Video Game / Death Road to Canada

"HIT THE ROAD!"

Death Road to Canada is a self described "road trip simulator"; a Roguelike with RPG Elements, and an The Oregon Trail hybrid mixed together with zombies, dogs, jerks, and otakus. It was developed by Rocketcat Games, who received funding on Kickstarter on September 27th, 2013, and initially released the game on PC through Steam on July 22nd, 2016. It was then ported to iOS devices on March 22nd, 2017, and then to Playstation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch on May 8th, 2018.

The Excuse Plot involves a worldwide Zombie Apocalypse. Why? How? Who knows. What's relevant is that Canada has somehow held out against the zombies while all other nations have fallen. Therefore your humble band of survivors aims to travel from their home in Florida to the land of poutine and socialized health care. The idea of a road trip sounds better than anything else right now…

The game's goal is to drive a car— or a series of cars, more likely— across the East Coast in order to reach Canada. During the journey, the player-character and up to 3 NPC allies must fight against zombies and loot different areas in order to survive the trip. Along the way, the group will encounter unique characters and events, depending on how the Random Number God feels.

Despite the subject matter, Death Road to Canada has a lighthearted tone; gore is featured in a "cutesy" style and the Steam store page describes it as the "most family friendly zombie apocalypse game on the market!". It doesn't take long to see that the game doesn't take itself seriously, you'll meet a lot of people, face moral dilemmas, like who should take blame for a fart, or whether should you share a fun sized candy bar or eat it alone. And lastly, have the opportunity to tell other people to COOL IT.

---

Death Road to Canada provides examples of:

