Video Game / Othercide

You will fight. You will fail. You will rise again.

I have lived for hundreds of years. I have lost the taste of life during this immortal journey. My only goal was to protect the veil, whatever the cost. Did all this pain and suffering lead me to this fateful moment? Was failure inevitable? My Dear Friend, we have gone through so much sorrow, can't you even remember my name? Through death, I will guide you...

— The Red Mother.

Othercide is a horror Tactical RPG developed by French independent video game studio Lightbulb Crew, and published by Focus Home Interactive released for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on July 27th, 2020, and for Nintendo Switch on September 10th.

Descend into Humanity’s last hope. The Daughters, echoes of the greatest warrior to ever live, are all who stand before Suffering - dread creatures pulled from the worst of Humanity’s crimes against itself - and the end of the world, caused through the efforts of The Child and his attempts to drag Suffering into the world. Through combat against the infected beasts and mutated cultists plaguing the increasingly surreal and warped black streets of the city, you will unravel the mystery of who you are, the past of the Mother, the source of the daughters, and the tragic tale of how The Child became what he is.

It is also a Nintendo Hard Roguelite, with the oppressive power of your foes and painful lack of healing serving to accentuate the surreal, Stark Gothic Punk atmosphere.

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Othercide provides examples of:

• 11th-Hour Ranger:
  • The Scytherdancer class is designed behind enemy lines. During the third phase of the third boss, one of these prototypes will escape from within the body of the boss to fight alongside your party.^note Afterwards, you can germinate Scythedancers like other Daughters.
  • Can also be invoked by the player by literally summoning new Daughters right before you fight the final boss.
• Apocalypse Maiden: The Child - notably, he's more than willing to go through with it.
• Addressing the Player: Mother treats the player like an old companion, though it's not entirely clear what your relationship with her is.
  • Reading through Mother's memories reveals thatthe player is an "Other", a benevolent spirit from beyond the veil who has bonded with the Mother, and who has been her companion throughout her entire life. It's also stated that this seems to be common with Chosen ones, and that once bonded with an "Other", the Chosen Ones cease to age.
  • Some of the loading screen quotes directly address the player.
  • Taking to a more menacing level when Suffering reveals itself.
    Suffering Ah, Memory remembers itself at last. We know you're there. We've always known. Stop hiding behind this ghost.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Most bosses get a moment of sorrow before they're dispatched, with one of the most poignant belonging to Suffering, surprisingly.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Mother was shunned by others from her village as a child for being a "voidkin".
• Alpha Strike: Burst, in a nutshell - the Daughter gets to use an extra 50 action points, but this causes them to spend an extra 50 ticks (beyond the standard 50, minus initiative bonuses) to reach their next turn. This is generally inefficient if the Daughter has AP bonuses, and can seriously leave them prone to attacks. Ultimately, Burst is best used when a dangerous enemy needs to die immediately, or when a Daughter needs to go on overwatch / support for an extended period of time.
• Amazon Brigade: You're in command of the Daughters, an entirely female unit with the same genetic base.
• Ambiguous Situation: Time and space are warped in this world; your "home base," if you can call it that, seems to just be an eldritch sea from which the ghost of Mother births and dispatches her daughters, and you're thrown into this world en media res. Figuring out exactly what's going on and where you are is part of the game. See Mental World, below.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: The “Other”s that the game is partially named after seem to be this. Each of them combines humanoid traits with some wild, monstrous mutation that fundamentally defines their behavior and abilities on the battlefield. As the war progresses, evolved Others have more distinctly human traits, yet they present themselves as less human-like because of those traits. Apparently, they grant powers to their “Chosen One”s in this reality depending on the concept they embody.
  • Suffering embodies the concept of suffering by allowing his Chosen One, the Child, to create various monstrosities based on the traumas and suffering he’s been forced to endure during his life. These 'Lesser Others' are what you fight during the game. During the Prologue, The Child's scream is so supernatural that it causes a nuclear-like explosion which utterly butchers The Mother. The Child will occasionally unleash a gameplay mutator that has various benefits (and consequences) based on the traumatic events of their life.
  • Memory, the player character, embodies the concept of memory by allowing their Chosen One, The Mother, to perfectly recall everything she’s experienced through her many, many years of living. This probably extends to things that would be useful for combat as well, resulting in her being the greatest warrior of all time. After her death in the beginning of the game, and the two “exchanging” their realities, Memory seems to use other abilities it didn't, or more likely couldn't, use during The Mother's life. One of these is using her memories to create Anthropomorphic Personifications of it's own to fight against the creatures Suffering and The Child has created, The Daughters. They seem to represent different periods of The Mother's life, and Memory can further power them up by equipping them with memories of certain experiences The Mother had during her life. Memory also seems to be able to resurrect Daughters that it remembers if it has a resurrection token, though if this is an exclusive ability of theirs or just a quality of resurrection tokens is unclear. May also be a bit of a Time Master, if the ability to reset the game and return to different eras if you possess certain objects is interpreted as them manipulating time. They can also apparently use certain objects with memories attached to them for various effects.
    • Swordmasters seem to represent The Mother's time training under her swordmaster, which had a core foundation of moving forward no matter the pain, before making the difficult choice to kill her master to save an innocent. This can be seen during gameplay as well, since killing to protect others is a tactic the player may find themselves using the Swordmaster for, with their high damage power attacks overcoming the defensive obstacles that the others cannot, while their movement-based abilities ensure they can always dive straight into combat.
    • Shieldbearers seem to represent The Mother’s time serving as a Knight to bring down a Khan who was also a Chosen One and summoned hordes of creatures for their army. That conflict came down to her enduring and holding the line with her loved one until someone else finally killed him. This is reflected in gameplay with the Shieldbearers specializing in stalling monsters and taking hits for her sisters until one of them is free to help deal with it.
