The Chant is a Survival Horror Action-Adventure video game developed by Brass Token and published by Prime Matter.
A young woman named Jess, wracked from a traumatic life event, is summoned by an old friend to a spiritual retreat, known as Prismic Science, on a private island. There, both women hope to find healing along with others folks dealing with their own problems. However, when a group chant goes horribly awry it ends up conjuring monsters from a dimension known as the Gloom.
Scattered and suffering in a horrifically changed island, Jess has to cooperate with Glory Island's increasingly unhinged inhabitants in order to finish the ritual to seal away the cosmic horrors.
The Chant contains examples of the following tropes:
- 11th-Hour Superpower: The indigo prism gives Jess the ability to become invisible for a short period of time as long as she doesn't attack anything, allowing her to sneak past Gloom creatures with impunity. Sounds great, right? Here's the catch: she doesn't unlock it until nearly the end of the penultimate chapter of the game and there are maybe two or three good opportunities to use it before the credits roll.
- Achilles in His Tent: When the ritual goes wrong, Tyler retreats to his tent to brood, leaving Jess and Hannah to sort things out.
- Acid-Trip Dimension: The Gloom is a psychedelic, neon-drenched hell straight out of a 1980s horror movie.
- Action Survivor: Jess is an ordinary young woman with no special training that we know of, but she manages to fight her way through a psychedelic hellscape with nothing more than a few fistfuls of herbs, some special crystals, and sheer bloody-minded determination to help her friend.
- Agony of the Feet: Notably averted. Jess spends the game walking/running barefoot through a forest, a mine, and many, many decaying buildings and somehow doesn't get so much as a splinter.
- Alien Kudzu: Wherever the Gloom is dominant, the ground is covered in glowing, unearthly plant life.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- As long as you're looking in the general direction of what you're aiming at when you're using a throwable item, Jess will hit her target automatically.
- The game is quite generous with invincibility frames when dodging.
- There are special stones scattered throughout the island that refill one bar of the Spirit meter when Jess stands next to them; it's possible to stand by one of these stones and meditate until Jess' Mind meter is topped off while the stone continually refills her Spirit to the one-bar mark, letting the player save consumables for later.
- Anyone Can Die: By the end of the game, only Jess and Kim are alive, with the Mind ending implying that even they die when their escape boat is pulled into a whirlpool.
- Apologetic Attacker: Jess apologizes to Kim when she smashes her head into a mirror to break the Gloom's hold on her.
- Arc Words: "From Gloom to Glory!"
- Artifact of Attraction: The crystals from the Glory Island mine are apparently capable of inspiring unnatural greed in anyone who finds them, possibly due to their emotional resonance properties. Several notes from the mine's manager suggest that most or all of the miners were trying to hoard the crystals for themselves, which eventually drove him into a frenzy of homicidal paranoia. There is even a note from a little girl, presumably his daughter, that states "I will not touch Daddy's crystals" over and over again; the other side of the note says simply "But I want them."
- Awesome, but Impractical: The Crystallize power Jess gets from the yellow prism. It summons jagged black crystals in a circle around her, dealing heavy damage to anything caught in the area of effect, but it also costs two bars of Spirit when everything else in the game costs one, and you unlock it at a point in the game when two bars of Spirit is probably all you have.
- Bad People Abuse Animals: When Jess tells Maya that she works in biomedicine, Maya invokes the trope by asking her about animal testing in that field, suggesting that she should change careers if Jess says that she doesn't approve of it. The original cult of the Gloom experimented on animals to test the effects of the various prisms.
- Bare Midriffs Are Feminine: Maya's shirt shows off her stomach.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted. Jess gets increasingly beaten up and splattered in muck and blood as the night wears on. By the final chapter, her face is covered in cuts and bruises and her clothes are so filthy that it's hard to believe they used to be white.
- Bioluminescence Is Cool: Creatures and plant life native to the Gloom are bioluminescent. It makes them look prettier than they should.
- Challenge Run: The "Savior" achievement requires you to beat the game without killing any cultists. This makes some of the puzzles (particularly the lighthouse puzzle) and the fight with Monroe Anton much tougher, especially if you decide to play on Magister difficulty. It also turns Jess into something of a Glass Cannon, since cultists are the main source of Body XP, without which you can't upgrade her health or damage resistance.
