Video Game / Immortal Soul: Black Survival

Are you prepared? Then please do your best to survive.

Immortal Soul: Black Survival is a free to play Battle Royale Game by Archbears that is currently being developed by Nimble Neuron. It was originally published as Black Survival but was rebranded to Immortal Soul: Black Survival on February 1st, 2021.

On Lumia Island, the Aglaia Project is studying superhumans. Players begin by choosing one of a varied cast of characters who have been modified byt the project, then taking them into Battle Royale style deathmatches where they must craft armour, weapons, food and drink in order to survive, their explosive collars threatening to detonate if they stay in one area too long. All item spawns are fixed, unlike in other Battle Royales, making optimising your route essential to victory. Through the course of the game players will fight wild animals released by the Project, as well as each other, culminating in only one of the ten making their way out of the island.

On July 29th, 2020 Eternal Return Black Survival, a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena featuring the same cast of characters and backstory was released.

On October 13th, 2022, the developers announced that the game would be shutting down on December 8th, 2022.

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This game contains examples of:

• Abandoned Hospital: The Hospital area is one of these.
• Ability Depletion Penalty: Once you run out of stamina, taking any further stamina-draining actions will cost you a flat amount of health instead.
• Abusive Parents: There are a few examples revealed through character backstories.
  • Jackie's parents locked her in the basement and neglected her.
  • Adela's parents cared more about gambling than they did their daughter.
  • Li Dailin's parents only cared about her learning their family's martial arts techniques, and otherwise ignored her needs.
• Action Dad: Downplayed, but Shoichi's reason for joining the Aglaia Project was to earn money to help support his daughter.
• Action Fashionista: Mai, a fashion designer whose abilities revolve around improving her armour.
• Action Girl: All of the female members of the cast qualify.
• Addressing the Player: Done in the tutorial where the player is asked to kill the participants after they have broken into the research facility.
• Aerith and Bob: Test subjects come from all over the world, but even still some names are much more unusual than others. Hart and Napathon stand out.
• Ambiguously Gay: Fiora and Jenny have shades of this. The pair fought over who should commit suicide to allow the other one to live at the end of a match, the only two test subjects to offer themselves up rather than claim a win without questioning it.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: The Aglaia Pass (Battle Pass,) offers three seperate character skins as a reward, including an animated one for finishing it.
• Anti-Armor: At S mastery all characters get armor-piercing attacks, which improves at SS mastery. Rio gets it earlier, at A mastery.
• Area of Effect: There are a few of these in the game.
  • Sissela's Unshackled ability deals damage to everyone else in the game.
  • Hyejin's Omen ability deals damage to everything in an area that is adjacent to the one that she is in.
• Ax-Crazy: Jackie, a serial killer shown to find the deathmatches fun, and only allowed to be handled by experienced researchers who won't be manipulated by her.
• A.K.A.-47: In full effect. The AK47 itself features as the 'AKR 98,' and most guns without similarly made-up designations have more generic names like 'Gatling Gun' or 'Machine Gun.'
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Some characters have abilities that base themselves off of a single stat. Maximising this stat can lead to some truly impressive moments... But you'd likely be better off building them normally.
  • Hacking allows you to kill the ENTIRE LOBBY all at once. To get there, however, you'll need to make the Network PC, the most complicated item in the game, requiring many extremley limited-quantity items, the System Shutdown Code, another rare item, then requires you to sit still for a full 70 seconds to hack, an action that is only guarenteed if you're playing JP. Initiating the hack will also inform the entire map to your presence, just in case you thought you could fly under the radar. Once you've done all of this, you'll still need to go to the newly-revealed Research Cener, find the Main Computer (a 1% chance,) then go through a 5 second cutscene whilst you're vulnerable to attack. Whilst the entire lobby is trying to stop you and you have to avoid the PC's guardian- Mr Meiji. Once all that is done, you can finally sit back and get your win, having expended more effort than it would take to just win a game normally.
• The Bad Guy Wins: You're there to win this latest deathmatch, not to stop the Aglaia Project's experiments. Win or lose, they still get the data they're after, and you're simply picked back up for the next one.
• Battle Royale Game: A rather unusual one, with a pseudo turn based feel to it and a heavy focus on inventory management.
• Batter Up!: Baseball bats are a common weapon, and Rosalio's default profile shows him wielding one.
