I Am Not A Monster (later relaunched as I Am Not A Monster: First Contact) is an isometric Turn-Based Tactics and Social Deduction Game, developed by Cheerdealers and published by Plug In Digital/Alawar Preminum in September 2018.
A tongue-in-cheek homage to campy Raygun Gothic sci-fi, I Am Not A Monster is set aboard the luxury space cruise liner Albatross, where a plague of infectious reptilian shapeshifters has begun to overtake the passengers and crew. Working together with your fellow humans, you must rescue civilians and uncover the monsters before they kill or infect everyone else. Each player controls a single character, planning out their actions, before everyone's choices play out simultaneously.
A singleplayer story mode, titled "Space Tales", was released in October 2019. It follows the exploits of a cast of characters across thirty levels, as they struggle to survive on the Albatross and find a cure for the infestation.
I Am Not A Monster contains examples of the following tropes:
- Action Survivor: The protagonists of the story mode include two movie stars, a socialite, a retired general, a prince, a smuggler, a stage magician, and a nurse, engineer and security officer from the crew of the ship. Between them, they gun down hundreds of monsters across the Albatross.
- Asshole Victim: Mr. X doles out a Psychic-Assisted Suicide to Prince Sencat, who had just murdered General Thul in cold blood and was about to send the Albatross on a course for Earth to satisfy his genocidal Fantastic Racism.
- Attack Drone: Robospiders are small multi-legged drones that can be built using the heroic ability "Deploy Robospider". They're armed with a basic laser pistol, and can be ordered upon placement to follow and defend their creator, chase a single enemy, or keep watch over a fixed position.
- The Bad Guy Wins: Despite James and Gloria's efforts, the Guest successfully opens the ancient gateway, and when its current host is slain it simply possesses Gloria to leap through the portal. Cue abrupt credits, as James extends a dispairing hand towards the portal.
- Batman Can Breathe in Space: The monsters can, anyway. An excursion to the ship exterior in Episode 3 sees Felicia and Chad (wearing spacesuits with limited oxygen) come under fire from aliens in human disguises (who conspicuously aren't).
- BFG: The higher-end versions of each weapon category usually take the form of these, with many of them including a cooldown period between attacks and forcing the user to sacrifice their movement for the turn. However, the biggest gun in the game is the military-grade Devastator, a huge wave-energy cannon with very high damage, unlimited range and an EMP effect. It's a justified Oh, Crap! moment for the protagonists when Mr. X is hauling one around for his second boss fight. According to the ship's AI, devastators were kept around the hangar bay to repel boarding actions during the war, and X just happened to find the last functioning cannon left over from the civilian refit.
- Big Bad: The Guest, an extra-dimensional alien that resembles a chameleon made of rainbow-colored energy. Emerald caviar turns out to have bizarre supernatural properties, enabling the imbiber to interact with other planes of existence, and Gordon's abuse of it through drink mixing accidentally causes him to drag the Guest into the corporeal universe during his Mushroom Samba. The Guest isn't pleased, blaming all of humanity for what happened, and uses its Body Surf abilities to control Mr. X and hijack the Albatross during the emerald varnus outbreak, attempting to reach the frontier world of Mirach where an ancient portal leads back to its own universe.
- Body Surf: Mr. X turns out to merely be a mind-controlled puppet for an extra-dimensional psionic being called the Guest, and the reason it lures the protagonists to the hanger for a boss fight is so it can hop to Roger Fox's body and use his piloting skills to flee to the surface of Mirach. During a single mission where you play as the Guest, you get to use its "Mind Capture" ability to swap bodies on the fly.
- Bottomless Magazines: Ammunition is not a concern in this game, though the higher-end BFGs require a cooldown between attacks.
