways to say "this place sells interesting things." Elsewhere in the building, there’s another NPC who uses that exact phrase.
• Try throwing a few karma into the Superstore’s wishing fountain. At first the narrator just says you feel a bit luckier, but after a while they start to get impatient, making increasingly sardonic comments about how luck is a scam, and accusing you of tormenting them just to see how far the text chain goes. Eventually they hit their limit, and throwing in any more karma will cause Catie to turn into a karma coin until you leave the store.
  You've thrown in so much money! You have become money!
• The Fine Bros. airship tour in YouTube’s west district. It’s basically a long, over-the-top Take That! aimed at reaction videos in general, and escalates quickly to the point of total insanity.
• Shift explains why he’s in jail: lollygagging and public shitposting. Til’s ‘thinking’ emote really sells it.
• Just try picking a fight with the guard sitting in the upper right corner of the Partnership Towers cafeteria.
  Mega Guard: You messed with the wrong guard! I've been eating spinach! *Suddenly grows twenty feet tall and attacks*
• If you keep trying to haggle with the ticket scalper, he’ll eventually let you take the tickets for 1 karma, as long as you please just give him some kind of validation.
• After chasing him all over the site, the heroes finally corner PewDiePie in the back of a strip club. He plans to sic the dancers on you and escape, but when the battle ends he’s still standing in the exact same place.
  PewDiePie: ...I was so mesmerized by the sexy girls that I forgot to escape.
• Halfway through the fight with RayWilliamJohnson, PewDiePie jumps in to try and help, only to be blasted away in one shot by RWJ, who insists on fighting alone.
• At the start of Chapter 4, you hear that 4chan is setting up a barricade to keep out intruders. A full chapter later, you finally get to lay eyes on it… and it’s the shoddiest little picket fence imaginable, about the same height as Catie. And the 4channers are building it right next to YouTube’s actual city walls. Why? Because they want their enemies to see it and be afraid.
• The Puddi enemy. It looks like a photorealistic custard pudding with big, muscular human legs.
• 4chan’s welcome sign has been vandalized, with the site’s name changed to say “COOL PERSON TOWN.”
• All of the Anons running around 4chan are exactly identical - except for one, who’s inexplicably T-posing.
• At the left end of town, there’s a staircase leading up, and a sign warning of “deadly squids ahead.” If you take the stairs, you find a man being accosted by three squids, who says “It turns out there’s nothing but deadly squids up here, and I am terrified.” Gee buddy, didn’t you read the sign?
  • Even better, their enemy bio refers to them as “a gang of squids from the bad part of town.” Let that mental image sink in for a second.
• How did the 4chan mod get the Anons under control to help fight Arianna? He didn’t, that was just the most interesting thing happening at the moment.
• In the scene where Arianna confronts Wolfram about the PasSWORD, one of Wolfram’s dataminers can be seen in the background, just spinning around without a care in the world.
• The flash mob that triggers in YouTube at one point. Especially the guy who shows up wearing a cardboard box with the word “GUNDAM” scrawled on it.
• When the PasSWORD initially fails to cut through the Firewall, it just falls to the ground and the epic fanfare music cuts out with a Record Needle Scratch.
• The absurdity of the game’s plot is summed up in a single sentence:
  Eddie: So our new task... is to convince the Fine Bros. to help us travel back in time. Have I got that right?
• How does the game enforce its Point of No Return? By having Anonymous accidentally drop the Google Gem off the side of the airship, and get called out for it.
• Anon’s insistence that the Wayback Machine’s time portal, (which very clearly resembles a Stargate), is just a “plain old nonspecific type of gate.”
• Up on the Wayback Machine, Benny Fine can be found at one point near a gauntlet of streaming fireballs. He warns you not to be reckless and try to run it… at least, not before he can get his filming equipment set up.
• The Infoshade enemy kinda looks like it’s dancing, so naturally there’s a hidden miniboss version, the Funky Infoshade, that actually is dancing, and attacks by Summoning Backup Dancers. It’s made funnier because of how totally out of place it seems in a dungeon like The Spire.