• Birds of a Feather: Isol and Luke and Echion and Nadine are apparently this, according to lore snippets.
• Breakable Weapons: All non-thrown weapons have a chance to defect, melee weapons have a 2% chance and ranged weapons have a 1% chance of defecting. If a defected weapon would defect again it is destroyed instead.
• Boomerang Comeback: The Boomerang and Enhanced Boomerang's main gimmick is that they will return, though there is a small chance that they will not.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Bernice's abilities aren't anything special- His debuff, whilst useful, is nothing special, and his active skill is also fairly meh. His base stats are fantastic however, giving him an advantage over most other gun characters.with his debuff not affecting gameplay beyond minor annoyance and his area skill giving you traps.
  • Various armour sets are this, featuring no special abilities whilst still providing the same protection as other, often harder-to-craft or more gimmicky gear.
• Brought Down to Normal: Yuki's 'Uchi-Ochi' denies enemies the ability to use their combat skills for eight seconds.
• Changing Gameplay Priorities: The early game is mostly about trying to get armour and weapons as quickly as possible, the midgame is brawling to build up mastery and collecting food, and the late game is all about trying to deny your opponents healing and stamina items whilst gathering as many as you possibly can.
• Character Levels: Two different kinds. Levels are measured between 1 and 18, and determine a character's base stats, wheras Mastery is measured from F to SS, and determines attack power, as well as having certain other effects when it reaches a high enough level.
• Character Portrait: Each character has a base and a variety of unlockable ones, seen on the bottom left and on the inventory screen during normal gameplay.
• Characterization Marches On: Initially, Mai's research journals focused on her negative attributes, such as her selfishness, but more recent lore snippets have tended to downplay this and focus on her occupation as a fashion designer
• Clingy Macguffin: Echion's gimmick is that his weapon can't be destroyed and can't be unequipped. Justified, since it's actually his artificial arm.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: Common items are grey, uncommon are green, rare are blue, epic are purple, and legendary are gold.
• Cooldown: Activated abilities and some passive abilities have them.
• Cool Sword: Most of the epic grade blade weapons are this. Special mention goes to the Tachyon Blade, which is essentially a lightsaber, and Hofud, said to be the blade of Heimdallr himself.
• Combat Stilettos: The Killer Heels armor allows any character to wear them.
• Cosmic Retcon: With the release of Eternal Return Black Survival multiple characters have been retconned to have special abilities using VF. Eva was the first to actually have these in Immortal Soul.
• Costume Porn: Each character has a number of skins, some of which have very intricate detail. On the other hand, a lot can be very plain, with the canonical experimental skins being little more than grey-coloured smocks with heavy bomb collars and a tag with the character's subject code on them.
• Creepy Doll: Nina, Chloe's doll is a cute childlike ventriloquist's doll... Until it starts moving on its own and its hair starts growing out thanks to Chloe's VF.
• Critical Existence Failure: Zig-zagged. Characters can be injured, with various debuffs depending on the injured area of the body, but it's perfectly possible for a character to be on a single hitpoint, with no injuries and still able to deal exactly as much damage as they could when they were at full health.
• Cruelty Is the Only Option: The tutorial starts with you killing all of the other test subjects.
• Crutch Character: Most gun characters are this, with quick to craft weapons allowing them to dish out very high damage in the early game, but are noisy and reliant on ammunition. Aya exemplifies this, with very high early game stats and an ability leting her consume an extra ammunition to deal a 150% damage attack, but poor growth stats causing her to fall off in power in the late game.
• Damage Reduction: All armor and accessories have an additional armour reduction value on top of providing protection. This damage reduction depends on their rarity, ranging from uncommon items providing -1 damage, to legendary items reducing it by 4. The Uchiwa is unique in this regard, being a rare item that provides 4 damage reduction, on par with a legendary item.
• Darkand Troubled Past: Par for the course, with most characters fitting into this rope.
• Dead Person Conversation: Adriana has these with her sister, who she sees in fires.
• Deadly Game: The experiment as a whole- a staged Battle Royale by unscrupulous scientific researchers.
• Death of a Child: Adriana and her sister Lily were trapped inside of a large walk-in freezer. When they were found in the morning, only Adriana was still alive.
