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Paint the Town Red is a Beat 'em Up video game by South East Games that is best described as Voxel Road House (1989) as directed by Quentin Tarantino. The game revolves around the player walking into various locations and gorily murdering everyone inside in a massive, brutal Bar Brawl, taking out bystanders, musicians, DJs and the obligatory back room full of shady crime lords.

This PC game entered Steam Early Access on October 13th, 2015. The current build has five levels available in the main Scenario mode: a Biker Bar, a Disco, a Prison, a Pirate cove (which comes in Day and Night variants), and a Saloon; a sandbox, and a level editor with access to user-made levels via Steam Workshop.

A Rogue Like mode, known as "Beneath", adds in new weapons, enemies, and bosses for you to brutalize.

There's also an arena mode that functions as sort of a survival mode where you have to fight your way through increasingly difficult levels within a gladiatorial arena; either through one of five preset challenges with a limited set of levels that you have to complete in a single life, or an endless mode where enemies and weapons continuously spawn in and you have to last as long as you can.


Paint the Town Red provides examples of:

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    General Tropes 
  • Absurdly Sharp Blade: Taken to its logical conclusion, as even a basic cleaver can dismember in a single swing.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: The Shockwave sends any enemies (except bosses) flying, making it powerful (and often hilarious) against large groups of enemies. However, it does no damage unless it causes them to hit a ceiling, fall off a tall ledge or into a death pit, and the survivors will aggro to you.
  • Barbell Beating: The Prison scenario features barbells and dumbbells that can be used as weapons.
  • Bloody Hilarious: You can smash people's heads into powder with (among other things) a ham leg, or play soccer with severed heads.
  • Blown Across the Room: Firearm kills often send enemies flying a dozen yards backwards, with splattery results if they impact a wall.
  • Boring, but Practical: Running up to an enemy, kicking them to knock them over, and pummeling them until they get up (or running away if it's a large group) is a very reliable strategy. This doesn't work on bosses, though.
  • Breakable Weapons: Most objects across a typical level's environment can be picked up and used as weapons, and will break after a determined amount of uses.
  • Bullet Time: Activates whenever the player uses Berserk or Smite.
  • The Brute: The Solitary Prisoner, the boss of the Prison level, although it's possible to make him friendly. Good luck finding out how, though.
  • Checkpoint Starvation:
    • Dying forces you to restart the level, and there's no way to heal. While the Scenarios are short and fair enough that this isn't a big deal, user-made levels can be very long and filled with hordes of enemies, possibly resulting in tedious exercises in trial-and-error. The addition of health altars from Beneath to the Editor mitigates this somewhat in the few user levels that use them.
    • If you thought this was bad in the main game, it's even worse in Arena mode. While you are restored to full health in each successive level of a challenge, you only get one life to complete the entire run; if you die and fail a level at ANY point, you have to start the challenge all over again, and considering that most of the levels have you facing increasingly unfair odds (e.g. the final level of challenge 1 has every single boss from the scenarios attacking you all at the same time, while you get nothing but chairs, bottles, and weight racks to defend yourself with). This happens A LOT.
  • Chef of Iron: There's a trio of chefs in the kitchen of the Biker Bar. They're all tougher than your average bystander, are armed with cutting utensils like meat cleavers, and have no qualms about using them on you.
  • Chunky Salsa Rule: While your enemies are often Made of Iron, mutilation of any body part except the arms (unless they lose both of them in that case) is (almost) always a guaranteed kill for them.
  • Combat Cue Stick: Cue sticks are a prominent weapon in the Biker Bar scenario.
  • Combat Pragmatism: This is an encouraged strategy in the game, use whatever you can get your hands on as a weapon and don't be afraid to fight dirty.
  • Contractual Boss Immunity: Bosses cannot be knocked over, making the KO Kick and Shockwave useless against them.
  • Determinator: Your enemies aren't about to let things like missing limbs or faces get in the way of kicking your ass (or the ass of whoever's closest if they aren't coming after you in particular).
