Video Game / Dead Estate

Cornered with nowhere else to turn, can you escape the monster-filled mansion?^note Clockwise from bottom-left: Jules, Jeff, Anya, Axel, Digby, Fuji, Lydia, Luis, BOSS, Mumba, Cordelia.

Dead Estate is an Action Horror Roguelike developed by Milkbar Lads and published by 2 Left Thumbs. It was released on October 19th 2021 for PC via Steam and itch.io.

After their truck breaks down in the middle of nowhere, late-night trucker Jeff and hitchhiker Jules find themselves in the middle of a huge zombie attack! Their only respite is a foreboding dark mansion teeming with horrors and something far, far worse... Can they fight their way out of the Dead Estate?

Gameplay consists of clearing rooms on a floor to find a Boss Key, which can then be taken to a Boss Room to fight the level's boss. Along the way you'll collect different weapons and items which offer a variety of abilities, as well as purchase items and level stats at the various shops, which are all run by the smokin' Hot Witch Cordelia. Other playable characters include Fuji, Mumba, Cordelia, Digby, Lydia, Luis, BOSS, and Axel.

The game has six post-launch updates planned, with five currently being released. The first, "Home Theater," was released on October 25, 2022, and added intro cutscenes for the unlockable characters and a ton of new enemies, bosses, items and weapons. The second update, "Bombs Away", released on December 29, 2022 and added BOSS as a playable character as well as the bonus sub-floors. The third update, "Heaven and Hell", released on February 14 2023 and added Filia and Faith's Hellmart and Heavenmart mechanic and a new set of unlockable costumes. The fourth update, "Axe To Grind", released on April 28th 2023 and added the final playable character, Axel, as well as "a shitload of bug fixes" and a rework of Chunks' mechanics. The fifth update, "Assignment Anya", released on December 21st 2023 and added 11 new unique challenges to the game^note one for each character, plus a unique challenge for Mumba styled after Pac-Man, as well as an entire separate full-on Survival Horror mini-campaign called Assignment Anya which takes place shortly before the events of the main game.

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Dead Estate provides examples of the following tropes:

Main Game

• The '90s: A handful of details and Assignment Anya both indicate that the game takes place in 1998, and it's overall a Genre Throwback to turn-of-the-century VHS horror as well as horror games from that period.
• 100% Completion: Achieved by unlocking every single medal in the game that was not added in an update. This includes unlocking every Costume B for and getting the true ending with every character that isn't BOSS or Axel, and a handful of challenge runs.
  Unlock Message: You can uninstall now!
• Abandoned Area: The Abandoned Set is completely deserted... until you try to pick up the boss key, upon which the game will pretend to crash and you will start getting chased down by a Chunks made of TV static.
• Abandoned Laboratory: The game's fourth level is set in one.
• Action Girl: A major part of the game's appeal is how many various ass-kicking and attractive women you can play as; Jules is a fiesty Tank-Top Tomboy, Cordelia is a large-breasted Hot Witch, Fuji is a towering Amazonian Beauty, Lydia is a sharply-dressed Lady in a Power Suit and BOSS is a ripped Sarashi-clad Dark Action Girl.
• Ancient Tomb: The second floor of the alternative path takes place inside of a cursed pyramid.
• Anvil on Head: Sudden Death gives a chance for an anvil to fall ontop of an enemy, causing immense damage.
• Amazonian Beauty: Fuji is a shredded girl in a skintight pink leotard. Doubly so for Champion Fuji, who is dressed in flamboyant and revealing Masked Luchador garb that shows off her gigantic six-pack.
• Apocalypse Cult: The basic cultists on the Second Story deal no contact damage but will slowly conjure a ball of blood before launching it at the player. They and the various other cultist enemies in the game are led by a mysterious woman named Cybil, who can potentially sell items or be the floor 4 boss. This cult is revealed in Assignment Anya to be the Mors Mundi Pro Supremo Leviathan^note Lit: "The death of the world for the Supreme Leviathan" cult, a completely separate threat adjacent to Diavola and her monsters, as they are trying to resurrect an Eldritch Abomination called the Leviathan using a month's worth of Human Sacrifices so that it can devour the world.
• Anthropomorphic Food: The Pumpkin Prince, a massive Jack-o'-Lantern, serves as the boss of Dark Mood Woods.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Chunks slows down in rooms with other enemies still in them, so that the player has a fighting chance at avoiding him while dealing with anything else in the room.
  • Most long hallways in a level will have a room with a green prism near the end that offers a one-time teleportation back to the start so the player doesn't have to trudge back through a bunch of empty rooms.
  • Lydia's challenge, "Great Depression", has a gimmick where she is constantly losing money and will die the second she runs out. As such, bosses in this challenge which have long periods where they can't be damaged (such as the Golden Mask and the Static Demon) have gold pots in their arena to prevent you from always incurring a monetary loss on them.