Tropes #-D

• 1-Up: The unlockable Phoenix trait gives a full (explosive) revive.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: Downplayed. Upon reaching the final stretch, characters with high enough morale will gain a point in dexterity (running speed) for the rest of the run.
• Abandoned Area: Well, it's a zombie survival game after all. Each place can be looted to help your gang survive the trip.
  • Abandoned Hospital: Both the Hospital and Clinics apply. They tend to have a few medical supplies and some scalpels and canes.
  • Abandoned Warehouse: The factory. Full of industrial tools that can be used as weapons and the occasional jerry can of fuel.
  • Ghost City: The usual template for maps. Some maps have a few houses to explore in addition to the main event described in the location's description.
  • Haunted House: The anniversary update gives you two types of haunted houses as rare locations: Dark and Haunted. The Dark Mansion has no ghosts, but is bigger than city maps and always has a nifty weapon or item hidden in it. The Haunted Mansion is a harder version with Respawning Enemies like a siege, but contains a (usually) powerful item like the Dark Mansion as well as ghosts that offer various stat increases, but at the cost of morale and/or health.
• Ability Required to Proceed: You can't reach the Canadian border without a car. If it breaks down or you run out of gas, your characters walk around in search of a new ride with a worse batch of random events than usual. Fortunately, you no longer need a car after reaching the endgame levels. In fact, your group will automatically sacrifice their car to blow up some zombies if it survives to the final level.
• Achievements in Ignorance: The "Oblivious" trait is surprisingly useful, as the character often bypasses bad events due to simply not noticing the horrifying thing (such as blithely walking into creepy locations that freak out the rest of the party) or distracting hostile adversaries with inane questions (such as asking the buff bandits why they're wearing sweatbands, which causes them to go into a flexing routine and forget about mugging the group).
• Achievement Mockery: You can get achievements for bad things happening to you or the party, like killing the Prime Minister of Canada or getting the Anime Girl to explode in the car.
• Action Survivor: You can create characters that start off as this or make them grow to be one. You can also meet people along the way that are this too (beware of liars, though).
• After-Action Patch-Up: May happen in-between driving events. The more skilled a character is in Medical the less resources they use and more people they can heal per healing event. Characters with maxed Medical can even improvise healing without supplies.
• After the End: The zombie apocalypse has destroyed every nation on earth except Canada and most humans are reduced to scavenging or banditry.
• A.K.A.-47: The guns have very basic names, such as ”Pistol” and ”Shotgun”. The basic revolver, however, is called the ”Dolt .45”, most likely based on the Colt .45 Peacemaker. There's an assault rifle actually named ”AK-47”, but it bears no resemblance whatsoever to the real weapon. A powerful handgun is also called the ”Ded-9”, based on the Red9 from Resident Evil 4.
• The Alleged Car:
  • The Putt-putt has low speed, poor durability, and only average gas mileage. Its big selling point is that it's the easiest vehicle to fix in the game, assuming it doesn't fall apart after hitting too many zombies.
  • Any vehicle close to the end of its life will start to spew smoke and steam while driving, and take a lot of effort to start up again once you've gotten back inside after looting.
• Ambidextrous Sprite: The eyepatch tends to flip-flop whenever your character turns. Which is strange, because there are sprites for both eyes individually.
• Ant Assault: The ANT ATTACKS camping event. It's only encountered while the party is walking, which is a good thing, because it hurts the entire party and makes them unable to sleep, a major handicap in the combat events necessary to get a new car.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Unvisited rooms/houses during Always Be Looting events will have a small colored sparkle flashing often so you don't waste time entering places you already went in.
  • You can more or less see zombies if you inch yourself close to doors. This is very useful to prevent yourself from being ambushed by a large number of zombies lumbering outside.
  • If you click the same equipment slot twice, this will lock the equipment and prevent the AI from suddenly changing to another weapon you don't want to. This is more useful than it sounds since the computer prioritizes REALLY weird items for weapons (like Golf Clubs) instead of Tire Irons, Wrenches and other weapons, or use their Martial Arts in that case as the computer normally absolutely refuses to fight barehanded.
  • Normally, quitting during a mission will cause the whole save to be deleted. However, if the game somehow suddenly shuts down, this won't happen.
  • The "Kinda Pushy" road event has a random character forcefully enter your party. This could potentially ruin runs where the player is intentionally trying to go with a single character, however in this case the game will still give you the option to refuse recruiting them. Similarly, if you have a full party, you can reject them instead of being forced to remove an existing party member. Ditto with the Clown, who you normally can't stop from joining the party; he won't join if you've been doing a solo run up until that point.
  • No random events that automatically causes damage will ever be of "lethal" damage type (ones that can actually kill characters), even Walking events, so you don't have to worry about someone just suddenly dying because of the RNG.
  • Rescued characters will always leave all of their equipment with you if you don't recruit them. Handy if they get a hold of something you might've wanted. However, the same cannot be said for any food, gas, or med kits their AI may loot by accident…
  • If someone is resting, you don't have to worry about leaving them behind, even if you acquire a new car that they couldn't logically have been resting in. Also, resting survivors can still train and make deals at trading posts.
  • If a character's morale is very low, they'll gain a bit of morale when the party rests and eats (moreso for those with high Attitude).
  • Before the final two sieges of the game (some of the hardest ones in the game) you'll always find a party member in the last Trader Camp that has either good Fitness, Strength or Shooting. This can be a helping hand if you need someone to fill a vacant slot and fight the zombies.
  • After the last night, there is no use for food, so if the party has excess, they will eat extra or even double as a last opportunity to gain morale (and even speed) before it is checked against the 11th-Hour Superpower event.
  • The final siege, City of Crushed Hopes, will never be at night, so you don't have to worry about wasting a precious equipment slot with a dinky flashlight.
  • Zombies stop spawning once a siege is complete, so the player doesn't have to worry about any more zombies coming their way.
  • Finally, if the zombies kill a party member, they will continue to dogpile the corpse for a while, giving the remaining survivors a shot at getting away.
• Anti-Hoarding: Downplayed. Bandit events and NPCs will discourage the player from hoarding food (and sometimes even ammo) as you can lose anything ranging from 1/4, 1/3, to everything depending on your party's size and the difficulty you're playing at. However you can prevent losses if you're prepared to face the consequences of said text events; either with a character that can handle it or tanking the health and/or morale damage.
• Anti-Rage Quitting: If the player quits during a mission, the whole save file will be deleted.
• Annoying Arrows: Characters with low strength or fitness will barely make a zombie flinch when shooting arrows at it. With good physical stats, however, you can pierce multiple zombies with a fully charged shot.
• Anyone Can Die: Comes with the roguelike package.
• The Apunkalypse: Some characters will express their disappointment over how this trope failed to happen. That doesn't stop the player from being able to make custom characters that sport mohawks and leather, and it doesn't stop Lord Humungoid from making a guest appearance.
• Are We There Yet?: Characters will sometimes ask this during driving segments. Sometimes another character will answer with an angry "NO, STOP ASKING!".
• Arrange Mode: There are game modes that make rare or familiar (player-created) characters show up more often, lower or raise the number of driving days to Canada, make the game Endless, start the game with rare characters of your choosing, and so on.
• Artificial Stupidity: Your AI-controlled buddies can show shades of this from time to time.
  • It's not uncommon to see characters get stuck behind furniture during a mission. A book shelf that's right in front of a door can cause a buddy to run into it and block him/herself from leaving, although they will try to smash through it with their weapons if necessary.
  • If an NPC becomes tired from using a melee weapon for too long and has a firearm, he/she will resort to using it. This wouldn't be a problem if the AI knew how to conserve ammo. Your buddy will shoot at any zombie that is in the way until his/her stamina recovers. Luckily, there are commands in the pause menu that allow you to tweak this.
  • Averted with explosives. Previously, he/she might have ended up using it in desperation, while the other members of the group might not even notice that a molotov/grenade was thrown except you. Thankfully, since then, the AI will no longer use any throwable weapons.
  • Party members under AI control who only have one item slot can't decide whether to hold onto a melee weapon or a gun. They'll constantly switch between the two, dropping whatever they had previously. Such characters holding guns will constantly fire unless they pick up a melee weapon for some reason or another.
  • An update now allows the player to change how NPCs in the group fight zombies and what tactics can be used against them. The problems still remain, but at least they can now be altered on the fly depending on the mission.
  • The AI has particularly unusual preferences when it comes to melee weapons. They often grab lighter melee weapons even if they have enough strength to reliably wield more powerful heavy weapons such as swords.
  • The AI can't use special moves such as the dog's bark, El Satan's zombie-grabbing, or DSYP's fart attack.
  • Don't try to cross narrow paths unless you're ready to see your AI taking a completely different path, often going all around the obstacle even if it means going through a thick horde of zombies (which more often than not can get them munched on or dead).
• Autosave: The game features this. After every text event the game autosaves.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Fire. Great for taking out a large group of zombies, but since your buddies are often fighting them up close, don't be shocked when one of them gets caught in the blaze.
  • The weapons that the Anime Salesperson sells to you. Otaku Katanas deliver decent damage but break quickly, and Shurikens don't return to you, forcing you to go pick them up.
  • Explosives. Clear a nice-sized chunk of a horde… And probably blow yourself up in the process. They can be lifesavers, but often that valuable slot is better taken with a gun or strong melee weapon.
  • Automatic weapons like the Assault Rifle, Uzi, and the Minigun. More Dakka that can clean through a horde like nothing else, but burn through the entire stockpile of ammo in moments.
  • The Double Barrel Shotgun is pretty damn powerful, since it fires two shells instead of one. But in a game where ammo is best used sparsely, and can be difficult to acquire depending on how finicky the RNG is feeling, this becomes a problem in the long run.
  • The Flamethrower and Chainsaw. Amazing horde-clearers… but they use super-valuable gas to work. The flamethrower has a good chance of self-damage, and the chainsaw has a high chance of stalling unless the user has high Strength. In most cases, they simply aren't worth the trouble. Averted once you hit the final levels. With no car, you don't need to worry about gas, and the chainsaw can make the final siege and Canadian border run a lot easier.
  • Heavier melee weapons can devastate multiple zombies in few hits, but it takes a lot of strength and fitness to use them effectively. Lacking these two traits means that you'll be tired out from swinging a lot.
  • Bow and Arrows. It's silent and can kill several lined-up zombies. However, it also has several problems: you must aim it manually, the bow is taxing on your Fitness (it doesn't use Shooting like most ranged weapons), and without the proper perk for it, there's no way to replenish ammo for it.
  • The Jason Expy Mason uses a Sturdy Machete and a Chainsaw as his signature weapons, and starts out with high Strength and Fitness. The big downside is that he'll randomly kill off a party member, and if you run out of party members to sacrifice, he leaves on his own accord. Hope you aren't too attached to your gang of survivors!
• Ax-Crazy:
  • You can stumble upon creepy cloaked traders who sell axes. Only axes.
  • You can make custom characters who are this, giving them a white porcelain mask and appropriate Fighter perk that grants them a red hatchet to start.
  • Mason most certainly is this, as he'll happily kill off your other party members to restore his own morale, or for no reason at all.
• Badass Boast: Normal random characters that you meet will do this in order to join your group. Unless one of your members has the Paranoid trait, or is high in the stat that the new person claims to be good at, there's no way to tell if the boasts are true or not. Whether they're lying or not also indicates their Loyalty: a truthful character will have high Loyalty, while a liar is invariably a rat.
• Bare-Fisted Monk:
  • Characters with the Martial Artist perk becomes this. They have real good unarmed attacks (Kung Fu) and can kick plenty of undead ass. If you find the rare character Bryce Lu, he will teach anyone Kung Fu, regardless of perk; if said character already knows Kung Fu, it will then become Kill Fu. The problem is that Martial Artists will absolutely not use firearms and gas powered weapons (chainsaw, weed whacker, leaf blower or flamethrower).
  • Big Bruiser characters will get a "Boxing" unarmed attack. Not as good as Kung Fu, but still hurts considerably more than an untrained punch.
• Batter Up!: Baseball bats are relatively common weapons, though they have a chance of breaking. Aluminum bats don't break, and are considered one of the better weapons to give to weaker individuals. There's also a cricket bat that's remarkably sturdy.
• Beating A Dead Player: If a party member is killed by zombies during an event such as a scavenging mission or a siege, the zombies will chew on their corpse for a while unless distracted. This means fewer zombies are attacking the remaining survivors.
• Being Evil Sucks:
  • Characters with high loyalty will suffer morale penalties if you try to rob people.
  • Trying to run a bandit party in general is incredibly risky. Robbing attempts can end in injuries if you steal from the wrong people, and your team will be more than eager to screw each other over and abandon the group if their morale gets low.
• Being Good Sucks:
  • The whole shtick of the "Civilized" trait. They are decent folk in a world of bandits, jerkasses, the soulless undead, and other morally questionable beings, but their Morale can never go above "neutral" (max of 3 instead of 6).
  • This trope is especially true for low Loyalty characters; doing good actions (especially not robbing people) will reduce their Morale.
• Bears Are Bad News: A particularly nasty event when camping without a car involves a bear attacking the party. Unless you think you can fight it, you'll have to choose what supplies you want to save.
• Berserk Button: The "Cool it" and "Say it, don't spray it!" options from Irritating characters will always piss off people and have severe consequences for the offending party. Unless you've used it 3 times before; in this case, it will be the complete opposite. People will love it or be utterly cowed by it, and will give some big rewards to your party.
• Beware the Living: Bandits and even your own buddies can enforce this trope, with harsh looting demands and all.
• Black Blood: The zombies have this.
• Blackout Basement: Several stages take place in the dark. Fortunately, you always start with two flashlights, with some other items also producing light.
  • The Spooky Graveyard, Dark Mansion and Haunted Mansion locations are pitch-black, with a special gimmick: due to their time of day, TIME TO BUY A NEW WATCH, the time of day is permanently locked⁺even the digital watch display that normally shows up on the top left is missing at the darkest hour of night possible. If you don't have a flashlight or a weapon that produces light on its own, you won't be able to see anything but silhouettes and a bit of the map within five feet or so of the controlled character.
  • Escape events that replace sieges can take place at night. The "River of Sludge" event takes place in the sewers and it's always dark when you go in; sometimes it can even feature the TIME TO BUY A NEW WATCH time of day.
  • Any mission that takes too long will result in the sun going down, forcing the group to wander in the dark while the zombie spawn rate jumps. Though if you can hold on long enough, the sun will rise again eventually.
• Blatant Lies: Sometimes, recruitable characters will falsely claim to have a useful trait in the hopes of deceiving you into recruiting them. A Paranoid party member can reveal that they're lying, so that you don't end up recruiting someone who's only going to be The Load (or worse).
• Body Horror: The Anime Girl gets bigger eyes the longer she is in your party until she explodes violently. The last version of her character model before the explosion looks hideously deformed and half-melted. The transformation can be stopped, but not reversed, if she meets someone with a pure love for anime in a very rare location.
• Bottomless Fuel Tanks: Averted. Gasoline is a key resource, needed to drive vehicles and power certain weapons such as the chainsaw and flamethrower. Using all of the gas forces the group to abandon the car and walk until they stumble upon another car.
• Bottomless Magazines: Zig-zagged. Although guns eject cases while shooting, no one ever has to reload. Even the revolver will dispense all the cases every six shots as though the chambers were emptied, but the firing speed is unaffected. That said, you still have only a finite amount of ammunition.
• Boring Yet Practical:
  • There are certain weapons that never break upon use. A few of these, such as the Tire Iron, Wrench, Hatchet, small Hammers (claw and ballpoint), and Rebar, don't deal as much damage as other weapons, but they're a godsend for a long-term means of defense.
  • The unassuming Meat Cleaver is one of the few light weapons that are guaranteed to hit more than one zombie per strike. It's also fairly common and has a very small chance to break^note 0.25%. The fact it's so light means that even characters with piss-poor Strength and Fitness are able to use it effectively as well.
  • A cane turns out to be more damaging and stable than a wooden bat. Cane Fu is in full effect here.
  • The basic firearms of each class, Pistol, Cowboy Rifle, and Shotgun, are the basic bread-and-butter weapons that can be found commonly and be reliably used in a pinch even with a low shooting stat.
  • The Tactical Spear that can be bought from a semi-common vendor in Trader Camps. It's far from the flashiest weapon out there, but it's usually affordable costing 9 Food, consumes less stamina per attack, and has a small chance to hit more than one zombie, making it a solid choice even for characters with poor Strength and Fitness.
  • The Practical trait is this by definition: great boosts to stats, but a personality as dry as a bone, with no quirks or abnormal behaviors.
  • Martial Artist characters can't use firearms, but start with an unarmed attack that is better than most of the melee weapons you'll ever find.
  • The meek Weed Whacker may not look as cool as the badass Chainsaw or as destructive as the Flamethrower, but it deals decent damage, is very gas-friendly (compared to those two weapons), requires very low Strength to start up without repeated tries, and doesn't consume stamina which is excellent to deal with a scattered horde or thin out some of the zombies.