  • Divide and Conquer: The Prison is the official scenario that properly introduces the mechanic of enemy factions (after being only used in small groups for the Biker Bar and the Disco), represented as opposing prison gangs and the prison guards, who will not infight (or at least until the numbers wean out enough). The player can take advantage of this system by allying themselves with a gang, accomplished by saving one of their members from a shiv in one of the cells before the brawl starts.
  • Elite Mook: Every level has one. They are easily noticeable (usually) by their appearance, and they do considerably more damage per hit. They also take quite a beating - it's not uncommon to beat them until you can see their skull and/or their ribcage before they go down.
  • Escalating Brawl: As soon as you throw the first blow or wander into a boss area, the entire area (or at least part of it if the map is huge enough) will immediately erupt into a massive, chaotic brawl, even if you started fighting in one of the backrooms or other hidden location.
  • Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: Even bystanders aren't above grabbing chairs, broken bottles or even swords and whaling on each other with them.
  • Everything Trying to Kill You: Even if you didn't provoke them, everyone in the level will eventually drop everything and come after you.
  • Exact Words: There is a mod that makes everyone die in one hit. Everyone. note 
  • Featureless Protagonist:
    • You can see your character's arms, but nothing is seen about them in more detail unless you play with the "Top Down" perspective, at which they simply appear to look like any typical Brawler. In earlier versions of the game, they didn't have a character model at all.
    • The closest thing the player character has ever had to actual characterization was in the game's early demo featuring solely an early version of the Biker Bar, where their reasoning to kill the bikers is because they believe the latter are surrounding them (although this is never made clear), as they state on a phone chat with someone else in the intro.
  • Frying Pan of Doom: Frying pans are among the many items you can use as weapons.
  • Game-Breaking Bug: Enemies have an annoying habit of clipping into walls when they get knocked down and getting stuck there, which can potentially render the level unbeatable and force you to restart. This can be especially frustrating since this bug occurs most often in huge user-made levels with upwards of 200 enemies, and you won't realize there are missing enemies until you've already killed everyone else.
    • Thankfully, this seems have been fixed in one of the many custom level patches. Nowadays you'll only really find it in poorly made maps.
  • Gang Up on the Human: Oh yes, they do, especially once you kill enough enemies. The "Everyone Hates Me" modifier makes this behavior the default.
  • Giant Mook:
    • The prison level has one such prisoner as a boss.
    • With the addition of size scaling in the level editor in a recent update, you can create some Titan-sized mooks.
  • Gladiator Subquest: Arena Mode offers a series of challenges where you must kill increasingly difficult waves of enemies and bosses without dying, using only what's available to you in the arena.
  • Gorn: You can rip limbs off, decapitate and disembowel people, and even skin faces down to the skull. The amount of carnage would be horrifying to behold if everyone didn't look like a Minecraft character.
  • Grievous Bottley Harm: The glass bottles stand out from other melee weapons in the game in that they go through a phase of degradation before breaking completely; this degraded phase deals more damage than the initial one, and can even be passed to by simply dropping the bottle or throwing it against a surface.
  • Guide Dang It!: Finding the shotgun in the prison map.
    • There are ways to make certain enemies (even the bosses) friendly. However, they are not hinted at in any way.
  • Guns Are Worthless:
    • The various guns featured in the game avert this with a passion. For example, a single well-placed shotgun blast can potentially mow down a whole crowd of enemies, and is held back only by its limited ammo.
    • Further averted in the "Shooter" modifiers, as gun-toting enemies are arguably far more dangerous than their melee-focused counterparts.
  • Heavily Armored Mook: Some of the guards in the Prison have riot helmets to protect their heads.
  • Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Objects like spears and pool cues are available for you use as hole punchers. An update eventually made it so that thrown spears can impale dead enemies into walls.
  • Improbable Aiming Skills: Gun-toting enemies are basically aimbots who will plug you from across the map with extreme precision no matter what they're wielding, such as an assault rifle or an 18th century flintlock pistol. If you stand still during gunfights, you will have a bad time. They don't much care for what stands between you and their shots, though.
  • Improbable Weapon User:
    • Anything you can pick up, you can throw at or beat people with, and while there are more normal weapons like swords, knives and baseball bats, most of the time you're going to be wielding things like bar stools, glasses, ashtrays, pool balls, plates, mic stands and even T-bone steaks.