• Art Shift: The Portrait Demon is drawn and animated in a more realistic style than most other characters, adding to its already horrific appearance.
• Batter Up!: Digby's weapon of choice. He can rack up a combo meter that increases his speed and fire rate as long as the combo is active.
• Betrayal Insurance: Cordelia's Dad created the Antidote in the event that Chunks became too unruly or impossible to control in his humanoid form. The Antidote transforms him back into a regular rat, although it appears he retains his intelligence and loyalty, as he opens the gate to the EXIT realm after being administered with it.
• Big Fancy House: The Estate itself is a sprawling mansion with at least four main floors and hundreds of rooms. It has an entire subfloor dedicated to just the kitchen, and the attic is both an entire floor and housing a massive laboratory full of equipment. There is also a roof-wide widow's walk balcony and a steeple which holds the EXIT Realm portal machine. And that's not even getting into all the alternative floors, which seem to defy euclidean space to a degree. Assignment Anya implies that the EXIT realm gradually caused the Estate to become Bigger on the Inside and constantly shuffle around its rooms, but even in that game the Estate is still a sizable abode.
• Bilingual Bonus: Anyone with a capable understanding of Latin can read the "Prayer to the Savior Leviathan Prince" which acts as the preface of the History of Mors Mundi Pro Supremo Leviathan:
  O sacred beast that sleeps among the stars, may you be our guardian, our lamp, our nourishment. Let our land be your dinner. Let our water be your wine. Digest the unclean world and leave the earth cleansed with your excrement.
• Bird-Poop Gag: Gully, an item that allows a gull to swoop in and take a dump on enemies for plenty of damage from time to time.
• Bittersweet Ending: The Normal ending has the player character defeating Chunks and escaping the Estate before it explodes with Cordelia's help, but the survivors never find out what exactly happened or what the true cause of everything is, meaning that Albert is still imprisoned in the Exit Realm and Diavola is free to restart her plans another day. Its especially bitter for Cordelia, since finding and saving Albert was the entire point of her storyline.
• Bizarrchitecture: The Estate has one hell of a strange interior, considering how it possesses a crypt, dark forest, arena, film studio, a bank, several treatment clinics, a lab and an entire sunken ship somehow crammed into it. It's also possible due to the game's randomized floors that the whole building is some kind of Mobile Maze, which is outright confirmed in Assignment Anya as part of the EXIT's realm's taint on the house.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!:
  • The Golden Gun. It has very few shots, but each one of them are extremely strong, capable of one-shotting most enemies and killing bosses in a couple of hits.
  • The Diamond Handgun and Shotgun. They may not deal as much damage as the Golden Gun, but they turn dead enemies into an immense amount of money.
• Blob Monster: A boss of the Laboratory, "The Experiment" can sink into the floor and hurl chunks of itself at the player.
• Boob-Based Gag: Two come from promotional material, and both involve Cordelia.
  • The first is the official soundtrack cover art, which depicts all of the playable(at launch) characters crammed into a floor's elevator◊. Cordelia's bosom is so large that it's causing visible discomfort for Jeff, Jules and Luis, with Jules looking like she's being crushed under their weight. It's also hard to tell whether Fuji is looking wistfully at her girlfriend or staring directly down at them.
  • The second is the Heaven and Hell update's promotional artwork◊, which again depicts Cordelia crammed in an elevator, this time with Filia and Faith. Cordelia's boobs are causing all three of their chests to be squished together, causing her some concern. Filia is loving the situation while Faith is looking deeply uncomfortable.
• Boss-Altering Consequence: Assembling all four parts of the Silver Key by clearing the alternate floors will unlock the coffin on the balcony, which gives the player the Antidote. Bringing this into the boss fight with Chunks on the final floor and injecting him with it will transform him back into a normal rat, ending the fight immediately and unlocking the way into the EXIT Realm.
• Boss-Only Level: The Old Set is completely eerily abandoned save for the secret and item rooms and the floor's Boss Key, which picking up causes the boss of the stage, the Static Demon, to manifest.
• Boss Rush: The Arena, a sub-floor where you have to kill several bosses in 140 seconds. It is difficult, but offers several items and plenty of money if you make it.
• Boxing Battler: Fuji, The Fighter. She is limited to using only her boxing gloves and other fist-weapons, any weapon she attempts to pick up is immediately destroyed.
• Canon Welding: Several of the characters are either from past games produced by Milkbar Lads or are related to characters from those previous games.
  • Fuji is the mother of Apple, the protagonist of Bonkers.
  • Digby was originally a shopkeeper in Holy Smokes.
  • Mumba is the protagonist of the Ugby Mumba Newgrounds games.
• Celebratory Body Tossing: In the true ending, the protagonists hoist the chosen player character up into the air, who then strikes a pose from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.