• Borrowin' Samedi: The rare character Samedi. She wears a top hat, a suit and a white mask, summons skeletons to fight for her, and can revive herself with a skeletal body (twice).
• Bowdlerise: The protagonist of Don't Shit Your Pants is in the game, and he is simply renamed to "DSYP". His character description says "DSYP is the star of a very popular game that I can't say the title of".
• Breakable Weapons:
  • Most scavenged weapons tend to be breakable, and hunting down decent unbreakable weapons is a large focus of the early game. Breakable weapons have a percentage chance to break with every hit, which can be surprisingly low for certain weapons, like the meat cleaver at 0.25%.
  • Annoyingly, firearms are also breakable, if you run out of ammo and have to resort to Pistol-Whipping.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Custom-made characters will occasionally say things upon being recruited or killed that suggests they know this isn't their first run, or necessarily their last. This includes leans such as saying they're glad to be back on the road, and outright breaks like hoping for better luck next time in their dying moments.
• Break Out the Museum Piece: Almost literally. Museums are rare locations that have neat things like Katanas (including an unbreakable one), Axes (Hatchets and Medieval ones), food displays (lots and lots)… and a Minigun. Everything is in pristine condition and ready to be used for some serious zombie killing.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: The "Dingus Savant" trait is described as "Always destined for great things! Never bothered to work for it." It raises all of a character's skill caps, allowing them to surpass most others with sufficient training, but also gives health and morale penalties.
• Burn the Undead: Molotovs and even blow torches can be used to do this. There are even deadlier weapons such as the Flamethrower and the Firelunk Sword that can reduce crowds of zombies to a crisp.
• Butt-Monkey: Due to the quirk Anime Fan has^note they become the Anime Girl if their Morale reaches maximum — the Anime Girl is essentially a 4-day time bomb that will explode and seriously wound the party inside the car, players will often throw them at events that cause morale drops, so this usually involves a lot of bad stuff happening to them during the trip to Canada.
• Bystander Syndrome: Averted if you decide to rob the doctor in Trader Camps. People from the camp will come to help her and rough up your party.
• Car Fu: Can occur whenever a mission starts and ends if zombies don't move out of the way. Some random events that occur while driving have this trope as an option. Works best with big, heavy cars like SUVs, but trying it in a fragile Hybrid is a quick ticket to a long walk.
• Cats Are Mean: Once the zombie apocalypse broke out, it seems like every cat became feral and turned into this; dogs come in friendly and feral varieties, but cats are only ever bad news. Even after the Halloween update allowed you to recruit them, the moment they want to leave your team, they will just decide to fatally maul someone, or mangle the entire group (non-lethally), for good measure. It reflects in their stats, too: cats always have 2 less max Morale than normal and invariably lousy Loyalty. There is only one single exception to this: the rare⁺2% chance of replacing a normal cat cat Oscar, "the nicest cat in the world", who doesn't maul people and is immune to Despair Events due to having one more Morale than normal characters. Even then, Oscar still has atrocious Loyalty.
• Chainsaw Good: While they need precious fuel to be used, chainsaws are one of the more powerful weapons in the game, able to clear through the densest of zombie hordes, or carve a path through to relative safety. There is a more fuel-friendly (and weaker) version of the Chainsaw called the Weed Whacker, which the game itself describes as the "slightly wimpy son to the chainsaw". There's also an electric chainsaw, which can't be recharged once drained, but won't consume fuel and is only slightly less badass than its gas-powered counterpart.
• Changing Gameplay Priorities:
  • Due to the nature of this game, your priorities in status boosting will change wildly depending what perk and traits you start with, or your gameplay style in general. Having enough food will let you get riskier locations with better weapons, which in turn (usually) has very few edible things.
  • As the player proceeds further onto the Death Road, food, skills, and gas economy become less important than having strong weapons and ammunition.
• Character Customization: The game allows you to save up to 80 custom-made characters. Each one can have their own unique trait and perk, and even if you don't take them with you up front, they have a small chance of showing up in any given playthrough. Familiar Characters mode has all the appearing characters be nothing but these, save for the random rescue missions.
• Celebrity Survivor: One random quip about a survivor states that he/she might be one.
• Combatant Cooldown System: Melee weapons' cooldown time are defined by your Strength and Fitness, and having only one isn't enough for long-term combat, as you'll either swing the weapon slowly or not recover the used-up stamina quickly enough to fight large numbers of zombies.
• The Computer Shall Taunt You: One NPC in particular can tell the player to "git gud", complete with a smug face emoticon.
• Combat Medic: The Surgeon perk adds points to Medical and Shooting, great to create a gun-toting healer.
• Console Cameo: The GameBronus Entertainment™. A thinly-veiled parody of the Game Boy.
• Cool Car:
  • Muscle cars. They are one of the fastest cars in the game, and a random blurb about a character can state that they want to use one to get to Canada.
  • The Hybrid car is extremely gas-efficient, which is great when gas is very hard to come by.
  • The Car Nut perk lets the characters start the game with one. Recruiting them on the road has them offer their car for the group to ride in.
  • The UFO car found in a rare location never uses up any gas. Better make the most out of it!
• Cozy Catastrophe: The United States is a Zombie Apocalypse hellhole with food acting as currency, but your survivors seem more concerned with recharging their portable games or keeping up on their workout regimen rather than the struggle to survive. Some of the oddball trainers don't appear to be taking this too seriously, such as the anime salesman, or the strength trainer who talks like an energetic 80's fitness instructor. There's also the fact your characters started this journey simply because they got bored in their safehouse.
• Crapsaccharine World: The zombie apocalypse has begun, food is the only currency, bandits run amok, feral cats and alligators have spread out across the east coast, but it's all Played for Laughs and presented through cute retro sprites.
• Crazy Cat Lady: The Cat Lady rare character. She has a hefty recruitment price at trader posts, but she does come with a reliable cat escort that doesn't take up party member space. Fittingly, her wits are low, but surprisingly, her attitude stat is high.
• Crazy Survivalist:
  • Downplayed with the Hermit rarely found in Always Be Looting events. He's justifiably pissed that you attracted zombies to his hut, but won't hurt you and will even reward you if you help him survive the siege. He can also be swayed to join your party if someone has the Charming trait.
  • Preppers are often mentioned as those who had prepared for an apocalypse scenario. Though most prepper cabins have long since been overrun.
• Crippling Overspecialization:
  • The Last Bodybuilder has an absolutely insane strength score (106, when the normal max is 6, or 13 with very particular traits and perks), letting him pick up and throw nearly anything in the game, including cars and heavy machinery. Unfortunately, this is his only method of attack, as he only has one inventory slot, and can't even swing or shoot actual weapons. He can use thrown items, but such items are rare and generally weak.
  • The T*S*T*C* (Too Swole To Control) perk lets characters start with a high strength, and can train it even higher than other characters can achieve. The description states that the character refuses to do cardio, so fitness is capped at 2. They can swing heavy weapons and pick up furniture, but still will get tired quickly.
  • Horse is the fastest human character in the game. Similar to TLB, he also only has one inventory spot, and can't use melee weapons. He can shoot, but will go nuts with any gun he's given, draining your ammo in moments.
• Critical Existence Failure: Every zombie in the game explodes into a pile of guts and gibs upon death. This can also happen to you or any of your buddies if killed and eaten by the undead. As well as the car, which will explode if it happens to run out of Chassis points during a mission. The point is, every survivor, every zombie, and every car can operate at 100% efficiency until their last hit point is taken.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Some of the random events cause this. One in particular involves a bee entering the group's car. The wrong choice can cause a character with one hit point left to die from having the bee enter their mouth!
• Crutch Character:
  • Characters with the Paranoid trait can often sail the party right through bandit events (and a few other bad things) without harm, at the cost of an occasional (but manageable) morale hit from their bad personalities. They're especially nice on higher difficulty levels, where bandit events are more brutal.
  • A BERSERK! Big Bruiser. The gist of it is that the BERSERK! supplies a mountain of boosts^note +4 to Strength, Fitness, and Shooting, the ability to flip out in some situations, and the ability to tell people to Cool It at the cost of being garbage at personality checks and having 1 HP, meaning they're unreasonably flimsy. Big Bruiser gives a boost to Strength on top of that supplied by BERSERK!, Boxing (better unarmed attack than normal, but worse than Kung Fu) and, the important part, 1 extra HP at the cost of a barely noticeable amount of movement speed. The HP supplied by Big Bruiser allows them to make it through fighting bandits and minor screw ups in Normal difficulties, but the problem arises with the fact that bandits are capable of dealing two points of damage in Hard modes, meaning that a BBB is drastically more at risk of death, and thereby unreliable in those modes. ^However…This problem can be negated every so often if you count the amount of toilets you've checked with the Robot in Unlocks. Every 100 Toilets (50 Toilets with an upgrade) between all runs, a Toilet Genie will be summoned, who will give you a wish. Having the BBB wish for immortality will increase their Vitality by 1, giving them the 3 HP that is standard for most everyone else.
  • Martial Artists are able to massacre small armies of zombies with just their bare fists; they can deal a lot of damage without needing a weapon, and they start with higher strength and stamina making it even easier to do so. However, they can't use guns and they do as much damage with melee weapons as anyone else. They can carry the team early on when supplies are low, but once everyone is fully stocked with high-end weapons and plenty of ammo and zombie hordes are almost solid masses of undead bodies, they can start to look like liabilities.
  • Certain rare characters have traits that are highly beneficial in the early game, but lose their significance when other survivors bulk up. One example would be El Satan, who can pick up and toss zombies without losing much energy, but can't use guns or chainsaws.
• The Cynic: Characters that have the Paranoid trait enforce this trope. They can wear on everyone else's nerves, but sometimes they may turn out to be right and save the group some headache.
• Cut and Paste Environments: Even though each run is procedurally generated, the houses and city blocks always have a basic layout, as do many of the miscellaneous building types; expect to see the same apartment, convenience store, and Yall-Mart layout pretty frequently. Some rare locations re-use the templates of their basic counterparts but add their traditional flair (i.e., the Haunted Mansion is just the Dark Mansion with ghosts that can be interacted with, as well as respawning zombies).
• Death Cry Echo: In worded form, at least. Sometimes a character goes "shriek" or something like that if they become zombie chow.
• Determinator: If you survive the sieges caused by extreme low morale (aptly named Despair Event) "Fatal Argument" or "Haze of Despair", your party will also receive a massive Morale boost. Never giving up pays off!
• Demonic Possession: One of your characters could end up being possessed by Hekatrius, who simply wants a slice of pizza. If you don't sacrifice a party member, said character gets devil horns, a pitchfork, and a morale penalty.
• Despair Event Horizon: Your group can cross it if their morale goes down. Once this happens, members can snap and abandon the group, demand (sometimes violently) that other members leave, or (worst of all) steal some of your loot and leave you. An entire group that has crossed it will thoughtlessly wander into large zombie hordes, at which point the players are presented with an instant Game Over button they can press if they've crossed the horizon themselves.
• Developer's Foresight: The game has unique outcomes for some extremely obscure and unlikely circumstances. Some examples include:
  • Introducing the Anime Girl to the cast of The Anime Club (found only in a rarely-occurring building that can appear during city excursions) will result in her otherwise-fatal mutation being halted by the club's pure love of anime.
  • A doctor in the rare "Final Hospital" trader location expresses boredom with his current workload consisting entirely of treating zombie-related injuries, and longs for an illness to treat instead. Party members can obtain the "sick" status from exactly one action in the game, namely going to a Coffee Shop looting location and drinking more than one cup, and the status goes away after the next rest event. Requesting treatment at the Final Hospital while a party member is ill in this way will result in a permanent full-party buff to four attributes (two of which are Vitality and Dexterity, both insanely rare).
• Devoured by the Horde: The most common way to die in the game. If any character's stamina decreases, he/she will have more trouble breaking out of a group of zombies, leading to this. Zombies will continue to gnaw at the corpse until only a skeleton remains.
• Diabolus ex Machina: If you do badly in several events/missions in a row, it can certainly feel like the RNG is bringing out this trope out in full force.
• Dialog During Gameplay: While you are travelling with your car, characters will often say things, bicker between themselves, or agree on something, among other things. Rare characters sometimes have unique lines of dialogue while fighting zombies.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Fire damage and explosive weapons. In the hands of a rookie, they're as dangerous to your own party as they are to the zombies; in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, these are some of the most effective ways to annihilate ranks and ranks of the zombie hordes.
  • The BERSERK! trait is this. New players will struggle to keep them alive, as any mistake can get them killed since they have a miserable 1 HP. However, the massive combat stat boost they get makes them one of the best characters to solve nearly any text event regarding Strength, Shooting, and Fitness, especially if you combine it with perks like Athlete or Fighter. Besides this, they can go one point over the usual cap on these stats as well, making them excellent candidates for high-end melee weapons like the Claymore or the MegaKnight Blade.
  • Martial Artists have to rely solely on melee attacks and thrown weapons, as they refuse to use guns or any gas-fueled weapons. However, their unarmed attack is pretty strong, always hit more than one zombie, and they start with some Strength and Fitness bonus which can help with them use the strongest weapons that usually requires both of them at high levels. They also are great for using Pipe Bombs, Grenades, and Molotovs due to their gunless quirk.
• Die, Chair, Die!: Furniture can be broken, either by smashing it with weapons, or using it as an improvised projectile against zombie hordes. Broken furniture usually leaves behind a piece of wood that can be used as an improvised weapon.
• Digital Avatar: You can make one as custom character. Due to the random nature of personalities that aren't predefined by traits, your avatar can be either a loyal companion or a complete jerk.
• Disc-One Nuke: Due to the randomized nature of the game, it's possible to find more powerful weapons or strong rare characters in the earlier parts of the game.
• Disaster Dominoes:
  • A small bad event can cause one character's morale to dip into zero (shown as a glowing orange bitter face). Characters with low morale can cause huge problems ranging from losing stats to dropping the morale of the party even further, which can cause even more trouble like forcing you to choose between kicking out a party member, having a party member leave and take everything with them (car, food, meds, and weapons), to facing an extremely difficult siege.
  • A small fire you used to torch a zombie can cause another one to set on fire, which can be useful to thin out some of the horde, but if the zombies are close to your party, they can set a member on fire as well and then another party member… You get the idea.
• Do Not Drop Your Weapon: Thankfully, bleeding-inducing bites will not make your character drop weapons, only death will. And sometimes not even that.
• Draw Aggro: Making noise will draw otherwise passive zombies to attack your group. Some sources of noise include dog characters barking, honking your vehicle's horn, or just shooting non-silenced guns.
• Drunk on Milk: In bars, you can find people who passed out from drinking too much soda.
• Dumb Muscle: BERSERK! characters embody this, having massive combat boosts in exchange for having the lowest personality stats possible and 1 HP. A prime example is that this is the only perk that can cause a character to kill themselves by punching themselves in the face in an attempt to catch a lost sneeze.
• Dump Stat:
  • Chassis toughness for cars. This only affects how tough the car is against the zombies when scavenging; cars get hurt equally whenever their chassis takes a hit through text-events, essentially rendering this stat worthless. Tragically, a lot of cars take the "tough chassis but bad gas mileage and slow speed" approach.
  • It may be wise to have only one or two characters that focus on Mechanical and Medical talents, as only one person is needed to heal people and repair things. Raising these two stats on your fighters would be a waste of resources. Of course, should they die, it's always good to have a backup.
  • Certain characters who cannot use certain weapons or fighting methods may not want to bother raising the stat outside their expertise, such as shooting with El Satan, who can't use guns, or Strength with Horse, who can't use anything but guns.
  • Downplayed with Composure. While there are situations where high Composure is helpful, there are equally numerous events where low Composure is also beneficial. Aside from certain combinations (such as bypassing a blockade with high Wits but low Composure, or fending off an attack with high Strength and low Composure), having low Composure makes it easier to determine if a character also has low Loyalty, as robbing traders and other Bandit actions requires both low Composure and Loyalty.
• Dung Fu: There are sometimes large piles of poop found in the restrooms that can be thrown the same way as furniture. Your character temporary turns brown afterwards.
• Dynamic Entry:
  • A mission usually begins with the group's car driving through a street before stopping abruptly. This goes up to eleven if you reach the Canadian border with a functioning car. You drive it at top speed and launch it against a thick horde, making the car explode in the process.
  • Zombies do this constantly during high-difficulty sieges inside buildings, dropping down from the ceiling or erupting from the ground periodically. They're still active during this, and can take a bite out of a party member on the way down if you don't keep moving.
  • The Mecha Mountie does this in a rather spectacular fashion in the final area of the game.