    • Soul Slingers seem to represent The Mother's time as a hired gun for the Nostra order, where she worked with a Bounty Hunter and a Seer to find and help other Chosen Ones before finding out what they were really doing with The Chosen Ones she’s been saving, then slaughtering them all and leaving. This is reflected in gameplay with Soul Slingers having abilities that help and support her sisters, as this part of The Mother’s life was particularly focused on teamwork, and having abilities which can kill multiple weak enemies at once, reflecting her slaughter of the Nostra.
    • Scythebearers, however, are a representation of another person's memory, The Maid, whose short yet compassionate life was spent breaking down the barriers of cruelty and resentment that plagued her two charges, and whose death unleashed a long-prepared apocalypse. This is reflected in gameplay with Scythebearers tearing down the armor of multiple foes, and are either the first to enter the fray so they can soften others up, or the last in a team attack to reap what has been sown.
  • Curiosity, also known as The Guide, embodies curiosity in all his interactions with The Mother, as curiosity is what drew him to her in the first place. He tends to act like a sort of Trickster Mentor to her at times and tells her of things he thinks would interest her. He's also curious about new experiences and occasionally changes hosts - the first one was a woman.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The codex contains detailed descriptions of enemy behaviors.
  • Each boss you discover - not kill, discover - unlocks a Remnant that gives you a resurrection token when activated. In addition, losing a run won't erase your graveyard, meaning you can quickly activate the Remnants and hire up to five Heroes from your previous runs to mentor and guide the greenhorn daughters on your future runs, averting Early Game Hell.
  • Once you defeat an era's boss, you not only unlock a Remnant that lets you skip an era, but you also unlock a remnant that either levels up your newly-created Daughters the moment they're born, or gives you a boost to experience gained.
  • You can turn on Remnants in the middle of a run.
• Artificial Stupidity: This is done on purpose. Enemies have a priority target that they go after. You can use this to manipulate which Daughter they target, thus leading them into ambushes by your other Daughters.
  • Scavengers and Ravagers in particular are dumb beasts that choose the Daughter furthest from them and then relentlessly hunt them down, ignoring the other Daughters in their path. The codex describes this behavior, but has no explanation for it.
• As Long as There Is Evil: After its defeat, Suffering says something to this effect. As long as there are people in pain, it will always be there.
• Assassination Sidequest: Ritual missions pit three daughters against a Lost Soul, a corrupted Daughter that has achieved some kind of apotheosis. The Daughters must fight through the defending army to slaughter the Lost Soul before they cast their Awesome, but Impractical long-casting Total Party Kill attack.
• Autobots, Rock Out!:
  • For the first few missions of the game, the music is largely ambient and ominous, aside from the main menu music. Then comes the Surgeon boss battle, who busts out an orchestral rock soundtrack once all his mooks fall, complete with electric guitars and heavy drums. When he gets to a certain threshold of health, the lyrics kick in as well.
  • The music that plays when The Child is fought also counts, transitioning from a music box arrangement and strings to a full-on rock opera sung from the boss's perspective about the Suffering and the horrors he's endured.
  • The main menu theme applies as well, as it also plays during the final boss fight.
• Badass Longcoat: Mother wore one, and Daughters wear a variation of one as well with the sole exception of Scythedancer.
• Bad Boss: Averted.
  • The Child loves his depraved creations, in an unusual way.
  • Suffering also averts this who merely mockingly asks "So?" when his minions are killed, but otherwise shows no signs of abuse towards them...or to his ward, The Child.
• Benevolent Boss:
  • The Red Mother display both pride in her daughters when they succeed and offers comfort to the players if they loose or have to reset, as well as sorrow at the appearance of The Corrupted Daughters.
    Look how my daughter flourishes!
    How foolish, my fears...
  • Memory is also an example, expressing concern for and comforting The Mother throughout her extended lifespan. In one particular memory, it asks if it has unduly tormented The Mother by giving her eternal life: when she response that her life would be filled with joys and horrors anyway, the extradimensional being actually express great relief.
• Body Horror: The Nightmares and Surgeons only get more distorted and deranged as time goes on, being made from the unfortunate remnant of the city. A standout is The Surgeon - aside form his massive size and forcibly beak-like head, and a cloak primarily made of his own skin, there is also the massive array of scissors sticking out his back.
• Body of Bodies: The final boss is implied to be made of human resources - specifically, the bodies of the many, many Daughters who have been killed on your path to the final boss.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted. The daughters will show charred facial scars and torn clothing as they learn from battle.
• BFS: The blade alone on the Swordsmaster's weapon is as big as her.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: The Child loves the Maid because she's the only person who treated him with genuine kindness, while others like the Deacon and the Surgeon horrifically abused him and treated him only as a means to cure the Plague by experimenting on him. This, along with some guilt, also forms the basis of The Child's Heel–Face Turn, thanks to the Red Mother's efforts, although the first few attempts are rather rocky, leading to violent rejection.
• Bishōnen Line: The final boss, natch - although the "humanlike" form is still obviously made of corpses piled together, with Floating Limbs and a Non-Human Head.
• Big Bad: The Child, a "Chosen One" who fell past the Despair Event Horizon, and now wants nothing more than to destroy the world using creatures created from his own traumas stemming from the horrific abuse suffered at the hands of others.
• Big Damn Heroes: Mother pulls this off during the boss fight with The Maid, creating a Scythedancer to aid you.
• Brainwashing for the Greater Good: In the past Mother had used her connection to Memory to erase some memories from the Medium, like the times when he accidentally discovered she was one of the Chosen. Eventually the Medium wizened up on that, but they resolved it amiably with him agreeing to keep it a secret and her not erasing his memories anymore. It's also implied Red Mother does it during the game, where after defeating the Surgeon and the Deacon she takes away Child's painful memories of them.