- Church of Happyology: The Prismic Science Spiritual Retreat presents itself as tuning and maximizing your own internal energies to achieve your highest and best self. Just beware of the psychedelic dimension of terror that feeds off negative energy populated by prismatic creatures and cultists.
- Combat Tentacles: All of the mandala creatures have them, as do the cankertoads and the final boss.
- Contrived Coincidence: It sure is convenient that the possessed Kim just happened to hole up in the one room on the entire island that has exactly the items Jess needs to enact the exorcism ritual.
- The Corruption: The Gloom warps the minds and spirits of the people it influences, eventually causing them to start acting on their innermost fears, resentments, and desires. They also tend to become covered in some kind of black ooze and develop serious crazy eyes. Kim, Sonny, Maya, and Hannah all fall victim to it.
- Cult: Jess flat out calls Prismic Science a cult about ten minutes in. Kim tries to deny it, but the rest of the game shows that yes, it is definitely a cult. Given that Tyler is descended from Monroe Anton, who founded the original cult of the Gloom, it's not surprising.
- Cult Defector: Tyler's mother Babs fled the cult in the 1970s, and she wasn't the first.
- Custom Uniform: Though everyone is technically wearing the same outfit, all of the characters except for Jess have made slight modifications to theirs.
- Cutting Off the Branches: The story has three mutually exclusive endings. The Gloom Below DLC follows on from the Mind ending, effectively making it the canonical end.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Pretty much all of the characters have one. Jess and Kim are still dealing with the mental and emotional fallout of Jess' little sister accidentally drowning thanks to a practical joke they played on her. Maya is mourning her son's death from a disease that she refused to have him vaccinated against. Sonny is struggling to prove himself to his father after botching a festival project that cost his wealthy family millions. Hannah is recovering from an ugly breakup that's left her with abandonment issues. Tyler's grandfather Monroe founded the original cult of the Gloom and killed dozens of his disciples in his experiments with Prismic Science. His mother fled the cult, only to deed the island back to Tyler when she died.
- Dying as Yourself: Sonny snaps back to normal after Jess kills the boss that attacked him, apologizing for his anger toward her and stating that he could only see his own pain. Sadly, Maya and Hannah don't get the same luxury.
- Eldritch Abomination: The main antagonists are horrific monsters coming from The Gloom after being accidentally summoned by the lead cast.
- Eldritch Location: Glory Island is a nexus for the Gloom, apparently because of the crystals in its depths. It's implied that the Gloom has been corrupting the place for a long time.
- Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Inverted. All of the enemies and weapons in the game are classified under the Mind, Body, and Spirit attributes; using a weapon of the same alignment as the enemy causes extra damage to that enemy.
- Equivalent Exchange: Jess can meditate to restore her Mind (Sanity Meter) in exchange for burning Spirit (the game's version of mana). One ability tips the exchange in favor of the sanity meter by allowing her to recover more Mind per use of meditation.
- Evil Tainted the Place: After the ritual goes wrong, Glory Island is slowly warped and consumed by the Gloom, with prowling monsters, jagged crystal formations, and neon-lit plants appearing everywhere the Gloom is dominant. It's also implied that the crystals in the mine have been quietly tainting the place for much longer than that.
- Extreme Doormat: Hannah, supposedly. Tyler's notes call her a doormat and she acknowledges that he treated her like one, but she stands up to him pretty easily and it's implied in supplemental material that she's effectively running the retreat for him.
- Fate Worse than Death: After Monroe absorbs Tyler, he reappears in the final chapter chained up inside a huge prism and being leeched of...something by Gloom Cultists. His screams of pain and pleas to Hannah indicate that whatever's happening to him is incredibly painful. Sonny and Maya are also trapped in the Gloom and forced to do Hannah's bidding.
- Fictional Counterpart: Sonny is investing in Tyler's retreat concept to make up for the failure of his previous Spirit Ember Festival, which is indicated to have been an expensive, badly managed boondoggle that cost him most of his personal fortune. One wonders if the Fyre Festival also took place in this universe.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: As Jess is returning to the geodome in the final chapter so that she and Hannah can enact the ritual to seal up the Gloom, she starts hearing Hannah's thoughts about how she hates being alone, and how much she misses the others, and how if she brings them back everything will be okay, and maybe even Jess will be her friend too...