• When the guide takes Catie to go upgrade the PasSWORD, Tyalie searches her bag for a fun way to help the remaining group kill time while they wait. A few minutes later, we cut back to find them sitting around playing Monopoly. And they’re so into the game that they don’t even notice the boss, which is a gigantic dragon, sneaking up right behind them.
  • The fight escalates and the party is forced to flee, leaving the gameboard behind. Then a few seconds later, Tyalie runs back onscreen to rescue her pile of Monopoly bucks.
• The guide/??? talks at length about how careful and precise he must be while merging the 404 Orb’s volatile essence with the PasSWORD… before letting out a battle cry and just stabbing the sword into the orb with all his might.
• Tumblr has a cheeky “keep off the flowers” sign in the middle of a garden. Til won’t get near it, since her eyesight is good enough to read it from a distance. But if you go back later as Catie, then you can walk right up and read the sign, and Catie will admit that maybe she needs to get her eyes checked.
• Til and Tyalie get a cute bonding moment in the last chapter when they discuss who in the party their hypothetical fans would ship. Til gets flustered at the mention of her and Anonymous being a thing, and Tyalie panics at the idea of Catie being shipped with anyone else but her.
• In the True Ending path, the party believes that the Sky Abyss is a Secret Test of Character devised by the elusive Sky Queen. When they finally meet her, she denies it and says she hadn’t even been watching them, because she’d been too busy binging Stranger Things. She then starts gushing about it until Anonymous intervenes, calling her “Sky Nerd.”

Chapter 6

Would it be too much of a stretch to just say "all of it?"

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• The Social Justice Warriors are such silly, over-the-top parodies of themselves that it’s impossible not to get a few laughs out of them.
  • An SJW in the tower’s storeroom says the room was “assigned ‘pantry’ at birth,” but she’s decided it’s really a kitchen.
  • There’s one in the old man’s bedroom, searching for his porn stash to prove what a sexist he is, and definitely for no other reason.
  • The SJW who asks how you’re speaking to her if gamer culture is dead.
  • One of them says something about equality, and then tries to shill her Patreon at you.
  • In the last room, there’s one who will heal you. Why? She’s a Social Justice Cleric!
• We meet Signboard again in TV Tropes, and it seems he’s fallen in love with a cute local sign. What does she have to say on the matter? “Welcome to TV Tropes.”
• The next town is only accessible by train, so the heroes are excited to spend a few days traveling in style. That is, until they get aboard and walk right into a classic “mystery train” murder scenario. Anonymous instantly tries to bail out.
  Anonymous: I know how this works, huh? I've seen the movies. That guy got killed, and one of the people on the train did it. It'll be up to us to solve the case before the train reaches GameFAQs in two days. That's stress I don't need right now.
  • Even after Catie talks him into staying to help solve the case, he never stops acting really annoyed by the whole thing.
• The sheer derpiness of the Hype Train staff. They’re like a pack of toddlers trying to play train engineers, barely even aware of the murder mystery that’s happening around them.
• Several passengers have reported hearing noises atop the train, so the party decides to investigate while they’re stopped at Twitch station. Just then, the conductor announces that it’s time to leave.
  Anonymous: Or we could do it while the train is moving, like a bunch of idiots.
  Til: Sounds like a typical plan for us.
• The guards who keep you from entering Twitch actually use the ‘Kappa’ emote in their dialogue.
• At several points during the chapter, you cross paths with another team of RPG heroes on their own epic quest. Til is increasingly perturbed by the whole thing, asking if she stumbled into some kind of parallel dimension.
• Just the fact that Tyalie would feel so slighted at a strand of her hair being kept as evidence that she would break into the guard’s compartment to steal it back.
• The entire scene with Tyalie on top of the train. She lures you up there to fight, and when that fails, she tries to explain herself by way of a scatterbrained rant filled with Insane Troll Logic. It’s helpfully illustrated by a series of images plastering themselves on the skybox, with quality ranging from actual photographs, to in-game screenshots, to crayon scribbles.
  • At one point, there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of someone typing ”freaky hentai” into Google, which is quickly replaced by an image of the word “Oops!”