• Depending on the Artist: Skins in Immortal Soul: Black Survival can look totally different, including showing a character at vastly different ages or even time periods. Special mentions go to any of the 'Three Kingdoms' skins, which have characters dressing up as Lu Bu, Guan Yu, and other mytho-historical Chinese figures.
• Desperation Attack: Alex's 'Desperate Throw' ability, having him deal vastly more damage at the cost of potentially destroying your weapon.
• Determinator:
  • Nicky, a stunt actress determined to prove herself despite her cute appearance.
  • Shoichi's daughter is dying of a rare hereditary disease. To keep her alive, he'll do anything- join the shady Aglaia Project, take on contract killing... Work as a salaryman...
  • Sissela was determined to get a painless death, suffering from an an extremley debilitating and painful incurable disease. Averted, as more recent lore has shown her to have abandoned her death seeking ways, focusing on winning the games until she inevitably succumbs to her disease.
• Developer's Foresight: The stealth ability and Hart's 'Peace Zone,' (preventing people from fighting in a single area,) aren't permitted in the Research Center, to prevent an easy win for a JP-Hart team.
• Difficult, but Awesome: The game is this in general, revolving around collecting items as efficiently as possible. Mastering the game's systems lets you build up items as quickly as RNG allows you to, thus freeing you up to contest others and rapidly build up mastery to become a powerhouse.
  • Barbara's ability has her building multiple gun weapons at a time to convert into sentry guns. Not only does this distract her from her regular build, but it also takes up valuable inventory spaces she could be spending on food and stamina items.
  • Hybridsol refers to playing Isol both as a regular character and a trapmaster, effectively having you play two seperate combat chains at once whilst everyone else focuses on one. Done well, it can force an entire lobby into playing exactly how you want them to, all whilst still being just as effective as them in a straight up fight.
  • Cathy has one of the best debuffs in the game and is capable of healing injuries faster than any other character in the game. To counter this, you'll have no idea what weapon type you'll be using at the start of the game, requiring you to know routes for every weapon type whilst also restricting ammunition should RNG decide you're working with guns or bows.
  • Eva can use every melee weapon in the game as if they were thrown weapons, without regard for ammunition, and has an ability that builds up her mastery faster than anyone else, at the cost of taking more damage. Playing as her requires you to read the lobby and build up more food than others, but leads to a flexible powerhouse who can almost always end up as a formidable force at the end of the game.
  • Sissela has less health and armor than any other character in the game, but has the unique ability to regenerate from damage depending on how many stacks of her ability she has- sometimes effectively no-selling an opponent. In addition, her active ability can deal damage to every player on the map, putting the hurt on without costing her healing items.
• Domestic Abuse: Jackie's parents frequently neglected her.
• Dub Name Change
  • Hart's name was originally Pidgeon in the Japanese version of the game. It was eventually changed to Hart.
  • Rozzi's name is Lodge in the Japanese version.
• Dysfunction Junction: Almost every character has some kind of quirk or neurosis. Being experimented on and made to fight in deathmatches doesn't help.
• Easy EXP: Almost everything provides you with XP- searching areas, fighting animals and players, surviving each closure phase, crafting items...
• Enemy-Detecting Radar: The Vital Sensor, a late game item, allows you to see the location of of other players in areas around you. Its upgraded form, the Radar, allows you to see where everyone is. The Scout ability also lets you see the location of animals and enemies around you.
• Elaborate Equals Effective: Most of the epic grade weapons and armor have noticeably more elaborate designs than common or uncommon weapons or armor.
• Equipment Upgrade: One of the main gimmicks of the game- almost every item can be combined with another to make a stronger piece of equipment.
• Expressive Health Bar: When characters are low on health their portrait will change, the screen will become increasingly more bloodied, and a heartbeat sound can be heard.
• Fantasy Metals: Mithril can appear quite early on in the game, and becomes Adamantium when combined with raw iron.
• Faux Affably Evil: Jackie. Charming conversationalist from a wealthy English family. Also a vicious serial killer with a pechant for using chainsaws and meathooks to kill her victims.
• Flat Character: Some of the characters without much lore to them can end up being this.
• Foil: There are two among the main cast.
  • Jackie, a serial killer who started off murdering animals to try to get her neglectful parents attention, and Aya, a police officer driven by her parents murder to see justice done might not seem like obvious foils... Until you learn that both of them seem to care much more about their own personal struggles than they do the bigger picture. Some of the lore snippets even explicitly call them not so different.
