Video Game / Overgrown: Genesis

Active ravaging of the Amazon rainforests led to the parasitic fungus (named "novel ophiocordyceps unilateralis", but now known simply as "the parasite") being released and infected the crops, which then were spread around the world to be used for food production, allowing the parasite to infect large portion of the population. At first, the parasite was incapable of hurting humans, but as soon as its host suffers from any serious illness or injury, the parasite strikes in. Males suffer from all kinds of health ailments, as well as start slowly covering with fungal growths, while females suffer from amnesia and uncontrolled carnal desires; scientists were unable to understand what's going on, while process rapidly escalated, eventually spreading to 60% of the population.

Then, infected, who became highly aggressive, broke out of quarantine all across the world, and started attacking still healthy humans. After several days, police forces in all major cities were overwhelmed. After several weeks, fell most of the world armies. Now, only few stable sanctuaries remains, run by the former officials and administrators, collectively called "the Suits"; amongst them is Brookside sanctuary. But life goes worse and worse with every day, with supplies running low and no hope in sight...

Juno Townsend, a former engineer, is one of survivors who found shelter in Brookside. Food supplies at home run out, and only chance to get more is by taking some risky job which the Suits are willing to offer. Unfortunately, her very first outing goes disastrously due to Juno being backstabbed by the people who were supposed to protect her, and now, abandoned and alone, she must find a way back home — or die trying...

Overgrown: Genesis is an H-Game in the setting of Zombie Apocalypse; gameplaye-wise, it's Survival Horror with emphasis on stealth and supplies scavenging (with more focus on action in the final third of the game). It was developed by Dystopian Project using RPG Maker, and published by TinyHat Studious. As of May 2020, it's available on Steam.

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Tropes

• Above the Influence: If Juno agrees to drink with Barton and later takes hot shower, she decides to seduce Barton. Barton at first tries to refuse, stating that she's drunk and he shouldn't take advantage of it, but she insists and he gives in.
• After the End: The story takes place unspecified amount of time after the Zombie Apocalypse; it's known that at least several months have passed.
• All for Nothing: That generator you restarted in Prologue? Dr. Feinstein later reveals that the generator was required to restart communication with his lab (so he and Dr. Peters may continue working on the cure), but it didn't work in the end. When Juno arrives to the sanctuary, she learns that the reason for that is Gavin's uprising, which led to near-collapse of the sanctuary.
• Almost Dead Guy:
  • During Act 1, Juno finds a lone injured survivor in the massacred shelter, who lasts for just long enough to tell what's happened there, and give her the key she needs.
  • During Act 2, Juno encounters mortally wounded Billy in the former Suits HQ; he tells how he ended this way, and gives her the keycard she needs to send zombies after Gavin. Billy then realises that he's infected and that he already started transforming (his wounds are healing), and he shoots himself.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Enemies die after successful attack, to prevent the Cycle of Hurting situations and give the player a chance for comeback.
  • Some supplies respawns if the player has exactly zero of those:
    • The container with batteries in Subway (that one in the room the player originally gets the flashlight) spawns more batteries if the player has none. It's because the level is extremely dark and full of Crawlers, while the player is yet to build up a supply of batteries.
    • There are some ammo pickups during boss fight with Elite Hivelings. If the player wastes all ammo, those pickups respawns, so the game doesn't become unwinnable (as the player is stuck on arena until all five Hivelings dies).
• Any Last Words?: During his trial, Dr. Feinstein gets allowed to say his last words. He says that he regrets nothing, and he still believes that he was doing the right thing and what's better for humankind; Peters has nothing of it. Ultimately, Feinstein accepts defeat and says that it's up to Peters to lead humanity now, but whether it's genuine acceptance, or stealth insult, is unknown, and then Feinstein gets executed by a firing squad, taking this secret to his grave.
  Dr. Feinstein: Everything I did... Everything I tried to do... I did it because I deemed it the best course of action for humanity's continued survival.
  Dr. Peters: Feinstein, come now. I saw what you had planned. You were going to arm enough missiles with the weaponised HAF serum to destroy the world! At least go with a clear conscience... Old friend.
  Dr. Feinstein: My conscience is clear, Theodore. I was going to purify the world. Rid it, once and for all, of the virus that brought us to our knees!
  Dr. Peters: You would have destroyed nearly all life on the planet! Wiped out nearly all that remained of humankind!
  Dr. Feinstein: A necessary sacrifice! The world would have been reborn, anyway! With stronger genetic material! The weak disposed of! Evolution as it was intended!
  Dr. Peters: You cannot play god with the lives of everyone on the planet! You do not get to decide the path that humankind goes down, Feinstein...!
  Dr. Feinstein: No. You're right. I don't get to decide... Not anymore. That's your right, now.
• Apocalyptic Log: Various notes and computer terminals which the player may find across the game contains interesting information, mostly regarding backstory, including on how exactly things ended up as bad as they're now:
  • David's diary documents his early days of survival once he got locked in the Subway's safehouse: him observing zombies starting slowing down and mutating (from Runners to Walkers to Crawlers), his friend and colleague Leslie dying from unknown infection (it's unknown whether it's the Infection, or some other sickness, but he died on the next day after showing symptoms), and ultimately David himself going nuts.
  • Computer in the Cold Pines safehouse contains the log made by the local ranger team, which explains why exactly there's so many zombie dogs (most of those are former domestic dogs gone wild; people abandoned them when shit hit the fan). It ends with last of them, named Sullivan, going outside to save his colleague Sophie O'Hara (who was snatched when attempt to gas the dog lair in old cabin gone bad). You enter safehouse using the ID you loot from his bloodied bag, meaning that he didn't succeed.
  • Kerry's diary describes how she'd lost her family during early days of the outbreak, and had to survive on her own with only dog Rex by her side. Then Rex got infected, and she had to watch how he slowly turns into zombie and becomes hostile to her, without understanding why he's acting like this; and she can't even leave to gather supplies, as the car keys are in the same part of the house where she locked him. The last entry is about Kerry (who by this point already started showing signs of Infection) deciding to take the risk and crawl in while Rex is asleep (she put a camera to watch him remotely). Computer to which camera is connected reveals that the plan went... poorly.
  • While visiting the police department, the player may check the computers and learn about Gavin's uprising from the police and Suits' point of view.
  • While restarting the water treatment plant on Sophia's request, the player may find a note from the group of Suits who've tried to take shelter there; it starts with them running from the rioters (with two of them being caught, one man and one woman), and ends with them being attacked by Reptiles, which killed two of them.
  • While doing side quests before evacuation, the player may find the corpse of a little girl Wendy, who clearly starved to death; nearby, they may find the diary, which tells how exactly she ended like this, with the last entry being about her feeling "dizzy" and going to "take a little nap".
• Asshole Victim: While Gavin and Billy are clearly in the wrong and cause only death and suffering by their uprising, the Suits makes everything in their power (both before and after) to be as unlikable as possible and make the player think that most of them had it coming. There's bureaucracy, there's corruption, there's pride, and there's distain for "lesser people" and aversion to being on equal terms with them.
  The rioters still try to break down my barricade every now and then. They shout that they know I'm in here. Those scum. How dare they. Upstart fucks rising against their betters...
• Attempted Rape: As soon as Juno restarts the generator, Gavin decides to "celebrate" by raping her along with his goons, and then leave her for dead. Juno can submit to her fate (she's alone, and they're armed)... or resist and even take Gavin's pistol, forcing him to retreat (he can't actually shoot her, and has little time to escape due to the generator restarting and starting making heavy noise).
• Back in the Saddle: During assault on the Area 66, Lindsey Taylor joins the attackers instead of staying on the base, much to her brother's annoyance.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Endings A and B are results of either Dr. Zara or Dr. Feinstein (respectively) achieving their goals; Zara wants for humans to die out, leaving the planet to Dryads, Feinstein wants to cleanse it of all infected life (including most of humanity) and then repopulate it with his chosen people.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • In the endings D and E, Geoff gets asked how it feels to work under Cassie. He says that she's like slave driver... and then says that nothing less would make the job done, and he's proud of being her subordinate.
  • Donny puts a gun at Juno and demands her removing shirt... and everything else. Another pervert? Nope, he's checking to make sure that she's not infected, by looking for open wounds; he already had to put down several people he used to know, and wants to take no risk. Juno just tells him that women don't turn into zombies, and they change topic to that instead.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: When Juno comes to ask Billy for favour, the guard tries to forbid her from entering. She tells him that if Billy learns that he turned Juno away when she came with an offer, he would likely be punished so badly, he wouldn't be able to stand afterwards. He decides to not test his luck and informs Billy — who indeed invites Juno to talk.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Geoff says that deep inside, he still hopes that his wife is still waiting for him, even though the only reasonable course of action would be to seek shelter. If Barton's sidequest gets finished, when the two comes to check, turns out that she did wait for him... and it ended fatally for her; Geoff was only able to give her proper burial, with Barton helping.
• To Be Lawful or Good: In the ending C, Juno gets torn between her loyalty to the military, and her duty for the people, who're looking at her with hope; choosing the civilians leads to the ending C1, choosing the military to the ending C2, but neither leads to a nice outcome.
• Believing Their Own Lies: In the ending C2, Juno gives up on hope to stop the radicals and joins them. To silence her conscience, she starts telling herself lies that all the bad things (like her former friends and comrades being enslaved) are "justified" and necessary. Ultimately, she believes in it and becomes no better than the rest of her new "colleagues".
• Better to Die than Be Killed:
  • Sarah Kane chose to shoot herself rather than end up in the hands of zombies; finding her suicide note is a requirement for one of side quests and getting the best ending.
  • In luxury flat, there's a man-shaped hole in the window. Juno immediately guesses that whoever lived there, chose to jump out rather than wait till zombies take them.
  • Billy realises that he's infected as his mortal wounds starts healing, so he shoots himself before he turns into a zombie.
    Billy: Damn, I was hoping to bleed to death before it came to this, but it looks like the infection's taken hold, and my body is actually recovering... and mutating. Well, looks like this is the end of the line, sweetheart. I'll be damned if I'm going to turn into a freakshow, so... See you later.
  • One of captives in the Hive tried to free herself; as the process of transformation already started, it killed her.
• Bittersweet Ending: Ending D. Juno stops both Zara and Feinstein, and prevents radicals amongst military from taking over, but General Hawke never copes with not being able to cure Eva, and either shoots himself once he accidentally kills her as the cure backfires, or seals himself away with her (depending on whether he received Zara's research or not). Juno manages to put up a fight against Dryads, but never comes quite close to complete victory, merely a stalemate, and no one knows for how long the war would last...
• "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: When Dr. Feinstein reveals to Juno his plan to purge the world via HAF-2 and start anew with carefully-chosen humans (and Juno herself being used in his Super Breeding Program, obviously against her will), Juno calls him heartless bastard. He only says that he prefers the term "morally indifferent".
• Blackout Basement: Some parts of the game are almost pitch-dark (save for occasional light sources), requiring Juno to use flashlight to navigate. Unfortunately, batteries are in limited supply (one battery lasts for 100 steps). Certain levels uses such darkness as major part of the challenge:
  • Subway is the first dark area Juno encounters, and also where she obtains the flashlight. Tunnels are narrow, and full of Crawlers, while the player at this point has limited ammo. Fortunately, most of them are in the side area, so player only has to face them if they wish to find more supplies.
  • As Juno arrives to Cold Pines park at night, it would be very dark, requiring the flashlight. Good news: there's no Crawlers. Bad news: this level is populated by lots of Dogs.
  • University is out of power, and thus is mostly dark. Instead of other zombies, you're pursued by a single dangerous entity, the Dryad.