• Broken Pedestal: Happens when The Mother refuses to stand aside and allow her Master to murder a young Chosen One, ending in her Master's death and Mother taking over her position after returning.
  • Vostra and the Medium resort to mass child sacrifices to try and appease Suffering. The Mother kills them all.
• Cast From Hitpoints: Reaction skills of the Daughters will use a percentage of their health. In a game where the only way to regain health is to sacrifice a Daughter, the alternative to using these skills should only be death or even more damage taken from an incoming attack.
• Character Customization: You can name and rename Daughters as you see fit, and a later DLC added the ability to customize their appearance.
• Characterisation Click Moment: Your Daughters are blank slates, but will develop character traits based on what they've done or what happens to them in battle. For instance, a Lv.1 Daughter who scores the most kills on their first-ever mission will develop the Aggressive Trait, giving them a major 50 points to their attack stat.
• The Chosen One: Deconstructed. "Chosen Ones" are people born with a connection to Unreality, such as Mother and The Child, granting them great strength and immortality, but marking them as pariahs to be slaughtered due to their unfortunate Power Incontinence and tendency to summon or mutate into monsters. Chosen Ones end up suffering horrifically in this game for circumstances that were no fault of their own, the most prominent example being the Child, who was experimented on to create a cure for a plague.
• Combat Stilettos: Taking a close look at the Daughters' models on missions shows that they all wear gigantic stiletto heels. Notably, despite her Out-of-Clothes Experience, the Red Mother also stands on her toes in the same posture despite lacking shoes.
• Continuing is Painful: If one of your Daughters is wounded, the only way to heal them is to sacrifice another unit of equal or higher level. Resurrecting Daughters costs precious Resurrection tokens, which can only be earned by discovering bosses or sacrificing Bright Souls.
• Creature-Hunter Organization: Nostra, the organization that Mother was part of for hundreds of years, although Mother rapidly became disillusioned with them due to their insistence that all Chosen Ones were too dangerous and needed to be killed, despite Mother's very existence proving that benevolent Chosen Ones were absolutely possible. It's double-subverted later on: the group seemingly changes its views after a few hundred years, and forms a new branch that begins rescuing and gathering Chosen Ones rather then killing them. Mother decides to give them a second chance and rejoin them... only to discover the real reason why they were gathering up Chosen Ones was so they could be grafted to each other to power a gateway leading beyond the veil. The end result was a monstrous entity made by surgically fusing all of the Chosen Ones into one body, still living, and still entirely aware of what was done to them. Mother Mercy Kills the monster and butchers the entire Vostra Order before leaving for good.
• Dark Fantasy: Takes place in a parallel world with magic - and a hate-boner for witches. As science progresses to the late 19th century, the depravity of 'witch-hunting' gets even worse. Pitch Black Fantasy may be a better description.
• The Dead Have Names:
  • There is a cemetery in the inner void which stores slain Daughters, all listed with their stats perfectly preserved. Expect it to be full by the midpoint of the game. But you can only list up to 32, so you're expected to erase some daughters from memory forever.
  • Surprisingly, The Child expresses that each of his own nightmare creatures have names as well in a few blink-and-miss it lines when they are killed.
• Deadly Doctor: The boss of the first era. See Plague Doctor below.
• Decoy Protagonist: In the tutorial, you play as a pre-generated character named "Mother", who is the Big Good of the game. After her physical body is obliterated, she's demoted to Mission Control. The actual playable characters are the Amazon Brigade of summonable characters named the Daughters.
• Deliberately Monochrome: The entire game is black, white, and red, with a tiny bit of yellow in the Mother's and Daughters' eyes.
• Demonic Possession: A Chosen One may completely merge with their bonded Other, the two effectively becoming one mind. The Khan from Mother's memories is implied to be such case, as well as all Curiosity's bearers. Mother herself does it with Memory after they had entered the City where Suffering was breaking through, indicating that the situation there crossed the Godzilla Threshold, though in their case it was more of a consensual Mental Fusion.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: In the backstory the Maid died like this, cradled by the Child as she was dying from the plague after the Deacon had locked her in the basement with the Child.
• Difficulty Levels: Othercide is well-known for its Nintendo Hard difficulty and about a year after being on the market, the game was given two difficulty settings. Nightmare mode is the original difficulty and Dream mode is the new, easier setting which gives your Daughters a 50% health recovery after resting for a day.
• Dirty Old Monk: The Deacon makes some uncomfortably suggestive comments about the daughters' lips and legs during his boss fight. It's also implied that he repeatedly forced himself onto the Maid in between physically abusing her.
• Doomed Hometown: Mother's home village was burned when she was still a child, presumably by a lynch mob coming after her.
• Double-Meaning Title: Othercide, in this context, refers to both the "Otherside" of reality you inhabit, and what you do to one of the "Others" at the very end of the game, aka literal Other-cide.
• Downer Beginning: The game starts with the Mother getting killed and the Child collapsing reality into a suffering-filled nightmare. The rest of the game is spent in an effort to stop the Child and undo the damage already done.
• Duty That Transcends Death: A little thing like death won't stop The Mother from fulfilling her duty to the Veil, even if she now lacks a body and has to send Daughters in her stead.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • The Suffering are horrific blasphemies from another reality, who are actually avatars of a single Abomination, Suffering, as he invades Reality by manifesting bits of the Child's traumas
  • Meanwhile, the player is a benevolent one bound to the Mother.
• Eldritch Location: The Dark Corner, where the game is set in, is a border place between Reality and Unreality where the two intermix due to the Veil that usually separated them getting sundered by the Child, with the Suffering trying to get into Reality through it. It's a horrific place of darkness, infested by twisted monsters. The actual Unreality, where Suffering along with the rest of the Others come from, is never seen but is implied to be even worse.