    • The 1.3.4 update added 32 new improvised weapons that are currently exclusive to the level editor, including three types golf clubs, a hockey stick, scissors, a pen, a syringe, a mop, a pizza cutter, a scalper, a screwdriver, a stapler and a trash can.
  • Infinity +1 Sword: The katana, which can cut clear through heads in a single slice and has decent durability. Fittingly, you can usually only get one via defeating the Yakuza/Katana Boss, who is arguably the single most durable enemy in the game.
  • Joke Weapon: Certain "weapons", for lack of a better term, do barely more damage than a barehanded punch and typically break after one strike. What can you expect attacking someone with a stack of paper bills, an orange, or a raw T-bone steak?
  • Kill Sat: The Smite power attack, which has the player painting individual targets with a Finger Gun before calling down some kind of aerial laser. Just one is enough to instantly gib most enemies (and even the tougher ones will feel the pain).
  • Lethal Joke Item: Yes, bonking a sucker with a ham leg sounds stupid as all get out, but it's a surprisingly durable blunt-force weapon that's capable of reducing people's heads into gibs.
  • Limit Break: The player has a meter that fills with each successful kill. Once full enough, the player can access three special attacks known as "powers" that each burn a certain amount of the gauge: in the main game, they're Shockwave (which knocks all enemies in the immediate vicinity off their feet), Berserk (which briefly increases your melee damage), and Smite (which allows you to attack individual targets from a distance with a Kill Sat). In Beneath, the set of attacks on the meter depends on the class the player plays as, with the three aforementioned ones being within different classes from each other.
  • Ludicrous Gibs: The end result of any enemy dying to the above Limit Breaks, as well as dying in any way with the "Splatter" modifier.
  • Made of Iron:
    • Zig-zagged. It's way too easy to maim and disfigure your enemies (you can shave off an enemy's face with a plastic comb, for godssake), but they can still potentially take a ton of punishment before they actually die.
    • The Katana Boss can take so many hits that he'll be stripped down to the bone by the time you finally kill him.
  • Made of Plasticine:
    • There are a few level modifiers that can really swing it into the "Plasticine" direction. "Weak Enemies" makes enemies so brittle that a mere punch will kill them instantly, "Weak Player" makes you a One-Hit-Point Wonder, "Soft Voxels" makes the enemies' voxels easier to destroy (thus making dismembering and disfiguring them far easier), and "Splatter" makes the enemies explode into gibs upon killing them.
    • The Berserk power makes almost every enemy in the game become this, as they will explode into blood and gibs with a single punch. Bosses are notably excepted, though they'll still go down in short order.
  • The Mafiya: The Bar and Disco maps have backrooms with a nondescript crime boss surrounded by bodyguards. Both the boss and the bodyguards have more health than an average enemy, and the boss will typically carry some kind of sharp weapon. Of course, if you find a machete or knife and play Assassin, they fall dead fast (one of them anyways). This can result in a Karmic Death, with you "honorably" dueling the boss, disarming them, and then slicing their head off.
  • Major Injury Underreaction:
    • Enemies take losing limbs like they just found a hole in their favorite wifebeater; no physical pain, but definitely lots of anger. Sometimes they may be briefly stunned by an attack, but that's about it.
    • It's rare, but sometimes it is possible to slice an enemy's head off without killing them.
  • Megaton Punch: Berserk makes your melee attacks so strong that you can turn heads into chunky salsa with a single punch or kick.
  • My Rules Are Not Your Rules: In the "Shooter" modifiers, enemies have infinite ammo whereas you're unable to even reload guns. Averted in custom levels with guns, as enemies are limited by the capacity of the weapon and switch to melee once empty.
  • One-Hit Kill: The "Weak Enemies" and "Weak Player" modifiers, which make the enemies and you, respectively, die in one hit.
  • One-Man Army: The entire game revolves around walking into different areas and killing everyone in them. Of course the player character is going to be one of these.
  • Overdrawn at the Blood Bank: Hitting with a rather small object (such as a pool ball or an ashtray) or shocking an enemy in the face will make them splurt a liter of blood all over the place. Some of the more durable bosses will have likely shed gallons of the red stuff by the time they finally die. Suffice to say, it's hard to paint the town red without a lot of blood.