- Flower Mouth: Mimicrawlers have armored heads that split open to reveal glowing flower-like mouths.
- Foreshadowing: While searching the cannery for Kim, Jess can find a document that describes the signs and symptoms of Gloom possession and details the ritual needed to exorcise the afflicted person.
- Form-Fitting Wardrobe: Maya's top is noticeably tighter than the other women's.
- Gold Digger: Tyler makes a point of collecting people who can fund his ambitions for Prismic Science. In particular, he's only dating Hannah because she's a trust fund kid.
- Granola Girl: Maya is a dancer who used to roam the world going to festivals, which is how she met Tyler, and believes strongly in the New Age ideals he's promoting with his retreat. She cooks using foraged ingredients, wears her hair in dreadlocks, and goes dancing in the forest in her free time. More tragically, her distrust of doctors and big pharma led her to reject a recommended vaccination for her son, only for him to die from the very disease she'd refused to have him immunized against.
- Greater-Scope Villain: One of Monroe Anton's notes reveals that the Gloom was not spawned by humanity's collective negative energy, as he'd initially believed. Instead, humanity was apparently created to feed it, indicating that there is someone, or more likely something, out there that views us as little more than cattle for the Gloom's denizens.
- Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Blonde-haired Hannah is a gentle and kindhearted young woman. Sadly, it doesn't stop the Gloom from corrupting her.
- Hair-Trigger Temper: Kim has IED (intermittent explosive disorder), and it causes her to accidentally mess up the chant by unleashing her bottled-up emotions towards Jess at the wrong moment.
- Hates Being Alone: Hannah is terrified of being rejected and left alone. The Gloom uses this fear to manipulate her into believing that she can bring everyone back if she completes the ritual.
- Healing Herb: Jess can eat spirit cap mushrooms to restore her Spirit meter.
- The Heart: Maya is outright called the heart of the group on the game's official website. She doesn't get much of a chance to show it in the game, sadly.
- Hero of Another Story: The prologue opens up on the night Tyler's then-pregnant mother escaped from the cult of the Gloom with her then-unborn son. She succeeds, if only in the short run.
- Heal Thyself: Jess consumes herbs to refill her sanity, health and spirit meters.
- I Just Want to Be Loved: Hannah is terrified of rejection and her deepest desire is to have someone care for her. This is the lever the Gloom uses to manipulate her into completing the ritual and unleashing the final boss.
- I Just Want to Have Friends: Overlapping with the previous trope, Hannah's thoughts reveal that she's jealous of Jess and Kim's friendship, even damaged as it is, and wishes that Jess would be her friend too. When she succumbs to the Gloom, she summons Gloom-twisted versions of Sonny, Maya, and Tyler to try and force Jess to stay on the island with her.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Mandaleeches have a tentacle that they ram through Jess' skull if they hit her when she's at low health. A Mandaphore skewers poor Maya through the chest when she embraces it under the delusion that it's her son. During the runup to the final boss fight and in the fight itself, Jess can be violently impaled on a crystal formation if she isn't careful.
- Improbable Weapon User: Jess uses bundles of sage, burning thorn branches, “witch sticks” (bundles of mugwort and sage), salt, and essential oil to battle the Gloom.
- Ink-Suit Actor: Most of the characters are modeled after their voice actors; the two exceptions are Jess and Maya.
- Insurmountable Waist-High Fence: Jess repeatedly comes up against low fences and other obstacles that she should be able to climb over pretty easily, but for video game logic.
- Interface Screw: Whenever Jess has a panic attack, she loses the ability to attack and the screen starts to turn red and pulsate, accompanied by a heartbeat sound effect. In Chapter 4, she starts suffering from a headache after picking up a canister of mercury, and everything on the screen becomes blurred until she puts it down.
- It's All About Me: Tyler's notes reveal that he doesn't give a damn about his disciples beyond what he can get from them, namely attention, power, money, and sex.
- It's All My Fault: Maya blames herself for her son Seva's death, since he died from a disease that she refused to have him vaccinated against. At the end of the game, Jess accepts that it's her fault that Angie died.
- Keystone Army: Killing a Mandacore will immediately banish all Gloom creatures in the area; the Mandacores serve as the Gloom's anchors in our reality, so destroying them destabilizes the connection between the two.