• Encyclopedia Exposita: The Codex gives information about the characters, memories and events of the game as you unlock the entries. Articles in the Codex include insights and accounts from the Mother and the Child (eg. The Child mentions that the Plague Butchers were once benign volunteers who had the ugly task of breaking down infected corpses, but have either come to like it or the process had unlocked the darkness within them).
• Escort Mission: The Rescue mission type, where you need to escort a Bright Soul towards the extraction point. The Bright Soul is very fragile and cannot defend itself nor has any useful skills but its movement is fully under the player's control.
• Evil Counterpart: You'll eventually start encountering Suffering-corrupted daughters as enemies, with a unique type for each of the game's classes.
  • In effect, Suffering serves a similar role to the player character themselves, being a spirit from beyond the veil who bonds with a Chosen one and commands an army to fight the party of Daughters. But where the player character is a benevolent companion to Mother, the Suffering other seeks to manipulate the Child for it's own malicious ends.
• Evil Is Bigger: The Corrupted Daughters are about two heads taller than their originals. Also, every boss is inhumanly tall, towering over Daughters.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Averted with the Surgeon but played straight with the Deacon and his smooth rumbling baritone. And the Suffering sounds even deeper.
• Expy:
  • The Suffering resembles a Behelit, complete with its role in empowering The Child and its connection to a Spirit World. In practice, its role is closer to that of the Idea of Evil.
  • The Child has many similarities with the Skull Kid of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. A Moon-themed character wearing a mask who destroys a city in a fit of pique by summoning an elder being, and then get trapped in a timeloop. Likewise, they both who turns out to be a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds lashing out in pain and fear, manipulated by an Eldritch Abomination for its own ends.
• Exotic Eye Designs: Mother and her daughters seem to have have yellow sclera.
• Facial Markings: The Mother has warpaint on her face. This shows her experience, newly born Daughters are unmarked but may develop the markings as they progress.
• Fantastic Noir: The game takes place on an alien world that developed similarly to Earth, but with wildly different experiences with magic, culminating in a Lovecraftian apocalypse just before the end of their 19th century. Cobblestones are mixed with electric signs as gruff girl gunslingers fight mutant zombies, all with a color palette of mainly black, white, and red, in that order.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: Downplayed. Technically all of the 3 starting classes are fighters given that they're memories of the warrior Mother. In play, the Shieldbearer is the tanky fighter, the Swordsmaster is the thief - a quick and fragile heavy damage specialist and the Soulslinger is the mage who guns down enemies at range. You can also unlock a fourth class, the Scythedancer, which focuses on area-of-effect, damage-over-time and Anti-Armor attacks.
• Final-Exam Boss: The second form of Suffering will put your mastery of every major element of the game's strategy to the test, from positioning to setting up follow-up attacks to interrupts. It hits like a truck, will only hit harder in its subsequent phases, has no real weaknesses but will exploit yours, and will apply multiple buffs and counter-stances per turn, so your only real strategy is to kill it quickly before it kills you.
• Fire-Forged Friends: In one of the memories, the Red Mother is annoyed by a Paladin who’s extremely confident due to having her on their side. He sheepishly apologizes, but she just replies with silence. Later, after they’ve apparently been through a lot of battles together (The Paladin having lost an arm, even) and after defeating the ruler of a country who was using dark creatures they elope together, this trope apparently having blossomed into a romantic relationship.
• Five Rounds Rapid: The basic attack of the Soulslinger and Shieldbearer are a 3 hit combo of bullets or spear thrusts respectively, in contrast the Blademaster's is a single powerful slash.
• Fragile Speedster: Your Daughters are waifish young women who zip across the battlefield in white-and-red blurs, and this is a fair indicator of how you should play them. None of them - not even the relatively heavily-armored Shieldbearers - are designed to face-tank waves of enemies at once, and so your playstyle will revolve around using speed, aggression, and lots and lots of Out Of Turn Interactions to do unto Others before they do unto you.
• From Nobody to Nightmare:
  • The Child goes from an innocent, abused child who was treated as a lab rat by others in their attempt to cure a plague, to a willing Apocalypse Maiden and the manifestation of Suffering incarnate.
  • Averted with The Mother. While she is a Chosen as well, she did not have the same meteoric rise, taking several centuries to become as powerful as she did.
• Full-Frontal Assault: A late-game enemy type, the Corrupted Daughters, wear nothing but black slime and hatred as they tear apart your Daughters.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: The Medium's mind is frayed when he convinces Mother to try and let him see beyond the Veil through her and her Other, and later completely snaps after he, Mother and the Bounty Hunter put down the Vostra-made amalgamation of Chosen Ones. However, in his mad ramblings he tells Mother of Suffering's coming, warning her early enough to travel to the City in time and try and stop it.
• Gothic Punk: Bleak gothic streets, constrain rain, surreal landscapes, and bodies everywhere. The only colors of the game are sickly whites, deep blacks, and splashes of blood-red.
• Ghost Amnesia: A major mechanic of the game. Much of The Mother's history was lost during her death, but they retain their power. Memories serve as equipment for you Daughters, and Remembrances provide permanent bonuses for all playthroughs. It's implied that while the Mother remembers her past just fine, it's you, the Dear Friend who's subject to the ghost amnesia aka The Other known as Memory.
• Giant Corpse World: Gigantic bodies decorate the background of several arenas in the game.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The enigmatic being known only as Suffering is revealed to be using the Child's trauma in order to manifest in the waking world, and takes over after the Child changes his mind.
• Hand Cannon: The Soulslinger's revolvers are as long as her forearms.