  • After hearing what happened, Til’s first response is to ask if the sky really did that.
• The solution to the “murder mystery”- the so-called victim was Faking the Dead purely for laughs. It may seem like a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, unless you played the prequel, in which case it’s a hilarious Call-Back to that game’s own B.L.A.M.
• After Tyalie joins the party, take a peek at your Key Items menu: she’s snuck her 3DS in there!
• In GameFAQs, the patrolling mods speak entirely in lines copy/pasted from the actual website’s Terms of Service page.
• The team at LoversLab is working hard to create erotic mods for all your favorite games… unless you’re under 18, in which case they’re not doing anything like that at all.
• In the site’s inner sanctum, we meet a puffball “fairy” who tells the party where to go next. He’s so cute that Tyalie immediately decides to give him a pet name. The fairy tries to object, but Tyalie’s enthusiasm just bowls him straight over.
  Tyalie: You're still cute, though. So poofy and fluffy... I know! I'm gonna call you Pluffy!
  Pluffy: Do not call me tha-
  Tyalie: Too late! You're Pluffy, my new best friend!
• Three of GameFAQs’ sacred orbs, the orbs of Plot, Puzzles, and Platforming, are kept at the top of three tall, interconnected towers filled with challenging trials. Meanwhile, the PVP orb is just sitting in a sandbox at the edge of town being guarded by a baby.
• The first Picross puzzle you get after the tutorial seems pretty strange, just a bunch of lines that don’t connect… And then it hits you - it’s Loss.
• The secret Tower of Plot areas are mainly meant to be creepy, but one of the “partiers” in Festival Square has this to say:
  Partier: Please, help me! I have St. Vitus Dance!
• The second “scene” in the Tower of Plot is a war between two enemy tribes… made up entirely of talking crabs and turnips. It’s all played totally serious, too, like you’ve stumbled into some kind of bizarro Game of Thrones. If you explore the area, you can find two exiles and their hybrid child, wondering why everyone else can’t just get along.
  • Yes, you read that right. A turnip/crab hybrid, and it looks every bit as silly as it sounds.
  • There’s a secret tunnel linking the two castles, which each side claims to have stealthily dug without the other knowing, despite both sides being present in the tunnel at the same time.
  • The turnips have a savage secret weapon if you side against them. It’s called… wait for it… a Dire Turnip.
• The sheer audacity of putting a coma dream ending in the middle of your game, complete with a full set of fake end credits, only to pull out at the last possible second and carry on like nothing happened.
  • The fake credits are hilarious in and of themselves. The cast roll starts by showing all the people you met in the dungeon… but then it starts listing characters you haven’t met yet, characters who aren’t even in the game, characters from other games, abstract feelings, random wild bears… and YOU, the player! Thanks for playing!
• After his revival, chapter boss One_Wing launches into a raging monologue filled with bouts of SUDDEN SCREAMING. The best part is how super into it Tyalie gets, asking tons of questions and urging the others to ‘get into the spirit.’
  • It’s even funnier if you interpret her incessant questions as deliberate trolling to piss One_Wing off.
• How does One_Wing, the largest of hams, end up dying? He just pops like a soap bubble, with no fancy animations or fanfare or anything. You almost have to feel bad for the guy.
• The final PasSWORD shard gets put straight into your inventory, meaning there’s no need for the flashy “Shard Get!” sequence. Catie feels let down, because she was looking forward to it. Then she decides to have the sequence anyway.

Endings

• The normal ending lets you walk around town and reunite with old friends (and a few foes too), leading to plenty of amusing conversations.
  • The antique shop is taken over by Social Justice Warriors and 4chan Anons, who seem to be in a battle over the furniture. The shopkeeper can only stand by and wonder if this is good for his business or not.
    • One Anon is staring into a mirror by himself. Talk to him to learn why:
      4chan Anon: I see an Anon trapped in the mirror world! Hang in there, buddy! I'll go for help!
  • If you explore the area, you can meet up with Wolfram again. It turns out he survived being fried to a crisp by ALPHA, and he hasn’t learned anything! He’ll be right back to making deadly robots… as soon as he gets some medical attention.