- Kill It with Fire: One of the three available weapons is the Firelash, which is just a bundle of thorny branches tied together and set on fire. Jess can also make and use fire oil, which is effectively a Molotov cocktail.
- Living Polyhedron: Mandaleeches and Mandacores look like intricate, flower-shaped mandalas.
- Malevolent Masked Man: The insane cultists wear animal skulls as masks. Monroe Anton wears an elaborate ritual mask meant to allow him to manipulate the Gloom's energies, which Hannah then takes up and wears in the finale.
- Mana Drain: Jess can leech Spirit from enemies by hitting them with witch bundles.
- Metamorphosis Monster: The Mandacore life cycle. They begin as Mandaphores, small green creatures that are spawned in swarms by the Mandacores. Any Mandaphores that survive long enough grow into Mandaleeches, which eventually mature into Mandacores. Their bestiary entry implies that the Mandacore isn't even the final stage...
- Manipulative Bastard: Tyler Anton, like his grandfather before him, uses the intake forms that his disciples fill out to learn how best to manipulate them. He plays on their needs and fears to get them to trust him.
- Mimic Species: The aptly named Mimicrawler, which can imitate the voices of a person's loved ones in order to lure them into ambushes.
- Mind Screw: Jess and the others frequently hallucinate due to the influence of the Gloom. Tyler even suggests at one point that Jess has snapped and killed Maya and Sonny and is lying about what she's done. The Spirit ending of the game goes all in by revealing that the events of the game were a very vivid and elaborate hallucination, which drives poor Jess Laughing Mad.
- Mineral MacGuffin: The six crystal prisms. Jess has to collect them all to try and finish the ritual that Kim inadvertently botched.
- More than Mind Control: The Gloom's modus operandi is to drive a person mad by picking at their inner darkness. This includes Jess and Kim's guilt over Jess' sister Angie's death, Sonny's obsession with proving prism science, Maya's grief over her son's death, Tyler's lust for power, and Hannah's fear of being alone.
- Misplaced Wildlife: The Cankertoads are said to be mutated from a species of Surinam toad. Surinam toads are native to South America, it's unclear how, when, or why a population of them wound up on Glory Island, which is off the coast of Washington state.
- New-Age Retro Hippie: This is the general vibe of the Prismic Science retreat before everything goes sideways.
- Only in It for the Money: Played with. Sonny's notes indicate that he sees Prismic Science as a way to make tons of money and redeem himself in his father's eyes, but also indicate that he's a true believer in its potential.
- Only Sane Man: Despite suffering her own issues, Jess is the most grounded out of everyone in the retreat, especially when the chant goes wrong.
- Please, Don't Leave Me: When Hannah finally succumbs to the Gloom, she unleashes Sonny, Maya, Tyler, and various other Gloom creatures on Jess to try and force her to stay on the island.
- Power Crystal: The crystal prisms harvested from the mine on Glory Island apparently resonate with the Gloom, allowing people to manipulate its energies. Jess gains a new power each time she picks up a new prism and can access new areas of the island. There are also Prismic Crystals (a powdered form of the prisms) that can be used to upgrade Jess' stats and abilities.
- Prefers Going Barefoot: Enforced. The retreat's standard outfit does not include shoes, meaning that all of the characters are walking around barefoot the entire time.
- Psychic Link: The Gloom lets Jess hear the other characters' thoughts, though it's not clear if it's a two-way link.
- Rule of Symbolism: The powers that Jess gains from the prisms tend to correspond to some aspect of their original bearer's personality.
- The blue prism that Jess is given at the beginning unlocks the Stasis power, allowing her to briefly slow time. She's still trapped in her own kind of stasis, unable to move past Angie's death or her broken relationship with Kim.
- The orange prism that she gets from Kim gives her a Super-Scream that knocks enemies back and inflicts damage. Kim's intermittent explosive disorder causes her to lash out and push people away.
- The yellow prism she recovers from Sonny lets her summon jagged black crystals that explode out of the ground in a circle around her, damaging any enemies caught in their radius. Sonny's temper and reckless behavior frequently lead him to hurt the people around him.