• Hate Sink: The Deacon is the one character with no redeeming qualities whatsoever in the game. The Surgeon is close second but he at least has an excuse in trying to find a cure to the plague ravaging the land, the Child is lashing out at the world over the pain he's endured, the Medium had Gone Mad from the Revelation and wanted to stop Suffering no matter the cost, and Suffering is only acting according to its natural affinity. The Deacon, meanwhile, was a Sinister Minister who neglected and eventually loathed The Child and frequently beat up the Maid, and was implied to have forced himself on her repeatedly. The Child agreeing to channel Suffering's power came as a result of the Deacon sadistically murdering the Maid by locking her up with the Child so she'd catch his disease, all because he couldn't handle the fact that The Maid tried to show The Child a scrap of kindness. Even The Suffering itself is more sympathetic than the Deacon, in part because he wants to live life to the fullest (by making others suffer) - The Deacon went out of his way and against his nature to make the world around him Hell.
• Healing Magic Is the Hardest: For all the power Memory and the Red Mother have, they can't normally recover even a single health point on an injured Daughter. A big aspect of this game is that you can only heal a Daughter by sacrificing a Daughter of equal or higher level; this makes over-leveling an ace Daughter risky, since you might not have enough Daughters at their level to heal them when they get injured. As for resurrections, those require the sacrifice of a Bright Soul, a being with no combat ability but inner potential so great that they can gift the player with enough Vitae to birth two Daughters.
• Health/Damage Asymmetry: Although, monster OR Daughter all damage tends towards the high side, to encourages counter-play and perfect play.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Being connected to and given relevant powers from the Anthropomorhpic Personification of Memory does not sound that flashy, compared to being similarly empowered by, say, Suffering. However, with time this eventually allowed Mother to become the greatest warrior in the world by making sure that not a single scrap of her experience was lost. And even more so when Mother finds herself in a Mental World - as a master of a mental concept, Memory effectively becomes a mix of Reality Warper and Time Master in it. By treating your attempts to help Child as Recollections Memory can rewind the whole timeline if it doesn't go as planned, giving you as a player unlimited number of tries to stop Suffering. It can also turn individual memories into pieces of actual power.
• Heel Realisation: After the fourth boss fight, The Child feels regret and sorrow for what they've become and relents their connection to sorrow and their revenge upon the world. Suffering, meanwhile, has other ideas.
  The Child: Is this me? No...no no no. Angry, yes, but this is too much. Too much hurting.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: The first weapon Mother had learned was a sword (and the Swordmaster Daughters take after her), though she also practiced other weapons.
• Holy Halo: Many bosses have a moon-like variant of this when they change stages. Naturally, Light Is Not Good, and it expresses both power and their connection to The Suffering.
• Hold the Line: The Survival mission types, where you have to last out until an exit shows up, at which point you need to get your Daughters to it and evacuate. Interestingly, while enemies spawn in overwhelming numbers those numbers are not infinite, so if you're good enough you can actually Leave No Survivors before bailing.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Played more subtly than many examples. While The Suffering is rather sadistic towards you and your daughters, it bears no ill intent towards The Child, and there is no indication it had any role in his crushingly depressing life to say nothing of it's curiously wistful and contemplative demise. Meanwhile, the most truly evil characters, the Deacon and the Surgeon, are human, being the two characters responsible for turning The Child into a vengeful entity who wants to bring suffering onto the world to make it pay for the suffering he endured. The Child himself fits to an extent, lashing out with immense cruelty at a world that only taught him cruelty in return, but The Suffering did not give him the motive, merely the means.
  • Suffering is indeed a monster that wants to turn the world into his personal canvas. But the humans who witnessed him went mad and stitched Chosen Ones together into a screaming amorphous mass, which was somehow worse than anything Suffering has created.
• Hunter of His Own Kind: Mother, a Chosen One, joined Nostra, an organization dedicated to hunting Chosen Ones. She did it as per the Guide's suggestion in an effort to be Hidden in Plain Sight, to protect herself from others who would hunt her. She still remains very empathetic to those she has to hunt, and manages to avoid crossing the lines Nostra was all too willing to cross.
• "I Am" Song: The "Soulswap" (main menu theme) and "Sacrifice" (Surgeon boss fight theme) vocal tracks are these, detailing the Mother's current position and her determination to see things through. "Child's Song" (Child boss fight theme) is "I Am Becoming" Song instead, detailing him moving from grief over Maid's death to his resolve to inflict suffering on those who abused him.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: There are three mission difficulty levels in the game: Hard, Challenging, and Impossible. Except it turns out that technically, Impossible is just 'Hard' and Challenging is 'Easy'; you have to figure out that yes, you can win Impossible-class missions on your first run, and the labels don't change to match your Daughters' levels.
• Interface Spoiler: The icons of Codex entries you haven't yet unlocked are just barely grayed out, giving you a glimpse of bosses you haven't encountered yet as well as revealing that there's a fourth unlockable class, while the Remembrance menu outright tells the names of bosses and Eras you need to beat to unlock them.
• Inspired by…: Info for the artbook mentions that besides various Western and Japanese influences, the game is inspired by Othercide art director Alexandre Chaudet's experiences living with a blood disease.
• Ironic Name: The Mother, in life, never had any children - and even as the Red Mother, her Daughters are more like clones than true children. Becomes less ironic when she redeems and adopts the Child.
  • The Plague Doctors tried to stop the epidemic but ended up turning into plagues upon the city themselves.
• It Sucks to Be the Chosen One: The Child was horrifically abused and experimented on in an attempt to find a cure for The Plague due to being born a Chosen One. Mother's childhood wasn't much better. And that's not even getting into what was done to all the other Chosen Ones who Mother had rescued and then sent to Vostra.