• Chainsaw Good: The Chainsaw is an extremely powerful melee weapon with a fast fire rate and great damage. The only thing holding it back is that you have to perpetually be very close to enemies for it to work its magic, but it's worth it.
• Challenge Run: In addition to the challenges required to unlock characters' alternate costumes, there are twelve unique character-specific challenges which unlock adjustable game-wide Curses after you beat them.
• Clothing Switch: Jules, Cordelia and Lydia can be seen trying on each others' outfits in the true ending. Jules' clearly, um, doesn't fit on Cordelia due to her large bosom, to her noticeable distress.
• Coffin Contraband: The coffin located on the balcony contains the antidote to revert Chunks back to his diminutive state.
• Collapsing Lair: In the normal ending, the entire mansion explodes as the player's character and Cordelia escape on her broom. In the true ending, it merely loses the top of the tower and suffers some broken windows.
• Conveniently Interrupted Document: The History of Mors Mundi Supremo Leviathan by M.M. Earle has three pages ripped out of it, conveniently interrupting the book just as it was about to explain what George V. Kostopoulos was instructed by the Leviathan to do in his mission.
• Creepy Basement: The Basement is a pretty eerie room with how silent and dark it is. Thankfully, nothing there can hurt you and it serves as a Warp Zone.
• Developer's Foresight: If you defeat Cybil on floor 4 and then encounter her shop afterward^note This is uncommon, as the only places she will appear after this point are in a secret room in the Sunken Ship, the Balcony if you have the VIP pass, and a looped run, she will have a different shopkeeper portrait where she is missing her hood and heavily bruised and bandaged from the battle.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: The True Final Boss is Diavola, an Eldritch Abomination from the Exit Realm who can be shot to death by the player. It's even more literal in Ms. Fuji's case where she can punch it to death.
• Difficulty Levels: Five of them. Easy (wich is given a variety of silly names with each playthrough), Normal, Painful, Nightmare, X Must Die.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Chunks is the final boss of the normal ending, which is the first ending the player can get. They'll have to beat the game two more times to even unlock the true ending, where Chunks is reduced to nothing more than a Cutscene Boss by pumping him full of the antidote, allowing him to open the gate to the EXIT realm.
• Doesn't Like Guns: Fuji is a melee-only character, and angrily scraps any gun she touches. Digby is the same way because his dad told him not to touch guns, although he will permit himself to use melee weapons, non-explosive or non-incendiary weapons and magic staffs.
  Fuji: I've got plenty of guns RIGHT HERE! *flexes*
• Don't Celebrate Just Yet: After beating Diavola in the Exit Realm, Cordelia (or her mother if you're playing as Cordelia) will pick both her father and the player up with her broom to fly off and escape the Exit Realm. However, the player is knocked off the broom during what appears to be the usual escape sequence, landing back on the platform to fight Diavola's One-Winged Angel form. The tip given for the level even hints to this happening: "Don't stop until you've reached the end".
• Eldritch Location: The Exit Realm is the hellscape from which all of the monsters stalking the mansion have entered from and is the True Final Level of the game.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Lydia gets the idea to go to the Estate after reading a newspaper headline which says "Haunted Mansion? Indie film crew still missing", which directly teases Axel's intro cinematic almost two years before he was added into the game. It also makes reference to the prison break caused by BOSS, teasing her being added in the following Bombs Away update.
• Enemy Summoner: The Elite Cultists you meet in looped runs summon other enemies to fight you wile being quite tanky themselves.
• Epic Flail: The cultist knights on the Second Story constantly twirl their flails around themselves, damaging you if you approach.
• Everybody Lives: The True Ending. Albert is reunited with Cordelia and Roselia, the rest of the playable cast gets to celebrate with their new friends, Chunks averts being killed after being transformed back into a rat and even the Estate itself doesn't blow to smithereens like in the Normal Ending, instead sustaining only some minor damage to its steeple.
• Evolving Title Screen: The main menu gets more detailed and the menu music gets more elaborate the more of the story the player completes.
  • To start with, the menu is simply a picture of Jeff and Jules frantically running from Chunks.
  • Beating the game once changes the menu to Jeff and Jules escaping with Cordelia on her Flying Broomstick.
  • The third menu depicts Cordelia showing Jeff and Jules a family portrait, referencing her discovery of what happened to her father and how to rescue him.
  • Beating Diavola once will change the menu to a hectic scene of all the playable characters in pitched combat with her.
  • Finally, achieving 100% Completion turns the menu into a shot of the heroes standing triumphantly atop Diavola's One-Winged Angel form's corpse.
• Eyes Out of Sight: Cordelia's eyes are almost always obscured by her bangs. On the rare occasion that this isn't the case they are instead hidden by the shadow from her large witch hat.
• Face Doodling: Jules and BOSS can be seen doing this to a passed-out Luis in the True Ending.