- Brain Uploading: Felicia Hicks turns out to be a perfectly life-like android rather than a human, which explains why she appears to be The Immune. Ginny speculates that she became an android as part of a bait-and-switch plastic surgery appointment turned illegal experiment, and either had no knowledge of the matter or requested that her memory be altered. In gameplay terms, Felicia is unable to be infected by the monsters' grapple attack, but she takes damage from EM weapons even when she isn't carrying vulnerable equipment.
- Captain Space, Defender of Earth!: James Gordon plays "Captain Laser" in a Show Within a Show being filmed on the Albatross during the cruise. He's still wearing his costume and armed with a prop gun when the emerald varnus outbreak starts.
- The Chosen One: As David Lee explains, James Gordon is awaited by the Ancient Conspiracy as "the Great Controller" (Patient Zero, able to command monsters), destined to fight "the Enemy" (Mr. X/the chameleon) and unearth the "underground temple" (the archeological dig on Mirach, where the portal is buried).
- Color-Coded Item Tiers: Common items have a white background, uncommon items have a blue background, and rare items have a glossy gold background. In Space Tales, any unique personal items a character has, which cannot be removed or replaced, are marked by a metal-plated background and a hazard-striped border.
- Crazy Survivalist: An optional encounter in the officers' quarters is a security guard who has shut himself in his quarters, ready to blast anyone he sees with a machine gun. It initially looks like just snapped upon learning of the monsters' shapeshifting, but examining his computer reveals that he'd been engaging in paranoid doomsday-prepping beforehand, hiding the machine gun in his bathroom. Mention is made of a cleaning lady he murdered, claiming that "judging from her insides" she was an alien infiltrator already.
- Damage Over Time: Certain weapons and heroic abilities can inflict a bleeding status on targets, causing them to lose health every turn and leave a Trail of Blood when they move.
- Damage-Sponge Boss: Mr. X has the "Subspace Shield" trait, which dramatically reduces damage taken from laser and plasma weapons and outright No Sells every other form of damage. This, coupled with his abuse of rescue beacons in his second fight, means he takes a tremendous amount of punishment.
- Deadly Doctor: The "Surgery" heroic ability, acquired by pairing a healing item with a melee weapon, allows a character to restore their target to full health and remove all negative status effects. Alternatively, Surgery can be used on a monster for a One-Hit Kill, presumably from being messily dissected on the spot.
- Deflector Shields: The Defence Matrix gadget provides a passive 50% reduction to all incoming damage while held, and can be activated to grant full immunity to all damage for a single turn. It has a close cousin in the Energy Converter, which only blocks energy attacks and lacks the passive defence bonus, but when activated it converts half of the negated damage into healing.
- Demonic Possession: The Guest performs this on humans, leaping from host to host. The possessed is aware of what's happening, but unable to control their body — something the Guest exploits as a means of torture to acquire information, forcing a guard on Mirach to break his own fingers until he explains how to reach the archeological digsite.
- The Dog Was the Mastermind: That rainbow-colored chameleon Gordon sees in his Mushroom Samba is in fact the closest thing the story has to a Big Bad. While not the source of the emerald varnus outbreak, it's a powerful and cruel psionic alien accidentally brought into the world by Gordon's misuse of the emerald caviar, and it wants to return to its own world by any means necessary.
- Doppelgänger Spin: David Lee's personal item, the Psi-Projector, creates a holographic doppelganger of himself to distract enemies.
- Drowning My Sorrows: The second level of Space Tales follows James Gordon at the Flipper Bar on Deck 22, drinking himself into a stupor to work off his frustrations with his acting career and job looking after Gloria. He downs a succession of increasingly exotic drinks and foods, including "borge scales" (which speed up his perception of time), "loh crystals" (said to restore neural pathways and suppress feelings of guilt), and finally some reckless drink-mixing with "emerald caviar". This last stunt results in a Mushroom Samba where James fights off reptilian monsters with explosive drinks, and he soon wakes up back in his bedroom... shortly after the real monster outbreak has started up.