  • William and Rosalio, two baseball-loving brothers who hate each other. In-game, their abilities are polar opposites of each other, with Rosalio's skills encouraging highly swingy critical hit builds, whilst William rewards good understanding of his abilities with consistent, if changing, effects and damage.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Most of the main cast were regular people before they were brought to the island. Now they're superhumans with vastly increased strength, stamina and agility.
• Game-Breaking Bug: When the North American servers were first released, there was a bug that trapped you in an endless loop of searching for a game until you restarted.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Frequently with characters.
  • Zahir, a teen with the supernatural ability to find dead bodies, and who believes himself to be charged by God to punish sinners has abilities revolving around... Finding dead bodies and dealing extra damage to 'sinners,' or those that have killed animals and other players.
  • William and Rosalio are both characters with baseball-themed abilities, William is a pitcher with an ability slate based around using specific variations of his combat skill to throw different pitches. Rosalio, on the other hand, is a clutch hitter with high-damage critical hits that are more likely to proc when he's low on health.
  • Jenny is an extremley convincing actor... Allowing her to play dead and escape a lethal hit.
  • JP, who was kidnapped for trying to hack into the Aglaia Project. His passive ability? Guarenteed successful hacks.
  • Isol, a guerilla soldier experienced in laying traps... Is one of the few characters that can use the normally merely annoying traps as a genuinely lethal complement to their skills.
  • Leon is a competitive swimmer who likes to collect things. His main combat ability is much more powerful around water areas, and he can find items much quicker than other characters.
  • Silvia, an adrenaline junkie motorcycle racer has an ability set entirely based around moving around as much as possible.
  • Li Dailin, a delinquent drunk and martial artist, whose abilities allow her to find alcohol during fights and dodge attacks when she's properly soused.
  • Hart, the pactifist musician can create 'peace zones' where nobody can fight, as well as destroying weapons. Slightly subverted in that in-game, this is mostly used to more effectively kill your opponents, or to get yourself out of a sticky situation.
  • Bernice, an experienced hunter whose abilities let him place traps that reveal people.
  • Adriana, an arsonist, with abilities based entirely around setting fire to places and people.
  • Mai, a fashion designer, whose abilities have her turning her armour into a fashionable masterpiece.
  • Luke, a "Janitor" known for assassinating people and leaving no trace that he was ever there. His abilities let him silence gunshots and placing contracts on other characters to gain extra effects when he kills them.
  • Rio, a competitive archer whose abilities revolve around inceasing her accuracy, and dealing damage based on her current accuracy.
  • Eva has telekinesis, and her ability allows her to use any melee weapon as a thrown weapon instead.
  • Nicky is a stunt actor and ex-boxer. Her punches hit harder, and she can push through pain to reduce the damage dealt to herself in a brawl.
  • Chloe is a puppeteer who uses her doll to fight. Her abilities allow her to put down her doll to help her fight or to defend her.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation
  • In her backstory Hyejin is a shaman who's constantly surrounded by disastrous events. In-game however, she has the ability to use an AOE attack and return damage dealt to her.
  • Sissela is a sick girl in lore who wishes to find a painless death... Whose abilities revolve around throwing herself into harms way to deal more damage.
  • Daniel is a hairstylist who kills people for messing up the hairstyles he gives them. In game, his abilities revolve more around the damage dealt to him and the time of day, instead.
• Girly Bruiser: There are a few among the test subjects. Special mention to Jenny and Mai, an actress and fashion designer respectively, whilst still also being able to kick just as much ass as the others.
• Glass Cannon:
  • Thrown Mastery is this in general. While the weapons are higher in damage, most of it's routes especially those that build the strongest weapons, such as Bone Crushers and High Explosive Grenades, lack most of the basic parts for armor and will often result in throw players being out damaged because they don't have enough armor.
  • Even among throw Characters Adriana is unusually glass cannon. She has higher Attack than most characters, but lower defense, and she's throw. Her abilities don't give her any defense,instead allowing her to deal even more damage.
  • Jackie has high attack throughout all stages of the game but doesn't even have 50 base defense at level 18. However, she has access to plenty of armor through the routes to build weapons with her masteries and her abilities allow her to easily out damage other characters.
  • Nadine starts off with a normally low attack stat, but if she manages to kill enough animals she turns into this.