  • Paint the Town Red: It's not named that for nothing.
  • The Pen Is Mightier: Two of the many weapons added in the 1.3.4 update are a pen and a pencil.
  • Pistol-Whipping:
    • When a gun you're using runs out of ammo, you can resort to continue using it as a melee weapon instead.
    • Before Update 1.2.0, enemies used to take this a little further: they'd only ever use their guns as melee weapons. As of said update, which made major changes to the guns and added shooter features, they can now shoot with guns.
  • Prison Level: The Prison is the official scenario that's set in a prison. Given that its enemy skins and weapons are featured in the level editor, there's a bunch of user-made levels involving the same (although plenty also have custom skins).
  • Punched Across the Room: You can kick other brawlers hard enough to send them flying a few yards backwards, and even injure other brawlers who get impacted by the flying body.
  • Purposely Overpowered: Fully automatic AK-47 and M16 assault rifles, against enemies that mostly use melee or guns with a lower fire rate? Figures they are exclusive to the sandbox, the level editor, and the "Gun Show" and "Hard Shooter" modifiers.
  • Railing Kill:
    • It's possible to perform one in the Biker Bar by kicking someone off the balcony. Originally, doing so didn't actually do damage despite the balcony's guardrails being coded to break, but eventually fall damage for enemies was added to the game.
    • Many custom maps take the trope even further, usually involving massive towers or moving vehicles for you to kick enemies off of, or even just outright bottomless pits.
  • Revolvers Are Just Better: There's a six-shooter in the Saloon scenario, hidden in the teller's room. It is the most powerful firearm in the game on a shot-per-shot basis, being able to instantly drop the level's two bosses with a single well-placed headshot.
  • Shear Menace: One of the many weapons added in the 1.3.4 update is a pair of scissors.
  • Sinister Shiv: The Prison scenario has some, made out of toothbrushes to boot!
  • Source Music: In the Biker Bar and the Disco, the music is initially played by an in-house band or a DJ, respectively. Attacking either of them (or once the number of remaining enemies is low enough) will briefly stop the music as they stop playing to fight you.
  • Static Stun Gun: The taser and cattle prod have their stun settings to maximum plus eighty - a hit from either will send your target into a violent electrocution fit, and a killing blow has the potential to make them explode into a mess of tiny, electrified shaking gibs.
  • Super Drowning Skills: Falling into the water in the Pirate Cove results in the instant death of either you or an enemy. Partially justified because a giant shark eats whoever falls into it.
  • Throwaway Guns: Once they are out of ammo, the guns are little better than fancy clubs.
  • Throwing Your Sword Always Works: Hurling weapons and objects at your enemies does more damage than striking them, and is a perfectly viable way of doing ranged damage without guns.
  • Turns Red: A mild case; enemies low on health will run after you and attack more frequently. Their angry, teeth-bared expression can tip you off once you notice it.
  • Use Their Own Weapon Against Them: You can grab an enemy's weapon by either knocking them over with a fully-charged kick or cutting off their hand. Certain enemies like the Chefs, on the other hand, can't have their weapons taken while stunned, and bosses can only be disarmed by... disarming.
  • Video Game Perversity Potential: There are an awful lot of custom levels that pit you against hordes of naked men armed only with soap, never mind that there are custom skins that look like strippers or hookers.
  • Your Head A-Splode: The result of a very hard hit with a blunt weapon.

    Beneath Tropes 
  • Advancing Boss of Doom: If you take too much time getting through a level in "Beneath", the Pursuer will show up to chase you to the exit. If it catches you, you'll die very quickly.
  • Attack Its Weak Point: The Crystal Crabs take a lot more damage to their legs than their bodies.
  • Airborne Mook: The Floating Heads, a Shout-Out to the Lost Souls from Doom.
  • Apocalypse Cult: It's not clearly stated, but it's implied by the runes on their bodies that the cultists you fight in "Beneath" worship and serve the Elder Gods.
  • Area of Effect: Most of the player classes have access to at least one such attack as a special,
  • Back from the Dead: The Necromancer's area is full of corpses. You'll quickly find out he keeps them there for a good reason.