  • We finally see RayWilliamJohnson again, for the first time since his defeat… and he’s caught upside down in a tree. And a few of his former guards want to try poking him with sticks to see what happens.
    • It’s even funnier because we know that’s not where he originally landed. So how in the world did he get up there?
  • The Sky Queen heroes are back, enjoying the ending and talking about how nice it is to see all the familiar faces from their adventure.
  • Shift has been picking up on all the subtext, and is convinced that Tyalie has a thing for him. The irony is, there is plenty of subtext saying that Tyalie is in love… with Catie.
• Boxxyfan’s final fate in the True Ending. Just as the plot seems to be wrapping up, he interrupts the party’s heartwarming reunion, demanding to settle things with Catie once and for all. Tensions rise… until a confused Coria wanders into frame. Questions arise, and she reveals the “curse” that turned her into a plant – the event which sent Boxxyfan spiraling into raging madness – only lasted a grand total of twelve minutes. After learning what her brother has been up to since then, she scolds him, makes him apologize, and drags him off by the ear to deliver a stern talking-to. Never before has a villain been so thoroughly defanged in such a short amount of time.
  • The best part is the implication that he’s pulled this sort of stunt before. That’s right, all the drama and pain we saw throughout the series was the result of a tantrum.
• The team’s vacation in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue has some funny moments:
  • Anon and Til spend the whole trip arguing about where to go, and have such a great time that they make plans to do it again next week.
  • Shift ends up becoming king of the site through a chain of wacky misunderstandings.
  • The last we see of Boxxyfan, he’s sulking moodily on a Ferris Wheel while everyone else enjoys themselves.
  • GmasterRED is briefly seen surrounded by piles and piles of riches, having successfully taken credit for everything once again.
• The secret “PC Ending” is mainly weird in a creepy way, but one part still manages to squeeze in some levity. The second-to-last question of the statue’s mega-difficult Pop Quiz is… a Crossword Puzzle. It pops up with a prompt to “get your pencils out, kids!” If you want, you can just exit the screen without even trying. Also, one of the clues ask you to name the developer’s favorite Pokémon.

Sidequests

• The Fanon party sidequest escalates from enjoying a fairly tame house party, to fighting an illegal hydra the host was keeping locked up in the back room.
  Eddie: Anon, why is this happening? I thought we were here to have fun.
  Anonymous: It's happening because Catie can be talked into anything.
• One of the changing huts at the beach is “locked” with a series of incredibly hard platforming trials. Once you finally make it through, the lady inside is understandably irate that you’d go through so much just to invade her privacy.
  • Shift’s trial is a Dropper – a long fall where you have to reach the bottom without hitting any hazards. There’s a checkpoint halfway down… but it’s blocked by a ceiling of spikes with a big trollface next to it.
• Alwaysland. The sheer absurdity of the quest makes it hilarious.
  • The Excuse Plot you’re given at the start. Tang’s waifu has been kidnapped and you have to save her. Go!
    • Oh, and Tang is riding on a Lakitu cloud when he tells you this.
  • At one point, Tang sends an email telling you to hurry up. Seconds later, he sends you an apology email, and then a third letter asking how to delete emails.
  • Forby’s bad acting and total lack of interest in the whole thing. And then Tang starts changing the script on him, leading to an argument that destroys the fourth wall.
    Forby: Tang, what the fuck are you talking about? None of this junk is in the script.
    Tang: I made a few last-minute edits, but trust me. This way is better!
    Forby: What you're talking about is forum drama from 2013. Most of the players won't even know who Kelly is.
    Tang: So? They won't know who we are either, but that didn't stop them from getting this far!
  • After the battle, Forby is just so utterly done with it.
    Forby: Ugh. I am beaten. I am dead. (Beat) Tang, this is dumb. I'm going home.
  • At the end, Tang offers you a choice between two sacred relics. Why? Because he’s moving to a new place and needs to get rid of some stuff.
  • Shrimp pops in to clarify something, causing Tang to freak out about the fourth wall. As if it hadn’t been fully obliterated by that point anyway.