- Duel Boss: At the bridge of the Albatross, Prince Sencat and General Thul finally come to blows when Sencat decides he wants to send the infested spaceship towards Earth and destroy the human race. The player is handed control of Sencat and has to kill Thul, who is armed with whatever weapons and items the player had given him beforehand. This is quickly followed up by a bait-and-switch fight between Sencat and Mr. X, which proves impossible to win.
- Dwindling Party: Chad Parsons loses his mind upon discovering his family transformed, and allows himself to be taken under the delusion that they're still normal. General Thul is murdered at the bridge by Prince Sencat when he attempts to stop the latter from using the Albatross to deliver the monsters to Earth, and Sencat is killed by Mr. X immediately afterword. Much later, when the other protagonists reach the bridge, John Hunt guns down Felicia Hicks out of paranoia, and is promptly shot in the back of the head by Gloria. Rodger Fox gets possessed by the Guest performing a Body Surf from the defeated Mr. X, and when found again he's been left to die from Possession Burnout. By the finale, only James Gordon, Gloria Stryker, Nurse Ginny and David Lee are still alive, and the latter two stay back on the Albatross to maintain order while James and Gloria go ahead to the final confrontation on Mirach.
- EMP: Electro-magnetic weapons (marked as "EM" weapons) disable any electronics they hit, instantly destroying machines like robospiders and interrupting actions that would've used EM-vulnerable equipment like laser guns or shields. Affected items are disabled for two turns, and characters also take some damage for each EM-vulnerable item they're carrying.
- Establishing Character Moment: After restoring her original, ruthless personality with a neuromod taken from General Thul, Gloria's first actions before speaking are to give the old man's corpse a kick and break the neuromod device.
- Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: The monsters infect other characters by grabbing them and regurgitating a spray of green fluids and eggs into their throats. These eggs then mutate the victim into an identical monster.
- Fantastic Racism: Humanity and the Wol K Lanians were at war with each-other twenty years ago. While the conflict ended with a white peace, tensions remain high between the species, and many still protest the war's end. Prince Sencat especially despises humans, and insists the war with them should have continued to the bitter end — a topic where he butts heads with General Thul, who holds more respect for humans and firmly believes that War Is Hell. A diary found in Sencat's quarters has him contemplate murdering the ship's human crew for fun, gloating that his Psychic Powers would make him impossible to catch. When the monsters exhibit the ability to mimic other humanoids, Sencat gets the idea to weaponize them against humanity, and attempts to set the Albatross on a course for Earth.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: Using the diagnosis machine in Deck 13 as James Gordon returns his species as "unknown". At the end of the next level, the Albatross AI reveals that Gordon is actually Patient Zero.
- For Science!: The archeological dig site on Mirach is staffed by members of "Sector 17", who Gloria scorns as a bunch of Mad Scientists prone to reckless experiments. Sure enough, they've been fruitlessly studying the portal for three years, and they gladly take up arms to protect the Guest when informed the alien is capable of opening it. The officer in charge of the expedition outright demands for the Guest to possess him to perform the psionic ritual.
- Green-Skinned Space Babe: Joyce, an NPC, is a passenger with bright green skin. James at the bar will remark that it's a fashion thing, but it still creeps him out. With all the green-skinned lizard monsters running around, however, the poor girl is later found cowering in the restraunt bathroom, terrified that the other survivors will kill her thinking she's one of the monsters. Tragically, her fears come true late in the game, when she's reappears as part a survivor group traversing the monorail passage. John Hunt, who is unfamiliar with Joyce, believes her to be a monster suffering a Glamour Failure and opens fire despite Gloria's protests, killing her and starting yet another pointless bloodbath as Joyce's companions shoot back.
- Grenade Launcher: A BFG that allows a character to lob an unlimited number of standard grenades at greater-than-normal distances, effectively working as an artillery piece. The drawback is that, like all the big guns, using the launcher requires the character to sacrifice their movement for the turn.
- Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: No matter what you do during the final level, the Guest still succeeds in opening the portal, and the death of his last host just prompts it to possess Gloria to leap into the portal. Cue abrupt credits.