• Facial Horror: The monkey-masked men in The Attic do not have any skin left on their faces, as shown once you kill them and blow off their masks.
• Fetus Terrible: The Nataleviathan, a boss encountered in the attic, is the spawn of an Eldritch Abomination called The Leviathan and the Mors Mundi cult found a way to hatch it. Good news: it didn't develop in time and the potentially god-like being is now an oversized mix between a stillborn fetus and a shrimp. Bad news: It can still cause room-wide shockwaves and spew acid all over the place.
• Fission Mailed: A very real-looking error message pops up on your computer when you pick up the boss key in the Old Set...but it's not. RUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUN
• Flawed Prototype: The Laboratory features unfinished and much weaker versions of Chunks that can actually be killed. In addition, the mysterious prism-shaped objects that teleport the player's character back to the start of the level are less-advanced versions of the device that opens the portal to the EXIT Realm.
• Floating Mask: Groups of floating masks in the Foresaken Crypt will rapidly circle around the player whilst slowly drawing closer to them.
• Fragile Speedster: Mumba has the fastest agility in the game coupled with the lowest base health.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Several characters' introductory cutscenes have visual gags that only appear for a few seconds.
  • The newspaper Lydia is reading in the diner makes reference to both a prison breakout and the disappearance of an indie film crew near a supposedly haunted house, teasing BOSS and Axel being added as playable characters later and referencing both of their introductions.
  • The list of merit badges Digby has acquired include things like "fire starting", "pan handling", "podcasting", "waterboarding", "second" and "third" aid, and "child labor".
• Friendly Shopkeeper: Cordelia the witch is an amicable, if flirty, seller of goods. Her mother Roselia even better exemplifies this trope, practically punctuating the end of every sentence with "honey". Inverted with Cybil the cultist shopkeeper, who sternly says that you had better buy something.
• Fun with Acronyms: The big glaring sign that says "EXIT" on it isn't actually a way out of the Estate; it's a label for the room containing the device that opens a portal to another dimension designated "Realm 3X1T"(Three-X-One-T), which is home to a whole bevy of monsters and also Diavola.
• Genre Throwback: The game is a love letter to '90s horror of all stripes, whether it be VHS B-movies or early Survival Horror games, especially Resident Evil and Parasite Eve.
• Ghost Ship: The Sunken Ship level takes place on a... sunken ship.
• Glitch Entity: The boss of the Old Set. It pretends to crash your game, then chases you down with an unkillable Chunks made of blindingly bright TV static. Finally, it's undamageable in its boss fight proper, so you have to avoid its attacks until it displaces itself into smaller pieces you can destroy.
• Graphics-Induced Super-Deformed: Since all the characters' sprites are small and boxy, they look much less defined than their realistically-proportioned character designs that appear in cutscenes. For example, Fuji and Cordelia's sprites are the same height even though Fuji is considerably taller than her. The only exception to this is Mumba, who was already a chibified character without much definition to begin with.
• Hair-Raising Hare: Pink fleshy ones appear in the Attic Sanctum and make use of holes in the floor to travel around the room.
• Halfway Plot Switch: After getting the Normal Ending with Cordelia, the plot is no longer about escaping the monster-filled estate and is instead about helping Cordelia to rescue her father from the EXIT realm.
• Harder Than Hard: X Must Die. All of the previous difficulties' stipulations apply, you have no map, the stores and treasure rooms are hidden, enemies are tougher and Chunks spawns in almost immediately and has a LOT more health, forcing you to either fight your way through every room while he's chasing you down or knock him out early, which is a time-consuming and dangerous process. Oh, and you may now have to run away from more than just one Portrait Demon this time!
• Haunted House: The majority of the game takes place inside one.
• Hot Witch: Exaggerated with Cordelia, who has a Buxom Beauty Standard figure and is constantly showing them off in various ways in her portaits.
• Impossibly-Low Neckline: Cordelia sports one of these.
• Intimidating Revenue Service:
  • The Eviction Notice, an old piece of paper from Roselia's less responsible days that can scare off the enemies from the room in an instant once you kill a foe. Even undead freaks, eldritch horrors, twisted experiments and murderous maniacs seem to fear the mere possibility of you being a representative of the taxman!
  • The Tax Forms. It drains away your money while you are in combat, but it gives you plenty of extra damage the more money you have.
• Invincible Boogeymen:
  • Downplayed with Chunks. He's capable of being knocked out on each floor, which prevents him from chasing the player and nets them a cash bonus. However, especially on harder difficulties, this quickly becomes impractical depending on the situation, so it still might be the better choice to run to avoid losing health.
  • The Portrait Demon, however, is totally unkillable and invincible, and will reduce your HP to 1 if it touches you. Just run if you see its creepy face coming your way.
• Joke Item: Despite being heavily overpriced at $500, Fake Poo simply replaces your weapon's firing sound effect with a fart. The description just reads "hehe".