  • The quest ends and everyone is warped safely back to reality… except for Kim, Tang’s waifu, who gets gets left behind.
    Kim in Ae: ...Hey guys? I'm still here... Guys?
• The Katy’s Diary sidequest is filled with these:
  • A cloaked figure can be found standing on a shadowy rooftop all Batman-like. He tells Katy that the winds of change are coming… and then he turns around and farts.
  • The One-Time Tavern is exactly what it sounds like: a bumpin’ tavern that you can only visit once. Because every good bar needs a theme.
    • A girl in the corner secretly admits that she’s been inside twice. She then promptly fades out of existence.
    • One man says he’s been there for four days, but that’s nothing compared to the guy next to him. Checking the guy in question? “It's the desiccated skeleton of a satisfied bar patron.”
    • Once you leave, trying the door again gets you this:
      Katy: It won't open. I'm not sure what I expected.
  • The Song That Plays For A Single Line Of Text, which is… a song that plays for a single, random line of text.
  • A kid in town tells you tells you that he hid something neat behind a pale cactus in the desert. If you find and examine the cactus, the narrator says Katy found something neat… and that’s it. She doesn’t take it, nor do we learn what it is.
  • The townfolk are quick to point out that the “lost temple” you’re searching for is actually a pretty well-known tourist attraction.
  • The first new enemies you meet are called Hella Crabs. They’re just like normal crabs, except they’ve got sunglasses and handguns. Checking their enemy description gives us this:
    "It's a crab who rebelled against the system. It looks cool, but deep inside, it regrets the choices it made."
  • Katy touches a mushroom that’s blocking the path. It wakes up, attacks, and then inexplicably joins the party. Yes, you now have a fungus buddy.
    • When the game asks if you want to poke the mushroom, the options are “Yes!!!” and “Ew, no.”
    • If you check Shroomy’s equipment screen after he joins you, his weapon is just listed as “Being a Mushroom.”
• The Instagram weapons shop owner is a pacifist. There’s nothing for sale, she just gives you some encouraging words and sends you on your way.
• In one sidequest, you get hired part-time at the Battle Arena… to do the laundry. As in, the entire process, including the part where you sit beside the washing machine and wait for the rinse cycle to finish, so you can take the load out, put it in the dryer, and keep waiting.
  • If you search for laundry in the dining hall, one of the fighters chews you out for assuming they’d be that unsanitary. Later, when you’re returning the laundry, that same fighter asks you to just leave it on the table, next to his food.
• The whole of the Fight Night quest, but Round 2 is the highlight. Your foes are a 4chan Anon and his deadly robot creation, who spends the first several turns analyzing your moves and devising a perfect strategy to defeat you. Invariably, it decides that the best course of action is to switch sides, defeat its master, and then escape.
  Enemy Anon: T-this isn't fair! Nobody ever said an A.I. could go berserk!
• A later sidequest involves replacing an old man’s dining room table, since his current one has a wobbly leg. The issue is, the new tables you buy tend to shatter at the slightest hiccup, including the old man’s shout of excitement when you finally make it back. Catie finally gets fed up and decides to just fix the problem “her way,” by propping up the original table with some books off a nearby shelf.
• The Deep Web is 99% raw Nightmare Fuel. The leftover one percent is a cozy, well-lit supermarket run by sentient onions.
• In the Phishers’ temple, Catie has to save her friends from the grasp of evil shapeshifters, who have taken their forms. It’s all suitably tense… until you get to the room where Shift is being held, and his “imposters” look like a bunch of totally different characters.
  PewDiePie: Thank goodness, It's Catie! Now we can settle this mess.
  Katy: Remember me, Catie? It's me, your best pal Shift!
  Hype Train Frog: Yeah, we're all your best pals!
  Catie: ...this one seems harder than the others.
  Shift: ...Seriously?! Quit kidding around and help me!
• When you meet up with Tyalie, she’s been tricked into tagging along with a fake version of the party. After the situation is explained to her, this happens:
  Shift: So, long story short, these guys are shapeshifters or something, and they want to kill us.
  Tyalie: *Turns to face her fake “friends”* That's pretty lame. Is it true?