• Lack of Empathy: The Surgeon. Using The Child as a living guinea pig to try and find a cure for the plague was bad enough, but what truly makes him reprehensible is that he didn't care that he was hurting the Child, and in fact delighted in the suffering he caused to what he viewed as an unnatural abomination.
• Law of Inverse Fertility: A memory in the codex tells of the Red Mother’s attempts to conceive children with a Paladin she served with who is only referred to as her “loved one”. It’s implied her infertility may have been the result of being a Chosen One.
  • Naturally, she becomes ultra-fertile after she literally dies, birthing an army of Daughters despite her real body disintegrating.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Shieldbearers, like the other Daughters, have their weapon of choice (a shield) be incredibly huge.
• Lunacy: The more powerful enemies and bosses have a Crescent-moon motif symbolizing The Suffering, often jutting out of their bodies or forming a Holy Halo when they enter a new phase. Memory has a similar motif, though it's inverted: an eclipse from the top left rather than curving to the bottom right, fitting its nature as a Foil to The Suffering.
• Macrogame: Completing missions gives you Shards but prevents you from using them, while achieving milestones unlocks Remnants. On future runs, those Shards become usable and those Remnants stay unlocked, allowing you to activate the Remnants by spending Shards and start out stronger. The most important of these Remnants unlock Resurrection Tokens, which let you resurrect daughters from previous runs, which is as overpowered as it sounds..
• Mad Woman In The Attic: One of the Child's many traumas involves being locked in a clay basement under mud and stone by the abusive Deacon.
• The Man Behind the Monsters: The Child is responsible for creating the monsters both the Daughters and the player must face.
• Master of All: By the final act, the Suffering will create a fifth type of Corrupted Daughter, one you don't have a counterpart for - The Hopebreaker. She takes aspects from all four other daughter types; high endurance, skilled in melee and ranged combat, capable of interrupting Daughters and launching area-of-effect-attacks.
• Mental World: Zigzagged. With so much of the game literally made from the suffering and memories of various characters, to the point that stages are called "synapses", it is clear this applies to Othercide to some extent. However, it is unclear whose mind we're actually in, and whether if these feelings are merely being overlaid over reality or if there is any reality remaining outside the city.
• Mentor Occupational Hazard: A number of the early Memories are of Mother's training under her nameless Master, who was confronted and killed by Mother when they were both sent to kill a young Chosen One and Mother refused.
• Mission Control: Mother, following the tutorial.
  • The Player Character is the real commander directing the Daughters, though what they are has to be discovered.
• Monster Progenitor:
  • A benign example, the Red Mother generates a small army of Daughters who are fighting to save the world from the Suffering.
  • The Child is one as well, having sculpted the various monsters of the game first out of clay, then flesh.
• Mystical White Hair: A trait of "Chosen Ones", such as Mother and her Daughters.
• My Greatest Failure: The Mother regards being unable to prevent the Child's suffering as this. The Daughters' purpose is to succeed where she failed.
• Naked on Arrival: Summoning a Daughter for the first time has them pulled from the shimmering ground, bare of clothes and fully grown, but in a fetal position that covers their extremities.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In her attempts to stop The Suffering by spawning Daughters to combat it, The Red Mother has unwittingly created a potent new source of misery for The Suffering to feed off - that of the many, many Daughters who were killed or sacrificed or corrupted in the womb.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The Child snatching up part of the Red Mother's essence to reanimate{ing} the Maid blows up in his face twofold: First, it allows the creation of the first Scythedancer using the Maid's memories, creating a Man Of Kyrptonite to the otherwise unstoppable boss. Second, it allows the Red Mother to better empathize with and understand his viewpoint, aiding her attempts to redeem him.
• No Body Left Behind: The ground is constantly shimmering, like a pool of water. A Daughter dying sinks below its surface, while their revival pulls them back up from the depths.
• No Name Given: Except for the Daughters, which you name yourself, nobody in the game has an actual name, instead being referred to by their titles: Mother (a.k.a. The Red Mother), The Child, Master, The Guide, The Paladin, The Khan, etc. The Mother's name is only revealed by the final remembrance- aka, when you've beaten the game.
• Nun Too Holy: The Maid, the boss of the third era is something of a Sad Clown. She was both a compassionate Cool Big Sis and an Extreme Doormat, which was a horrible combination that prevented her from escaping from her hellish life under The Deacon until it was too late. When she's brought back to life by The Child, she becomes apathetic and kills your daughters because they cause her pain.
• One-Hit Kill: Ideally this should be the method of winning battles. Your Daughters can become powerful enough that they can even do this to bosses, including the final one.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: The Mother has been killed, but lingers on as a ghost, the Red Mother. She can reach into her "Inner Void" to create her Daughters and send them into "synapses" to fight the Suffering.
• Our Vampires Are Different: The Daughters are heroic pseudo-vampires. Spawned from a pool of blood and memories as adults, capable of powerful blood magics that heighten their reflexes to supernatural levels, superior to humans and ageless in the night, yet forced to feed on each other to heal their injuries.
• Out-of-Clothes Experience: This is how the soul of Mother, now called "The Red Mother," manifests by default. Bright Souls probably count for this since they’re, well... souls. They’re usually curled up in the fetal position for modesty, like the daughters. They show up in rescue missions; if they are successfully extracted, they can be freed for 400 Vitae or Sacrificed to resurrect a Daughter. In contrast, Lost Souls are caked in filth, but have been mutilated so badly that there's nothing left to expose.
• Plague Doctor: A whole group of enemy units are named "Plague [Something Medical]", and all have the appearance of robed, thin, and tall (actually taller than your units) humanoids, whose faces include a long and pointy beak. One of them is literally named "Plague Doctor", which wears a hat (more a Robin Hood-esque cap than the classical round hat usually associated with the outfit), and wields a sickle.