  • The Weapon rush strategy is this. The focus of this strategy is to get a powerful weapon as fast as possible, but will often result in a lack of armor in the early and potentially mid-game.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: While all of the test subjects brutally fight each other, outside of (and often times in) the experiments plenty of them are friends. Jacky averts this, with none of the other characters having mentioned to be friends with her in the Research Journals, and she only appears as a villain in the Aglaia's Pass.
• Good Parents: Despite all the dark backgrounds some characters have good parents.
  • Shoichi's reason for participating in the experiment is for the money to save his daughter's life.
  • Aya had good parents in a normal family, and then they died.
• Gunsare Useless: Justified. While guns deal slightly more damage than any other weapon type, they're dealing about the same damage as superhumans capable of breaking through walls and uprooting trees.
• Healing Potion: Crafter using an herb and a bottle.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Justified, the characters have been altered so that they have a greater healing factor. This is sped up when they eat food.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: Survivors have twelve slots for items in total, one for a weapon, five for armor, and six in their inventory. Inventory spaces can hold up to 10 of any non-equippable, non-enhancing, and non-lighter item whether it is full grilled tunas or glass cups.
• Improbable Weapon User: A few of the weapons are this, where it is possible to attack people with sewing needles, statues, playing cards, and ancient scrolls. Justified in that the characters are powerful enough that in their hands near anything could be used lethaly.
• Informed Equipment: Character's portraits will only show the skin that you are using, never any of the armor that they are using.
• Instant-Win Condition: Averted. Even though Hacking allows you to kill everyone else in the game, if you manage to build both a network PC and a System shutdown code. However, you're still capable of dying during the animation, and if you aren't playing JP and don't die there's only a 30% chance that hacking won't work.
• Item Crafting: The game is played by crafting your weapon, armor, and food items. It's the central mechanic to progressing in the game.
• Item-Drop Mechanic: Whenever a player or Animal dies they will leave a corpse that will let you take items from them, players leave behind the items they had equipped and in their inventory when they died, while bats will drop water, bread, and an item from a type A supply crate; Crows will drop bird meat, a feather, an item from a type A supply box, and an item from an Icebox; Ospery's will drop eggs, a feater, an item from a type D supply bow, and an item from an Icebox; Hunting Dogs will drop a Fountain Pen, Leather, an item from a type A supply crate, and an item from an icebox; Bloodhounds will drop lighters, leather, an item from a type A supply crate, and an item from a type D supply crate; Gorillas will drop Burdock, Fertilizer, one item from a type D supply crate, and an item from an Icebox; Beats will drop Garlic, a Flower, one item from a type A supply Crate, an item from a type D supply crate, and an item from an icebox; Dr. Wickiline will drop Holy blood, first aid kit, an item from a type A supply Crate, and item from a type D supply crate, and an item from an icebox; and Mr. Meiji will drop Vital Sign Sensor, Bull Intestines, Cigarettes, Fountain Pen, and one type of supply box.
• Just Add Water: Just by adding lye to chain leggings you can make Bio-Boosters a leg armor piece that regains life whenever you attack someone.
• Karma Houdini: The Researchers have a set of experiments forcing the Test Subjects to fight to the death, most of them get off scot-free.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Averted, Katana's and their variants in the game are worse than most other blade weapons of the same grade in terms of attack. However, they are much faster than most weapons which play the trope straight to some degree.
• Kill It with Fire: Adriana's Combat skill allows you to burn someone with your attack. Molotov Cocktails and Incndiary Grenades also allow you to do this.
• Killed Off for Real
  • Lily, Adriana's Sister, died for real before the story started.
  • Catalina, Camilio's Sister, killed herself after Camilio helped ruin her engagement.
  • Averted for the Test Subjects, if they die they would just ressurect.
• Loot Boxes: Bears Roulette and the Mystery PC are both loot boxes.
• Love Triangle: Rosalio, William, and William's fiance were in one before coming to the island. It's what ruined Willaim's relationship with his fiance.
• Magical Accessory: Pretty much every Accessory in the game, with the exception of Sniping Scope which is non-magical. Most of them such as the Moonlight Pendant, Kundala, Eye of Horus, Quiver of Infinity, give you powerful effects despite being a small Accessory.
• Madeof Indestructium: All Legendary grade weapons are indestructible, averted by the Legendary grade Armor Queen of Hearts which is also made of an Arcane Motor but will be destroyed when its wearer is attacked 15 times.