- The green prism she gets from Maya allows her to summon a swarm of Mandaphores to attack enemies. Maya misses her son so much that the Gloom is able to warp her mind into accepting the Mandaphores as replacements for him.
- The red prism she takes from Tyler lets her summon Gloom cultists out of the ground to grapple and slow enemies. Tyler wants his disciples to become unthinking, obedient minions who obey his every command.
- The indigo prism that Hannah gives her grants the ability to become invisible to enemies as long as she doesn't attack them. Hannah is afraid of being invisible to others, having been rejected and ignored before.
- Sanity Meter: Jess’ Mind meter. It can be lowered by certain enemy attacks and by staying in Gloom infested areas. If it runs out, Jess has a panic attack and is unable to use any weapons until she recovers, either by consuming lavender or meditating.
- Secretly Rich: Late in the game, it's revealed that Hannah has a trust fund worth over a million dollars. Tyler is manipulating her via their romantic relationship so that she'll use her money to fund his retreat.
- Slipping a Mickey: When the Gloom is unleashed, Jess initially accuses Tyler of drugging the tea that everyone drank before the ritual.
- Summon Magic: Two of the prism abilities let Jess summon Gloom creatures to attack enemies; the green prism calls up a swarm of Mandaphores that will jump to a new enemy after killing the last one, and the red prism summons a gaggle of Gloom Cultists that burst out of the earth to grapple and slow enemies.
- Super-Scream: The orange prism lets Jess unleash an ear-splitting howl that knocks enemies back and physically damages them.
- Team Mom: The game's website indicates that this is Maya's role in the retreat group, though she doesn't get much of a chance to show it before things go sideways. After she's swallowed by the Gloom, she becomes its Team Mom, adopting the Mandaphores as her own and violently insisting that she'll "take care" of Jess too.
- That Old-Time Prescription: Jess can eat lavender and ginger to restore her Mind and Body meters, both of which have been used as folk remedies for centuries.
- Trauma Button: Jess isn't too fond of flies, as they strongly remind her of the moment she found her sister's body. As such, swarms of them act as tutorial enemies.
- Uncertain Doom: The Mind ending sees Jess and Kim leaving the island on a boat, only for a Gloom whirlpool to suddenly open up and suck them in. It's made less uncertain as of The Gloom Below, which reveals that they've been sucked into the Gloom and now have to fight their way out.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Kim blows up at Jess in the middle of the group ritual thanks to her intermittent explosive disorder, causing the chant to go wrong and unleashing the Gloom on the island. As a direct result of this, everyone on the island except for the two of them winds up dead.
- Vampiric Draining: Tyler meets this fate at the hands of his own grandfather. Monroe absorbs Tyler's entire body and soul, restoring himself to his youthful appearance.
- Video Game Caring Potential: Most of Jess' dialogue choices include the option to be kind, encouraging, and friendly to whoever she's talking to. The game also grants you an achievement if you avoid killing any cultists, though there is no other reward for doing so.
- The Walls Have Eyes: Gloom-infested areas tend to sprout large, color-coded eyes on the walls that watch Jess as she moves past them.
- Was Once a Man: Gloom Cultists used to be ordinary humans, but they have now been absorbed into the Gloom and cannot survive outside it.
- "Well Done, Son" Guy: Sonny is trying to prove himself to his father after a string of failed projects. The Gloom uses this against him.
- We Used to Be Friends: Jess and Kim were best friends for years, until the two of them took a fateful trip to Jess' family's lakeside cabin with Jess' little sister Angie. Kim told Angie that there was treasure at the bottom of the lake. Jess played along with the joke, and Angie decided to swim out and find it, but drowned when she couldn't get back to shore. Both girls had their headphones on and couldn't hear Angie's cries for help. Their relationship fell apart in the aftermath.
- White Is Pure: Invoked with the outfits that the group is wearing, which are made of plain white linen.
- White Shirt of Death: Everyone at the retreat wears white linen clothing. Sonny and Maya's clothes are soaked with blood and filth by the time they both die.
- Women Are Wiser: After the chant goes wrong, Jess, Maya, and Hannah all manage to keep it together better than Sonny and Tyler; Sonny flies into a paranoid rage almost immediately and runs off, while Tyler withdraws into his dome to brood. Maya and Hannah do eventually succumb to the Gloom, but it takes much longer for them to be corrupted.