• Blatant Lies: Gavin claimed that convoy was attacked by zombies, resulting in some casualties. As pointed by forensic expert who checked the APCs on Rebecca's request, unless the zombies suddenly learned how to use guns, it was clearly made by humans; and since the guns were police issue, it was an inside job.
• Body Horror:
  • Fungal growths which covers the zombies' bodies are extremely creepy and unnatural; Crawlers have it worst, as not only their bodies are almost entirely covered with fungi, but they also partly mutated, with one of mutations being their extremely long, frog-like tongues.
  • Fate of the women captured by zombies and brought to the Hive is to be merged with plant growths to the point those become inseparable from their bodies, and be turned into living incubators. All victims whom Juno manages to save before this happens develop PTSD (with one attending therapy), while those whose process goes far enough have to be euthanised they can't live without a Hive anyway; all the other captives dies as soon as the Hive gets destroyed.
• Boss-Only Level: There's no other zombies in the University, only a single Dryad — and she's the most dangerous enemy you would face in the entire game.
• Botanical Abomination: General Hawke has no way to describe the monstrosity that is the Hive and its defenders, other than call it "something... alien"; it's just that unnatural and hostile to everything human. It's not just some zombies, it's the true face of horror.
• Breakable Weapons: All melee weapons breaks after certain number of uses: 1 for Knife, 2 for Crowbar and 3 for Axe.
• Breeding Slave:
  • It's believed in-univers that zombies abducts women for reproduction, being instincts-driven monsters. Later it turns out that it's more complex than that: women are required as catalysts for creation of the Hive.
  • Dryads can reproduce with humans, with offsprings always being other Dryads; more sinister of them uses their mind control powers to break the willpower of captured humans to turn them into unwilling slaves for both pleasure and reproduction.
  • In the ending B, Juno gets used for Dr. Feinstein's program of repopulating Earth after cleansing it of all infected life. Naturally, no one asks her opinion on that.
• But Thou Must!: On Dr. Feinstein's trial, Juno can either agree that he's too dangerous to keep alive, or insist on sparing him (killing such mind is a waste), and instead make him join the efforts to find the cure. But if she tries the second option, General Hawke and Dr. Peters would overrule her, saying that he's too dangerous, and thus it's two votes versus one. He then gets executed by a firing squad for high treason and all the crimes against humanity.
• Call-Back: Juno would mention her last meeting with Gavin as the reason why she would never work for him; what she actually says depends on whether Gavin raped her, or Juno managed to fight back.
• Cannon Fodder: In the ending C, radical militaries takes over and forcibly conscripts all even remotely fit male civilians, not caring about neither experience nor fight capabilities, and sends them to the frontline (along with those militaries who resisted them), compensating for the lack of quality with quantity; it doesn't quite work out, and this militia gets slaughtered.
• The Cavalry: General Hawke and entirety of his people (including Lindsey Taylor) arrives to storm Area 66 and arrest Dr. Feinstein. This is why Juno has to face relatively few enemies, instead of entire army.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • In the Prologue, Cassie is annoyed by Suits providing no resources to fix the fence which is about to collapse on its own. By the time you return to Brookside, it would be already broken — in fact, this hole is how you enter the now-overrun sanctuary.
  • Just before Juno goes on the mission in National University, General Hawke gives her his daughter's locket, in hope that maybe it can bring her luck. When Feinstein turns on Juno and captures her, it gets revealed that the locket contains a beacon, which military uses to track her down and attack the Area 66 base.
• Child Soldier: In the ending C, the military under radicals do so poor job at fighting the Dryads and suffer so massive attrition, they're forced to recruit children; quoting one officer, it's "child soldiers or no soldiers".
• Citywide Evacuation: It ultimately gets decided to abandon Brookside (what's left of it) and evacuate to military base at Fort Patton. However, certain preparations must be made, or it's gonna end in disaster.
• Clone Army: Before it was decided to use androids, Feinstein and his allies were relying on cloned operatives (so-called project Gemini); they were absolutely loyal, but had estimated lifespan of 5 years, with no chance to replace them when they finally expire. This explains all those operatives you've seen before.
• Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: In the endings D and E, Barton ends as Dr. Peters' deputy. When asked why he was chosen, of all people, he says that while Dr. Peters handles theory, Barton is here to remind him about practice, and prevent him from building Awesome, but Impractical tech.
• Collection Sidequest: One of requirements for the Golden Ending is collecting 8 notes scattered across the game; some of the notes can be easily missed if certain actions weren't taken while still having a chance.
• The Coup: While Juno was busy making it back to Brookside, Gavin performed a coup in the sanctuary (backed by Billy); he gave all the Suits who failed to escape to the angry mob from Stanton (who promptly lynched them), including former sanctuary's leader, Richard Harvey, and started ruling as a tyrant, raping and enslaving people left and right. His reign ended when he had a fallout with Billy over a disagreement regarding whether Billy gets his share in Suits' stockpiles or not, and, after being fired at, Billy exploded the bombs he had preinstalled across the sanctuary, which allowed the zombies inside.
  Gavin's message: At last! Harris is dead, and the sanctuary is ours! Folks, it's time for a new fucking era — an era where we, the strong, are free to do as we please to the weak — as it should have been from the start!
• Crazy-Prepared: Subverted with the Subway shelter; surely it stockpiled food for years to come... but whoever did the preparations, didn't bother to stockpile any medicine, so by the fourth day, Leslie developed unknown sickness, and by the next day he died, leaving David alone.
• Critical Annoyance: When the Infection level is high (5 or more), edges of the screen covers with pulsating green vines.
• Critical Hesitation Blunder: General Hawke hesitated to attack the Hive, and as result, he retrieved his daughter Eva already being half-turned into Dryad.
• Despair Event Horizon: If Juno runs out of Morale, she would be too demoralised to keep struggling if a zombie manages to actually subdue her, causing game over.
  Juno: I'm done fighting. I'm done struggling. I'm... I'm done.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • At the Subway, there're two places which, instead of random loot, always contains one pack of cigarettes; both are along essential paths. This ensures that the player wouldn't be screwed out of doing David's quest just because they were unlucky with random loot.
  • At Downtown, if the player didn't bring any Bleach with them, or wasted it, they can find more in the hotel's restroom. If they wastes that, too, it respawns. The reason for that is because there's plot-essential entrance blocked by fungal growth.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • It takes Gavin by surprise that generator goes fully online — and very noisy — just when he decides to "celebrate" by raping Juno; he and his goons barely escapes with their lives.
  • Sullivan suggests to ask Porters for help and use their fumigant to just kill the dogs in old cabin with gas. As he himself writes in the log after barely escaping, he forgot that ventilation shouldn't be operational after so much time without maintenance. The team wastes precious time on repair and gets ambushed, which results in Mr. Porter being killed and Mrs. Porter snatched; Sophie O'Hara gets snatched too, but manages to escape... or, rather, the dogs lets her to escape, and then traces her to the house and attacks Sullivan as soon as he decides to play hero and exit to help Sophie. No one of them made it out alive.
• Don't Celebrate Just Yet: When convoy finally reaches Fort Patton... military refuses to let refugees in: they can't let any potentially infected people inside. They only reconsiders when Dr. Peters asks to tell their commander about him and and that he brought the HAF research data; turns out, General Hawke is aware of Peters' work, so he orders to make an exception just this time.
• Downer Ending: Every ending below D would suck in one way or another:
  • Endings A and B are outright The Bad Guys Win cases, with humanity either succumbing to Dryads (ending A) or being "purged" by Feinstein, who wants to start anew (ending B); in both of them, Juno gets enslaved by the winning side.
  • Ending C comes in two variants. Both involve General Hawke shooting himself, and radicals amongst military taking over and enslaving civilians (former leaders, like Natasha, Cassie and Sophia, are outright turned into Sex Slaves for daring to oppose them). Juno can try to stop this... and just share their fate (ending C1), or accept it as inevitable evil and join the radicals, who reluctantly accepts her as one of them (ending C2) due to her having just that much of support; ending C2, due to Juno staying free, also shows just how bad things are, with no hope for better tomorrow anywhere in sight: Forever War with the usage of mass conscription and ultimately Child Soldiers, people being worked to death on the factories or starving to death due to barely being fed, etc. And on top of it, the once noble and heroic Juno is now just as cruel as the other radical militaries.
• Down the Drain: There are several sections where Juno has to navigate the sewers; first and final ones are safe, but others are inhabited by Reptiles — mutant alligators. To make things worse, deep water slows Juno down.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • As soon as Gavin abandons Juno, the player may find a shaft leading to safe room; there would be a corpse of a woman, a discarded gun, and suicide note which reveals that her name was Sarah Kane and she did this out of desperation: she's the only survivor in the zombie-infested town, with no chance to escape.
  • Donny shoots himself once told that Sarah committed suicide, as he has nothing to live for anymore; alternative is to let him stay and wait for his deceased fiance who would never come back, and grow progressively more insane (he already occasionally sees hallucinations).
  • If General Hawke doesn't read Dr. Zara's research on Dryads, he would ultimately try to use HAF-2 on her despite all warnings, which, unsurprisingly, kills her, with the last thing he sees on her face is the expression of utter betrayal. He can't live with it, and he blows his brains out.
• Drowning My Sorrows: If radicals manages to take over the military and enslave civilians, and Juno sides with them (ending C2), Dr. Peters (whose research was weaponised to fight Dryads, instead of helping humanity) becomes heavy drinker to deal with depression. It doesn't help that in this ending, his former assistant Sophia was turned into Sex Slave as a punishment for opposing the military junta.
• Due to the Dead: One of the ways Juno can earn favours with military is by retrieving the dog tags of the fallen.
• Early-Bird Cameo: There are several Dogs in the park in Hamilton, next to a corpse (setting right away that they're not friendly); those are the only ones on entire level. The level next after Hamilton, Cold Pines, is entirely built around surviving dark forest full with zombie dogs.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: The best outcome requires the player to be really thorough in exploring the game, but achieves happy peaceful life for everyone, and gives Juno and her allies a new meaning in life.
• The Elites Jump Ship: How Feinstein got the sponsoring for the Area 66? By promising to use it as safe haven for the world's rich elites in the upcoming purge. In truth, they became his test subjects, explaining just where he got so many people to experiment upon.
  ''The proposal is simple - pay the fee, and you get a safe haven when it all goes to shit. The plan has proven immensely successful thus far. Dignitaries, celebrities, and leading businessmen have started to sign on one after the other. Cash flow will now cease to be a problem. Of course, they do not know that their conditions will be... less than luxurious. Still, all we need is their money. And they won't see the true nature of their accomodations till it's too late to complain.
• End of the World as We Know It: Endings A and B both ends with different flavours of apocalypse:
  • The ending A leads to humanity (left without its only chance to fight back and create a cure, as Dr. Zara destroys HAF-2 prototype) being mostly exterminated by Dryads, with what's left of it used as breeding slaves.
  • The ending B leads to Dr. Feinstein wiping out nearly all life on Earth via HAF-2 he put into ICBM, so he can reseed the world with his own, approved branch of humanity.
• Enemy Civil War: Gavin and Billy eventually were on the same side, pre-planning the coup against the Suits. Billy turned on Gavin when he failed to deliver what he promised — give people the food they wanted. The conflict essentially destroyed both factions: Billy's gang was gunned down in nearly entirety, but Billy detonated the bombs he'd preinstalled across the sanctuary, allowing zombies to breach defences. To add insult into injury, while two groups were busy wiping each other out, what's left of sanctuary survivors (led by Dr. Peters, Natasha and Cassie) managed to secure the warehouse which the whole fuss was about, leaving them nothing.