• Last Chance Hit Point: The Chrysus Medallion and "Second Chance?" items. The former lets you stay alive at 0 HP while rapidly draining your money and killing you when you run out, while the latter causes an explosion around you when you get hit at 1 HP and saves you from death if you kill something with the explosion.
• Macrogame: Chunks Medallions, awarded for completing a run with the amount dependent on the difficulty. They can be used at Filia and Faith's shops to buy curses and blessings on a looped run.
• Mad Bomber: BOSS's playstyle revolves around this. She explodes upon taking damage and starts with the item that allows her to tank a fatal hit if she kills someone with the explosion it causes, as well as having sticky bombs. She apparently broke out of prison by blowing up half of the prison wall, which left her with some hefty injuries as a consequence.
• Made of Explodium: The Beating Bomb item can potentially cause any enemy to explode on death — even Chunks and Diavola.
  • The IED item turns some pots into this, causing them to explode upon being destroyed.
• Mad Scientist: Cordelia's father is the one responsible for opening the portal to the Exit Realm.
• Madwoman in the Attic: Floor 3 features disgusting monsters that resemble humanoid women with far-too-long necks that get enraged and spew blood from their eye sockets when hurt. It's likely not a coincidence that this floor is the Attic Sanctum and is styled after an old attic filled with junk.
• Marathon Level: The EXIT Realm. Instead of simply finding the boss key and bringing it to the locked boss room, this level requires three buttons scattered throughout it to be pressed to open the gate to the Sacrificial Grounds, and it's about twice as large as every other floor in the game and filled with difficult enemies. Luckily, it also includes one of every kind of Cordelia's shops, so ambrosia and other items aren't in short supply.
• Marionette Motion: The mannequins of the Second Story twitch and teleport, rapidly advancing towards the player.
• Merit Badges for Everything: Digby's backstory is that he had completed all of his merit badges except for one, which was a apparently to serve as a lab assistant. He thought that he could complete it by answering an ad that lead him to the Dead Estate, where he was abducted by Chunks.
• Metal Slime: Golden leeches sometimes spawn in rooms and drop a huge amount of cash upon death. Downplayed in that they can't actually escape the room they're in, but they will try to hide behind pots or bits of furniture while the real threats of the room do the attacking.
• Miracle Food: Ambrosia fully heals you upon buying it.
• Mission Control Is Off Its Meds: The loading screen quotes are all over the place, ranging from Captain Obvious suggestions("kill enemies by shooting at them!") to blatant shilling of other Milkbar Lads games ("Play Bonkers!") to straight-up telling the player "you're going to die" right before Diavola's boss arena.
• Monster Clown: Pierrot, the boss of the Attic Sanctum, spews damaging tears as he jumps around the room on his ball. Once he's knocked off of it, he'll aimlessly run around the room, crying even more in despair.
• Moth Menace: The moths of the Second Story hover in place until they've locked on to the player, swooping downward to strike them.
• Ms. Fanservice: Cordelia is quite attractive, and all of her outfits are meant to play it up in different ways. Exaggerated with the various shopkeeper character portaits of her; the higher the level you're on, they get increasingly flirty and pin-uppy, culminating in the Balcony portait, which has her dripping wet from the rain while leaning forward and brushing her hair back.
• Murderous Mannequin: The Second Story is littered with mannequins that unpredictably teleport towards the player.
• Nepharious Pharaoh: The Foresaken Crypt features the Golden Mask, a giant stylized Egyptian-themed pharaoh statue head, as a boss.
• New Jobs As The Plot Demands: You'll quickly start noticing that the Merchant, Arms Dealer, Nurse, and Bank Teller all look awfully familiar to one another.
• No Cutscene Inventory Inertia: Averted. Cordelia's secret cutscene at the end of her Normal Ending route has a unique sprite of her holding a lantern and reading her father's journal for each of her costumes, and both endings have unique sprites and artwork for every costume on every character.
• No OSHA Compliance: The Laboratory is filled with giant spiked crushers, the only purpose of which can be deigned is to smash anyone standing under them. A canny player can trick Chunks into running under one for an instant kill.
• Nostalgia Level: Jules' challenge, "Old Grounds", is simply to clear a run of the original Newgrounds version of the game^note What this means in terms of gameplay is that anything which the main game and subsequent updates added is not available to the player. It's not even that difficult or challenging, but long-time followers of Dead Estate will be please to see the Monster Maker machine at the end of the game again.
• Number of the Beast: As seen in Digby's intro cinematic, the Estate's address is 666 Hamlin Street.
• One Stat to Rule Them All: Strength. Increasing damage early on makes the game a lot less punishing, so it's vital that the player increases it a couple times in the guaranteed Doctor's Office on the Ground Floor. Health isn't as big of an issue, since there are numerous items which increase your max health, and agility is only worth purchasing on characters like Jeff and Fuji who are slower at the start, since too much agility increases the likelihood of accidentally running into spikes and actually makes Chunks faster to compensate for your greater speed.