Tropes E-H

• Earn Your Happy Ending: After all, this game isn't called "Vacation Trip to Canada"; reaching it won't be easy. You WILL fight through thick and thin to get to your destination.
• Easy Level Trick: Running into side rooms during sieges may sometimes (key word being sometimes) make the ordeal of surviving them a little more manageable, since the main bulk of the horde won't immediately make a beeline for your party and you can bottleneck them with a little more ease and control. This may work wonders in some sieges and even the dreaded final siege, City of Crushed Hopes, as long as you don't have to walk too close to the horde and draw their attention.
• Early Game Hell: Depending on perk and trait choices, the early game can be quite hard when you lack good weapons, good stats, and good characters to effectively deal with the zombie hordes. Even a few zombies can be very hard to take out.
• Elaborate Equals Effective: Simpler weapons like Kitchen Knives and Wooden Bats are as plain and bland as you can imagine, but weapons like the Cold Steel Greatsword or the MegaKnight Blade looks very cool. Similarly, basic firearms like Pistols and Shotguns look bland compared to their "upgrades", the Magnum or the Autoshotgun.
• Eldritch Location: The Lost Woods variety. When G*** says he hates Mondays, he means it. Don't make him upset — or he'll toss you into an incredibly tough siege.
• Emergency Weapon: Pieces of Wood and Femurs are extremely common since you'll break plenty of furniture and meet lots of skeletons (dead ones, not walking ones). They are also equally flimsy and have a very high chance of breaking, but it's still better than having your characters just punching zombies in the face (without the benefit of Kung Fu or Boxing).
• Endless Game: The aptly-named Endless Mode, which makes Canada the stuff of legend in-universe, with some survivors doubting its existence. It's really a 1000-day hard mode run. The game lampshades the insanity of clearing this mode in the credits, and the longest run counter is replaced by a win streak counter like every other game mode.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: Zigzagged. Text events that destroy the car (usually not exploding either) sometimes won't hurt your party, but getting a car roughed up by zombies too much, or having one in real bad shape and driving to escape the horde, will make them explode and deal huge damage to everyone in it. Additionally, if you reach the Canada Border with a functioning car, your party will throw the car at full speed on the first horde and make it explode.
• Escort Mission:
  • Comes in two flavors: "get this person out of the map alive" and "protect this person until the siege is over". Rare locations can have you saving more than one character in order to get the (usually much better) reward. Thankfully, the AI works as usual and will actually act as an additional party member helping you fight the zeds, provided they get a hold of a weapon.
  • The K*E*P*A game mode makes a whole run into one long Escort Mission, in which you must keep Kepa (the leader of the dev team) alive to earn an achievement. His personality stats are all bottomed out, he starts with the worthless Cardboard Tube as a weapon, and has a max vitality of 1, meaning that any fatal hit will kill him.
• The Everyman: Any character with the Practical trait fits this trope to a T; superb stats, boring personality with no quirks whatsoever. This trait was also previously called Everyman.
• Everything's Deader with Zombies: And they become dead-er in the more difficult modes where they become more numerous.
• Evil Feels Good: Characters with really low Loyalty will not feel bad about stealing from traders or helpless or innocent people, among other things that would normally cause a Morale drop with characters with higher Loyalty.
• Excuse Plot: Zombie apocalypse happened and it's better to go to Canada now. Get to it.
  • Even better, the opening text for a new run implies that you're going to Canada because Florida got boring.
• Extreme Omnivore: Car dialogue has characters mention that the cat food they're eating isn't that bad. If a character is a Gourmand, they can participate in the Giant Spider Attack event by eating the spider.
• Failed a Spot Check: If the party has very low morale, they might be too busy arguing to notice a zombie horde until they're right in the thick of it. This siege gives the player the option of giving up instead of attempting the siege.
• Fake Difficulty:
  • Mainly when there are too many options for the game to care to display. You may find a case where you can't leave a talk with a trader without doing anything^note The game will show something along the lines of "6 for training, 15 for group training, A charms the trader, B tells the trader to COOL IT!, or when you find a character that you want to recruit but already have a full party, and the one character you wanted to kick out is the one the game won't let you because it doesn't want to display five options at once. It's also not fair that if a character is under attack, you can't take control of them to manually break them out of whatever situation they've gotten stuck in.
  • And of course, there's the whole nature with the RNG. The same location may provide plenty of weapons in a run, or scarcely any supplies at all.
• Fancy Toilet Awe: One event involves the party coming across a working toilet with a futuristic control panel. Since most toilets don't work in the post-apocalypse, everybody is excited to see it. All of the possible options are beneficial, but the buttons are labelled rather cryptically: jets of water, musical notes, flapping wings, or a butt.
• Faux Horrific:
  • Some rather mundane things can cause a big drop in morale, including vending machines that won't take your money, terrible video games, and losing a sneeze.
  • One event, "TRUE DESPAIR", has you decide who, if anyone, will open a government ration box with dog poop on the handle. If not done by someone with a high attitude stat, the "Friend to Dog" perk, an animal that isn't a cat, or by using a tree branch, it can cause a permanent drop in morale!
    WARNING: THIS IS REALLY GROSS
    THERE IS DOG POO ON THE CRATE
    (flashing) THIS COULD BE A BIG DEAL
• Fission Mailed: If the only surviving member of your party is a dog, the game will start off by saying that your journey is at an end. However, the dog will get a flash of inspiration and teach itself to drive the car, thus continuing the game.
• Fitness Nut: The Fitness Instructor, one of the potential encounters at trader camps.
• Forced Transformation: The "telegraphic vortex" random event will alter your party's characters in a small variety of ways, provided you choose to interact with it. Any character that attempts to fight it, specifically, will be turned into a dog. This can also be done from experimental machines located in labs.
• Fortune Teller: The Wiz can appear in trading posts. Ask him for his services, and you can get your fortune told, in which case everyone's morale will take a hit but a random party member's maximum health will increase, get a tarot reading for a party member which reveals their personality stats, or hire the man himself. He always assumes everyone else will die a horrible death.
• Friendly Fireproof:
  • Thankfully played straight — largely. You can't hit other party members with your guns or melee weapons, but you can hurt them with explosives or fire if you (or they) are careless.
  • Averted in the "Abandoned Gun Range" text event. Choosing "Train Group Haphazardly" can have your own group accidentally shoot each other, possibly killing someone.
• Gas Siphoning: Several events have characters siphoning gas from other cars.
  • One event has a lot of wrecked cars close to a campsite. One person can spend all night siphoning gas. They'll be tired tomorrow, but they'll get a lot of fuel.
  • Some of the options when dealing with the drag racer have you siphoning his gas. The funniest is a Bandit character will steal his gas while he rambles on about all the rules of drag racing.
• Gender Bender: A possible result of messing with the Mysterious Device or Tetrographic Vortex.
• Gender-Blender Name: The names of some rare characters are still randomized, yet they're always of one gender. This can result in Sumo Wrestlers named Susan or Roller Derby Girls named George.
• Glass Cannon: The BERSERK! trait turns a character into a One-Hit-Point Wonder (and a complete Jerkass), in exchange for a big increase in all fighting stats.
• Glowing Eyelights of Undeath: Some of the zombies rock this style.
• Golden Ending: Parodied when using the stick to remove the dog poo in the "TRUE DESPAIR" event. The game proudly announces that you've unlocked the true ending to the game, though you only get the food without harm and the music changes temporarily when you resume your journey.
• Golf Clubbing: You can even find them lying around in offices! Too bad they don't deal a whole lot of damage and can easily break.
• Gonk:
  • Most of the preset human faces available for custom characters aren't exactly… cute. This even extends to some of the options for women.
  • Exaggerated for characters with the Anime Fan trait if they hit maximum morale, or the Anime Girl who automatically starts as this. Their faces start off looking like a standard, if pretty, Magical Girl, but over time will morph and deform before they explode.
• Good Feels Good: It's far safer and potentially more profitable to not be a total jackass to other survivors via high loyalty, as there are many events where high loyalty pays off, such as watching out for bandits/zombies at night, getting food at a grocery store, and getting morale boosts for doing altruistic things. This is especially important for Civilized characters, who have high loyalty but can't have their morale higher than a neutral state.
• Goodies in the Toilets: "Toilet loot" can be found in bathrooms. Yes, this even includes gas. There's even a Toilet Genie that can grant you a wish for every 100 toilets you loot.
• Gory Deadly Overkill Title of Fatal Death: Most of the possible names for arcade games fall under this trope: DEATH SPLATTERS, TOUCH OF DEATH, DEATHSPLOSIONAL, and U*L*T*R*A*D*E*A*T*H. Overlaps with Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000 in that playing the games also increases the Shooting skill — "the critics were right!"
• Government Conspiracy: Characters around campfires occasionally state that Canada is one. Also, in the "Death Road Radio" event, giving the mic to a Paranoid character will result in them ranting about how the government engineered the zombie apocalypse "as a smokescreen to make jorts^*jean shorts illegal".
• Graphics-Induced Super-Deformed: Due to the nature of the game's style. You can take it to ridiculous levels with characters having the usual head size and really tiny bodies. The experimental machines also have the capability of changing head sizes even further.
• Grease Monkey: Any character with the Mechanic, Gungineer, or Car Nut perks is this by default. They can even have their own complementary wrench or crowbar!
• The Grim Reaper: You can find him in graveyards. Shaking hands with Death will also give you his Sinister Scythe and a boost to your character's fighting stats, but reduce their maximum HP to 1 permanently.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Ex-Wrestler perk and Grappler trait allows characters to pick up downed zombies and throw them around. Best used against other groups of zombies. Combine both to be able to grab zombies without even needing to knock them down! This also gives the trait holder the El Satan body sprite.
• Gruesome Goat: A goat may appear at trader camps. You can milk it for food, but you'll get hurt, or you can recruit it to your team if you have room (the goat won't join if your team is full, not even to replace an existing party member like other recruitable characters). The goat always has the lowest loyalty, making for a poor choice of pet.
• Gun Nut: The Gun Collector perk makes a character start with decent Shooting skills and a bunch of basic guns and ammo.
• Guest-Star Party Member:
  • If, during an Always Be Looting mission, you recruit a rare character and you kick out a party member for them, the party member you kicked out will stay with you until the end of the mission.
  • Several events spawn special NPCs that can be rescued, such as the Gothic Farm and the event "Danger Ranger Rescue". Rescuing them will give you a bonus: if you get all of them, your party gets a morale boost, but if you leave any behind, your party's morale drops.
  • The Knight will stick around with you for one mission after recruitment, after which they will leave. If you can keep them around for several missions (by assigning them to rest in the car during Always Be Looting events), they will leave behind a Knight Sword. Ditto for the Ninja, although she sticks around for much longer and leaves behind some smoke bombs.
  • Lynn C. Thompson, the CEO of Cold Steel Knives, can be recruited at a Trading Camp by asking for a demonstration of their Cold Steel Greatsword. They will join you on your next mission, after which they will leave — but not before offering their greatsword at a reduced price of 30 food (from 40 at the Trading Camp).
• Guide Dang It!:
  • It is possible to determine which personality your character has by observing their dialogue in-between driving events. Good luck figuring which is which on your own, though. And there still is no way to figure out loyalty this way.
  • Personality combos are not fixed to the selection traits when making a custom character and can be generated at random, and the option to use them will show up even if you don't have the personality status of the character that has it revealed.
    • Paranoid requires high Wits and low Attitude. Oblivious requires low Wits and high Attitude.
    • Calm-shooter requires high Composure and high Shooting. Angry-strong requires low Composure and high Strength.
    • Charming requires high Attitude and high Wits. Grating (Irritating) requires low Attitude and low Wits.
    • Sociopath (Bandit) requires low Loyalty and low Composure.
  • There are a few items that are almost worthless as weapons but have some utility outside combat. The game makes little to no effort to tell you that.
    • The "True Despair" event can be safely disarmed if you have either someone with the Friend of Dog perk or a Tree Branch, a weapon that's about as useless as you'd think compared to other things you find around.
    • The "Horrible Weather" walking event is morale taxing, but if you have Umbrellas (another really flimsy weapon) equal to the number of characters in your party, you won't take any morale penalty at all. No one in their right mind would hoard Umbrellas unless in extreme desperation for weapons.
    • Recruitable Dogs sometimes found in Trader Camps or Junkyards can be bribed to join your party if you have a Femur handy.
  • Individual text events rely heavily on survivor stats. Some ideal outcomes aren't immediately obvious.
• Gut Feeling:
  • Characters with the Paranoid trait use it to determine who to trust, identify traits when recruiting characters (as well as tell when they're lying about their skills), predict and counter bandit attacks, and avoid traps and other dangers. On the other hand, they can turn down perfectly fine meals or camp sites, starving themselves or exhausting and stressing the party out, so it can be a bit of a gamble sometimes whether or not they're right.
  • Characters with high stats in something (Strength, Fitness, Shooting, Medical, or Mechanical) can actually measure if a new recruit's skill is true or if they are trying to pull a fast one on your party.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Characters with the Angry-strong trait are this by definition. One particular bandit event has the option for this character to simply punch the daylights out of them.
• Hands-Free Handlamp: If a character is carrying but not wielding a flashlight, they give off a short-ranged radial glow similar to a lantern's. Very useful if you're afraid of your only flashlight breaking or you need to wield heavier hardware to negotiate the zombie hordes.
• Have a Nice Death: YOU HAVE DIED on the DEATH ROAD TO CANADA™^note DANG IT
• Heroes Love Dogs: The "Friend of Dogs" perk makes it easier to tame and recruit wild dogs. This doesn't guarantee that wild dogs will return the favor in the long run, though…
• Heroic Canines, Villainous Felines: It seems like every dog you find in the game is either tame enough to adopt or too feral to become a pet. Dogs don't attack humans unless they've passed the Despair Event Horizon or are too feral. They can still screw over the party if their loyalty isn't too high. Cats, on the other hand, only appear during random events to attack a group member. An update allows you to recruit cats, but their despair events can have pretty nasty consequences, and they always have low loyalty…
• Heroic Dog:
  • This is inevitable since the player can adopt a randomly encountered dog. Dogs can be used to find supplies, fight zombies, keep watch over camping events, and can even be trained to drive the car. This can be subverted, as a dog's loyalty is not always guaranteed to be high…
  • Played straight with the Puppy character, who can be recruited at trade posts. It starts off slightly weaker than the standard dog, but eventually grows and always has maxed out loyalty stats. Also played straight by any humans turned into dogs via the laboratory machine, whose loyalty stats get maxed out.
• Heroic Second Wind: The Shield of Hope perk grants the ability to endure bites from zombies that would kill the bearer as long as they have high enough morale (though each use drains some morale). It doesn't work on some instant-death events, however.
• Hockey Mask and Chainsaw: Mason is equipped with both an unbreakable Machete and a Chainsaw.
• Holiday Mode:
  • Santa can be recruited as a party member in an event if it's Christmas! Just don't be a jerk to him…
  • Starting the game on Canada Day (July 1st) starts you off with 255 hockey sticks and a beaver as an additional party member.
  • Uncle Sam will join your party if you start a game on July 4th. He only has 1 HP, but if he dies in the field, he transforms into a muscle eagle, with normal HP and high strength. Both Sam and his eagle form always have low attitude and wits stats.
  • Playing the game on (American) Thanksgiving starts you off with a live turkey. You can just eat it if you don't want to recruit it, of course.
  • All of the characters will wear masks if you play on Halloween.
  • Cupid will join the party on February 14th.
• Howl of Sorrow: Dogs can do this if morale is low, or if they die.
• Humanoid Abomination: Some of the rare characters border on this, usually Played for Laughs.
  • G*rf is not a cat, but a guy in a cat costume… maybe. The game phrases his recruitment text to imply that he's some sort of animatronic or an empty costume that somehow moves on its own^note he's perfectly still until the group approaches, at which point he suddenly springs to life while screaming "I FREAKING HATE MONDAYS", and whenever his Morale hits 0 (which happens easily, given that his Morale cap is 2), he removes his head^note presumably the costume head, but the game doesn't specify, declares "THIS IS THE DAY THAT I HATE… THIS IS MONDAY!", and somehow warps time and space to drop the group in some strange forest teeming with zombies. If they survive, G*rf regains some morale and the journey picks up from where it left off. Also, a separate event has another survivor refer to G*rf as some sort of monster, and the game explicitly calls him an abomination if your party is full when trying to recruit him; when he’s recruited, the game says "Welcome to a new world of terror".
  • Mason, once recruited, can only leave the party in one way — if his morale hits rock bottom and he's the only one in the party. If his morale hits zero and there's someone else in the party, someone will abruptly vanish and Mason will regain morale. If Mason's health hits zero during a mission or event, he'll reappear sometime later to rejoin the group, with no explanation on how he survived, and one of your other characters will mysteriously vanish.
  • Anime Girl's eyes get bigger over time, eventually reaching Body Horror proportions — at which point she will soon spontaneously explode.
  • Even if you try to refuse to let the Clown join your party, it suddenly shows up in the car anyways. The only way to avoid this is to either attempting to do a solo run or already having a full party when you encounter it.
• Humans Are Bastards: The zombies are the main threat to your party's survival, but you'll also have to contend with plenty of bandits and jerkasses, including low-loyalty party members.