• The Plague: One occurred before the start of the game, and is an indirect cause of the game's events, as well as the source of both the Plague Doctor and Infested enemies. Specifically, it was the torment of being an immortal test subject for the cure that led to The Child becoming the Big Bad.
• The Pretty Guys Are Stronger:
  • In an endless army of warped beats, infected cultists, and maddened infected, it's the most humanlike creatures that are dangerous. justified, considering they are corrupted copies of the most powerful warrior to ever live - in other words, Corrupted Daughters.
  • This also applies to the bosses, going from outright Body Horror in Monstrous Humanoids to an undead, nearly-human husk, to The Child, a normal human aside from being The Chosen One of Suffering. Downplayed with The Suffering itself, and even then their obvious mutilated body is still very humanoid compared to their prior form.
• Powers as Programs: Your Daughters can't buy new weapons. Each of their skills has a memory slot, and memories can be installed or replaced at home base for a Vitae fee.
• Quick Draw: Most enemies cannot attack on their first turn.^note Unless you're stupid or unlucky enough to leave a daughter exactly adjacent to one. Painslingers, if they're already within range of fire on their first turn, don't give a flip.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: The Child's accounts regarding what he overheard suggest that the Deacon not only physically abused the Maid but also forced himself onto her.
• Really 700 Years Old: Almost dead on the nose, with her memories revealing that Mother was born around 1200, with her 'death' in 1897.
• Recoil Boost: The Soulslinger's Wrathful Rain is an anti-swarm skill that weaponizes this trope; the user jumps in the air, then fires an explosive bullet below her to destroy any surrounding foes while using the recoil to double-jump to a far away location.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: Soulslingers' guns take shape of huge revolvers, reflecting what Mother used in her time. Justified, as Mother picked her gun skills in the time period when revolvers were the default pistols.
• Scarf of Asskicking: All Daughters wear flowing red scarves that serve as the main Splash of Color on them. They are all badasses to match.
• Samurai Ponytail: The Mother has her hair done up in one of these before her death. Her childhood pictures has her hair set loose.
• Scarred Equipment: Every weapon in the game is, in some way, fractured, fragmented, or worn down. The Daughters themselves use weapons that are literally in so many pieces that a normal human would find them unusable, but their willpower and the nature of the Dark Corner keeps them stable.
• Scratch Damage: Scavengers have pathetically weak attacks, to the point that it may be considered less costly to sacrifice HP to defend against them. They make up for this by being really fast.
  • Infected have an annoying ranged attack they they constantly use; it doesn't do much damage, but it does break armor, which lets the buddies they buffed finish the job.
• Sequel Hook: The Stinger reveals that in the future the Mother and the Child face together a different Other - Fear.
• Sequential Boss: Every boss has multiple phases, activated once you deplete their health below certain thresholds, and each phase adds new moves to their arsenal. The Suffering doubles it, as it has two distinct forms each with multiple phases and unique moves.
• Shapeshifter Guilt Trip: A heartwarming inversion. In one memory, Memory briefly takes on the form of The Mother's long-lost husband, in order to comfort her during her final march on the city. The latter isn't fooled for a second, but applicates the gesture.
• Sinister Minister: The Deacon, boss of the second Era. He was supposed to take care of The Child after his parents' death, only to abuse him and lock him in the basement to starve. Making matters worse, he also abused The Maid, who was one of the few people who actually cared about The Child. One dialogue reveals that he once told the Maid that he doesn't believe in God - whether or not this is true, it's exceptionally cruel to force a powerless servant to realize that she's trapped with a violent hypocrite or a cruel manipulator.
• Sinister Scythe: The Maid boss uses a scythe as her weapon, same as the Scythedancer Daughter that Mother spawns using the memories of the Maid, though with less sinister. Hatedancer, Scythedancer's Corrupted counterpart, brings the sinister factor back up.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: The Bounty Hunter of the Mother's memories is very foul-mouthed.
• Soprano and Gravel: The Child's Song is sung like this, with mostly a clear male vocal but also with a gravely voice joining in.
• Stoic Woobie: The Mother. In her immortal life, she had lost everyone she loved or cared about, leaving her with nothing but her self-imposed duty to protect humanity against the creatures from beyond the Veil. She does not complain, and keeps pursuing her duty despite all the misery she has to face in its course, and eventually it gets her killed.
• Story Breadcrumbs: Most of the game's story is told through a series of snippets in the codex, unlocked via obtaining memories.
• Stripperific: Averted by most Daughters but played straight by Scythedancer. Where others wear rather modest clothing which shows almost no skin Scythedancer's outfit exposes her belly and includes an A-Grade Zettai Ryoki with short shorts.
• Super-Scream: The Child unleashes a deadly scream that destroys the City and kills the Mother.
• A Taste of Power: When you do the tutorial, you start with the Mother. She has 4900 Health Points, 70 armor, a high level of hidden bonus damage, and uniquely, she only takes 20 points of scratch damage from using her interruption counterattack. She conjures greatswords, shields, and revolvers, and shows mastery over all three. She's a One-Man Army and will have no problem disposing of the mooks that stand in her way. Your starting Daughters will be significantly weaker in comparison (they all start with under 1000 Health Points and their armor is disturbingly flimsy), but they can rise to surpass the Mother in their specific field, mastering capstone skills that took her whole life to acquire, and merging their souls together to achieve stats that The Mother couldn't dream of.
• Taught by Experience: The Mother became the world's best warrior through training and centuries of experience. How else would the Chosen One of Memory empower themselves?. This shows up in the Daughters - in addition to the normal benefits of levelling up, Daughters collect more traits as they fight their way through never-ending nightmares. A daughter who spawns at max level is locked out of certain traits, while a daughter who has been carefully tutored in combat from a low level will end up with more versatility, higher AP, and better overall stats.