    • Once you unlock the Corrupted/Necromancer class, you can do this to dead enemies and have them fight for you.
  • Beneath the Earth: "Beneath" takes place in an expansive cave system full of zombies, cultists, monsters, and eldritch beings.
  • Bittersweet Ending: You've saved the world from the Elder Gods, but the end credits shows a mangled corpse washed up on a beach, implying your character wasn't able to escape The End's death explosion.
  • Boring, but Practical: The Brawler/Mauler class has more or less the same skillset as the player character in the Scenarios, save for Smite, which when combined with possessing the slowest starting movement speed makes them the most mundane of all the available classes. However, they have the highest starting attack damage and health of all the classes, as well as Stone Skin and Berserk, which are invaluable when you're trying to quickly end battles with multiple enemies that can kill most other classes in 3 hits or less, such as the Shard Lords.
  • Boss Rush: The final battle with The End requires you to kill all six of the Shard Lords, two at a time, in order to make him vulnerable.
  • Canon Welding: A whiteboard in the UHDF facility implies that the events depicted in the Scenarios were influenced by the Elder Gods, perhaps as a Hate Plague.
  • Can't Move While Being Watched: The Statues in "Beneath" can sneak up on you while you aren't watching them and sucker punch you.
  • Cast from Stamina: The Warlock/Sorcercer's fireballs consume stamina rather than energy, which is reserved for special abilities.
  • Combat Tentacles: Some zombies in "Beneath" have a tentacle arm that gives them extra reach.
  • Crystal Landscape: The Crystal Caverns.
  • Darker and Edgier: In comparison to the rather whimsical take on violence in the main game, Beneath takes itself dead seriously, featuring eldritch horrors that threaten the world, foreboding, winding levels filled with dangerous foes, the terrifying Pursuer that relentlessly chases you, and a general feeling of hopelessness given the glum, dejected look of your crewmates in the UHDF base as they await their turn to descend into the Beneath, never to return.
  • Death Is the Only Option: Until you defeat the other three Elder Gods, The End's gate will remain sealed off every time you reach it. Your only option at the end of these runs is to kill yourself in the iron maiden the friendly Minions have prepared for you in the chamber.
  • Duel Boss: The Trickster will face you alone, unless you bring a Bodyguard.
  • Eldritch Location: The Islands are accessed through a cult altar portal, and consist of tiny floating islands suspended in a pink sky. As the home of The Aberration, an island-sized Eldritch Abomination, it's possible they exist on some kind of alien world.
  • Everything's Deader with Zombies: Most of your basic foes in "Beneath" are the zombified remains of the facility staff previously sent into the caverns.
  • Fragile Speedster: The Spectre/Wraith class is all about movement and attack speed, and has access to a Weaponized Teleportation attack that kills any enemy left in your path.
  • Gang Up on the Human: Unlike the Scenarios, there's no in-fighting between different enemy types, even though some of the starter enemies seem to be pirates/raiders rather than undead.
  • Guide Dang It!:
    • The Necromancer and The End are the only Elder Gods that are reachable by simply progressing through the Beneath, though the latter can only be reached after defeating the other three. The other two require you to do certain tasks that aren't always obvious:
    • Accessing the Islands, the domicile of The Aberration, requires you to take the Island Artifact from the cult altar on the first level of Caves to its corresponding altar in the Crystal Caverns. Note that the Artifact occupies your shield hand, and the Caverns' altar changes location and level per run.
    • Getting to The Trickster requires you to undergo a series of tasks so convoluted you're highly unlikely to figure them out yourself unless you look very carefully, such as capturing a Pursuer with an item that only appears in the shop on Ruins I. See here for a walkthrough.
  • Heroic Sacrifice: The end credits heavily imply that the protagonist sacrificed their life to defeat The End, either in a Mutual Kill or by defeating it and being caught in its death explosion.
  • Hero Secret Service: The Bodyguard upgrade grants you an NPC ally that will help you fight the terrors in the Beneath. With upgrades it's possible to get Elite Mooks instead of basic Brawlers and the like.
  • Hub Level: The UHDF base, built above the great beam of red light emanating from the caverns below, and the place where you start all of your playthroughs.
  • Humanoid Abomination: Aside from The Aberration, the Elder Gods all look vaguely human.