Tropes I-L

• I Know Mortal Kombat: The GameBronus event allows a party member to play a video game to build skills that apply to the main game. The downside is that all the games are notorious for being Nintendo Hard, causing a big drop in morale for the person playing them.
  • Playing an arcade game gives the character a level of Shooting.
  Like all video games ever made, playing it increases your skills with guns. The critics were right!
• Impossibly Delicious Food: Hospital food, apparently. It can be acquired at the rare "Final Hospital" trading site by slipping substantial bribes (of regular food) to the Cleaning Lady; the character chosen to eat it regains +4 morale, all missing health, and gains +1 maximum health.
• Improvised Weapon: In addition to all of the scrap that your characters can wield (wood, rebar, etc), the game encourages the player to throw furniture so zombies can move around it. If a character has high strength, he/she can throw sofas. The Last Bodybuilder can even throw cars.
• Infernal Retaliation: Reckless usage of fire damage (Blowtorches, Molotovs, Flamethrowers…) will result in a zombie giving a more than warm hug on your characters besides the possible bite.
• Infinite Flashlight: The Flashlights will only stop giving off light if they break when swung^note the unique Tacticop Lite(TM) is unbreakable. They even give off light when not being held.
• Infinity +1 Sword:
  • The chainsaw is an awful early-game weapon due to needing gas, which is supposed to be used for your car… But after you begin crossing the border for the final stretch of the game, you no longer need the car, turning the chainsaw into a godsend.
  • The Sturdy Machete counts as the standard melee weapon, being unbreakable and having great stats, while requiring no special stats to use well.
  • Likewise, the Strong Katana is equally as powerful as the Otaku Katana, but it never breaks. It can only be found in a Museum, or being used by an Anime Fan (who risks turning into the ticking time bomb that is the Anime Girl).
  • The Golden Knife and the Golden Spear may not be able to damage multiple zombies, but they still hit hard, and they don't drain a character's stamina as fast as other melee weapons. They're ideal on characters with low strength & fitness.
  • For high-strength characters, large swords such as the Claymore or the Dragonslayer are the best weapons. They can consistently one-shot zombies and swing in a wide arc that cuts through multiple targets, but are also so heavy that without sufficient strength and fitness, most characters can only swing it very slowly, and will get tired quickly in the process. There are lighter options such as the Cavalry Sabre, the Gladius, or the Knight Sword. These and the weapons mentioned above can often be found in the Dark/Haunted Mansion.
  • The Auto Shotgun is this for firearms. It has a huge magazine and deals lots of damage per shot, even with poor shooting skills. It has competition in the Submachine Gun and Assault Rifle, but those eat up pistol and rifle rounds rather quickly.
• Insufferable Imbecile: The "Irritating" trait (and those with low wits and attitude) in a nutshell.
• In-Universe Game Clock: Zombies are more aggressive at different times of day. Sieges require the group to hold off hordes until a certain amount of time passes.
• I Regret Nothing: One of the possible last words, along with "I regret everything".
• It Only Works Once: The Hero Type character can prevent somebody's death in a text event, but once done, that ability is depleted. Ditto with the Phoenix's self-revive.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: The loyalty stat is often difficult to uncover, and not important right up until the moment that it is (for example, when you need to trust someone to keep watch for the night, or when the character suddenly leaves due to running out of morale). It also doesn't correlate neatly with the other personality stats. Someone with bottomed-out attitude and wits can nevertheless turn out to have a high loyalty stat, and the opposite can also be true.
• Joke Character: There are a number of rare characters that don't have any redeeming qualities whatsoever. Such examples include The Clown (who, if you have room in your party, can't reject its request to join), G***, and the Governor Emperor. The last one in particular simply steals your food when it's time to rest.
• Joke Item: Anything the Anime Salesman sells is an example.
  • Otaku Katanas, purchasable in bulk for almost nothing, and for good reason; their damage is decent, but they have a very high break chance, largely negating any value they have.
  • The Shuriken from the same merchant. 10 food for a shuriken that does decent damage when thrown… but you only get one, and if it fails to come back to you, it has to be retrieved. A basic pistol does more damage and requires less micromanagement.
  • There are various other weapons that are also very weak, such as the Purse and Knitting Needle.
• Jump Scare: A very downplayed example. Quitting the game causes a zombie head to fly onto the screen and play a quiet 8-bit zombie roar.
  • There are a few in-universe examples that apply to the characters during certain events; some of these are just flavor, while others result in Composure checks.
• Just Keep Driving: When entering and leaving a mission, characters will always drive into any zombies that happen to be in the way.
• Kaiju: One rare event has your characters dealing with a giant prehistoric monster stomping through a city… If you choose to "save the city", you find that she's just a recruitable human in a costume, with high strength, fitness, and one more point of health than the average character. She doesn't have any pockets, though, meaning that she can't hold more than one weapon at a time.
• Karma Houdini:
  • Characters can steal some of your loot if they decide to leave the group or screw over the party during certain events. He/she will never appear in the game again, which makes one wonder if that character even got their comeuppance at all. All the more reason to make constant loyalty checks and ditch the ones with low loyalty.
  • Sadly, you can never just kill off and loot any bandits that harass you throughout your journey.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Subverted for most of them in the game, as they shatter easily after being used against zombies. You can pick up a sturdy one in a museum, however, which never breaks.
• Late Character Syndrome: Characters usually need time to train up their skills to good levels, so ones that show up later in a run are usually weaker and you'll only recruit them if you're desperate for manpower.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: Quite a few of the rare characters are parodies or pastiches of popular fictional characters. Some will amusingly have their in-game name chosen randomly from a pool that all skirt around the famous character's real one. Some of these had their costume colors changed for the console release.
• Le Parkour: Characters with good fitness can perform it during a random event.
• Lethal Joke Character:
  • Irritating characters can tell people to "Cool It", which usually ends in something really bad happening. On the plus side, after telling people to "Cool It" three times, the option is replaced with a "Cool it!!!" (with flashing exclamation marks) option, and is guaranteed to have a favorable effect, from having bandits apologize to getting a free assault rifle to recruiting characters that cannot be obtained by any other means. They can also defend against the worst effects of Despair Events, like the "Giant Rant" one. Making the character say "Say it, don't spray it!" will piss off the other one, but it will also prevent the nastiest outcome from happening (the other character simply leaving the party).
  • Horse, at least when controlled by the AI. He's the fastest character in the game… but has one item slot, cannot use melee weapons, and if given a firearm, will fire wildly at the nearest zombie with no restraint at all. In the player's hands, he's one of the best characters to solo with due to his high speed: in the AI's hands, he's more of a distraction than anything else.
  • The Last Bodybuilder can only attack by picking up and throwing objects. But he's so swole that he can lift and throw even cars.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Every zombie you kill will explode in a shower of gibs.