• Entitled Bastard: In the civilian shelter, you can encounter a couple of former Suits who... complains that the military appointed Juno as the shelter's leader instead of one of the Suits, completely ignoring everything she did for them before. Those two would stay here and say all the same things even if you fully upgrade the shelter; this also means that they're amongst few people who don't bother with finding a job in the shelter and earning their stay, preferring to whine about being treated "unfairly" because they're accustomed to luxury.
  Former Suit: This is an outrage! The military should have appointed us the leaders of this shelter, not you and your ragtag bunch!
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • As soon as Gavin opens his mouth, it becomes clear that he's blatant sexist, sociopath and just jerk. It would only go downhill from there.
  • The first time you meet Dryad is when you arrive to the University, and see all militaries sent before you being massacred. Then you see Dryad herself abducting a soldier who tries to escape and, when it fails, shoot, only to realise that she run out of ammo. You're now gonna face that Dryad yourself, alone, in the darkness.
• Everytown, America: The story takes place in several fictional towns; all of them are rather generic small towns without major differences.
• Evil All Along: When Juno finds Feinstein and Zara in the University, both would insist that the other one is evil and dangerous... but Juno has to trust one of them, as Dr. Peters can't finish the cure with just his data alone. The catch is that both are evil, but in different ways:
  • From the day one, Zara was undermining the efforts to stop the Infection, and speeding up demise of humanity: provoking research centers being attacked by infected, and sabotaging any search for the cure by falsifying or destroying data. Now, she tries to destroy HAF-2 project. If Juno trusts her instead of Feinstein, Zara would reveal her true colours after destroying the material entrusted to her, immediately triggering the ending A.
  • Despite Dr. Zara mostly lying to Juno in order to gain her trust, she's not lying about Feinstein planning to release HAF-2 into atmosphere, disregarding how toxic it is to any life containing even smallest pieces of the parasite; as soon as Dryad dies, he gathers her biomaterial to finish perfecting his new weapon, and abducts Juno, whom he needs to immunise the people he's planning to keep alive after the... cleansing. Unlike what Zara does, it still leaves enough time to salvage the situation, leading to the endgame. At the Area 66 base, the computers contains the data revealing that Feinstein and his backers knew about upcoming collapse of civilisation in advance, and prepared this facility as an arc of sorts, as well as already were working on the plans to exterminate the infected with zero regards for common people's survival. Feinstein was ready to abduct Peters and force him to join the project if he wouldn't be cooperative.
• Evil Versus Evil:
  • Bandits and Gavin's loyalists eventually turned on each other, resulting in both sides being almost wiped out. By the time you reach the Suits HQ, Gavin and few survivors amongst his loyalists are holed up in the well-barricated room, while Billy is bleeding to death in the cleaning closet, with few survivors of his gang escaping to join the sanctuary.
  • By the time you reach the University, Dr. Zara and Dr. Feinstein are at each other's throats. Both would try to convince you that other one is dangerous lunatic with world-ending goals; both are right. The player has to side with Feinstein, however, as at this point, he at least shares the goal with you, while helping Zara triggers Nonstandard Game Over.
• Exact Words: When accused of planning to release HAF-2 into atmosphere, knowing about it being deadly poisonous to any life at current stage, not just infected, Feinstein, instead of denying it, asks how he's supposed to do it with resources at his disposal. Well, he doesn't plan to do it from this laboratory; he has an ICBM elsewhere.
• Face–Heel Turn: In the ending C2, when conflict between civilians and military occurs, Juno sides with military, seeing no hope to prevail if she keeps fighting, and trying to convince herself that it's the only possible choice. As the time goes on, she gradually believes what she was telling herself, and becomes just as cruel as the militaries; noble and heroic Juno is gone.
• Fate Worse than Death: Only males can turn into zombies (when not killed outright); females instead becomes mindless broodmothers. It's generally accepted that shooting yourself in the head is preferable fate in either case.
• Fire-Forged Friends: In the ending D, radicals tries to accuse Taylors of siding with civilians over "their own". They gets a response that those civilians are their own.
  Radical Leader: Hmph, I should've known you Taylor brats would betray our own for a bunch of civilians!
  Thompson: And where are these civilians you speak of? All I see around our side are hardened soldiers who have fought through countless campaigns with us side-by-side!
• Forced to Watch: According to the notes Juno can find while restarting the water treatment plant on Sophia's request, during Gavin's uprising, a group of Suits tried to run to the HQ, but their branch manager and his assistant Rita were caught by rioters. The guy was lynched on the spot, slowly, with Rita being forced to watch the entire process of execution. The rest escaped just when Rita was ordered to strip down and "service" all rioters to not end like her boss.
• Forced Transformation:
  • The Infection transmitted from Dogs sometimes works weirdly, turning infected females into werewolf-like creatures. Such beasts exhibit improved strength, resilience... and aggression. They also quickly degrade to the dog level of intelligence, so they're likely unintentional dead-end mutation.
  • The women chosen to become Dryads gets enclosed in the Hives and gradually transformed. Eva was in process of becoming a Dryad, too, but was taken out and put into anabiosis before it could finish.
• Foreshadowing:
  • During the Prologue, one of survivors (a firefighter), if approached, says that he has to take care of his sick friend's daughter, but has nearly nothing to feed her with. In the Act 2, it's possible to find what's happened to this family; turns out, the sick friend turned zombie, the firefighter died protecting the girl, and the girl herself actually starved to death. We also learn that the firefighter was named "Mr. Kelly", and the girl was named Wendy.
  • The note which Juno can find in the Prologue while doing Billy's errand tells about planned uprising long before it happens, albeit it omits who's gonna perform it.
  • Dr. Peters, if approached in the sanctuary during the Prologue, reluctantly shares "non-classified" info on the Infection. Just what information on it can require being classified? Well, the fact that every human in the world is infected, which he would reveal much later, and confirm that he kept it secret to not provoke panic, as it doesn't actually change anything, yet can make things worse if revealed to the general public.
  • There are some hints at Dr. Feinstein is untrustworthy long before he backstabs you, and before you learn about his very unethical experiments:
    • Reading the notes in the hospital and later paying attention to Dr. Feinstein's dialogues in the laboratory under Hamilton hospital reveals that he shows zero regards for infected, seeing them as nothing more than test subjects.
    • Dr. Peters wonders how Feinstein managed to create the HAF virus; doing something like that would require very specific samples...
  • It's pretty clear that Feinstein and Zara did something with Juno while she was asleep, mentioning some "assets" and calling Juno "bearer". Later it gets revealed that they injected her with HAF-1, so by contact with her blood it would turn into vaccine.
• Forever War: The ending D has the humans and Dryads being in the state of eternal stalemate, with neither side gaining upper hand in years. It's an improvement over ending C, as unlike the military junta, Juno knows that it's not a good idea to go on offensive against Dryads: you don't want to fight them on their territory; instead, you want to trick them into attacking you, wear them down and only then finish off. Dryads learned to not mess with humans after multiple defeats. There's a hope that one day, the HAF research would allow to fully reclaim the planet, but it definitely wouldn't happen in the near future.
• For Science!: The scientists under Dr. Feinstein chose to explore how and why the Infection spreads to certain animal breeds (namely, dogs and alligators) and why they targets humans, by breeding more of them with the usage of unwilling test subjects. They got no useful data out of it, even after many failed experiments. The player may read the logs to see just how messed-up those experiments were; fortunately, we're spared details.
• Fragile Speedster: Both Dogs and Runners are very frail (having only 1 and 2 HP, respectively), but are much faster than Walkers (albeit both have limitations: Dogs ignore everything outside of their territory; while Runners quickly give up if lose visual contact, and return to their "patrol" area). Justified, as the Dogs are barely mutated at all, while Runners are the early stage of the Infection, and are yet to be covered by fungi which is both the source of toughness and reason for slowness.
• Friend or Foe?: Rebecca and the other imprisoned cops don't trust Juno at first: they're in the enemy's lair, and too many people have proved themselves untrustworthy. Juno asks them whether any sane woman would work under Gavin, which they finds good enough argument to trust her (that, and her knowing Natasha).
• Fungi Are Plants: The parasite is explicitly a fungus (it even gets compared to сordyceps), and fungal growth is the reason behind zombies' toughness, regeneration and slowness; despite this, it's occasionally called a "plant", zombies can feed via photosynthesis, both the Hive and Hivelings are plant-based, and Dryads are half-humans, half-plants.
• Fun with Acronyms: Androids are code-named "The Automated Cybernetic Enforcement", or ACE for short. They're the strongest non-boss enemies in the game.
• Gaia's Vengeance: The "Infection" is the indirect results of ravaging of Amazon forests: the parasite which would later start it all was released when its habitat was destroyed, infected the crops, and from them, gradually spread across the world. Later it gets revealed that it's the planet retaliating against humanity's predatory behaviour, with Infection being the way to cleanse or at least cull humanity, while Dryads are intended as our replacement, who would reseed the planet with life and keep protecting it. Whether this plan succeeds depends on the ending: in the ending A, it comes to fruition, in the ending B the Infection and Dryads gets wiped out (along with almost all other life, including most of humanity), ending C and D have humans and Dryads in the state of eternal conflict, and the ending E has them negotiating for peace.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • Juno is an engineer, so many puzzles involves her gathering spare parts and fixing broken equipment.
  • Uncontrolled lust is amongst symptoms of the Infection in females; at high Infection level, the player may lose control over Juno, even in the middle of the outing, which leaves her vulnerable.
  • Juno's max Morale increases as she grows in confidence that she can make it (by going through main story), or when something shows her that this world is not as bad as it seems; and conversely, it can decrease from certain traumatic events.
  • It's not possible to get a game over by sleeping with high Infection in the sanctuary, both because Dr. Peters has means to treat it, and because Juno can't just run away like she does in such situations in the other areas.
  • Military base has enough supplies to ensure that Infection and hunger are no longer the problem; as such, the player no longer needs to manage Hunger and can rest freely.
  • Wendy's father was already injured by the time you find him; due to that, he has only 1 HP instead of standard 2 other Runners have.
• Glass Cannon:
  • Downplayed with Dogs; they deal nowhere as much Morale damage as the other enemies (35, versus 50 for Walkers and Runners, and 75 for Crawlers and Hivelings), but they rises Infection by 2 instead of 1, which is harder to deal with, causes extra dangers due to control disruption, and can make the player unable to rest (sleeping with 5+ Infection means instant game over).
  • Hivelings have the same health as Walkers, one of the weakest enemies, and are just as slow as the Crawlers; but they can cause whopping 75 Morale damage and 2 Infection if they manage to capture Juno.
• Go Back to the Source: Downtown is where the Infection originally started in this country, and now it's where another Hive is about to hatch. General Hawke sends Juno on the operation there, in hope to obtain crucial data and stop whatever monstrosity the infected are growing there.
• Golden Ending: If the player manage to collect all 8 notes, complete all sidequests, stop the apocalypse and talk General Hawke out of committing suicide by bringing him crucial data on Eva's condition, they would achieve the ending where humans and Dryads negotiate for peace, Juno would be elected new president and reform society, and Hawke would retire to spend time with daughter and the little Dryads.
  Here, the actions you've made, the people you've met, and the relationships you've forged during the course of the game, are now yours to reflect upon. Enjoy!
• Goodbye, Cruel World!: Just after being abandoned by Gavin, Juno can find a saferoom by traveling through an air vent, where she finds a corpse of a woman right next to a pistol, and a note nearby, which reveals that she was named Sarah Kane, and that she's the last surviving worker of this power plant, who chose to end her life on own terms rather than wait till zombies take her. Later, Juno may encounter Sarah's fiance who spent several months waiting for her, in vain.