  • Invincible Boogeyman: The Pursuer is an effectively invincible Advancing Boss of Doom. Once it shows up, your only choices are to die to it or find the escape. Subverted during "The Construct", where you can battle an incarnation of the Pursuer; it's extremely powerful, but can be killed.
  • Jack of All Trades: The Vanguard class is not slow as the Brawler, nor as fragile as the other, more specialized classes, and has access to a melee weapon buff, Light Blade, ranged specials like Smite, and Regen Circle.
  • Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: There's very little in the way of direct storytelling, as events unfold wordlessly as you progress through the Beneath and interactive NPCs have no dialogue. What little established lore there is can be found written on whiteboards in the UHDF base and in the environment.
  • Kill Enemies to Open: The Ruins, The Construct, and Blood & Fire will often lock you into a room until you kill the enemies within it. Averted in the rest of the levels, where simply making a run for the exit is always an option provided you can dodge enemy attacks.
  • King Mook: The Shard Lords are essentially bigger, power-boosted versions of run-of-the-mill enemies.
  • Load-Bearing Boss: It's implied that the whole Beneath collapses following the The End's defeat.
  • Mirror Boss: The End's vulnerable form fights much like the player does, being able to kick and combine weak and heavy attacks.
  • The Most Dangerous Video Game: To face The Trickster, you have to plug yourself into a virtual world called the Construct where you have to fight through twisted versions of the Scenarios from the main game before taking The Trickster himself on. Fittingly, dying in the virtual world kills you in-game.
  • No-Gear Level: Since the Construct is a virtual world, you can't bring your weapons with you. You'll need to fight through the corrupted Scenario simulations and defeat the area boss using only what you're able to scrounge up.
  • One Riot, One Ranger: Justified. UHDF operators are always sent down into the Beneath by their lonesome (or in teams of four in multiplayer) because sending any more at once caused Pursuers to quickly show up and kill everyone without making progress.
  • Red and Black and Evil All Over: The End, oh so much.
  • Roguelike: Well, Rogue-lite: The game mode pushes you through a series of often brutally difficult randomly-arranged dungeons, power ups are sporadic and randomized, money and healing opportunities are limited, exploration is frequently limited due to the Pursuer, you cannot save, and dying forces you to start from zero. On the other hand, you can unlock permanent upgrades such as better weapon spawns, more frequent power up podiums, and level up character classes to make future runs easier.
  • Rogue Protagonist: Judging by their distinct appearance, it's implied that the UHDF soldiers resurrected by The Necromancer are actually your deceased player characters from previous runs.
  • Shielded Core Boss: The Necromancer and The End; for the former, you'll need to kill all of the Minions shielding him, and for the latter, you'll have to fight and kill all of the Shard Lords while avoiding his attacks.
  • Smash Mook: The Statues are big, tough, slow, and their attacks consist entirely of punches and overhead smashes.
  • Squishy Wizard: The skinny staff-wielding Minions may be very fragile, but they can blast you with a laser beam that can both push you back and rapidly chew through your health if you don't avoid it.
    • The Warlock/Sorcerer class is this combined with Long-Range Fighter, encouraging you to keep your distance as you whittle enemies down with fireballs.
  • Sprint Meter: Unlike the base game, Beneath limits sprinting with a stamina meter that recharges over time, though it's possible to obtain infinite stamina with enough upgrades.
  • Suicide Mission: It's not stated, but it's implied that nobody ever returns from a run through the Beneath. Demonstrated in-game, as it's actually impossible to complete a new game in less than three lives: you must kill yourself after beating the Necromancer and Aberration for the first time. Even after defeating The End and destroying the Beneath, you'll still go out in a Heroic Sacrifice.
  • Super-Persistent Predator: Aggro'd enemies will chase you all the way to the end of the level if you run past them. While if you do make a clean break for the exit you shouldn't encounter them again, backtracking could result in a nasty surprise.
  • Temple of Doom: The Ruins, the deepest point of the Beneath aside from Blood & Fire, are a series of labyrinths filled with dangerous enemies.
  • The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Blood & Fire, a Lethal Lava Land at the very bottom of the Beneath and the home of the Final Boss.

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