Tropes M-P

• Machete Mayhem: Machetes can mainly be found in hardware stores. The Sturdy Machete is considered one of the best melee weapons in the game, being unbreakable, but rusty ones are everywhere.
• Macrogame: The "Zombo Points" mechanic. ZP is used on a variety of permanent upgrades to every future run, including perks and perk level ups, unlockable traits, improving the chances of rare random events, and a secondary ZP store that sells Challenge Run modifiers for new cosmetics.
• Mad Libs Dialogue: With several pieces of chatter during the road trip. Some variants can cause Morale drops or raises.
• Made of Plasticine: If you don't keep your characters healthy, they can die in some astonishingly stupid ways in some of the random events, such as simply pulling out a tooth or getting bit by ants. Zombies will often explode into Ludicrous Gibs from one or two hits, and characters with the BERSERK!! trait will always die instantly from any source of damage unless you found a way to raise their health (in exchange for huge fighting stat boosts).
• Magikarp Power:
  • "Irritating" characters' ability to say "Cool It" during events often doesn't yield any benefits (and may even diminish morale), but after saying "Cool It" enough times, it will yield a good result for the party when said (indicated with three flashing exclamation marks when available).
  • Characters with Hidden Potential don't start out with high combat stats, but their Strength can exceed the usual maximum if trained thoroughly enough. This also applies to Nimbus Ordeal, who uses a BFS but starts out with the lowest Strength and Fitness.
• Manly Tears: The Last Bodybuilder has a single tear in his eye after the inevitable result of challenging him to a flexing contest, in which the challenging character is completely obliterated upon witnessing TLB's first flex. Note that the game doesn't even check the challenger's strength or vitality; flexing-off with TLB is a guaranteed death sentence.
• Maximum HP Reduction: The BERSERK!, Frantic Whiner, and Dingus Savant traits will reduce a character's maximum health from the natural 3 points to 1, 2, and 2, respectively. Shaking hands with the Grim Reaper will also decrease a character's maximum health to 1 (while giving massive combat boosts).
• Minmaxer's Delight:
  • The Paranoid trait gives a character the ability to detect if someone is lying about his/her advertised skill, as well as revealing a whole slew of hidden stats on new recruits. It can also save the whole group from bandit encounters and other bad events, making it one of the best traits in the whole game.
  • The Civilized trait grants a character the maximum personality stats, which can also be used against bandit encounters, or be used safely for other events that require things like composition and loyalty. The only downside is the harsh cap to morale, where it's impossible to go above neutral. Even this tends to be quickly remedied upon resting thanks to their high attitude stat.
  • The T*S*T*C Class has maximized strength and only mediocre fitness. Fantastic for manual control such as using furniture as a weapon.
  • The famous BERSERK! Big Bruiser build. Taking Big Bruiser mitigates the worst drawback of BERSERK! (giving 2 hit points rather than 1), boosts your starting Strength even higher, and grants you Boxing for an unarmed attack, which will carry you until you can find a weapon worthy of your godlike might. Even better if your starter buddy is Paranoid, which will help protect your (still low) HP from bandit events.
• Monster Clown: A possible party member, although the game questions just why you would do that if you do recruit him. You don't get a choice to leave him behind if you have room, unless you've been doing a solo-character run. Make him mad, and he'll leave… and bring FRIENDS.
  • If you get the Clown to the final siege, all clowns in that stage and the next stage will be zombie clowns. This gets you a hidden achievement on Steam.
• Mook–Face Turn: On a few occasions, you can get a bandit to join your party instead of robbing you with a fully charged "Cool it!!!"
• Mooks, but no Bosses: There are no special types of zombies, let alone boss ones. Not that zombies need them anyway. Or that the zombies are the only thing you need to worry about.
• Moose and Maple Syrup: Exaggerated to stereotype levels by your destination, which milks the trope for all it's worth if/when you get there. There are a bunch of mounties running around with hockey sticks saying "sow-rry" and "aboot", there are a handful of beavers and a moose, and as the border guard starts to get overwhelmed, a Giant Mountie Robot smashes down from the sky to wipe out every last zombie effortlessly.
  Giant Mountie Robot: [[Pun EH-ZER BEAM!]]
• Multiple Persuasion Modes: Some text events can have special options for characters with special personality combos (Charming, Paranoid, Oblivious…).
• Murder Simulators: Playing arcade games, "Like all games ever made" in the game's own words, will increase the shooting skill.
• My Car Hates Me: Your car's engine stat isn't just for show. The worse it is, the harder it will be to actually start it, and this can be a real problem if you need to bug out quickly because of angry zombies gunning for your party…
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Parodied with the Ominous Labs.
  The group drives past an office complex. The sign says OMNI-BIO-CORP LABS, which sounds way too evil to be a real company.
• Nerves of Steel: Characters with high composure can calmly deal with events that rattle others, or maintain their cool in tense situations. The Calm-Shot stat combo is even better, letting the character smoothly and easily take out threats with only a few bullets.
• New Game Plus: Sort of. You can start new games after upgrading perks with Zombo Points to start with better chances of surviving the death road.
• Nice Day, Deadly Night: You don't want to stick around until nightfall in city looting locations. While daytime is by no means safe, it is undoubtedly safer. When nighttime hits at 9:00 PM, the area goes dark, the music cuts out for a much more foreboding tune, the zombie spawn rate jumps considerably and they become extraordinarily aggressive, necessitating the use of a flashlight if you don't want to stumble around blindly getting mauled by zombies you can't see. Inside looting locations with no street access in gameplay (the exit to the building automatically takes you to the car), it's much less pronounced, with only zombie aggression changing, though it still gets dark indoors as well.
• Ninja: A female ninja is one of the rare characters. As one might expect, she's a good fighter, but will mysteriously vanish after a few days, leaving behind only a supply of smoke bombs.
• No Bikes in the Apocalypse: Played perfectly straight. There's no mention whatsoever of bicycles or even motorcycles; if you don't have a car, you're on foot, even when you only have one character.
• Nobody Poops: Played surprisingly straight, considering the weird focus on toilets this game has.
• No Bulk Discounts: Nope! However, characters with the Charming trait will get extra items, especially if you buy large quantities.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed:
  • One of the rare characters you can encounter is Alvis, who is capable of using Karate while unarmed, and croons tunefully every time he attacks a zombie. If you can bring his morale down to its lowest, there's a chance that he'll leave the party and come back with a different appearance, reflecting Elvis' own reinvention of his image. Do it again, and…
  • The Kung Fu Master location involves your party searching a cityscape for Bryce Lu. If you manage to rescue him, he'll teach one of your survivors Kung Fu.
  • The Prime Minister of Canada resembles Justin Trudeau.
• Non-Standard Game Over:
  • If your party consists of nothing but non-sentient animals (such as goats), the game will come to an end. The only exception is if you have a dog in the party, who miraculously learns to drive.
  • You may also get the option to end the game entirely before the special Sieges that come from your party crossing the Despair Event Horizon, giving you this.
  • One Despair Event with a human and an animal involves the human teaching the animal how to drive before leaving the party, allowing the game to continue. This even allows goats and pigs to learn to drive. However, if the animal in question is a cat, it completely ignores the lesson and ends up driving the car off a cliff, ending the game with a message of "CATS DON'T LISTEN!!!".
  • Quitting a session outside of driving scenes wipes the save in that file and adds one "loss" to the player's stats. Deleting a save also counts as a loss.
  • The Jason Expy will leave on his own if he runs out of party members to kill off randomly. Similarly, the Clown will leave if they are at low morale and are the only character in the party, and Alvis will do the same if they already went through a Despair Event Horizon and changed appearances. In both cases, this ends the game.
  • Normally, you talk to the Prime Minister of Canada to win the game. If you can figure out how to kill him, though, the game chews you out for your idiocy, and you get a game over. (But also an achievement.)
• No Sense of Direction: If your group decides to take a detour, there's a chance that they could get lost and waste precious gasoline. The chance is fairly high, so this is always a high-risk option as opposed to other choices.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: Played straight in the description for the "Toilet Upgrade ULTIMATE" Zombo Point unlock. The first two levels of Toilet Upgrade merely increase how much loot appears in toilets by a smidge, but ULTIMATE does something different:
  With this final upgrade, you only need to open 50 toilets to summon the Toilet Genie, instead of 100!
  
  NOTE: I'm being serious.
• Not the Intended Use: Walking events are normally there to punish the player for losing the car, but daring players can use them to stock up a large amount of gas at cost of Morale and every other resource. It takes preparation (and luck) to pull this off, and the random nature of the game means this can still backfire horribly.
• One-Hit Polykill:
  • Heavier higher-end weapons can hit multiple zombies at once. It takes a lot of strength and fitness to use them, but being able to cleave through multiple zombies with a single swing is incredibly valuable.
  • Rifles and shotguns can easily mow down hordes of zombies if your character's Shooting skill is maxed out. This is one of the most effective ways to survive the final siege.
• One Stat to Rule Them All:
  • Gas mileage for cars. Gas is somewhat difficult to find, and you're in for three usually miserable events if you lose your car, often due to running out of said gas. Smaller cars such as the Hybrid or the Hotrod are incredibly valuable for this very reason.
  • For personality stats, having high Loyalty is pretty much guaranteed to be important in the long run. You'll run into many text events that require someone in the party that's trustworthy. Anyone with the lowest Loyalty will betray the team by either sleeping on night watches, turning on the party to bandit checkpoints, not gathering supplies in an abandoned grocery store, or not taking responsibility for a fart. Having a decent enough Loyalty stat also prevents the option to rob a trader from appearing (this requires a character's Loyalty and Composure to be super low), thus preventing the list of actions from being cluttered. This applies doubly-so for pets such as dogs, as their combat stats cannot be properly raised, which makes them ideal for night watches. A dog with low loyalty isn't worth keeping.
  • It never hurts to improve one's Strength and Fitness, combat stats that make swinging melee weapons easier. They also factor into text events as well, so they're pretty universal stats, even for those who prefer to use guns.
• Only in Florida: Downplayed; the zombie apocalypse has ravaged the entire east coast. You just start your journey from Florida.
• Optional Stealth: Running past zombies during missions when zombie aggression is low is often viable and even encouraged by the game, especially if the melee weapons you currently have can break. There is a trader specialized in silenced guns^note which can't be found anywhere else, that encourages this kind of play. That said, there are a few events where stealth is totally inviable, such as sieges and the final battle to reach the border — zombies are always too alert for any kind of sneaking.
• Our Gnomes Are Weirder: Mostly resembling the classic garden gnome, DR2C's gnomes are weird little buggers who shout nonsense, ride dog-sized rats, and can seemingly ascend into the sky at will. Then there's Bogan, who has retractable hand-claws and 'Gnomish Regeneration' — and is a weird, shouty little man like all the others.
• Overly Long Gag: There's a chance that a DMV may appear in a city map. Exploring inside shows a very long line of skeletons, leading to a driver's license machine (this allows you to change the name of a survivor, though the options are very limited).
• Padded Sumo Gameplay: A strange variation: higher difficulties throw more zombies at you, so you will either take more time to handle the horde to progress or just ignore them instead, which will make this trope work in reverse.
• Path of Most Resistance: Usually, rooms with the most goodies are filled with zombies. This is especially true for Dark/Haunted Mansions and Rest Stops.
• Pay Evil unto Evil:
  • There are opportunities to do this throughout the game under certain conditions, often involving the "COOL IT" mechanic, violence, or suicide.
  • The Irritating character can tell pretty much every trader to "COOL IT" by saying offensive things to them. This includes the Anime Salesman.
  • The recruitable survivor at the Dinkdoor can be given a taste of their own medicine if another Irritating character is in the party.
  • It's possible to take manual control of disliked survivors and deliberately send them into a zombie horde. It turns into this trope if they have low loyalty. It's not even pure cruelty, either, as their "sacrifice" can buy time for your favored characters to escape.
  • The one and only "good" deed a bandit character can do is threaten to burn a bridge guarded by bandits. Should they successfully intimidate the bandits into backing down, they'll burn the bridge anyway.
• Phonýmon: The player may sometimes find a Pukeyball item, which summons a random colored animal to help in battle for a limited time.
• Pistol-Whipping: Once a character runs out of ammo, he/she will resort to using any firearm as a melee weapon. This is generally a terrible idea, as they're only marginally better than the lowest-tier weapons and some guns have a chance of breaking in the process.
• Player Nudge:
  • Some dialogue in-between Always Be Looting events can give the player hints and tips. Like how throwing furniture at zombies is effective, or that shutting doors can buy you some time to avoid having to deal with a small horde inside houses. Some survivors tend to give bad advice, however; these people tend to have low Wits.
  • Whenever you're playing on big grocery stores or gas stations, the AI controlled characters may sometimes loot the food on the shelves, as it's very easy to mistake them for mere decorations instead of lootable items.
• Point Build System: A core mechanic of the game. You raise your characters by increasing their Strength, Fitness, Shooting, Mechanical, and Medical abilities, and starting traits and perks can change how powerful they are.
• Polar Bears and Penguins: Once you get to Canada, there are penguins and polar bears in the background. This is lampshaded in the dialog.
• Pokémon Speak: Rck Grimes can only shout the word "CARL!"
• Post-Apocalyptic Dog: The player can encounter stray dogs that they can adopt.
• Post-Apocalyptic Traffic Jam: The "Traffic Jam" text event involves the road being blocked by a sea of rusted-out cars. Your options to get the group through are: abandon the car, take a detour (might work), drive the car offroad (probably won't work), or bench-press a car (makes the bench-presser stronger… but doesn't work).
• Post-Processing Video Effects: Film grain and scratch can be turned on or off in the options menu.
• Power at a Price: There are plenty of very attractive perks, traits, and events that will give you massive boosts… at an (usually) equally hefty price.
  • The BERSERK! trait is a shining example. You start with massive combat boosts, but your character can take only one hit before dying (not all text events are lethal, thankfully) and their personality stats are all low.
  • Civilized has your character starting with maxed personality stats and 3 points in Medical and Mechanical, making them an extremely useful party member. The catch? They will never be able to raise their morale higher than 3 (with the usual maximum being 6); if you get a real bad morale event, this is all it takes to make them liable to cause the dreaded "Despair Events" that can end your run.
  • T*S*T*C perk has the character starting with maxed Strength at 6 (and can train up to another six times); however, your Fitness is locked at a pitiful 2 points and can't be trained further, so your character will be strong, but will tire out very fast as a result when swinging heavier weapons.
  • The Cursed Treasure text event allows you to pick from supplies to stashes of certain status boosts and good weapons, with the flashing option always being the Mighty Claymore. However… the stashes of status boosts or weapons will hurt your party, and the Mighty Claymore will permanently lock the weapon to the selected character and reduce their inventory to a single slot. The red options (The Dingusnomicon and Long Lost Weapons) are lesser versions of this; your team will take 1 HP worth of damage and take a hit to their morale in exchange for stat boosts or an assortment of lighter, but still worthwhile melee weapons.
  • The Grim Reaper, found in the rare map Cemetery, will grant the character who shakes hands with him maxed Strength, Shooting, and Fitness… at the cost of setting your maximum health to 1, like BERSERK! characters.
• Power of Trust: Loyalty is a really important stat; characters with low loyalty will often stab the team in the back, or abandon the party altogether to join bandits. Meanwhile, those with sufficient loyalty will at least do what they're asked to do, such as watching guard at night camps, or getting through a bandit-infested choke point. Loyalty also determines whether or not a character gets a morale boost by doing heroic things, as those with low loyalty will actually get a morale penalty when doing so. Suffice to say, should your entire party be full of people with enough loyalty, you'll have fewer problems when it comes to certain events.
• Press X to Die:
  • Sometimes, when a siege is imminent, the player may be given a choice to give up on the journey to Canada. Selecting this choice will end the game immediately.
    Driving Off the Death Road
    The team finally gives up. They retreat to an unknown fate.
    The journey to Canada is at an end.
  • On occasion, when confronted by bandits, you may have the option to have one of your "Irritating" characters say "COOL IT" as their Last Words. This will always result in their death, unless a Hero Type character can save them.
  • If you try to make a feral dog follow you without using a bone or Friend of Dog, it will deal 1 lethal damage. If you try this with a character at 1 health, the button quite literally reads "Get Killed By Dog".
• Properly Paranoid: Whenever it comes down to bandits, the Paranoid character is a godsend, as they (almost) always come up with a plan to deal with them, avoiding painful injuries and/or catastrophic resource loss.
• The Power of Love: The Anime Girl is a pretty powerful recruit despite endangering your party by mutating then exploding after three days. But, given that she's a Magical Girl, her mutation can be halted indefinitely if she talks with someone with a "true love for anime", aka the nerds at the rare Anime Store.
• Pre Ass Kicking One Liner: The option for exiting the car during an Always Be Looting mission says "Let's boogie!"
• Punched Across the Room: High-knockback weapons can send a zombie flying several yards back.
• Punny Name: Unomey the gnome who can appear in Zombo Town (pronounced "You-know-me".)
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: Custom characters can be made either male or female, but there is no distinction between the two in stats or events.
• Purely Aesthetic Glasses: There's a nice amount of them in the character customization.
• Purposely Overpowered:
  • OPP Mode stands for "Overpowered Party Mode", and lets you recruit rare characters at will right at the start. Subverted in that the zombie hordes start out three times as numerous, and bandits deal more damage akin to the extreme game modes.
  • Even the out-of-the-box Rare Characters Mode makes the game easier on average, which the game acknowledges in the description, and in the ending where it hopes you found an OP party member.
  • And, of course, regardless of mode, the "big guy" the RCMP brings in at the very end of a successful run is this.