• Graceful Loser: During the trial, Feinstein, when accused of playing god, gets told that it's not up to him to decide the fate of humanity. He says that Peters is right: it's not up to him... now it's up to Peters and his friends. Then he just closes his eyes and waits for guns to fire.
• Green Thumb: Dryads can trigger rapid plant growth; that's the reason why they were created — to reseed the planet with plant life and reclaim the territories "conquered" by humans.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Just before going to plant C4 to destroy mainframe keeping androids online (thus allowing Hawke's men to assault the base and stop ICBM from launching), Juno can find a computer with research notes from Feinstein's team — specifically, on their experiments on Dogs and Reptiles, in attempts to find out just why the Infection targeted them; they got... interesting results:
  • Dog branch of the Infection, on rare occasions, can trigger mutations in human females, turning them into werewolf-like creatures (explaining what's happened to Kerry). Those creatures are no longer capable of transmitting Infection to male humans (females aren't so lucky), nor they're capable of reproducing with humans; all of them demonstrates greatly increased strength, resilience and aggression, but also massive decrease in intelligence, nearly to that of a dog (still an improvement over common zombies). After Feinstein's research group, just out of curiosity, tried to breed them with Dogs instead, it somehow succeeded (on the 10,316th attempt), producing healthy offspring of a great strength, who then proceeded to took over the leadership over the pack; scared, the researchers decided to terminate all test subjects and not explore this field further.
  • Reptiles are capable of reproducing with humans (it's explained as them "corrupting" human ovum, which turns it into actual egg), producing what is essentially a Reptile, but with few human-like features (like opposing thumbs, or being capable of walking upright). But they're still dumb as a brick, and researchers dismisses it as the evolutionary dead-end.
• Healing Factor:
  • Lore-wise, it's why zombies can't be reliably killed without shooting them in the head, even though they aren't undead: not only fungal growths acts as natural armour, but it quickly covers any open wounds, preventing the zombie from bleeding to death.
  • Dryads can recover from any wounds which fails to kill them outright; the only way to gain reasonable chances against them is by using HAF-2b (weaponised HAF-2), either in gas form or as special ammo, which would cause enough damage that Dryad wouldn't be able to recover from it even with their enhanced regeneration. The Dryad whom Juno encounters in the University is no exception, and as special ammo wouldn't be invented until after the story's done, Juno has to find a way to spread the gas around University to poison her.
  • Story-wise, Androids are so unkillable due to quick self-repair; facing two-three is already a challenge, but there's an army of them. However, once shut down, they stay dead.
• Heel–Race Turn: In the ending E, under Eva's influence, Dryads (initially hostile) ceased to act hostile to humans, and negotiated for peace.
• He Knows Too Much: Even if Juno submits to Gavin (she's alone, and he and his goons are armed), he would decide to leave her for death anyway: if she tells what he did to her, not even his boss (who otherwise ignores his antics) would tolerate it. He can't kill her, as gunshot would attract zombies, and the next group would ask questions when it finds the corpse with gun wounds, but the zombies would do it for him. Later, when Juno learns about Gavin's coup, it becomes apparent that he planned to dispose of Juno anyway to get rid of everyone who may sabotage his scheme (this outing was used to dispose of non-loyal officers, and keeping Juno alive may lead to her alerting Gavin's enemies).
• Heroic BSoD: When Juno reaches safehouse in East Greer, she just collapses, cries and then falls asleep due to exhaustion, lamenting all the crap which just collapsed onto her.
• Heroic Willpower: While exploring the danger zone in preparation to evacuation, Juno can encounter a lone Runner-type zombie who's acting weirdly and mixes zombie-like noises with calling for someone named "Wendy"; avoiding him and entering the hole in the wall reveals a corpse of the little girl (she starved to death), her discarded doll (with nametag "Wendy" on it) and diary telling her story and revealing that the zombie is actually her father. When the zombie sees the doll, he, rather than attack, manages to ask where's Wendy, and rushes to her once told; he then... begs Juno to terminate him, so he and Wendy would be Together in Death; she grants it, but loses 10 Morale.
• HP to One: After surviving attack of the Dryad, Juno would lose all Morale and gain 5 Infection, bringing her on the brink of death. This may happen up to two times, third encounter is invariably fatal.
• Hive Mind: It's observed that the Dog packs have so great coordination as if they share same mind. Given what's known about the parasite, it may indeed be true.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Dr. Zara released Dryad from captivity to use her against Dr. Feinstein, believing that they may become allies. Dryad later brainwashes her and turns into a part of her harem.
• Hopeless War: The ending C has humans and Dryads being in the state of eternal war; unlike the ending D, which also has them at war, military junta is nowhere as competent at fighting Dryads as Juno (who knows their tactics, and is better at reinstalling infrastructure), and suffers massive attrition during (mostly futile) attempts to fight Dryads on their territory. They've lost a lot of people and must recruit Child Soldiers to have any army at all, while everyone are slowly starving to death as after everyone fit was sent to frontline, leftovers were left to work on factories and farms in horrible conditions.
• Impressed by the Civilian: Thompson at first is sceptical about Juno being assigned to work with him, thinking that she's just a civilian, while the task she's about to do is considered a suicide mission, due to sheer amount of infected around the bridge, on the bridge, and in the bridge control tower and tunnels beneath it. When she does pull if off, he and the soldiers under him openly says that she's badass. Eventually, she develops this reputation amongst most of the military, even those who normally despise civilians.
  Thompson: Well! The General was right about you. You actually pulled this one off!
  Soldier: Base is going to go nuts when they hear of this one! Lone woman op, holy fucking shit!
  Juno: Just doing my thing.
  Soldier: Well ma'am, keep on doing it and I feel like you're gonna save the shit out of humanity.
• I Did What I Had to Do:
  • One of the notes Juno can find in the Subway is from a guy named Hansen, who, when the buttload of zombies arrived to the station, locked it up, sealing all those zombies (and few survivors) inside. It ends with him asking for forgiveness for doing what must be done. The note can be found close to his corpse; he bleed to death from the wounds sustained when attempt to hold off the zombies failed miserably.
  • After operation to lower the Jamesway Bridge, General Hawke admits that he knew about Dr. Peters' research, but didn't try to rescue him and the others until now, because he saw no need for it: Peters wasn't in immediate danger, his research was only potential asset (he had no progress up until he got the data from Feinstein and Zara), and evacuation was massive risk for the military base, which is Hawke's direct responsibility. It may look unethical, but that's how military duty works.
  • At the Fort Patton, Dr. Peters admits that performing experiments on live infected is repulsive; sadly, there's simply no way to gather necessary data to produce the cure otherwise; he only has as much data as he has now because Feinstein and Zara did the same before.
  • When General Hawke receives Dr. Zara's research, he admits that he knew what's the purpose of the Hive, and that, had Juno arrived later, it was fully possible for her to kill Ellie without realising what's going on. He says that he knows how ugly it looks, but he would do everything to save his daughter; he feels sorry for not telling Juno, but not for the operation itself.
    General Hawke: I will answer for my crimes, Townsend, when my daughter is healed. Until then, I will continue to make the hard choices. Even if they are despicable choices.
• The Immune: While performing experiments on Juno, Feinstein and Zara learns that Juno is naturally immune to HAF. They injects her with it, and later uses her blood to make vaccine from HAF-2, which is poisonous to any life with even a smallest traces of Infection, including all "healthy" humans.
• It Can Think:
  • Dogs barely changed physically after being infected (if not counting them being capable of feeding via photosynthesis, a trait shared with most other infected save for Reptiles), but got significant increase in intelligence, particularly, their ability to hunt as a team, as if they're the part of same organism. For example, they have exterminated the entire population of the refugee camp in Cold Pines via hit-and-run tactic, and then ambushed and destroyed most of the team trying to exterminate them, with only one escaping — whom they then tracked down by releasing one of the captives and following her to the safehouse. Additionally, when Juno later checks the ventilation which the aforementioned group tried to fix, turns out that the wires were chewed: dogs purposely disabled it.
  • During operation in the Downtown, Thompson's unit gets ambushed and barely avoids being wiped out. Given that normal zombies are too dumb to open a closed door... Soon enough, Juno finds out the reason for such intelligence: there's some clearly sentient force which controls the Hive and its creations.
• It's a Wonderful Failure:
  • Downplayed if the player fails to do side quests to secure the evacuation convoy; the player gets told the horrible consequences of their failures, but the game keeps on... albeit now you're locked into bad ending no matter what.
    • If the player failed to retrieve Cassie's tools (so she may reinforce the more vulnerable vehicles), some vehicles would fall back and get attack by zombies, who successfully breaches inside.
      The noise of the convoy's movement begins to attract the infected. They swarm and overrun the weaker vehicles in the convoy! To stop and help would doom the rest of the convoy. Without any other choice left to them, the convoy keeps moving, leaving the screaming victims to their fate as their car doors are prised open... (...) Lives that could have been saved, have been lost...
    • Sophia tasks Juno with repairing water treatment plant, so the sanctuary would have supply of fresh water. Not doing so ensures that many people would fall sick and die en route to Fort Patton.
    • Near the end of the journey, convoy runs out of food. If Rebecca was rescued, she and Natasha would organise salvaging parties which returns with much-needed supplies; but if not, Natasha would fail to do it by alone (Rebecca was invaluable for her logistics skills), and the group returns with heavy loses and next to zero supplies.
  • All endings for the main story starts with narration to what's happened — including endings A and B:
    • Ending A tells how the Dryads matured up en masse — and, without HAF-2, humanity stands no chance against them in open combat, nor they have a cure from the Infection. Soon, humanity was almost entirely wiped out, and what's left became enslaved.
    • Ending B tells how Dr. Feinstein succeeded at launching ICBM with HAF-2 and exterminated all life on Earth, so he can then reseed the planet anew, according to his own views.
• Kangaroo Court: If Juno fails to prevent the radicals from gaining support and then tries to work against them, she would be put on trial (explicitly called "kangaroo court" in-game) for "treason", and promptly sentenced to lifetime of slavery, alongside the other former civilian leaders.
• Karmic Death: Gavin gets killed by the zombies (who're here because he indirectly caused sanctuary being overrun) whom Juno (who's here because he previously backstabbed her) redirects to his hideout, making his crimes finally bite him in the ass.
• Killed Offscreen: Interactive part of the ending C2 reveals that Thompson Taylor died in a battle at some point; his death hurt Juno a lot. He's alive and well in the endings D and E.
• Kissing Under the Influence: Juno and Thompson gets drunk and start talking about the past, with topic of Juno's part-time jobs to pay for college coming up. When she tells that she was also an assistant of a dominatrix (it was way less disgusting than working under Billy, due to lack of jerks), Thompson shows interest to the idea (specifically, roleplay part of it), and Juno (just as drunk as him) decides to show him how it works. One thing leads to another.
• Kryptonite Factor: If Juno stops both Zara and Feinstain, HAF-2 would be modified after conclusion of the main story, making it safe for humans, while retaining its deadliness to zombies and Dryads. While Dryads remains formidable foes, they ceases to be invincible: if it bleeds, it can be killed.
• Landslide Election: In the endings D and E, Juno gets elected a new president of (what's left of) the country by overwhelming majority, despite Juno herself wanting nothing to do with it and not even running for it.
• Last-Second Ending Choice: The ending C ultimately branches into endings C1 (where Juno tries to oppose the military junta, and loses) and C2 (where Juno sides with junta); which one would play is determined by the player themselves during the ending itself.
• Late to the Tragedy: During the course of her travel, Juno would encounter several other places ravaged either by infected or the other humans; sometimes, she can learn what exactly happened from various notes and computer terminals.
