Video Game / The Eternal Cylinder

What an unfortunate time and place for a beginning.

"This is not the story of the One; the One encompasses too much, crushing everything and making it the same. No, this is the story of the Many, who are blessed with difference and rich in strangeness. This is the story... of a family."

— The Narrator

The Eternal Cylinder is a Playstation 4/Xbox/PC surreal survival game developed by ACE Team and published by Good Shepherd Entertainment.

The story takes place on a mysterious, faraway planet, where the player takes control of small, long-nosed critters called Trebhums, who must survive in a bizarre, hostile alien landscape that is being constantly destroyed by the titular Eternal Cylinder: a massive rolling structure that crushes everything in its path.

On their journey, the Trebhums must face many challenges, such as treacherous landscapes, native predatory wildlife, and mysterious cyborg abominations known only as the Servants of the Cylinder. But they're not completely helpless, as the Trebhums have one very important and beneficial trait: by consuming various foodstuffs, they can mutate their bodies into various useful adaptations, allowing them to overcome the many obstacles they face on their quest.

The Eternal Cylinder was released on September 30th, 2021, and its early gameplay trailer can be viewed here. Its main site can be seen here.

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The Eternal Cylinder contains examples of these tropes:

• 11th-Hour Superpower: The final mutation the Trebhum unlock, the Master of Song, allows them to summon a Trewhaala to aid them. You only unlock this in the final biome, long after you'd gained the ability to shield every other mutation if you've played your cards right.
• Advanced Ancient Acropolis: The Trebhum apparently used to have a thriving civilization, the ruins of which now dot the landscape. Among these are special towers that temporarily bring a halt to the Cylinder's fury. It's implied their civilization was destroyed by the servants of the cylinder.
• Advancing Boss of Doom: The Eternal Cylinder serves as one, as it keeps advancing towards your Trehblums while getting faster, requiring ways to delay its advance.
• Aerith and Bob: The names of the Servants of the Cylinder are human-sounding titles like the Cleanser, the Witness or the Mathematician, as opposed to the goofier-sounding names of the native predators such as Zooshgarg, Tonglegrop and Omnogrom.
• A Head at Each End: The two-headed Springworms which move around in a somersaulting motion much like leeches.
  • The Grashtuub could qualify, having a "mouth" and eyes on both ends, however it has a cylindrical body with no defined distinctions so it's questionable if it even has a head(s) to begin with.
• After the End: The game seems to take place after the collapse of the Trebhum civilization, though this only really becomes apparent if you reach the (currently unavailable except through exploits) desert biome, where ruins of the Trebhum civilization are very common.
  • It's revealed that one of the previous civilizations destroyed by the cylinder was Earth, and the Servants of the Cylinder were forged out of human remains.
• Alien Blood: When the Trebhum use the three lenses in the desert to kill the Mathematician, his insides have a transluscent yellow-amber quality instead of innards.
• Alien Sky: The sky is a constant pinkish-orange in tone, with various moons and a ringed planet visible in the sky.
• All Flyers Are Birds: The Onkifurt looks hardly like a bird, being a tentacled, bug-eyed, pig-snouted Starfish Alien that floats with a gaseous sac. Still, it does display bird like behaviors, brooding its eggs in a nest and hunting prey by swooping them from above, and male and female Onkifurt even have different color patterns akin to the dimorphisim found in many birds.
• All in the Manual: Flavor text in the item and creature descriptions reveal a lot about Trebhum culture. Some items are named after mythological folk heroes in Trebhum mythology, animal entries tell of fables and idioms Trebhum told about said creatures in their oral tradition, and even some mutations are mentioned to have been banned in civilized Trebhum society. Indeed, some creatures are said to be Trebhum creations implying the Trebhum had once reached a genetic engineering level of technology and advancement.
• All Your Powers Combined: In a sense, the ??? Biome is this to the other biomes — due to the contents of the Cylinder being spilled into said Biome, you can encounter creatures, benevolent and hazardous, from every previous biome of the game here, alongside new creatures and hazards.
• Always a Bigger Fish:
  • No matter how big or mean a creature is, the Eternal Cylinder will crush it in seconds.
  • You'll eventually run into the corpse of a Trewhaala, which is clearly dead due to the efforts of another party. The narration states that your Trehblums are trying not to think about what could have killed said Trewhaala. A close examination of its corpse, however, reveals the corpse of one of the servants of the Eternal Cylinder, leaving the cause of death fairly obvious.
  • The best way to kill any large predator in the game is to lure an adult Tonglegrop over. And should two Tonglegrops clash they end up mutually killing one another.
• Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: Tonglegrops, tonglegroplets and omnogroms are pink. Shelled grolluscs are purple. And Trebhum come in all sorts of colors. Every creature in the game is this trope to one degree or another unless it is camouflaged.