Tropes Q-T

• Ramp Jump: A couple of random events have this as an option. Its success varies on the speed of your vehicle; fast cars can make the jump (and look really cool doing it), average cars barely make the jump but sustain some damage in the process, while slow cars fall into the pit and explode.
• Random Event: One of the primary mechanics of the game.
• Resting Recovery: Trader camps sometimes have bonfires which can be used to rest for a day, which uses up food. It will also remove the "Tired" status and heal wounds if you have enough med kits. During those moments where you've abandoned your car, should you run into an event that uses up your food, your team also uses this opportunity to heal up, and removes the Tired status (except in disastrous versions that involve ants, which makes your entire team Tired).
• Revolvers Are Just Better: The Dolt 45 and Snubnose are more powerful than the average pistol, at the expense of firing slower and holding less ammo. They're better as early-game weapons where saving ammo is more crucial and where the Shooting stat is a bit underdeveloped. In the endgame, it's better to switch to pistols with higher reserves, assuming one's shooting stat has improved.
• Road Trip Plot: With zombies!
• Room Full of Zombies: Ayup. All the time in houses and other buildings.
• Run-and-Gun: Required if you want your gang to survive sieges. Though taking time to stand still to line up a shot deals more damage.
• Running Gag:
  • The game seems to have an affectionate thing for bodybuilding, having people obsessed with it and even a bandit gang that abides by the "Bodybuilder's Code" (yes, even their dog is super-buff).
  • It also has a tendency to call random people nerds, almost always in condescending fashion.
  • There's a lot of Toilet Humor. Figuratively and literally. Opening toilets can summon a Toilet Genie, and a rare event in the game is encountering a high-tech toilet that still functions.
  • Anime is also mentioned fairly frequently, although in a much less flattering light.
• Samus Is a Girl: There are quite a few rare characters who are always female, despite being in a full costume and could thus qualify to be both genders otherwise, such as the Knight or the Kaiju.
• Save Scumming: Despite the Anti-Rage Quitting measures for quitting in the middle of a mission, there's no stopping a player from force-quitting the game (via a Home Menu quit or stopping the application forcefully on a computer) and restarting from where they left off. The save is only deleted if the player selects to quit back to the main menu in-game. There are a few situations where Save Scumming flat-out won't work though, such as determining the ultimate prize in the Dark Mansion, determining the result of the experimental machines, or making decisions based off of stats rather than pure luck. There's flat out no way to save scum for trader posts, as returning to the game immediately sends the player back to the road, with a glitched out party display to boot (it gets fixed after the next level).
• Sdrawkcab Name: When someone goes through the Tetrographic Vortex, their name gets reversed, capitalization and all. The character may also experience gender-swapping, body changes, and potentially being turned into a dog.
• Self-Harm: Mostly played for laughs. Some text events can have characters do stupid stuff like smashing their face into a wall to prevent a sneeze from being "lost", or failing to pull out a loose tooth on their own (via brute force, or with medical knowledge, or by tying the bad tooth on the car door and slamming it).
• Serious Business: Since this is a Road Trip Plot game, farting. Expect huge morale drops, especially for the one you choose to accuse, unless you have someone who can solve the mystery, in which case only the accused takes the hit. (Unless they have a great attitude, in which case they blame ghosts.)
• Severely Specialized Store: One store you can encounter during an Always Be Looting event is a store that sells umbrellas. Just umbrellas. They're irritatingly common in Malls too. There's also the rare Toilet Emporium.
• Shmuck Bait: There are various choices in text events that never end well:
  • Should you run into the Last Bodybuilder, you can decide to have a randomly chosen survivor start a flexing contest. Said survivor is guaranteed to be killed.
  • Telling people to "COOL IT!" in text events often ends in a morale penalty for the team, being robbed anyway and getting hurt in the case of bandit attacks, and simply the person saying so getting insulted. It's far safer to say this to traders (sans the Chainsaw girl, who will hurt people with this response), and to various isolated people (such as the Dinkdoor).
  • During "Cloud Watching", there are options to say what a cloud looks like, randomly selected from a pool. Do not pick that the cloud looks like a swarm of bees, because it will turn out to actually be a swarm of bees.
  • It's ill-advised to make any decision that will make the entire group tired (such as berry-picking or tinkering with machinery to raise one's mechanical stat), except possibly during the first camping stop after the first stage, but especially during the second, and generally just before a siege. Being tired greatly reduces one's combat stat, and this is essentially a death sentence when a siege happens, or when one goes to storm a densely-populated place full of loot.
• Shooting Gallery: One random event involves your group finding one. It can be used to train one member carefully, or train your entire group haphazardly (which can get someone accidentally killed).
• Shoplift and Die: Stealing from certain merchants can be really bad for your character's (and party) health if they don't succeed (and sometimes it happens anyway). Those who aren't absolute traitors will also suffer a morale boost.
• Shopping Cart Antics: Shopping carts are common props in the game that can be thrown at zombies. One character that can be met by a campfire states that they are the ultimate weapon.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: There are various shotguns, starting with the basic pump shotgun, which is already very practical. Variants include double-barreled shotguns with twice the destruction and auto shotguns which is an absolute lifesaver provided you have plenty of shells. Shotguns tend to be effective even when used by people with low shooting stats.
• Shout-Out: Has its own dedicated page.
• Shows Damage: If you damage a zombie enough without killing it, it will drip blood as it chases you.
• Sliding Scale of Undead Regeneration: Type II: zombies do not heal, but they don't rot away either.
• Smiting Evil Feels Good: Zigzagged in case of bandits. Fighting them head on will cause damage to the entire party with no Morale boost. However, outwitting them with someone, like a Paranoid character, will usually give you a Morale boost and prevent the harsh loss of resources.
• Smug Snake:
  • The rare character named the Governor Emperor. He shows up as any normal recruit would, although in this case, you stumble into his home and he shouts at you. Consider allowing him to tag along, and he'll charge you quite a bit of food to do so. Say "no" after this, and he'll start begging you to change your mind, offering to give food in return. If you accept this offer, it's only two units of food. If he's in your party, he'll rob you of pretty much everything by the next day. You can't recruit him if you have a full party, but as a result, there's no way to avoid a morale penalty as he shouts insults at you. Sadly, there's no option to kill him immediately (although there's nothing stopping you from taking manual control of him in the next battle and getting him killed deliberately).
  • The anime salesman claims to "do his part in keeping civilization alive". This apparently involves selling crappy items to unsuspecting survivors. Don't bother talking to this man unless you have the Anime Girl or want to power up your "Cool It" stat.
  • Irritating characters are described as this. "They think they're cool, but they're totally not!" This is reflected in their personality stats, as both their wit and attitude are at the lowest values.
• Speech-Impaired Animal: While most animals are explicitly labeled "not sapient", dogs are excluded from this label, though they still look like normal dogs and can't talk. They can draw up a banner as a Distress Call, and the banner will say "bark!" instead of the word "help!" used by human rescuees. The game usually ends if only animals are left in the party, but dogs will miraculously learn how to drive the car if one is in the party when this happens.
• Spread Shot: The Shotguns (except for the Slug Shotgun) all use this type of bullet pattern.
• Super-Soldier: One random description for survivors can include claiming to have been a Super Soldier.
• Tactical Door Use: Encouraged by the game itself. It not only blocks zombies but also attracts nearby ones to it, which can either work in your favor or not.
• Taken for Granite: Characters with high strength can challenge a strength trainer NPC to a pose-off. This results in an rather interesting result:
  "IMPOSSIBLE! THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE!" shrieks the Strength Trainer, in a strangely high-pitched voice.
  "ARE YOU 'THE SWOLE THAT WAS PROMISED'?" and then he turns into stone and, moments later, shatters into a million fragments.
  • Averted with the immortality wish from the genie. At first is sounds like the wisher is the victim of a Jackass Genie, but all that happens is the character gains a boost to their max health and their sprite gets a tint of grey.
• Take That!:
  • The game has quite a jab-streak when it comes to anime.
    • The most obvious one is the Anime Girl, a Sailor Moon Expy who kills zombies with her Lovely Wand and says some sort of cliched anime one-liner or emoticon every time she attacks. The caveat is that her head turns more and more Super-Deformed with each passing day until she explodes inside the car, heavily damaging the rest of the party.
    • Survivors with the Anime Fan personality trait turn into the Anime Girl when their morale is maxed (even if their max morale is lowered through events), and merely talking to NPC anime fans or looting a manga in an anime store is enough for their morale to skyrocket. Trying to keep an Anime Fan around in the party becomes a balancing act between not hitting max morale and not hitting rock bottom, with all the usual despair events that entails.
    • Pretty much every anime-themed weapon is terrible compared to similar counterparts. The Otaku Katana is the only breakable sword-sized weapon, sharing its 5% break chance with most weaker "garbage" weapons (e.g. the 2x4, kitchen utensils, cardboard tube), suggesting that it's just a prop that happens to be an effective weapon. Its slightly stronger counterparts, the Strong Katana and Ninja Katana, are either incredibly rare or a permanent, undroppable fixture of the aforementioned Anime Fan. Lastly, there's the Shuriken, which is about as "powerful" as a thrown empty bottle, and the Windstar, an overpriced Shuriken that only the Anime Salesman sells. The only advantage it offers over the original Shuriken is that it's a Precision-Guided Boomerang.
    • The Anime Salesman sells all of the above weapons aside from the Otaku Katana upgrades. He also sells an Anime Figurine, which affects the party's morale based on their attitude. If you buy one or look at it in your inventory with an Anime Girl in the party, her explosion timer advances one day. The only objectively good thing he does for your party is give away his wares for free in worship of the Anime Girl, if she's in the party.
    • The rare Anime Store looting location is the only anime-related thing in the game that's treated in a (mostly) positive light. The lootable manga gives a +1 morale boost to most survivors at the cost of 1 hour, and the four NPC survivors holed up in there can temporarily join the party and are pretty handy in a fight. These survivors can even permanently halt the Anime Girl's explosion timer through their sheer love of the medium. The only real bad things that can happen here are that Anime Fans get +2 morale from manga, which may trigger their Anime Girl transformation, and survivors high in wits instead get -1 morale from manga.
  • Characters with low Wits tend to blame Barack Obama for everything (this game was developed and released when Obama was still the President). Other party members occasionally call them out on this, souring the overall mood.
• Talking Animal: Pets can't talk on their own, but can respond perfectly to other survivors' banter somehow.
• Throwing the Distraction: If someone bites it during an "Always Be Looting" scavenging mission, you can throw their corpse to attract a large number of zombies to feast on it until they are only bones.
• Toilet Humour: There are several text events that have this, erm, flavor. Farts and dog poop — among other things — are included.
• Token Heroic Orc: Characters with the Bandit trait qualify. Their experience in banditry means they can rob and steal from people they cross paths with, letting them procure supplies quickly (if riskily). Of course, they're more than willing to screw your party over if opportunity knocks.
• Totem Pole Trench: The rare character Woof is one of these in the form of three dogs, one of them a pug.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Unless you've ventured into a guide or watched videos of the game thoroughly, you won't know what most text event does or what stats you must have to get the positive outcomes on them. Expect to get your party killed a lot while learning.