• Matter Replicator:
  • Draupnir's effect is to duplicate every fifth food item you make while it is equipped.
  • The Quantum Fluctuation of the Ultra-Vibration Research Result creates additional bullets or arrows out of nothing.
• Maximum HP Reduction: The Harpe weapon has this effect, every 150 seconds it will reduce 3 hp from an enemy on a successful hit.
• Microtransactions: Almost everything in the game can be gotten for free, however, microtransactions still exist in the game and allow for unique skins and music that can only be gotten by spending money on Aglaia pass.
• Mithril: An item in the game, helps make some of the best weapons and armor available to players.
• Multi-Platform: Immortal Soul: Black Survival is developed for computers and phones.
• Nebulous Evil Organization: This is what Erebos is. Not much is known about it other than they employ Alex and are directly opposed to the Aglaia Project.
• No Such Thing as Dehydration: Averted hard. Stamina is one of your primary tools, it generally works so that each point of stamina you use is worth 2 health. Because of this stamina is just as important as health to recover so that you aren't constantly losing health.
• Not Completely Useless: Blue weapons have less damage than an Epic weapon, and if you can't upgrade them that ensures every other player will out damage you in the long game. However, most blue weapons can be built faster than any epic weapon and can deal damage similar to epic weapons in the early and mid-game without taking as much time to build. The golf club is the best of all of these, which only requires three items to make and will last into the mid-game before you have to make a stronger weapon.
• Now It's My Turn: How the Counterwork Aptitude works, you take reduced damage from your opponent's attack before unleashing an even more powerful attack on them.
• Older Than They Look: Angelica is 60 years old, despite looking younger than even Dr. Thomas who's in his twenties.
• One Degree of Separation: Nathapon was taught Photography by Sylvia's mother.
• Only One Name: Lenox, Rozzi, Echion, and Chiara are only known by those names all others have an additional name with Isol and Eva being the only other characters without a given last name. Eleven's real name is listed in her research journal so this trope doesn't apply to her.
• Oral Fixation: Hart constantly has something in her mouth. While her default skin shows her with a sucker in her mouth she also is stated to chew on nuts and seeds that she finds.
• Orphanage of Love: Isol belonged to one before he was recruited into MOK.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Bianca stylized herself as a vampire, but only survives by drinking blood and has no other common characteristics of vampires. She's also chipper and mischievous.
• Pacifist: Both Hart and Eva want to be this, although being forced into Battle Royale deathmatches doesn't leave much room for pacifism.
• Padded Sumo Gameplay: A lot of the early game can be this, with players dealing scratch damage to much more heavily armoured opponents. Then, players get higher mastery and better weapons, and suddenly the damage numbers start spiking.
• Parental Abandonment: Adela's parents abandoned her to gamble.
• Parents as People: Sissela's mother was so caught up in trying to cure her daughter that she failed to recognize just how much pain her daughter was in and eventually got so caught up in working on the cure she failed to realize that her coworker was helping her daughter run away.
• Pastimes Prove Personality: Barbara is primarily defined by being an engineering shut-in who thinks she's smarter than everyone else. All of her mentions in research journals focus on one of these aspects of her.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Despite the game having a large amount of lore, with each character getting their own backstory and the island itself having a long history, most players won't encounter it due to the frustrating way in which the research journals (which provide the lore snippets) are unlocked.
• Power Fist: Invoked with a weapon called the Fower Fist in-game. Also applies to hand weapons as a whole.
• Real Is Brown: Most of the areas color palette makes heavy use of brown and grey, the only exception to this is Forest which is primarily green.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Jackie, a vicious serial killer, Bianca, a vampire, and Hyunwoo, a teenage delinquent, all have red eyes. Subverted with Hart, who's a pacifist.
• Resources Management Gameplay: The basic gameplay revolves around collecting items to craft more items. Managing which items you currently have in your inventory is vital, and failure to pick up enough food or the right pieces for your armor will guarantee you get out-matched in the late game. As a result, it is important to manage what items so you don't fall behind.
• Resting Recovery: Resting allows you to recover 2 hp or 4 stamina per second rested, green cell allows you to increase either hp or stamina by 1 and Cathy's passive allows her to recover 1.5 more hp and Sua can recover 2 more stamina while The Blue Bird is active.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: Zig-zagged. The best gun in the game, the legendary Kelte is an unbelievably cool revolver, but the other revolvers aren't particularly special or vastly better than other guns.