- Healing Potion: The most basic healing item is a single-use Medkit, which resembles a high-tech glass sphere filled with green liquid.
- Healing Shiv: Heroic abilities tied to healing items involve jury-rigging the character's current weapon into a tool of healing. Firearms shoot darts loaded with medicine, energy-wave weapons like EM guns and X-radiators unleash waves of revitalizing energy, grenades and rockets deliver healing payloads, and melee weapons are used to perform field surgery.
- Heal Thyself: A number of healing items are available, which can be used on you or on a nearby character. The basic item is the Medkit, a single-use Healing Potion. First Aid Kits heal a lesser amount of health, but can be used indefinitely. The rarer First Aid Kit Mk.2 is even better, healing the same amount as the single-use Medkits, but they have a cooldown before they can be used again.
- Heroic BSoD: Chad Parsons reaches his family, only to discover that they've already been turned into monsters. The poor man snaps in that very moment, deliriously insisting that they're still normal, and that they're just closing in for a 'hug' when they infect him. Felicia, who accompanied him up to that point, has no choice but to close the door and leave Chad to his fate.
- Hopeless Boss Fight: Prince Sencat versus Mr. X. The player gets to set up their actions as normal, but Mr. X uses Control to hijack Sencat's turn and perform a Psychic-Assisted Suicide.
- I Ate WHAT?!: Emerald caviar, harvested from Ka'raax, infects James Gordon at the beginning of the story and turns him into Patient Zero for the outbreak. The ship AI explains that the caviar is completely harmless under normal conditions, but Gordon's impulsive drink-mixing at the bar accidentally created the necessary environmental conditions inside his stomach for the eggs to become 'active'.
- Identity Amnesia: Gloria Singer turns out to actually be Gloria Stryker; a lieutenant in the Federation navy, a member of a black-ops division, and a war criminal from the Wo K Lanian war. Right when the war was about to end with a peace accord, she blew up a Wo K Lanian space station. To salvage the peace, she was tried and sentenced to a Death of Personality via the neuromod, with the file of her original personality surrendered to the Wo K Lanians as a goodwill offering. Fellow veteran and old flame James Gordon knows all of this, and was asked to keep an eye on her. However, Gloria was perceptive enough to realize that not all the pieces of her new idenity lined up, and hired private investigators to learn that the neuromod rotates owners and, for the duration of the cruise, was in the possession of General Thul. When she finds Thul's corpse in the bridge, she immediately uses the neuromod to restore her original, ruthless personality.
- Interface Spoiler: If the player gets the idea to use Control on Mr. X (easy enough to attempt with David Lee, a psychic), it fails with an alert that "another character" is already using a mind-control ability on the target. Sure enough, the human Mr. X is merely a possessed host of the Big Bad.
- Joke Weapon: James Gordon begins Space Tales armed with the prop laser gun from the Show Within a Show he acts for, which the description notes is handy for lighting cigarettes. It deals zero damage normally, but it is a laser, so Gordon's "Captain Laser" trait still grants it +20 damage.
- Limit Break: "Heroic Abilities", in which a character combines their currently-held weapon and item to create unusual and powerful effects. They're activated by spending a variable amount of morale, gained by damaging monsters and helping humans. Monsters cannot use heroic abilities — the relevant button is replaced by the toggle between human and monster forms.
- MacGyvering: The basis of Heroic Abilities. By combining a weapon and item, a hero can perform powerful and unusual actions. A swap-teleporter, for instance, is created by combining a teleportation device with a laser gun.
- Magic Antidote: The Xenophage item is an immediate cure for the monster infection, allowing Zombie Infectees to be saved if administered in time. If used on full monsters, meanwhile, it deals damage.
- Magicians Are Wizards: David Lee, a human passenger identified as a Stage Magician with a plethora of magic tricks at his disposal, has the "psionic" trait that makes heroic abilities related to Psychic Powers cheaper to perform, and makes him Immune to Mind Control.