• Orwellian Retcon:
  • BOSS and Axel were retroactively added into the game's Evolving Title Screen and the True Ending's credits after they were introduced in their respective updates.
  • Cordelia's brother Lambert was added into her collage of memories in her introductory flashback starting with the Assignment Anya update.
• Our Gnomes Are Weirder: The Dark Mood Woods are inhabited with evil hopping garden gnomes. This is also Jeff's unlockable costume.
• People Jars: The Laboratory contains large vats of green liquid that will crack and burst open, releasing the zombies contained within.
• Poltergeist: The ghosts in the Foresaken Crypt will attempt to hit the player by possessing nearby pots and levitating them above you before sending them crashing towards the ground.
• Poverty Food: All of the ramen items give you quite significant buffs, but only when you have less than 100 dollars on you.
• Power Fist: Some items are based around using fists and they are among the only weapons that Fuji can use outside of her regular hands.
• Rainbow Speak: Certain words in various loading screen tips and item descriptions are emphasized with a changed color and shaky letters to make them more distinctive. All Bathroom items have descriptions like this.
  Tip: Try to clear the floor before CHUNKS shows up.
• Rodents of Unusual Size: Chunks is a hulking rat monstrosity that relentlessly pursues the player if they spend too much time on a floor.
• Rouge Angles of Satin: The Forsaken Crypt used to be misspelled as the "Foresaken" crypt, before it was corrected in the Axe to Grind update.
• Run or Die: When you hear a loud rumbling sound or if you see a pale creepy face coming your way, START RUNNING...
  • The main threat of these two, Chunks, is actually capable of being temporarily knocked out for the current floor, which nets the player a tidy sum of cash. The problem is that this takes quite a bit of firepower, and Chunks isn't just going to stand there and take it, so the player had better be prepared to juke him for a while if they want to take him out.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Jules sure seems to think so, as her primary weapon is a single-barrel 12-gauge. There are also a variety of other shotguns lying around the estate, ranging from the sawed-off to the auto.
• Shout-Out:
  • Jules' costume B is titled "Ballistic Jules" and gives her Ashley's outfit. Her costume C instead dresses her like Faye Valentine.
  • Revengeance is a red katana that will violently explode if the user falls to 1 HP. In addition, Fuji's Costume B has her dressed up like Senator Armstrong.
  • The mannequins that reside in the Second Story are a clear reference to Silent Hill.
  • Cordelia's arms dealer outfit strongly resembles Dick Tracy. And her mother will dress up as a very familiar merchant.
  • A plush Tankman can be collected as an item.
  • The minigun looks exactly like The Heavy's, right down to the white underbarrel. Its Flavor Text even references "Meet the Heavy."
    Do you know how much it costs to fire this gun for 12 seconds?
  • When Luis picks up an item or weapon, he will sometimes say "Groovy."
  • The Friday Night Pumpkin item sports a very familiar set of eyes. A more straightforward example is that Digby's costume B lets him dress up like Boyfriend.
  • Cordelia has posters of Apocalypse Now, Kill Bill, and Alien in her shop. There is also a poster in the Old Set that looks like the poster for The Thing (1982), but the humanoid figure is replaced with a distinctly familiar silhouette...
  • Lydia's introductory movie is labeled "Better Call Lydia".
  • Mumba's costume B is based on Horror from Nuclear Throne.
  • BOSS's costume C dresses her up like Big Boss from Metal Gear.
  • Lydia's costume B is called "J.S. Lydia". Her costume C gives her Mariah's outfit.
  • Cordelia's costume C puts her in the dress and hat of Lady Dimitrescu.
  • The lower levels of the mansion contain a painting of a trio of marching bombs.
  • The Mr. Moneybags item is a Uncle Pennybags doll that gives you a damage boost if you are carrying more than $700.
  • Upon getting the true ending, most characters will celebrate with JoJo poses.
  • Like the Resident Evil 2 remake, the game begins with a shot of a big-rig trucker driving through the stormy night and coming across a young woman. Thankfully, Jeff is actually paying attention, and Jules isn't a zombie.
  • The biggest Resident Evil reference is probably how in the normal ending a self-destruct sequence is activated, and Cordelia throws down a rocket launcher with a cry of "USE THIS!" which the player then uses to finish off Chunks.
  • The Portrait Demon's appearance is a reference to Yoshie from the horror game Death Forest, which is also commonly used as a Screamer Prank.
  • The Golden Gun is a pretty obvious one to Francisco Scaramanga's favorite weapon.
  • Fire Punch, a pair of burning fleshy gloves, have a description that reads "Become Fire Punch".