  • By the time you arrive to West Greer power plant, it's completely abandoned, and in the hidden safehouse, you can find a corpse of some girl who'd committed suicide. By reading her suicide note, you'd learn that she was named Sarah Kane, and she was a worker on this power plant; realising what's gonna happen when the zombies finds her, she chose to die rather than let it happen.
  • Subway is entirely dark and filled with countless Crawlers (it's the first time you meet them, albeit not the last). Later you would find two dead security guards, and one alive (but insane); by reading the notes spread around, you would get the picture of how exactly the station turned into a hellhole.
  • When you arrive to the Cold Pines national park, you would see massacred camp, and a corpse of a ranger not far away from it. Reading the logs in the safehouse (which you unlock with said ranger's ID) reveals backstory behind those events, and tells why there're so many zombie dogs.
  • Juno would return to Brookside by the moment when it's already overrun, with zombies on the loose and many people being dead. She would soon catch up with survivors and learn about Gavin and Billy cooperating to take over the sanctuary, which ultimately resulted in what you see around when they turned on each other. You would find some extra horrors while exploring the now-overrun parts of Brookside.
• Lecture as Exposition: Dr. Peters gives Juno a lecture about how the Infection and zombie "evolution" works, and what's their end-goal: zombies' transformation stages, why they abduct women, and how the Hive is working. He also tells that the Hive isn't the final stage either: it's an egg of sort; and what is the final stage, can only be discovered by going to the University, as it's the only place they know where they can find yet-to-hatch Hive.
• Life Meter: The game lacks health points as such, but instead makes the player manage Morale (MP) and Hunger (HP) points. Of those, Morale is the closest player has to "health", as it symbolises Juno's willingness to keep struggling, and drains from certain traumatic events, including close encounters with enemies; player doesn't lose immediately when Morale drops to zero, instead, game over triggers when they gets caught while already having zero Morale. Morale can be replenished by using consumables, but those are rare; the main way to do so is by resting, which drains Hunger Points (Juno has maximum 200 HP at any moment, and must have above 100 to rest), and, during Prologue and Act 1, can trigger immediate game over if she sleeps while having 5 or more Infection.
• Lightning Bruiser:
  • Played With regarding Reptiles. While their basic speed is rather slow, they invariably shows up in flooded areas, where Juno can't run; and at walking speed, it's equal to Juno running away from Dogs or Runners. As such locations are also rather narrow, Juno has no option but to fight them — which isn't easy either, as they have whopping 5 HP. If they catch her, they deal less Morale damage than most enemies, but cause higher Infection.
  • Elite Hivelings are as fast as the Runners and as tough as the Reptiles, while also having One-Hit Kill attack; the group of those serves as the Wolfpack Boss.
  • Androids have just as much speed as Runners, and even more HP than Reptiles. The only weapons which can reliably kill them in one hit are melee weapons and upgraded shotgun, but androids are amongst the enemies you don't want to get close, due to their One-Hit Kill attack.
• The Load: The driving point of conflict between military and civilians; militaries refuses to feed civilians who don't contribute to survival of the base (read: sick and injured), giving only bare minimum of supplies which wouldn't feed everyone. Resolving this issue (by proving your worth and improving conditions in the civilian shelter without begging militaries for help) is one of requirements to get any ending above C.
  • One of the first conflicts occurs soon after arrival, when military provides just enough supplies to feed those who did some jobs in the shelter... which means everyone else has to starve. Juno temporarily resolves it by asking whether she'd earned extra rations for what she did on the Jamesway Bridge, and, when confirmed, requests those, so she can share them with the hungry people.
    Natasha: We need more supplies. You know that these aren't enough.
    Sergeant: Then, earn them. Or feed only those who contribute. No point sharing among people who don't deserve it.
  • As it's clear that conflict with sergeant wasn't an one-time occurrence, it gets suggested to make the shelter as independent as possible, so it wouldn't rely on militaries to do everything. This includes setting up a hospital and training paramedics (Sophia's task) to deal with sick people who can't work, and setting up work station (Cassie's task) to give recently-healed people some means to contribute and earn their rations. Sadly, conflict doesn't end just here, either, as some jerks continues abusing civilians just because, requiring to also install military police (Natasha's task).
• Lock and Key Puzzle: At several points, Juno has to search for the key or keycard to proceed.
  • In the Prologue, Juno has to restart the generator in West Greer, but it needs a keycard. It serves as tutorial to the mechanic, as the keycard is the room to the side.
  • In the Subway, Juno can only unlock the door which leads towards exit from a terminal, but for that, she has to find the password from it. The password can be obtained from the other terminal, which has its own password put in plain sight (the dude wasn't good with passwords). Then the player has to trade the key from exit from deranged guy David (who wants a pack of cigarettes).
  • To navigate Grand Hotel in the Downton, you have to free specific captives and use the "Plant Hearts" you get this way to open specific doors.
• Madden Into Misanthropy: Dryad from the University is the first Dryad to finish her incubation (Eva was taken out prematurely)... and she ended up in the hands of Dr. Feinstein and Dr. Zara, who used her for their experiment; you can actually read the logs in Feinstein's hideout and learn that those were... not exactly ethical. Firstly, they locked the Hive in the containment room, filling it with HAF-2 which kept killing any Hivelings until the Hive gave up on trying to free itself and concentrated on incubation. Then, when process was finished, they sucked out all air, almost suffocating newborn Dryad to weaken her, and then leaving just enough to survive. The Dryad is a telepath, so she knows what kind of people she's dealing with, and that they don't see her as a human being, only as a resource to use and discard. Much later, it would also be revealed that she wasn't captured by zombies; Feinstein did that, killing her father right in front of her and putting her into the Hive against her will. And Dr. Zara set this powder keg on fire by feeding her with her Eco-Terrorist propaganda.
• Make It Look Like an Accident:
  • Gavin can't shoot Juno; if next group finds the corpse with bullet wounds, he wouldn't be able to explain what the hell it was. Instead, he tries to make it look like she was snatched by the zombies, as it's both plausible and hard to check, plus if zombies actually attacks Juno, it may distract them from Gavin himself.
  • Reading the logs in the police HQ during Act 2 reveals that Gavin tried to dispose of the other participants of the outing whom he can't trust to be a part of his coup, passing it as the zombie attack; amongst them Natasha. It obviously failed, as you'd find Natasha alive and well long before you read this entry. Neither he succeeded at deception: as pointed in the same logs, unless infected suddenly learned how to use guns, it was an inside job: the guns used were police issue.
• Maximum HP Reduction: Begging the military for help with upgrading the shelter (instead of paying for it with "favours") predictably makes them demand very specific "payment"; the experience is so traumatic for Juno, it permanently reduces her maximum Morale.
• Mercy Kill: During operation in the Hive, Juno encounters several previously captured female soldiers; some can be rescued, some are too far gone (being merged with the plants and turned into living incubators) and can only be granted quick death.
• Mercy Rewarded: Helping Brookside survivors, both before and after evacuation, provides Juno with a boost to maximum Morale, as it shows her that not all hope is lost, and rewards with free supplies she wouldn't have otherwise. This is also the only way to get any ending above C.
• Metamorphosis. Fresh infectees are called "Runners", but as the fungal growth covers more and more of their body, they gradually become tougher, but slower (so-called "Walkers"), and gain ability for photosynthesis; alternatively, if they end up in some dark space, fungus drains the body of nutrients, crippling the body and creating "Crawlers". Both types eventually dies and decomposes, and that biomass assembles into a Hive. That's also why zombies captures women: Hive needs them to spread growth further, and to spawn more hivelings for its defence. Hives themselves are then used to transform specifically-chosen girls into Dryads.
• Mighty Glacier: Crawlers have 4 health (more than Walkers), and cause whopping 75 Morale damage (default maximum is 100), but they're slowest enemies in the game. What makes them dangerous is that they're always showing up in the dark rooms, and can smell Juno from a distance, so they generally notice you before you notice them.
• Military Coup: In both endings C and D, radicals amongst the military tries to perform a coup to depose civilian leaders of the new society, thinking that they deserve power better; in the ending C, they succeed, while in the ending D, too many other militaries sides with civilians, leaving them a minority which easily gets arrested and imprisoned for treason. In the ending E, they never takes the risk, likely too afraid to mess with General Hawke (as his absence in the other endings is stated as one of hte key factors why the coup happened in the first place).
• Mind Rape: Dryad in the University tries to assault Juno's mind via telepathy, in attempt to break her resistance.
• Multiple Endings: The story has several endings, marked with letters, ranging from "A" (the worst) to "E" (the best). Would it be utter apocalypse (ending A), purge and restart of civilisation (ending B), military dictatorship (ending C), uneasy stalemate (ending D) or new era of peace (ending E), depends entirely on the player's actions.
• Murderous Malfunctioning Machine: The final level lacks zombies; instead, Juno faces androids, who're equally hostile to both attackers and defenders, due to lacking "Friend-or-Foe" system.
• My God, What Have I Done?: If General Hawke wasn't convinced that, despite her halfway turning into Dryad, there's still humanity left in Eva, he would grow too desperate and try to use the cure on her anyway, in the blind hope that maybe it's gonna work, despite it being previously stated that it's likely gonna kill her — and it does, with the last thing he sees is the look of betrayal on her face. This proves too much for him, and he shoots himself in the head.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • At Stanton, the locals rebelled against the Suits out of protest for them reducing rations and opportunities to obtain more by doing various jobs (particularly, they no longer hire any unskilled laborers, so those may as well starve). All they achieved is to break the spare generator, break half the town and cause many people get killed or injured. It's also why Juno gets sent on the outing to restart a generator in West Greer.
  • Why there's so many zombie dogs in Cold Pines? In the wake of the outbreak, people started abandoning their dogs in the park, hoping that maybe they would somehow fend for themselves (by then, many people were no longer capable of supporting their pets). Guess what? The dogs did fend for themselves — by starting hunting on the people who gathered in the park after escaping from overrun cities; and the effects of Infection on their mental capacity made them quite efficient hunters. By the time you arrive in the park, there's exactly one non-dead person, and, had she stayed sane, she would've wished for death instead.
• No Fair Cheating: Zigzagged. Game has two types of cheats: cheat menu (accessible at any time from menu), and cheat room (accessible from the house where you begin the game), which works differently:
  • Cheat menu has cheats to add ammo (and melee weapons) and manage Juno's stats, and can be used liberally with no penalties.
  • Cheat room offers free weapons (including upgraded ones), batteries, details and military base's currency, as well as allows to complete all side quests, but has some limitations which it openly acknowledges:
    • There is a button to unlock all notes; if you click it, you'd instead get a mocking message from the developer, saying that it's not that easy, and if you want the best ending, gonna actually play the game and find them legitimately.
    • The only way to exit the cheat room is by skipping some parts of the game, with earliest part being West Greer. However, when you do this, you get cut off from the parts you skipped (officially, to avoid bugs due to missed event flags), and can't explore them, even to find missing notes. And the first note (necessary for the best ending) is before West Greer. You can safely use the room after doing Billy's errand, but by this point you'd already complete most of the Prologue.
• Nonstandard Game Over: Normally, the player loses if Juno gets caught by the enemies with zero Morale, or (during Act 1) tries to sleep while having 5 or more Infection. But there are some special cases:
  • Every zombie enemy (excluding Hivelings; those get different one instead) has once-per-game Room Full of Zombies situation, when you can run into a horde of those (so-called "swarm game-overs"), which triggers immediate game over with a different narration than if you simply run out of Morale. All of them can be either avoided or safely neutralised, in one way or another.