- Missing Floor: The Albatross has a missing Deck 13, which is subject to fanciful rumors like being a hidden blacksite for government experiments. It actually contains an abandoned military R&D facility and an AI core, held over from the days when the Albatross was a flagship in the war against Wo K Lan.
- Nightmare Fetishist: As a member of the Cult of the Domed Eye, who venerate the emerald varnus as part of their prophecy, David Lee has the "Monster Lover" trait, which gives him a small boost to morale whenever he sees a new monster. His quarters on the Albatross is coated wall to wall in lizard paraphanilia, with a huge reptile-skin comforter draped over his bedsheets.
- Ninja Log: The "Teleport Swap" heroic ability allows you to swap places with another character within line-of-sight. While it can be used for travel, the primary use is to make someone else suffer attacks on your behalf, since teleportations have a higher play priority than most actions.
- Non-Standard Character Design: Mr. X wears a black suit-and-tie with a fedora, an outfit noted in-story to be very out-of-place in the game's Raygun Gothic Retro Universe (according to Gloria, hats in general have been out of style for ages).
- Old Soldier: General Thul is an aged veteran of the war between the Wo K Lanians and humanity. In contrast to Prince Sencat's youthful jingoism, Thul fully believes that War Is Hell, and that the controversial peace accord saved many lives in the long run.
- One-Hit Polykill: The quirk of laser weapons is that even single-shot laser attacks will pass through characters and damage everyone in a straight line. This makes them useful for fighting tight clusters of enemies, but one must be aware of where that laser beam is going to avoid striking a friendly on the other side.
- The Paranoiac: Security officer John Hunt is initially gun-ho about fighting the monsters and saving the day, until he learns the creatures reproduce by infecting humans, and can shapeshift to mimic human form. Realizing that anyone he meets could be either a monster in disguise or a Zombie Infectee, Hunt snaps and carries out an indescriminate purge of Personnel Cabins B, and goes on to instigate several more bloodbaths against survivor groups across the ship. It culminates in him turning against the rest of the protagonists and gunning down Felicia Hicks, an android, believing that her status as The Immune is a ruse.
- Patient Zero: Upon learning that the monsters reproduce by infecting people with eggs, Nurse Ginny resolves to Find the Cure!, which she claims requires finding the first person on the ship to become infected. A tall order with the ship in utter chaos, but she eventually gets her wish when James Gordon is revealed by the shipboard military AI to be that first monster, and allows the AI to run biological testing on his body in a failed attempt to prove his humanity. The resulting antibody samples are used to create a "xenophage" that cures Zombie Infectees and severely harms monsters.
- People in Rubber Suits: To go with the campy Flash Gordon-esque Retro Universe, the shapeshifting, infectious monsters appear as bulky, grunting humanoid reptiles with unblinking yellow eyes and a plodding, unsteady gait, in the style of countless schlocky sci-fi monster costumes. Even the way they grab humans to infect them, wrapping their arms around in a loose bear hug while their victim leans back in disgust, is very Touch of the Monster-y. Parodied further by an unlockable multiplayer skin for the monsters, which is just a guy in an unconvincing rubber costume.
- Puzzle Boss: In the first fight with Mr. X, the Albatross AI informs Gordon that his Perception Filter ability can be overwhelmed by expanding the local Psychic Link of the monsters — once enough people are infected, X's psychic cloak fails and he can be attacked. Since Gordon and Lee can't infect people themselves, they need to play defensively and use Gordon's ability to control monsters to infect the squad of human survivors X brought along with him, as well as protect the monsters until their population is high enough.
- Psychic-Assisted Suicide: The Control heroic ability can be used to force other characters to attack themselves, walk into deadly obstacles, or run headlong into Sentry Gun firing arcs. In the story mode, Sencat becomes a victim of this courtesy of Mr. X, who uses Control to force the Prince to impale himself with his cutlass.