• Scavenger Hunt: How the game usually plays out. Every character has a weapon that they are better with than the rest so they have to seek out the pieces to make it and their armor in the game.
• Scratch Damage: No matter how much armor you have, wild animals will always do a tiny amount of damage to you.
• Serial Killer: Daniel, a Sweeny Todd-esque hairstylist, and Jackie, a more horror movie style.
• Silk Hiding Steel: Chloe is a very polite, gentle, and kind test subject... Fully capable of using her ventriloquist doll to lethally injure you.
• Skill Gate Characters: Weapon rushing is generally this, in lower-level lobbies it allows you to easily out damage players but as they improve it gets worse as players learn how to craft armor faster.
  • Aya is the bane of lower-level lobbies as she has some of the highest damage in the early game which can allow her to kill players easily within the first few minutes of the game. However, in higher-level lobbies where armor and food are built much faster her strengths are easy to play around. In addition, her late game is fairly weak and she doesn't have the tools other characters do to stay ahead in the game all of which limit her in stronger lobbies.
  • Nadine's gimmick is that she gets a permanent attack boost when she kills animals. In lower-level lobbies her area skill allows her to find an animal which allows her to build mastery faster than everyone else and give her a massive attack boost. In higher-level lobbies animals are highly contested, so she's held back by her lower starting stats that make it hard for her to force other characters out to let her get animals.
  • Bianca's skill, bloody hands, allows her to deal skill damage to players which bypasses armor. With additional damage dealt to all characters in the area, this allows her to rack up damage faster than most characters. In higher level lobbies this doesn't matter as her late-game damage output is lower than any character with a normal weapon.
  • Danial has some of the highest damage possible in the game with his scapegoat ability. In lower-level lobbies this can easily take out a large chunk of players hp. In higher level lobbies they simply make sure that the condition that makes scapegoat deal so much damage doesn't activate turning it into a far less threatening attack.
  • Rozzi is practically the arch-example of this. A punishingly high-damage gun user in the early game, but who needs a constant feed of kills to maintain her advantage into the late game, something which is much harder to pull off in more experienced lobbies.
• Smoking Is Cool: Lenox, retired mafioso and confirmed badass is often seen with a cigarette in her mouth.
• Splash Damage:
  • Bianca's Bloody Hand skill deals damage to every enemy in the area as part of its effect.
  • While Chloe's Marionette is out she deals damage to every enemy in the area whenever she moves.
  • The Bannana Leaf Fan's 'Stormwind' ability will hit everyone in the area.
• Stance System: 'Offensive' stance, increasing the likelyhood of you both finding and being found by other characters, and 'defensive' which does the opposite.
• Stat Grinding: The Mastery System is this- you'll need to craft and fight with one kind of weapon to build up proficiency with it.
• Stats Dissonance: Hyunwoo has high defense and low attack, but his stats encourage him to play aggressively in order to build up mastery faster than other characters. Sissela is another example with both low health and defense but abilities that make her the best-suited character for long drawn out battles in the early and midgame. Averted in the late game for Sissela where she returns to being a glass cannon as her stats would imply.
• Throw Down the Bomblet: The Dynamite, Grenade, and High Explosive Grenades thrown weapons are all this. In addition, this is practically Celine's speciality.
• Trauma Conga Line: Shoichi has this in spades. His wife died of a rare medical condition, and he later learned it was hereditary, and his daughter also had it. Desperate to try to keep her alive, he took on more and more jobs to try to pay for expensive treatments, culminating in him becoming a hitman, then in him willingly joining the Aglaia Project. Since he came to the island he doesn't know if she's alive.
• Undercover Model: One of Aya's skins show her in a bunnygirl costume she apparently wore as part of an undercover job.
• Victory Quote: Every character has one for when they win a match, the researchers also get different messages that are displayed on screen depending on how the win occurs.
• Video Game Tutorial: Included in the form of a small revenge plot of you as a researcher helping Hyunwoo get back at Jackie for killing him.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Fiora is primarily motivated by getting her father to acknowledge her skill. Before he died, at any rate.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: Hart is a pacifist who believes that she can get everyone to stop fighting with the power of music. She's currently fighting in a Death Game experiment and even before that the members of her band abandoned her because she refused to work with companies so that they could make money.