  • Attempt to take David's key by force leads to him attacking Juno, and ultimately turning her into his Sex Slave; given that he's showing the signs of succumbing to the Infection, it's gonna become even nastier than this very soon.
  • Approaching Kerry triggers her to immediately attack and infect Juno; the player does receive a warning to stay away, but the border isn't clearly marked.
  • Losing to "elite" Hivelings leads to instant game over instead of merely losing some Morale and gaining some Infection; Juno becomes a part of the Hive. It replaces usual "swarm" game over.
  • Going to sleep with too high Infection while at Cold Pines triggers different game over than doing the same in East Greer or Hamilton, as there're no human zombies, only zombie dogs.
  • Juno can survive up to two encounters with Dryad, but on the third defeat, she would be finally brainwashed, triggering game over.
  • Attempt to rescue Dryad's captives (who're so conveniently in the open and not guarded) leads to them attacking Juno and infecting her. This game over plays slightly differently if it happens after Dr. Zara gets captured.
  • Trusting Dr. Zara and giving her HAF-2 prototype leads to her shattering it, saying that humanity deserves being cast away as the dominant species. It leads to the apocalypse, as the Dryads ultimately overrun what's left of humanity. Dr. Zara is amongst those who were enslaved.
  • Losing to one of Feinstein's Androids leads to Juno being captured, and Feinstein fulfilling his plan, leading to the second-worst ending and ending the game immediately.
• No Ontological Inertia: Hivelings can't be killed permanently, as they fully heal soon afterwards. But if you destroy a Hive Node, all Hivelings connected to it would wither and die, and destroying the main Hive kills the entire system. Justified, as they're extension of the Hive, and Hive is the only thing keeping them alive.
• Not Always Evil: On the path to Golden Ending, Juno realises that Dryads aren't some evil alien creatures; they're still human enough to negotiate with them — one just has to try; surely, that Dryad they encountered before was murderous, but they also know that, before gaining all this power, she was Madden Into Misanthropy by the cruel experiments performed on her. She uses this knowledge to convince Hawke to give Eva a chance and free her from captivity: Dryad or not, she knows that he's her father, and trusts him. He reluctantly tries... and she, even after finishing the transformation, embraces him. This event leads to peace negotiations between two species and prevents the Forever War which happens in the endings D and C.
• Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: Before expiring, Dryad in the University tells Junot that humans are monsters who destroys the planet out of own greed and hubris. Juno wonders, whether she was truly evil, or just misguided in her hatred (she's basically repeating Dr. Zara's rhetoric). If she finds Dr. Zara's research, she confirms the latter (Dryads do have their humanity left in them, they just need a push to awake it).
• Notice This: Most (but not all) interactive objects are marked by sparkles (including stashes with items), and exits are often marked with big bright arrows.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: The Brookside sanctuary is run by the remnants of government (collectively called "the Suits", and universally despised), who provides people with jobs, and pays for them in food. In the Prologue, Juno (who run out of rations) goes to them to get something, only for them to demand the documents proving her qualification (knowing that those weren't amongst top-priority things during evacuation), on the loose justification that one dude tried to scam them by posing as researcher. Despite Juno already working for them in the past, and them being perfectly fine with it. Juno comments on the fact that, after the fricking apocalypse, she was fucked by petty bureaucracy, of all things. That's why she has to ask Billy for help.
  Juno: Damn it... Am I seriously being screwed over by petty bureaucracy in the middle of an apocalypse?!
• Once More, with Clarity:
  • Dr. Peters' exposition about the Infection repeats many points of Juno's narration from the game's opening scene, but now tells why it happened the way it happened.
  • Research logs in the Area 66 base retells past events, including what Juno came through, but from Feinstein's point of view, finally putting the missing pieces of the puzzle into place.
• One-Gender Race: All Dryads are feminine-lookng hermaphrodites; while first generation is entirely made of transformed human females, the same applies to any naturally-born Dryads.
• One-Hit Kill:
  • All three melee weapons deals 9 points of damage; the only enemy in the game who can survive it is the Dryad (having 10 HP), and she's a boss. Any other enemy would be destroyed in one hit.
  • Shotgun deals 5 point of damage, which is enough to kill even Reptile (second-toughest common enemy). Tactical shotgun can one-shot Androids, too.
  • Both Elite Hivelings and Androids, if they manage to successfully attack Juno, causes immediate game over.
• One-Man Army: It's stated that a single Dryad can wipe out entire squad of infantry with zero efforts; even if they have HAF-based ammo, they would only have a chance to fight back. Chances becomes more reasonable if not trying to attack Dryad on her territory, and instead make her fight in urban environment where she can't exploit her powers to get extra advantage.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted, several characters who never interacts with each other shares surnames, which may or may not indicate them being related (the plot happens on relatively small territory):
  • Natasha and Sarah share surname Kane; Sarah has moved to West Greer shortly before the outbreak, and at least some of the cops in Brookside used to live there before it was overrun.
  • One of the cops attacked by Gavin soon after the outing in West Greer is named Jules Freemantle; he shares surname with Leslie Freemantle, David's co-worker on the Easter Greer subway station, who died from unknown infection.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The Infection was originally caused by parasitic fungi infecting the crops, and then humans eating the food produced from those; the parasite targets the brain, but can't actually take it over until the host gets weakened by some other infection or injury. Once it intercepts the body functions, it starts gradually covering the host with fungal growths, which slows it down, but gives heavy protection, as well as allows to quickly "patch up" any wounds. Once zombified, people becomes contagious: scratches or contact with body fluids would expose the victim to strengthened strain, which would overwhelm their immune system. The zombies can sustain themselves via photosynthesis, albeit they would still try to eat flesh if have a chance. Only males turns into actual zombies, and they always attack the other males with intent to infect or kill them; females instead undergoes mental degradation and become consumed with desire for reproduction: the parasite needs them as the incubators and relay nods. Male zombies eventually dies and gets recycled into fuel to create the Hive, which is the entire purpose for the Infection's existence: there, carefully-selected female children gets turned into Dryads, the ultimate life form intended to surpass humans. The Infection also targets dogs and alligators, but first ones seems to the tools to infect more humans, and latter are evolutionary dead-end.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": The player, when accessing computers in the Subway, can read correspondence between David and Leslie. According to it, David was publicly reprimanded for using "123abc" as his password by his boss, Judy Taka, who was tasked with improving security by installing decent passwords on every terminal. The new password is "die judy" (blatantly violating another instruction, not using spaces), which he put on a sticky note and attached to a monitor (which is how you access it).
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Juno deals with Gavin by using the security alarm to send Runners into the section of the abandoned Police HQ, where they massacre both Gavin and his few surviving corrupt goons.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • One of requirements for the best ending is to find all 8 notes (not counting Sarah's suicide note, which is a part of sidequest), which are spread across the game. Due to earlier areas becoming inaccessible past certain points, notes must be retrieved before passing them, with some being easier to miss than the others:
    • Very first note can be found as early as in the Prologue, but the only way to gain it is by refusing Billy's advances and doing an errand for him. Due to the way the cheat room works, using it before doing the errand (read: almost entirety of the Prologue) would also skip the note.
    • There are three notes which must be retrieved before going to Cold Pines; two in Subway are across essential path anyway, but one in the Hospital is in a side room which player may easily miss if they just grab the medkit for Geoff and run with it (especially since it's in a small room with zombie inside, and no other useful supplies).
    • Two of the notes can only be retrieved while doing side quests just before evacuation; both requires going out of your way to actually find them, and taking major risk.
    • The final note is in the University; it has to be retrieved before the player kills Dryad and checks on her body, because as soon as the player does that, Dr. Feinstein would reveal his true colours and backstab Juno, automatically leading to the final level.
  • Once the player moves to Cold Pines, helping Donny to find out what's happened to Sarah, and Barton what's happened with survivors he was trading with becomes impossible, cutting away the best ending (which requires all side quests being completed).
  • Cassie, Natasha and Sophia each have a side tasks how to make the upcoming evacuation of Brookside safer; not completing all three before proceeding with evacuation locks the player in the bad ending.
  • During the operation in Downtown, Thompson would ask to find survivors who went missing; the player is free to leave and return as much as they want while operation is ongoing, but once it's finished, you can only leave the area permanently; if you didn't finish the quest yet, it would be failed, locking you out of best ending. Fortunately, all hostiles dies once you deal with the Hive.
  • If you plan to get any ending above C, you have to fully upgrade the shelter before finishing the assignment in the University, as you wouldn't get a chance to return afterwards.
  • Looking for Dr. Zara's research for General Hawke is necessary to obtain the best ending, but it must be done before you kill the Dryad and check on her in the main campus, as it's when Dr. Feinstein reveals his true colours. You then have to give that data to General Hawke; if you missed the chance to give it to him at the base, you can do it during the final mission, but it must be done before proceeding to the final push.
• Plant Mooks: Hivelings (also known as the "grunts") aren't zombified humans; the Hive grows them as needed, and recycles them when they dies.
• Playable Epilogue: Every ending, after the credits, allows the player to wander around and see for themselves how things went afterwards.
• Point of No Return: At several point, the player gets warned that there's no way to turn back and retrieve the missed loot or complete missed side quest once they proceed.
  • Before using the cheat room, player gets warned that they wouldn't be able to return if they enter, and given a chance to reconsider.
  • Once the player goes back to the Suits HQ and gets recruited for outing, there's no way to go back and stockpile missed supplies. Juno wouldn't return there until Act 2, by which point sanctuary would be mostly overrun.
  • Moving to Cold Pines on a boat cuts off everything in the previous areas. Likewise, once Juno leaves Cold Pines on a car, she leaves behind whatever she didn't pick up, including one of the notes.
  • Before evacuation to the military base, the player gets a chance to stockpile and complete the side quests to improve the chances for successful evacuation; not doing this cuts those options off, as well as the better endings.
  • Before leaving the Jamesway Bridge, the player gets warned that they wouldn't be able to return. Unlike the other similar cases, it has no plot-critical items, so the player would only miss on supplies they could've recovered.
  • Before leaving the Downtown, you would be warned that you wouldn't return there, and that any ongoing quests in this area (namely, Thompson's quest to look for survivors) would be failed.
  • You can go back and forth as much as you want during operation in the University, but as soon as you complete your task there, Juno would be captured by one of the scientists backstabbing her, and the game would proceed to the final level. If the player didn't give General Hawke's Zara's research yet (which is obtainable in the University), they can do it now, but all other tasks are forfeit: if you didn't do them before, then it's already too late.
  • Once you exit the laboratory you start in at the Area 66 base, you can't return back.
• Poisoned Weapons: When Hivelings attacks with intent to kill rather than capture, they use strong poison which not only paralyses the body, but can cause cardiac arrest (that's why Juno has to use adrenaline to help some victims).
• Posthumous Character: There are multiple plot-important characters who're dead or worse by the time you learn about their existence:
  • Sarah Kane chose to shoot herself rather than be captured by zombies; you can find her suicide note, and tell about her fate to her fiance, who feels relief that at least it was painless (he spent months waiting for her in vain, expecting the worst), and then follows her into death.
  • Out of several named characters in the Subway, only David is still alive, yet insane; one of his higher-ups, Hansen, bleed to death due to injuries sustained during attack (but not before sealing the station to prevent all those hordes from spreading further), his friend Leslie succumbed to Infection and died, and Anna was snatched by the zombies due to David locking the door on her to save his skin.