- Psychic Link: Late in the story, it is learned that the monsters operate under a hierarchal "psi-network", with older monsters exerting control over younger ones in their presence. James Gordon, being Patient Zero and thus the oldest monster on the ship, learns that he can exploit the psi-network to control the turns of nearby monsters, though he can only command one at a time.
- Pummeling the Corpse: After restoring her original, ruthless personality using a neuromod chip taken from General Thul's dead body, Gloria Stryker gives the old man's body a contemptuous kick as an Establishing Character Moment.
- Real-Time with Pause: Moves are prepared in the "planning phase", before playing out simultaneously during the "action phase". Certain actions, such as teleportation or EMP attacks, have higher priority than others, and regular movement always occurs last.
- Reptiles Are Abhorrent: The monsters are ugly lizard-men driven to kill or infect everyone they meet, employing cunning human disguises to deceive their victims. Then there's the Guest, a sociopathic energy being that resembles a chameleon, who has no qualms about possessing people and torturing them until they agree to do its bidding.
- Retro Universe: The world of I Am Not A Monster is a tongue-and-cheek homage to campy Raygun Gothic sci-fi, particularly Flash Gordon and Star Trek: The Original Series. Several cutscenes are even rendered in a pixel-art 3D style reminiscent of old DOS games.
- Robotic Reveal: Believing her status as The Immune to be a ruse, John Hunt guns down Felicia Hicks before being shot dead himself. Felicia's midsection is ripped open by machine gun fire, revealing metal plates and electrical wiring. Ginny explains that the bio-analysis machine in Deck 13 had correctly read her as an android, and speculates that the socialite had fallen victim to an illegal Brain Uploading experiment while seeking plastic surgery. The reason Ginny didn't tell anyone was because she feared Hunt wouldn't have considered an android worth protecting.
- Sentry Gun: Defense Turrets, deployed by a heroic ability or already present on certain maps, are stationary guns that are aimed in a single direction upon placement. They automatically fire at monsters, or anyone attacking their owner, that enters their cone of vision.
- Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: The heroic ability "Control" allows you to steal another character's turn, which can be used to have them attack their friends. Late in Space Tales, James Gordon gains the Monster Control trait, which allows him to exploit the monsters' Psychic Link to briefly control the actions of any single monster within a short range. Since he's by himself at the time, he needs to quickly dart around the battlefield, dominating monsters with useful weaponry to help fight the hordes.
- Shout-Out:
- One of the museum exhibits in Chapter 4 resembles a tripod from The War of the Worlds, and the description explains that the vehicle is the remnant of an ancient alien army that collectively died of unknown causes while invading the world they were found on.
- Slow Laser: Laser pistols, laser/plasma rifles and plasma cannons, while seeming to avert the trope by firing a thin beam of energy in a straight line, are visibly slow if observed at long range or the map view. Laser assault rifles, meanwhile, fire a scatter of typical sci-fi laser-bullets.
- Smart Gun: A class of firearms. Smart weapons have a fixed maximum range, but they completely ignore line of sight and cover to strike the single square they're aimed at. They're an excellent choice for shooting into a crowd or interrupting a monster's infection grapple, since there's little risk of collateral damage.
- Social Deduction Game: The multiplayer. Players are divided into heroes and monsters, with the goal of wiping out the opposing side or completing some objective. The monsters have fewer members to start with, but are capable of disguising themselves, and can infect heroes to turn them into more monsters.
- Socialite: Felicia Hicks is an "outrageously famous socialite" who joins the heroes purely for the sake of having an exciting adventure. Her personal item is even a technologically-advanced makeup kit, which can be used to lightly heal herself.
- Sociopathic Hero: In Space Tales, John Hunt has the "Psycho" trait, allowing him to attack and kill humans without suffering a penalty to his Limit Break meter. His psychopathic self-preservation instinct leads him to slaughter multiple groups of survivors, while his companions are forced to defend themselves alongside him.