• Time Crash: Implied by the fact that the date of the Age of Shattering flickers between two different years.
• Timed Mission: The Ritual mission types. You must reach and destroy a Lost Soul enemy before it has its turn and explodes. The Lost Soul is very resilient, but inactive and does not move on its own - however, it can be affected by your Daughters' delay and movement skills, allowing you to buy more time or use one Daughter to move the Soul closer to the rest of the team.
• To Create a Playground for Evil: Suffering's endgoal- to enter Reality and shape it In Their Own Image
• Tragic Villain: The Child endured insane levels of trauma throughout his life at the hands of people who were supposed to take care of him, while also suffering the burden of responsibility that came with being a "Chosen One". When the only person who ever loved him was tortured and executed by his own stepfather by forcefully infecting her with The Child's diseases, he ended up crossing the Despair Event Horizon, lashing out at the world he was supposed to protect with monsters representing his painful past.
• Tragic Dream:
  • What does The Suffering want, deep down? Simply to be. It's not Suffering's fault that it requires trauma the way matter requires molecules.
    Suffering: ...I wanted nothing. Love? Compassion? No. Only...to exist. If I cease than so does this flooded world...Nothing of me survives. Nothing re-
  • The Child has one as well. A desire to resurrect The Maid, literally the only person who showed him kindness, by using the Red Mother's memories. Alas, his attempt only raises her as a twisted empty shell. This is not his only goal, and it is entirely contained within the Third era; his main goal throughout the game is vengeance against the world by allowing the Suffering to manifest.
• True Companions: The fourth period of Mother's memories has her team up with two more people, the Bounty Hunter and the Medium, as they track down other Chosen Ones for Nostra. Mother comes to appreciate them in their time together, which adds another tragedy to her life when the Bounty Hunter gets killed and the Medium loses his mind, too traumatized by the horrors he had witnessed from beyond the Veil and willing to experiment on children to save the world, so Mother has to leave him behind.
• Unlockable Content: Shards are earned after each mission and a Remembrance may be discovered on a slain foe. You can spend shards to unlock equipable memories from that particular Remembrance.
• Unnamed Parent: The Mother, or, posthumously, The Red Mother, isn't actually the name of the player's friend who dies at the beginning of the game. We just can't remember her name, apparently. The name's only revealed after beating the final boss and looking at the Flower of Paradise Remembrance. Ironic, considering we’re an Other named Memory.
• Uriah Gambit: Curiously, the game's sacrifice-and-resurrection mechanics mean that killing off your most powerful Daughters on the battlefield or to heal lower-level ones is a perfectly viable strategy, since it fills your Cemetery with high-level reinforcements for you to bring back at full health as and when you have the tokens. This is particularly true near the end of a doomed run, since the Cemetery is a persistent asset and you can thus amass yourself a powerful starter force (and save yourself some Vitae on birthing new Daughters) next time round.
  • Rescue missions are considered the hardest type in the game, as enemies constantly spawn at ridiculously high rates and chase the player all the way to the extraction point. One strategy is to take a daughter whose growth is considered 'inadequate' and use her as a living lure.
• Variable Mix: The music progresses and loops certain sections during combat missions, most notably when the last enemies spawn in during Hunt encounters and during boss battles.
• Villainous Breakdown: After the Maid's defeat, the Child flies into a rage at seeing his only true friend and caretaker die again, and confronts the Daughters himself.
• Walking the Earth: After the Paladin's death, Mother burned her home down and wandered for 400 years, until she "had wandered for so long there was nowhere left to go".
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: At least one memory mentions that the Red Mother "lost her taste for life" and that she mainly lives out of a sense of duty to maintain the Veil. She also suffers from the "outliving your loved ones" syndrome, as she has lost family, a mentor, and her loved one during the course of her long life. Her loved one's death is particularly relevant since he died of old age while she lived on. The only friends she's kept throughout her life are her Other, which manifests as a voice she's heard in her head since she was a little girl, and The Guide, another seemingly immortal person who shows up in her life from time to time while changing their appearance and sex sometimes (though they only appeared as a woman once). The Guide is revealed to be another Other named “Curiosity”, who gets past the boredom of living forever by frequently choosing new hosts.
• Weird Currency: Vitae is collected after a mission and can be spent on equipping a memory or generating a new Daughter. Also, most missions^note Penance only grants exp grant 25 Shards, which are used to activate Remembrances and persist through runs.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Surgeon was so desperate to find a cure to The Plague that he repeatedly cut apart The Child to find out why he didn't die after contracting it.
• Wham Episode: The third era. It begins with The Child stealing a portion of Mother's power on the behest of a sinister voice, and using it to resurrect The Maid. While the bosses of the first two eras are irredeemable monsters, The Maid is a straight up tragic figure.
• World's Best Warrior: Mother is the greatest warrior of all time.
  The Red Mother, upon one of her daughters levelling: She is ever closer to what I was!
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: The Child, and boy do they fit the trope both in terms of power and suffering.
• Zerg Rush: Scavengers' / Ravagers' tactic in a nutshell. They are individually weak, to the point that the light armor of the Daughters can easily No-Sell most of the damage, but they always come in numbers, they can act faster than any other unit in the game (which equates to them getting about two turns for every turn your daughters get on average), and their packs always prioritize one Daughter on the map, obsessing over their target until she stops existing. Ravagers, in particular, have a skill that lets them follow up attacks from other Ravagers with an extra-powerful attack of their own, making them exponentially more dangerous if they manage to swarm their target.

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...Names are made to be forgotten. But still, if you can remember only one thing from our journey, please recall those few letters..Lily

— The Flower of Paradise.