Tropes U-Z

• Uncanny Valley: Deliberately invoked with the Magical Girl Rare Character. She starts off normal, but it says she is getting "more anime by the day", and this is shown by her features becoming increasingly exaggerated to disturbing effect. Until she suddenly just violently explodes, not only dying, but severely hurting the other party members.
• Undesirable Prize:
  • The Pukeyballs in the Dark/Haunted Mansion. These are consumable items that summon creatures to fight for you, but they disappear after a period of time. Meanwhile, the other potential ultimate prizes in the Mansion are all powerful melee weapons that never break on use. The Turret can also be this for the same reasons. An update replaced the Pukeyballs in the Haunted Mansion with Haunted Cutlery. The result? Just regular old Cutlery that act like boomerangs, which are terrible weapons, making them even worse than the Pukeyballs!
  • The DMV in City Locations. All it does is allow a character to change their name, and the choices are limited. Meanwhile, other rare finds in City Locations include certain rare characters, or miniature versions of rare locations such as the Dark Mansion (without darkness), a device commonly found in the Ominous Labs, or a Comic Book Store that provides a power-up to a character.
  • Similarly, the W*Y*K Station only has skeletons inside it, which you can recruit, but their combat stats are terrible and they only have one HP. Another waste of a rare City Location prize.
  • The Flamethrower in the Burning Inferno. Flamethrowers use up a lot of gas. The other prize is the Firelunk Greatsword, which is a powerful sword that can light zombies that haven't been outright killed by the blunt impact on fire.
  • Sometimes if you lose your car, you'll automatically obtain one without having to go through a zombie-infested level to find it. However, among the cars provided this way is the SUV, which is a terrible, slow, low-mileage car. There's no way to save-scum for a different result.
  • And of course, the rare characters that suck (ie the Cleaning Lady, Debutante, Clown, Governor Emperor, etc) whenever they show up, especially if one spent 30 ZP at the gnome store to get them!
• Undignified Death: The game features several embarrassing ways to kick the bucket, usually by picking the wrong result during a text event at low health:
  • Trying to swat a bee can result in dying by getting stung. Yelling at the bee can have it fly into the offending character's mouth and sting them.
  • A character with a sore tooth might die when, in an attempt to pull it out by tying it to the car door and slamming it, they smash their face into the door instead. The game claims this was a common cause of death pre-apocalypse, kept covered up by the auto industry.
  • One way to recover from a lost sneeze is to punch yourself in the face. BERSERK! characters can die when they scream "BERSERKEERRR!" and smash themselves in the face full-force. The game even calls out the utter lack of self-preservation.
• Undying Loyalty: Since personality statuses are very difficult to change, characters that have high Loyalty will (most likely) remain loyal. Civilized and Hero Type characters start out with high Loyalty by default.
• Uplifted Animal: A dog can be turned into a dogman if selected to be zapped by the Strange Machine found in places like the Ominous Labs, resulting in this trope. ^note A similar effect can be achieved if Hekatrius possesses the dog and nobody is sacrificed in his event. This has the opposite effect on humans, which turns them into a dogataur, a creature with the head of a human and the body of a dog.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: While many, many event outcomes avert this, there are some that play it for laughs. For example, if the road is blocked by a sea of cars, the party will face the risk of having to continue on foot. If the strongest character in the party decides to bench press one of the wrecked cars, they may well succeed in this and feel good about it, but the game will point out that this accomplishes little for clearing the wreckage and force the party to leave their car all the same.
• Useless Useful Spell: The Fireproof trait. On paper, it sounds awesome being unable to be harmed by fire in combat and text events and even more on ABL events like Burning Houses. But even if one of your characters is immune to fire, the rest of your party won't be, so you still have to navigate around flames unless you want to send the fireproof one on a mission alone. Also, text events where Fireproof is useful are few and far between. In the October 2020 KIDNEY update, Fireproof was combined with Phoenix, giving it more of a use.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • One tip that the game gives you in the beginning states that sacrificing a character that you don't like is usually a benefit, since it can distract the zombies. A purchasable upgrade even compensates you with a Zombo Point for getting characters killed!
  • Having a Bandit character lives and breathes this, as you can rob peaceful traders and other travelers, and screw over various NPCs and groups just because you can. Of course, you can always do the same to said character.
  • Upon dying, characters have a chance to ask to be buried with something, such as their food cans or the car keys, or to have a sweet epitaph on their tombstone. Regardless of the nature of the request, you cannot bury them, and instead must leave their bodies to be inevitably chewed to the bone. Of course, sometimes they're already surrounded by zombies and couldn't possibly be buried, but other times you just casually leave an ally's body alone in an empty room after getting hurt by a single zombie. Or, if you've already tossed the poor sod's body into the middle of an inbound cluster as a distraction.
  • You can also simply leave characters behind when they're too far from the team leader at the exit, or by driving the car when they haven't boarded.
  • You can freely kill peaceful people, traders, and salespeople in camps with fire or explosives.
  • The best way to deal with the Governor-Emperor if you recruit him. Otherwise, he steals your food when you next camp.^NoteYou shouldn't reject his request to join immediately lest you suffer a morale penalty; you have to consider letting him join, then change your mind and say no multiple times before he goes away. Or if you know you aren't going to rest anytime soon, get him deliberately killed using Player 2's controller.
  • You can use fire to kill NPCs such as the traders or the Prime Minister.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment:
  • On the other hand, don't expect to get away with things like this in random events, as being a consistent Jerkass will quickly nosedive your group's morale. Some cases will even have a violated character leave the group or be killed!^Note... unless your whole group has low loyalty, in which case they won't care. Some of them will even GAIN morale when you act like a Jerkass... Of course, that also means they're more likely to stab you in the back at the first opportunity.
  • Robbing traders in Trader Camps can backfire real bad too. Either you get some nice supplies or some heavy hits to Morale and Health.
  • At the end of the game, you can kill the Prime Minister of Canada with fire or explosives. This nets you an achievement... and forfeits your current game, counting it as a loss.
• Video Game Tutorial: The game starts with one to show the quirks of conversations and how combat and map navigating work.
• Voice Grunting: Featured in every character with lines. Including animals.
• The War Sequence: Sieges near the end of the game (or even at the start depending on the difficulty) easily becomes this.
• Warm-Up Boss: If one sees the sieges as "boss battles". The first siege will usually be rather tame and have not a lot of zombies, mostly to teach the players how they work.
• We Cannot Go On Without You: Averted. If the player-controlled survivor is killed on a supply run, the game switches control over to one of the AI survivors escorting them; if everyone on a supply run dies but at least one survivor was set to 'Rest,' control is switched to them as they flee the scene. The only way to get a Game Over is through a Total Party Kill.
• We Care: Somewhat implied by Yall-Mart's logo, a red heart.
• What You Are in the Dark: A few events, like helping a helpless person stuck under a pile of cardboard boxes or sharing a fun sized candy bar will reveal your party's Loyalty.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: At the end of a successful run, each survivor gets a blurb describing their new life in Canada.
• With Friends Like These...: Just because your characters are traveling together (and even dependent on each other for survival) does not mean they're obligated to get along. Depending on their quirks, they may routinely decrease each other's morale with pointless bickering, cause backlashes during events with their incompetence, or even sell out the party to bandits.
• With This Herring: If you don't pick certain perks for your starting characters that give them weapons or some kind of unarmed strike, chances are you're going to be armed with crap at the beginning of the game, ranging from things that could theoretically serve as weapons like kitchen knives and frying pans down to a sewing needle. Which breaks in a handful of hits. Needless to say, acquiring better weapons is hugely important early in a run for this reason.
• A Winner Is You: You get to see characters that made to Canada walking with a Mountie; they speak a few lines of dialogue and you get to see a random epilogue, but that's it.
• Wolverine Wannabe: Bogan can sometimes be found as a rare recruit. Though instead of a "snikt" noise, his claws make a "fwink" noise. Not only that, but he can heal himself between missions without using up medical supplies.
• Yet Another Stupid Death:
  • Screwing around with fire, explosives, or getting a little too greedy while a massive horde is coming for you are very, very common ways to end your run.
  • Forgetting to check if a character is afflicted by the Tired ailment before sending them to a text event that requires Strength, Fitness, and/or Shooting and getting them killed because of that is also very easy to do, and will make you feel very stupid.
• You Lose at Zero Trust: Downplayed. The game doesn't outright end if your party's morale gets critically low, but any party member who hits zero morale can bring some real nasty events down on the entire group. Some of the things that can happen is having them walk out on you (possibly taking a good chunk of your supplies with them, causing catastrophic loss of resources), suffer loss of hard earned status boosts, or, in case of pets, severely wound, possibly killing, a party member. If your whole party's morale hits rock bottom, the difficult "Fatal Argument" siege can trigger; characters travelling alone may face the equally difficult "Haze of Despair" siege. Both sieges give the player the option to give up and end the run before even trying.
• Zombie Apocalypse: The setting of the game. Nobody knows how it started, and no one really cares.
• Zombie Gait: Since all of the zombies follow the rules established in the Living Dead Series, this is expected. Some characters lament that they aren't fast, but given their sheer numbers, it's probably better off that they're slow. The developers have explicitly stated that there will be no zombie variety for the sake of focusing more on text events and hordes.

---