- Space Elves: The Wo K Lanians are humanoids distinguished from humanity by pointed ears and an affinity for Psychic Powers. They're a Proud Warrior Race|Guy who were at war with humanity twenty years before the start of the story.
- The Spook: Mr. X, a mysterious man wearing an anachronistic three-piece suit and fedora. He's a tremendously powerful psychic capable of generating a Perception Filter that makes him invisible even to the ship's security cameras. David Lee believes him to be "the Enemy" from the Ancient Conspiracy's prophecy, and the Albatross AI eventually concludes that he hails from Another Dimension. It is eventually revealed that Mr. X is merely a mind-controlled host for the actual threat — an extra-dimensional energy being referred to as the Guest.
- Starship Luxurious: The Albatross is a spacefaring luxury cruise liner, large enough to contain multiple decks of apartments, a ballroom restraunt, a museum, an arboretum and hydroponics bay, quarters for the ship's crew and their families, and space to spare for an elaborate movie shoot during the cruise's normal working hours. At one point, a side character describes it as a "flying city". More bizarrely, it used to be a military warship, and an abandoned military R&D department (with a cavernous AI core chamber) is located on the ship's Missing Floor.
- Sticky Bomb: A type of thrown explosive, which must be used on a specific target rather than the ground. Unusually for the trope, sticky bombs aren't wired to a timer, but a proximity sensor — they only explode when their victim gets too close to another character.
- Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: The second fight with Mr. X in the third-to-last level, and the final level, are both preceded by rooms full of crates with high-end weapons, giving you a chance to kit out your party.
- Swords to Plowshares: The Albatross was originally a military dreadnought named the Bloody Shepherd, which served in the war against Wo K Lan twenty years ago. After the war, the Shepherd was refitted into a civilian cruise liner as a symbolic gesture, but its Missing Floor still contains a military R&D department and the dreadnought's AI core.
- Teleportation Rescue: The Rescue Beacon is a placeable secondary item that provides a one-time rescue when its owner takes lethal damage, bringing them to its location and healing them a bit for good measure.
- Teleporters and Transporters: A Teleporter item can be used to quickly warp a short range within line of sight, and heroic abilities combine it with various weapons to teleport in unusual ways (like swapping positions with another player, performing a deadly Flash Step, or leaving behind a patch of burning plasma). Teleportation actions have a very high priority during the action phase, allowing the player to teleport out of the path of an anticipated attack. A related item is the single-use rescue beacon, which is instead placed to mark the destination of a Teleportation Rescue.
- That Man Is Dead: When she finally regains her original personality (a vengeful war-criminal), Gloria Stryker breaks her neuromod to erase the ditzy actress "Singer" personality that was imposed on her before.
- They Look Like Us Now: The emerald varnus is not only a virulent parasite, it's also capable of shapeshifting into human forms to decieve its prey and attack at range using guns and items (though their heroic ability is replaced by the toggle between forms).
- Third-Act Misunderstanding: The Albatross AI sees fit to broadcast the evidence of James Gordon being Patient Zero across the entire ship, destroying James' reputation among the survivors and leading the other protagonists to attempt to kill him.
- Tomato in the Mirror: James Gordon learns from the ship's military AI that he is a monster; he was the first person to be infected by consuming emerald caviar while carelessly mixing exotic drinks, which created the necessary environment inside his stomach for the eggs to become 'active'. The Mushroom Samba sequence was actually Gordon turning and infecting other patrons of the bar.
- Trapped-with-Monster Plot: The Albatross is a cruise liner in the middle of a journey through the depths of space, leaving the protagonists trapped as the ship's passengers and crew are overtaken by The Virus. When Mr. X sets the ship to enter lightspeed, it becomes impossible to even leave the ship physically, via shuttlecraft or spacesuit, until the ship reaches it's destination at the edge of charted space.
- Turn-Based Tactics: In the Real-Time with Pause style. The multiplayer mode only allows you to control a single character at a time, but in the Space Tales singleplayer story you control groups of named characters.