  Fake Catie: ...don't listen to them. join us, we've saved a place for you here...
  *The fake Catie hisses and slides backward, creating a hole in the group*
  Tyalie: Er, that's a little bit creepy.
• The Phisher King echoes back all the personal information you entered throughout his temple, saying he’s now ready to take your place in society… except you can input anything, which means he’s probably just yelling nonsense at you.
• At the heart of the Deep Web, you finally make it to the boss’s lair. The source of all evil in this nightmarish place. It’s tense, it’s dark, and it’s terrifying. You slowly open the door, prepared to meet your foe, and… he’s in there watching TV next to a pile of wine bottles. He tries to say something dramatic, but the moment is already lost.
  • His final form is an onion, taking the dungeon’s Running Gag to its logical conclusion.
• Just outside the eBuy Superstore during its winter sale, a sailor is building a snowman but can’t decide where to put the carrot. Said snowman’s face can basically be described as ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).
• The Holiday Sale sidequest involves battling the unholy fusion of Santa’s cap and Cthulhu on the roof of a shopping mall. Enough said.
  • If Tyalie is in your party when you beat it, she’ll end the scene by wishing you a Happy Easter.
  • Take an extra good look at the battle results screen. “You saved Christmas!”
  • After it’s all over, one of the shoppers exclaims that Santa Claus was just how he always pictured him. That’s, uh… that’s one hell of an imagination you’ve got there, pal.
  • Another shopper gives us this gem:
    Shopper: Y'know, while I was being assimilated by that nightmare thing... For just a few seconds, I thought I might've felt the True Meaning of Christmas.
• There’s an Elsa doll for sale on one of the tables. The narrator wonders how the hell Frozen is still so popular after all this time.

Misc/Other

• Literally everything about the “Shifted Spires” book series. It’s a retelling of the prequel’s story, but in the loosest and most hilariously awful way possible.
  • Anon gets killed off in the second volume, by “sacrificing himself” in a fully unspecified way. Catie forgets all about it by the start of volume three.
  • Intrepid, the saga’s Big Bad in place of Boxxyfan, screams all of his lines like an unhinged Gilbert Gottfried character.
    "THIS WORLD IS A WORLD OF LIES!" the lunatic said. "EVERYTHING IS TAINED BY LIES OF EXISTANCE! I SHALL CLEANSE THE EVERYTHING AND THE LEAF SHALL BUD ANEW! HA HA HA HA HA!"
  • The fourth book’s description calls it “a thrilling tale loved by literally tens of people!”
  • GmasterRED is introduced, and he swiftly takes over the plot, becoming the lead protagonist by Volume IV and ousting Catie altogether by Volume V. She only gets one brief mention in the last book, and even then her name is misspelled as “Katie.”
  • The final pages simply have to be seen to be believed. The level of Troll Fic writing is almost up there with the likes of Half-Life: Full Life Consequences.
• Many items have silly or snarky Flavor Text:
  • Apparently, Hackerberries taste like “retextured Snozzberries.”
  • The Megabyte Gun’s description asks if you actually have a proper gun license.
  • For the Steampunk Fedora: “A needlessly expensive novelty hat with glued-on goggles, which do nothing.”
  • The VR Headset: “What's the point of this, if you're already in a virtual reality?”
  • The menu icon for “The Dress” is black and blue, but its description says it’s “clearly white and gold.”
  • A type of gun held by Social Justice Warriors, the Trigger Warning, claims that “its name has lost all meaning.”
  • Similar to the Dress example above, the Laurel Wreath’s description asks if it’s really a “Yanny Wreath.”
  • The Wayback T-shirt’s description wonders when the shopkeeper had time to make it.
  • The item text for Cornelia’s dress notes that the fabric is extra stretchy by necessity.
  • If you pick the Overpowered Crown as a reward for beating Alwaysland, its description tries to guilt you into not wearing it.
• Even the unused content can be funny. A man left behind in one of the beta rooms has this to say:
  H-help me! Please! I'm trapped in a test map! I don't want to be dummied out... I've got a wife and three kids!