  • The log Juno finds in the Cold Pines safehouse tells about the team of rangers (Bryce, Sullivan and Sophie O'Hara), and Porter family which agreed to help them. Bryce was killed early on, leaving Sullivan in charge, and then operation to gas the dogs in the cabin went poorly and resulted in Mr. Porter being killed and Mrs. Porter snatched; Sophie was captured too, but briefly released, so the dogs could track her to the safehouse. Sullivan (who initially fled in panic) tried to go out and help Sophie; all that has to be said about it is that you loot his ID to enter safehouse from his mutilated corpse.
  • By the time you learn about Richard Harvey (the head of sanctuary), he's already dead, torn apart by the angry mob during Gavin's coup.
  • While exploring the dangerzone, you can find the corpse of a little girl (nametag on her doll identifies her as Wendy), and read the diary which confirms that she starved to death. Close nearby is her zombified father, and the corpse of his friend who died protecting Wendy.
• Practical Currency: During the Acts 1 and 2, booze and cigarettes serves as a currency of sort, as Juno can exchange them for ammo. In the Act 3, they cease to serve as such, and instead can be sold for Base Points (virtual "currency" which represents Juno's standing with the military).
• Press X to Die:
  • Whenever you go to sleep during Act 1, you receive a warning that trying it with high Infection is a bad idea. The player may try to do it anyway, only to get immediate game over.
  • If you enter inside after Donny shoots himself, you'd lose some Morale when Juno would see his corpse. There's no reason to do that, as he already gave you all his supplies, so it's either greed or unhealthy curiosity.
  • There are plenty of options which only hurts the player, but some are blatant and obvious traps which leads to well-deserved Nonstandard Game Over if taken:
    • In the school, there's a locked door to restroom with "Don't open; dead inside" written on it; the player even receives a warning when they attempt to unlock it. If they go inside anyway, they would find out that survivors locked inside truckload of zombies who promptly ambush Juno with no chance to escape.
    • David is clearly deranged and highly unstable, and gets very angry when he thinks that someone may try to steal his precious key. The player may try to steal it anyway (rather than negotiate with him; he readily trades it for cigarettes), which leads to him attacking Juno and easily overpowering.
    • If you read the log in Cold Pines safehouse, you would learn that the dogs which massacred the camp you previously encountered have set up their lair in the old cabin on the lakeside. While you do need to go there in order to obtain the fuel for your car, nothing stops you from going inside without doing what Sullivan failed and gassing them first; as may be expected, you would never come back.
    • In Kerry's house, you have to read Kerry's diary to find out the password from the computer to unlock the locked door (it's her mother's maiden name). Once in the bedroom, you immediately hear strange sounds and see Kerry's portrait, which clearly shows that she was mutated into human/canine hybrid; it's even more blatant if you also saw security footage from her computer. Nothing stops you from coming closer in attempt to help her, only to get immediately attacked by both Kerry and Rex, and share Kerry's fate.
    • The door to evidence storage room has the remote alarm right outside, which redirects the zombies there further down the corridor. The player may try to check where the zombies went, and enter interrogation room... and promptly get attacked by all the zombies which gathered in that room.
    • The terminal which you must use to send zombies after Gavin has an option to send those zombies into your room; if you try it anyway, turns out that only alarm in Gavin's hideout is still operational.
    • By the time the player reaches Jamesway Bridge, they already know that if there's a button close to a door, better check it first; this one reveals that control room is flooded, and can't be un-flooded without a keycard. You may try to enter control room anyway, and get an immediate game over when you run into a pack of gators. Even if you somehow survive, Juno would comment that the panel wouldn't work because of water, so you still have to backtrack and do it the intended way (with unflooding also removing the gators).
• Press X to Not Die: When the player gets attacked by an enemy, a QTE triggers to push them off, giving Juno a chance to either kill it or run away. However, this mechanic has 30 seconds cooldown. This mechanic works for every enemy, including the Dryad and Androids.
• The Purge: By the time Juno returns to the sanctuary, Gavin had killed a lot of people who didn't side with him:
  • During the ill-fated outing in West Greer, he sent Natasha and her group into ambush, where their transports were gunned down by Gavin's co-conspirators. He failed to actually kill her, and her group later rejoined the survivors in Brookside when Gavin's coup collapsed on itself. He also planned to kill Dr. Peters and Sophia, but they insisted on going with Natasha to gather more samples, which saved their lives. In light of this, it also becomes clear why he chose to backstab Juno in the first place: she's not on the plan, and he can't take any risks.
  • Gavin imprisoned, tortured, interrogated and then killed most cops who refused to submit to him.
  • After successful coup, Gavin and Billy disposed of all captured Suits, including former leader of the sanctuary, Richard Harvey.
• Puzzle Boss: As the Dryad can't be permanently defeated by conventional means, the goal is to find a way to poison her with HAF-2b. This requires using a boiler, which has to be turned on first — all while being pursued by the Dryad in almost utter darkness.
• Random Drop: While some sources of the loot are fixed, most would randomly give you cigarettes, beer or whiskey (some people, namely Barton, accepts it in return for ammo, and later those can traded for "base point"), bleach (used to get rid of fungi blocking the way), desinfectant (lowers Infection), painkillers (used to restore Morale) or food.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: In the ending C, some sane military officers, like Lindsay and Thompson Taylor, were reassigned far away from their units, on some minor and insignificant positions. It's still better than what they did to the opposition amongst civilians...
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: All infected dogs have glowing red eyes. Kerry and Juno, in Kerry's Nonstandard Game Over scene, gains those too as part of the mutation.
• Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: It's of no use to shoot zombies anywhere but the head: the wounds would be quickly sealed by fungus. But destroying the brain destroys the parasite driving the zombie.
• Revive Kills Zombie: When Dr. Peters manages to use the HAF-2 research to make viable cure, turns out that it can't help those whose Infection has progressed too far; it would kill them instead, shutting down their body organs. This includes Dryads, so if General Hawke wouldn't be convinced that Eva turning into Dryad wouldn't strip her of her humanity, he would try to use it on her out of desperation — with disastrous consequences.
• Reviving Enemy: The Hive, when threatened, would create Hivelings for its protection, repeatedly.
  • Juno would run into Hivelings during operation in the Downtown (they're the only enemy she would encounter there). Hivelings can't die for real for as long as the Hive Nod controlling them is alive; they would respawn 5 seconds later. But if the Nod dies (or the Hive itself gets destroyed), they perish permanently.
  • Defied by Dr. Feinstein when trying to make the Hive he managed to capture mature without attacking: he put it into containment filled with HAF-2, which keeps killing any Hivelings spawned; just as he expected, the Hive was intelligent enough to stop this useless bruteforcing, and concentrated on incubating instead.
• Room Full of Zombies: Every non-boss zombie (excluding Swarmlings, who instead have unique game over during boss fight against "elites") has exactly one Nonstandard Game Over caused by running into a room full of this kind of zombies; all such cases can be either avoided or neutralised:
  • In East Greer school, there's a locked door with "don't open; dead inside" warning. Unfortunately, if Juno disregards the warning and own bad feeling, and opens it anyway, turns out that zombies are pretty much alive...
  • In the Subway, there's a shotgun in some dead end. Unfortunately, attempt to go there leads to floor breaking, and Juno falling somewhere deep and getting surrounded by Crawlers; many Crawlers. It doesn't happen if the player previously found the note about that part of subway being in the state of disrepair, as Juno would just jump over safely, otherwise, there's no chance to avoid it, and it would catch the player by surprise if they try to grab it.
  • During Cold Pines level (which concludes the Act 1), Juno eventually encounters a building which suspiciously still has light coming from its windows; if you read the logs in the safehouse, you'd know that it's a lair of the local dogs. If Juno tries to enter anyway, she would promptly get ambushed by huge dog pack. You do need to get inside, but only after dealing with the dogs via Deadly Gas.
  • The Brookside's police station's evidence storage is full of Runners, who immediately ambush Juno if she enters inside without redirecting them to interrogation room via remote alarm right outside; afterwards, the player may enter the interrogation room.
  • Early in the Act 3, Juno participates in the operation on the Jamesway Bridge, which needs to be lowered. Unfortunately, if she's not careful, she may end up in the flooded room full of mutant alligators.
• Rule of Three: The player can survive two encounters with Dryad; third one would be invariably fatal, as Dryad would finally succeed at breaking Juno's willpower via her psychic powers.
• Run or Die:
  • Hivelings can be temporarily stopped, but not destroyed. They only die for real if you destroy the Hive they're attached to. So, the best course of action is to avoid them, as, while frail, they hit like a truck, and ammo is highly limited.
  • Dryad is easily the most dangerous enemy in the game, being able to easily catch up with you and annihilate you; even if you put her down (which wouldn't be easy), she would soon regenerate back and resume pursuit. Finding the way to kill her is part of the challenge.
• Sanity Slippage: Kerry's diary is divided into 10 chapters, from earlier days, to just shortly before your arrival. The last couple of entries reveals that she was infected by Rex and shows early signs of succumbing to the Infection; by that time, she starts using somewhat weird choice of words, with the Entry 10 in particular also having numerous spelling errors and missing spaces. Much later, it would be revealed that intellect degradation is amongst symptoms of dog-transmitted strain of Infection: Kerry was doomed even before Rex overwhelmed her.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • The dark, but empty corridor in the Subway with sudden free shotgun on the other side? Try to go there without knowing of the damaged floor, and floor would break as soon as Juno steps on it, leading to her falling into some room below filled with Crawlers and without any exits.
  • Attempt to save Dryad's captives (who lies in the open, completely unprotected) results in them attacking Juno and infecting her; turns out, they're just too far gone by this point.
• Schrödinger's Gun: If you resist Gavin and take his gun, Sarah's gun would be rusty and broken beyond repair, providing only ammo; if you don't, Sarah's gun would be perfectly operational. This is to ensure that the player wouldn't get two pistols and screw the scripts.
• Sewer Gator: The reason why all Reptiles (mutant alligators) are in the sewers, and not in the wild — because those are mutant sewer gators; parasite only bothers with mutating animals because it makes easier to spread Infection on humans (or, failing that, kill them).
• Sex for Services: At several points, Juno and/or her friends may pay with body for certain favours, as "easier" solution to the current problem. It's always strictly harmful option, both in short-terms and long-terms; begging the military for aid in improving the shelter has especially bad negative effects.
• Sex Slave:
  • David, already not exactly nice guy, went completely insane after what he survived in the Subway. If Juno tries to take away his key by force, he beats her up and ties, to use as his playtoy. It ends the game prematurely.
  • The ending C has radicals amongst the military overthrowing civilian leaders when they opposed their brutality, and condemning them to serving as public slaves for the military. If Juno tries to defend them, she shares their fate, otherwise, she has to comfort herself with the lie that it was "necessary" and that "they were punished for endangering the war efforts".
• Sexual Extortion: Billy agrees to do fake documents for Juno, but only if she would "please" him (he doesn't care about just getting more food rations, but he has... certain interest to Juno herself). When she understandably reacts with disgust, he offers alternative solution: go to Stanton through the sewers and bring back a package; choice is hers. Player may do either, but actually submitting to Billy not only drains Morale, but also cuts off the best ending.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Shotgun has the highest base damage amongst firearms, allowing to kill any enemy save for Dryad and Androids in one hit. Upgraded shotgun one-shots Androids, too.
• Shout-Out:
  • The locked restroom has "Don't open; dead inside" written on the door. Unlike Rick, Juno may try to actually open it. Even the map's internal name is a reference, as it's called "High School of the Dead".
  • Apparently, Thompson is a Monty Python fan, as he makes several quotes of their works; he asks Juno to not tell anyone, especially his sister.
• Shower of Love: The mix of having a first hot shower since the outbreak, dealing with gentleman instead of another jerk for once, and, of course, the alcohol consumed, leads to Juno trying to seduce Barton while taking a shower (they agreed that he would take it once she finishes, but she calls him prematurely). He tries to resist, refusing to take advantage of her being drunk, but ultimately gives in. This intimacy with someone loving and caring for once greatly increases Juno's resolve, permanently increasing max Morale.