- Unusable Enemy Equipment: Late in Space Tales you'll encounter Wo K Lanian variants of various secondary items, which function identically to their normal counterparts but cannot be activated by humans thanks to a "psi-lock". However, the monsters are apparently able to circumvent the problem by assuming the forms of Wo K Lanians. Since General Thul and Prince Sencat are both dead by that point in the story, the player won't be able to make any use of these items.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: In multiplayer, where harmless NPC civilians are everywhere, and can be led around by players:
- As a monster, you can lead a civilian while disguised, allowing you to take your prey somewhere out of sight for infection, or keep them around as a guilt-inducing human shield.
- Tag a civilian with a Sticky Bomb (which is a proximity explosive) and wait for a hero to approach them for rescuing.
- If you idle without taking actions, you get a prompt to pretend to be a civilian, gaining the civilian icon above your head. This can be used by monsters to set up ambushes, waiting for a hero to "rescue" them.
- As a hero, use the "Teleport Swap" heroic ability on a civilian or another player, just in time for them to suffer multiple attacks in your stead. Since it's not a direct attack on your part, it incurs no guilt.
- As a hero, use the "Control" heroic ability to force someone to attack his friends, attack himself, or perform suspicious actions like poisoning the air supply on Hydroponics. You can even control a monster player and use him to deliberately infect somebody.
- As a hero, use the "Psi-Cage" heroic ability to trap one of your friends in a 3x3 box with an angry monster.
- Video Game Cruelty Punishment: As a hero, damaging non-monsters causes you to lose a hefty chunk of your morale meter, and leaves you with the status effect "guilt" that prevents gaining morale the following turn. This ensures that players who are too reckless or disruptive are placed at a tactical disadvantage.
- Villain Shoes: The penultimate level "Sector 17" is played from the perspective of the Guest, using its Body Surf power to traverse the Mirach archeology camp and evade the pursuit of James Gordon and Gloria Stryker.
- The Virus: The emerald varnus monster reproduces by infecting hosts with its eggs, which take over their bodies and mutate them into a new emerald varnus.
- Weapon Specialization: A few playable characters in Space Tales have unique personal items, marked with hazard-striped borders, that cannot be unequipped or lost. A few of them, like Prince Sencat's sabre and General Thul's pistol, are special weapons.
- Characters in the story mode also have traits that encourage the use of certain weapons and gadgets. James Gordon's trait, "Captain Laser", gives him a +20 damage boost while using laser weapons, allowing even his prop gun from the show to deal minor damage. General Thul has a similar trait for pistol weapons. Roger Fox's "Mercenary" trait grants extra damage with kinetic firearms at the cost of shortened maximum range.
- Weapon of X-Slaying: The infection-curing Xenophage syringe can be used as a weak weapon against monsters in a pinch, and various heroic abilities tied to it involve performing attacks that harm monsters but deal zero damage to humans caught in the blast.
- We Cannot Go On Without You: While defeated characters in the story mode will recover between battles, allowing any of them to become infected is an immediate game over until a cure is found.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: After spending most of the game gunning down monsters in their dozens in self-defence, James Gordon is horrified to learn from the ship's AI that all the monsters will eventually turn back into mostly-normal people on their own, like he did. This leads to James needing to find a way to minimize casualties on both sides as he continues to explore the ship.
- Wounded Gazelle Gambit: In the officer cabins, Prince Sencat and General Thul are lured into an ambush by a monster impersonating a frightened passenger, who promises to lead them to the command bridge. Fortunately, a box of grenades on the floor allows the player to trap the onrushing pack in a psi-cage and blow them to smithereens.
- Zombie Infectee: In multiplayer, a hero infected by the monsters will transform into one of them after a few turns, swapping teams, unless they're cured or killed in time. Infected civilians, meanwhile, are used by the monster team as respawn points, assuming control of them the same way heroes do.