  • Filia's idle animation is very similar to that of the Demon Girls from Helltaker.
• The Spook: The boss of the Old Set, the Static Demon, is substantially harder to explain than the other monsters infesting the Estate. While things like giant sentient gobs of flesh and killer clowns can be explained as coming from the EXIT Realm or Dad's experiments, there is nothing that explains the Static Demon's existence or how it's capable of manipulating sprites and nearly crashing the game itself. It all just serves to make the encounter that much scarier.
• Stalked by the Bell: Chunks does NOT like it if you stay on a single floor for too long.
• Take That!: The Easy Mode tend to have different names for each playthrough. One of these names are "Game Journo", probably a reference to Dean Takahashi's memetically-infamous turn at Cuphead.
• The End... Or Is It?: The very end of the True Ending credits finish with "The End" appearing, only for a bright red "...?" to slowly fade in after the words. Whether this is a legitimate Sequel Hook or just keeping with the game's Horror aesthetic is unknown.
• The Tease: Cordelia is an incredibly flirtatious and moderately exhibitionistic witch. Almost all of her dialogue has her giggling or softly moaning.
  Cordelia [as the player enters her shop]: ~Well~, if I'd known someone was coming in...
• Threatening Shark: The submerged sharks in the Sunken Ship charge at you extremely quickly once you're in their sights.
• Three-Stat System: Health, Strength and Agility. Health determines how many times your character can get hit before dying, Strength linearly increases how much damage they do and Agility increases their base speed. These stats can be upgraded by Cordelia at the Doctor's Office, which spawns guaranteed on the Ground Floor and the Attic Sanctum.
• True Final Boss: Diavola serves as this and can only be reached by clearing every alternative path and obtaining all four parts of the silver key.
• Unfortunate Names: There is a gun which very rapidly fires six shots at once. It's called the "Sex Gun". It even has "SEX" spelled out on top of it! Plus, the version which fires radioactive bullets is called the "Rad Sex Gun".
• Variable Mix: Each floor has a passive and aggressive mix depending on whether or not there are enemies in a room, and switches back to the passive one after they are defeated.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The Exit Realm. A ghoulish Eldritch Location full of sand-blasted red rocks and all manner of demonic entities, this realm is the last challenge before the True Final Boss on the True Ending route.
• Victory Pose: Upon getting the true ending, each character strikes a unique pose referencing JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, except for Gnome Jeff, who is a gnome and cannot articulate his body.
  • Jeff does Jotaro's taunt from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future.
  • Jules does Narancia's pose from the cover of Golden Wind. Alternatively, Ballistic Jules instead does the pose Ermes makes when she offers Mcqueen her panties.
  • Cordelia performs Dio's memetic "WRYYYYYYY" taunt. Grad. Cordelia instead does Josuke's pose.
  • Fuji does Joseph's pose from the cover of Battle Tendency. Senator Fuji, meanwhile, does Funny Valentine's pose, which is fitting since they're both politicians.
  • Digby does Koichi's infamous deer-in-the-headlights pose from "Crazy Noisy Bizarre Town". Funkin' Digby instead does the pose that the child being possessed by Anubis does.
  • Mumba strikes two different poses that Iggy makes for both of his costumes.
  • Lydia strikes Yukako's pose, while J.S. Lydia does Trish's pose from "Traitor's Requiem".
  • Luis imitates Killer Queen's introductory pose, and Stan replicates Pucci's stance during the Heavy Weather arc.
  • BOSS does Diego Brando's transformation pose.
• Video Game Flame Throwers Suck:
  • Hairspray is essentially a truncated flamethrower, firing only two jets of flame and doing about half as much damage, making it a worse version of an already bad weapon. Lydia starts with it, but can swap it out for the regular flamethrower using one of Filia's curses.
  • The Flamethrower does piddling damage with low accuracy and its only saving grace is that it can set enemies on fire, which is still a decent status effect that can be enhanced with the Demon Lung item. Averted with the Super Flamethrower, which has very good DPS and therefore none of the regular flamethrower's downsides.
• Warp Zone: The Basement serves as this, with elevators for each of the other rooms, but not the 3X1T Realm. This can give you the opportunity to skip to the end or to go back to the beginning without having to do a looped run in case you don't want to run into stronger enemies, elite cultists or the Portrait Demon.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The True Ending credits play over polaroid snapshots of the various playable characters after the events of the game, such as Jeff and Lydia arm-wrestling Fuji, and Jules, Cordelia and Lydia trying on each other's outfits. The very last photo is of Cordelia and her family holding a welcome back party for Albert.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: Averted as of the Assignment Anya update, which reveals the Estate is likely located in Michigan's Northern Lower Peninsula, specifically the area around the Leelanau Peninsula and Traverse City, due to the Mors Mundi cult activity there.