• Stealth-Based Game: While the player eventually stockpiles enough weapons to fight their way through most enemies, generally best course of action is to just avoid confrontations altogether. This, obviously, doesn't work with Androids, as you can't avoid them, and they stand between you and your goal.
• Suddenly Voiced: Dryad in University has all her lines voiced; no character before or after her does that.
• Survival Horror: The story takes place after a Zombie Apocalypse, with Juno having to survive in zombie-infested ruins of now-overrun towns, carefully managing limited ammo, hunger/morale and flashlight batteries and avoiding being snatched or infected by zombies (and sometimes humans who're worse than zombies). Sometimes, Juno's adventures brings her to the dark, narrow tunnels with the slow, but resilient pursuers lurking just out of sight, and to the flooded undergrounds where she can't even run, while the danger is always close...
• Taking You with Me:
  • When Billy's attempt to force Gavin to fulfil his end of bargain ended with Gavin gunning down him and his gang, Billy detonated the bombs he preinstalled across the sanctuary, which allowed all kinds of zombies to breach it. By the time you reach the former Suits HQ, only Gavin himself and few his supporters are still alive, holing up in one of the rooms, while mortally wounded Billy is bleeding in the janitor closer.
  • When asked why he's helping Juno with taking out Gavin, by giving her the keycard she needs to send zombies after him, Billy says that he's about to expire, but he can avenge his death by Juno's hands.
• Technically-Living Zombie: Zombies aren't undead; their bodies are alive, while their brain is controlled by the parasite. Their bodies gradually gets consumed by fungi, which then dissolves them to fuel creation of the Hive.
• Teleporting Keycard Squad: As soon as you restart water treatment plant, several Runners spawns on your way to exit: the noise attracted the zombies.
• Tempting Fate: The final note is from the dean of University, who took his mute daughter with him, thinking that it's the safest place for her, while he was participating in experiments to stop the Infection; he claims that with their supplies, they can last for years. By the time you arrive there, he's dead, University is overrun, and said daughter is that same Dryad you're facing.
• Time Skip: All endings takes place several years after conclusion of the main story.
• Torn Apart by the Mob: According to Cassie, the first thing Gavin did after taking over the Suits HQ is to give over every captured Suit to the angry mob from Stanton, who see the Suits as the source of their problems; they were promptly lynched, with the former leader of the sanctuary, Richard Harvey (who made the last attempt at negotiations), in particular, being literally torn apart, limb by limb.
  Cassie: Funny how sometimes an angry mob of regular humans will do way worse to you than infected monsters...
• Tragic Monster:
  • If you read Kerry's diary, you would learn that she has a dog named Rex who was heavily protective of her after the outbreak, even refused to eat until she eats first, and later went out for hunting. But you just know that things aren't gonna end well when diary mentions Rex being wounded (you already encountered plenty of zombie dogs before). Sure enough, the rest of diary describes how he turned into a zombie, slowly, being aware that something is wrong with him and trying to resist, or, failing that, warn Kerry to stay away, feeling that the danger now comes from himself. Then he succumbs. All this time, Kerry (who already lost everyone but Rex) is unaware just what's going on and why her fateful dog is suddenly betraying her.
  • One of the zombies you can encounter in Brookside is a father, who, despite recently being zombified, still has some sanity left. He reacts if he sees Juno with the doll which belonged to his daughter Wendy (by the time Juno finds her, she's dead from starvation), and rushes to check on Wendy instead of attacking Juno... and then uses his last strength of will to beg to being killed.
  • The Dryad from University, once you read Feinstein's research logs, becomes hard to not sympathise with. She wasn't captured by the zombies; Feinstein killed her father right in front of her (surprisingly, he wasn't okay with idea to use his daughter as guinea pig), and forcibly put her into artificially-created Hive; in fact, when you first step into the University, Dryad would stand near his coffin. Feinstein then grew her in extremely horrific conditions, and performed cruel experiments on her. Zara, meanwhile, whispered her poisonous lies into the girl's ears, hoping to use her as a tool against Feinstein and anti-Infection efforts. Neither takes into account that she's a telepath. While she does believe in Zara's Eco-Terrorist cause and that humanity should be stopped, she doesn't see her as a friend, and easily betrays. Not even Juno finds her truly evil, despite being directly threatened by her.
• Unfinished, Untested, Used Anyway: The androids never were finished, lacking proper Friend-or-Foe system and thus attacking everything that moves (obeying only the person holding special beacon, which are in limited supply due to safety concerns), yet Dr. Feinstein still ordered to release them as the last ditch attempt to buy time to launch ICBM with weaponised HAF-2... and they proceeded with attacking everything that moves. One of survivors defects to Hawke's people and tells about this, but Hawke says that he has zero compassion for them.
• Unfriendly Fire: Gavin ordered to shoot at his own convoy, to get rid of the officers he can't trust (amongst them Natasha), and passed it as the zombie attack. It didn't quite work, but it became a moot point when he started an open coup.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: If the player forces Juno into (avoidable) traumatic situations, it always severely penalises them:
  • Billy (whom Juno openly hates and asks for help out of desperation) offers two options how she can pay for his assistance in gaining the documents she needs, one involves "servicing" him, another involves doing errand job; taking errand job is part of requirement for the Golden Ending, while other option drains 50 Morale (out of default 100).
  • Submitting to Gavin drains 50 Morale; fighting to the end not only costs you nothing, but gives a free pistol and extra ammo.
  • Military despises civilians, thinking them as The Load, and refuses to share and assist in improving civilian shelter. Juno can beg for help (even after a warning that it's not a good idea), or work hard to earn respect; guess which option penalises maximum Morale (as the military demands very specific kind of "payment") and locks you in a bad ending, and which makes everyone happy and rewards the player.
• The Virus:
  • Called simply "the Infection", the disease exists as both driving force of the plot and as actual gameplay mechanic.
    • The disease (caused by microscopic fungus) originally spread when the once-dormant parasite was accidentally disturbed and infected the crops in South America, which then were distributed across the world. The parasite is incapable of hurting its host right away, but instead hides in their brain, waiting till something else weakens them (injury, other disease...), which allows it to take the body over. Men turn into your typical zombies: rabid and attacking anyone on sight which isn't them, to either kill or spread disease, while women become sex-crawing and gradually go insane; either can spread the Infection further via body fluids (blood, saliva, etc). The true purpose of those "zombies" is even more sinister: men are used as organic fuel to grow a Hive, and women as the Hive's incubators, to produce its defenders; the ultimate goal of the Hive is to hatch a Dryad, created from abducted and carefully transformed female children.
    • The game tracks Juno's level of Infection, representing it as the scale from 0 to 10. When the infection level reaches at least 5, Juno may occasionally lose control over herself, even in the middle of the battle, which may be extremely dangerous. During Act 1, there's also another risk: attempt to sleep with high Infection leads to immediate game over. It can be partially removed with desinfectants (common consumables), or fully by suppressants (rare consumables), but generally the best protection is to simply avoid it altogether. Every enemy spreads it on contact, with some causing extra Infection.
  • As the countermeasure against the Infection, the special virus (Hyperevolutionary Antiparasite Formula, or just HAF for short) was created; idea is that, once project is complete, the virus would be capable of catch up with constantly-evolving Infection, and destroy it. It goes through multiple stages of development:
    • First stage, HAF-1, simply doesn't work, being too weak at this stage. However, it's this weak form which Feinstein uses to create vaccine from it, which becomes crucial for his plans later.
    • Feinstein continues working on HAF on his own, and makes it actually work... and also makes it extremely lethal to humans (not even gas mask ensures enough protection): the virus, int the current state, can't tell apart infected and "healthy" humans, due to similarities in DNA. Feinstein has to weaken it, which makes it possible to actually study it, but also renders it incapable of spreading around.
    • When Dr. Feinstein manages to improve it using the samples received from Dr. Peters (creating HAF-2b), it gets used against Dryad when Juno helps him to spread it around University. He then further improves it with Dryad's genetic material, making it capable of survive in the atmosphere, and tries to use it as a weapon of mass destruction (not caring about human casualties); stopping him is the goal on final level.
    • If Feinstein gets stopped, research gets continued, but it gets discovered that even after resolving issue with lethality to humans, it still remains poisonous to infected, Dryads included. Whether Dr. Peters would focus on weaponising it further, or improving the cure, depends on the ending the player achieves.
• Was Once a Man: All Dryads were originally female children, abducted and put into incubators, where they gradually undergo transformation and emerge fully-adult. They do keep some traces of original personalities, which can be reawakened if they meet the persons who used to know them, and gets approached with love rather than hatred and fear.
• We Have Reserves: Military junta in the ending C2 has little regards for casualties.
  Soldier: Alright team, huddle close and listen up! We get one shot and one shot only! Team A will advance as Team B flanks and Team C provides covering fire! We expect to lose Team A completely! This is a necessary sacrifice for us to take down the enemy asset! Your name and legacy will be honoured forever! Be brave! Be valiant! Now - Draw ballots for who goes in Team A!
• We Used to Be Friends: Feinstein and Peters were friends before the outbreak; it doesn't get elaborated upon, but it's rather clear that Peters was hurt by revelation of Feinstein's goals and methods, judging by how he talks to him during the trial.
• Wham Line: At Fort Patton, Dr. Peters reveals that everyone is infected; the parasite is already within every human, but can't overcome them until they either grow weak from some other illness or injury, or come into contact with body fluids from the zombie (saliva, blood, etc).
  Dr. Peters: I did not think disseminating that information would have been helpful. After all, it does nothing but spread needless panic. Juno... Everyone is infected. The entire human population. From the first days of the outbreak, it spread like wildfire.
• What the Hell, Hero?: General Hawke understandably gets called out on not warning about what to expect in the Downtown, during attack on active Hivemind, as it costed many lives and nearly killed Juno herself. He tells that he didn't encounter the Hivelings (Eva was so close to completing her incubation, the Hive risked to redirect all resources to that instead of defence, which was a fatal mistake), so he was caught by surprise just as Juno; but she then tells that he knew what the Hive is doing to humans, yet didn't warn Juno, which could've resulted in her killing Ellie had she started incubating. He has nothing to say to it, other than that he takes all the fault for this, but it was his only shot to find a way to save his daughter.
• Wolfpack Boss: When the player reaches the Hive, they have to fight five "elite" Hivelings. Those move faster and have twice as much HP, but wouldn't regenerate once killed. The player has to defeat all five, while having limited space for mobility, and no right for mistake.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Geoff blames himself for being too late to save his wife, but Juno comforts him, saying that he did everything in his power.
  Juno: At the very least — she believed in you and waited for you till the very end. And you met that expectation, no matter how long it took. That means something.
  Geoff: Yes. I have to look on the bright side. Be strong, and live on. In her memory. Thank you, Juno.
• You Are in Command Now:
  • In the endings D and E, due to General Hawke either committing suicide, shutting himself with his daughter or retiring, major Lindsay Taylor gets assigned to "temporarily" replace him; after Time Skip, she's still holding that position, despite never being formally promoted.
  • As Dryads had no leadership to begin with, Eva gets chosen as their representative due to having both connections and motivation. She's frequently addressed as "Dryad princess".
• Zerg Rush: Dogs often come in packs, which compensates for them being killable with one shot: it's enough if at least one reaches you and successfully attacks, and struggle has a cooldown.
• Zombie Apocalypse: The story takes place at least several months after the Infection destroyed most of humanity and forced humans out of large cities.

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