• Witch Classic: Cordelia wears a classic witch hat and travels upon a broomstick (when she isn't playing nurse, banker, doctor or arms dealer.)
• You Dirty Rat!: Chunks is a rat turned massive by a lab experiment and he will stop at nothing trying to catch you.

Assignment Anya

• Another Side, Another Story: While Axel's intro cinematic shows how he went from indie film actor to Action Survivor, the story of Assignment Anya shows how his co-star Anya managed to escape the Estate after their film crew was attacked.
• Apocalyptic Log: Anya can find several written by Cordelia scattered across the house, detailing the onset of its gradual overtaking by monsters and cultists from the EXIT Realm.
• Author Avatar: Parodied. The Milkbar Lads appear in the ending, but as a AAA game studio capable of potentially making a game which sells billions of copies instead of an extremely small indie studio made up of less than ten people.
• Big Fancy House: This game shows that even before the Exit Realm and the Mors Mundi cult turned the Dead Estate into an Eldritch Location which is vastly Bigger on the Inside, it was still a sprawling mansion with features like a gigantic library and courtyard. And that's only the stuff on the ground floor, as Anya never ascends to the upper stories where Albert's laboratory presumably lies.
• Call-Forward: One of Cordelia's logs makes note of Luis being Albert's only friend, foreshadowing Luis traveling to the Estate to investigate his friend's disappearance.
• Covers Always Lie: The update promotional artwork depicts Anya amidst zombified versions of all the other player characters. Needless to say, nothing of the sort happens in the actual game.
• Direct Line to the Author: The ending reveals that Anya's account of what happened during her experience was the direct inspiration for the story of Dead Estate's main game...except several things in Assignment Anya also indicate that the main game happens as normal, so make of that what you will.
• End-Game Results Screen: Upon completion you're ranked from a grade of C to S based on three categories: How long you took, how many times you healed and how many times you saved.
• Escape Sequence: The final segment of the game is a frantic escape from Chunks as the entire house begins to burn and furniture starts raining from the ceiling.
• Family Theme Naming: This game confirms that Cordelia inherited the "-elia" suffix of her name from her mother Roselia, while her brother Lambert shares the name suffix of her father Albert.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: On your way to collect the Winter Medallion, you'll hear both Chunks' distinctive thumping sound and his signature growl, keying you in that you'll probably be fleeing from him very shortly. You'll never guess what happens next.
• The Mafia: For some reason, one of the reviewers who judge Dead Estate (1998) at the end is called "Mafia Previews" and writes their reviews in the style of The Don.
• Multiple Endings: The mode has different endings based on your ranking:
  • Bad Ending: Dead Estate (1998) becomes a failure and Anya is forced to work at a burger joint to put herself through college
  • Good Ending: Dead Estate (1998) becomes a massive success, with Anya becoming a billionaire and eventually President of the USA.
• Loophole Abuse: The game keeps track of how many times you heal throughout the game, which affects your ending score and what rank you'll get. However, it only tracks how many health potions you've consumed, meaning the two items in the game which increase your HP by 1 but also heal your HP to full (The Odd Potion and the Champagne Bottle) can be used without hurting your overall score at all. This means you can technically still S rank the game while having two heals available to you if you know where to look.
• Prequel: The events of the mode are set before the main game. The ending shows how Chunks lost his arm to a monster pretending to be Cordelia.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: While the base game is a horror-influenced action Roguelike, Assignment Anya is an actual Survival Horror game, completely contrasting in tone to the rest of the game's content.
• Resolved Noodle Incident: This game shows how Chunks lost his left arm: the Cordelia Mimic bit it off while he was chasing Anya.
• Self-Deprecation: If Dead Estate (1998) flops commercially, the reviews for the game will trash it for being too difficult, encouraging Save Scumming and making the reviewers uncomfortable due to having too many huge breasts.
• Shout-Out:
  • The game's title itself is a reference to Assignment Ada, a non-canon bonus campaign in Resident Evil 4 unlocked after beating the main game.
  • In the Tool Shed room, someone has conspicuously taken a chainsaw off of its holding rack.
  • The achievement for beating the game without saving more than once is called "To Boldly Flee".
• Solve the Soup Cans: Almost exactly like the game series it takes direct inspiration from, many of the doors and chests in Assignment Anya can only be opened by solving a convoluted puzzle. The main overarching one is that Anya must find four medallions representing the seasons in order to open the Courtyard gate and escape the Estate, which all are found in their own unique puzzles in different locations around the house.
• You Have Researched Breathing: By default, Anya can't jump and has average agility. She needs to find boots and socks that let her jump and move faster respectively.
• Warp Whistle: By staring into mirrors in certain rooms, Anya can warp to different parts of the map instantaneously.
• Wham Shot: Upon collecting the Winter Medallion, you'll hear an all-too-familiar growling noise...and then upon entering the next room, Chunks charges in, with both of his arms intact.

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