• Amazing Technicolor World: The Savannah has trees with lime green orbs on them, blue mushrooms, and green and red flowers. The tundra has red and pink fungi. The deserts have pink sand. The world of the Trebhum is this trope.
• An Ice Person: The Frozen Sklaa, which can form ice-based armor around its body.
• Animal Motifs: Elephant-like features seem to be incredibly common on the planet, from the tusks of the Onogrosh to the snout of the Great Gaaahr, to the trunked Trebhums themselves. In the teaser, the Cleanser used to be part elephant.
• Animal Stampede: Once the Cylinder starts rolling, every animal will make a break for safety.
• Antagonist Title: The Eternal Cylinder is the Big Bad of the game.
• Antepiece: The first encounter the player will have with the Servants of the Eternal Cylinder will end with the player retreating over a bridge bordered by towers containing captured Witnesses. The light emitted by the Witnesses will burn away some of the player's mutations (it might even take away all of them), which not only informs you of what the yelllow light does, but also that you will need to be wary when you start seeing free-flying Witnesses later on.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • If you need a certain mutation to progress (e.g. filter trunk to access the second Trebhum shrine), you can usually find the food needed to induce the mutation nearby.
  • You cannot save while the Cylinder is rolling, preventing you from being caught in a sequence where you can't outrun the cylinder.
  • Most mutation items will provide health or food when consumed, so they maintain utility throughout the game.
  • Any creature that does not provide a mutation when eaten will always restore some health.
  • Only the Trebhum you are controlling needs to have mutations needed to pass through the environment — others will automatically obtain that trait for the duration of your adventures in hostile environments.
  • If a Trebhum obtains the Mixer Body mutation, they automatically get an extra inventory slot to store any bombs they create.
  • Desert Heat and Arctic Cold will damage you, but will stop short of killing you, meaning that getting mutations to resist them are encouraged, but not necessary.
  • The first mutation you will be able to shield against the Cylinder is the Filter Trunk, ensuring that you will always be able to explore toxic areas for goodies.
  • While there is an element of randomness to it, the Upgrade Shrines tend to give out formulas to shield mutations that you use often, meaning that you are generally likely to be able to shield your favored mutations before the ones that have less value.
  • Certain highly valuable mutations — namely the Mineral Processor Body, Toxic Trunk, Mixer Body, and Regenerative Body — have their catalysts as potential collectibles in Shrines, while their recipes use items that are fairly common in any biome. This allows you get their recipes without having to worry about permanently missing them due to the limited number of shrines.
  • Both areas where the Mathematician launches a raid on the Trebhum have bodies of water in them, allowing you to lure cleansers to the shoreline to be slaughtered, netting you free Chaos Amber. This is extremely useful for those who want to get every possible Trebhum mutation shielded.
  • Acquiring the final two lenses for the Floatong Palace in the desert requires using the Tornado Trunk mutation, which, in turn, requires you to venture inside a Great Gaahr. Since none of these can be found within the explorable area surrounding the lenses, a Gaahr corpse containing the needed catalysts can be found near both lenses, so they you don't have to worry about a servant stealing that mutation from you.
• Ascetic Aesthetic: The room inside the Mathematician's mind after it sucks in the Trebhum is made of white, digital-like blocks that fill this trope.
• Art-Style Clash: The Cylinder's servants compared to the rest of the world. While native plants and animals are colorful, cartoonish creatures, the Servants are more realistically-textured and combine features of human bodies and machines.
• Arch-Enemy: The Eternal Cylinder and its servants are this to the Trebhum - not only are they destroying the Trebhums' world, but the yellow light emitted by the servants of the cylinder can take away any adaptations the Trebhums have obtained from food.
• Arc Words: "The Eternal Cylinder cannot be stopped."
• Artificial Stupidity: Pathfinding by non-leader Trebhum can be very frustrating at times: they tend to jump and bounce all over the place and sometimes fall into hazards or off cliffs if you're not keeping track of your group. Thankfully, they always teleport offscreen to your leader.
• Art Shift: An example within a single game - Trebhum homes found in the Savannah or Tundra have an organic appearance and look as if they were grown from some kind of plant. By contrast, the ones found in the Desert have a distinctly artificial look and appear to be composed of metal.
• Artistic License – Biology: Filter-feeding in large animals really only works for aquatic environments, with an abundance of plankton, making the Great Gaaahr's feeding strategy very inefficient. Made worse that it lives in deserts, where food is few to support huge megafauna, and heat dissipation is another notable problem as large animals find it more difficult to lose heat.
• Artistic License – Physics:
  • Zooshgargs fly and hunt prey by manipulating gravity itself. How an animal would manage to evolve such a feature is never explained.
  • The concept of the Cylinder makes sense only on a totally level planet; such an object would only touch the ground for a few dozen miles before extending into space - for the plot to work the Eternal Cylinder would need to be an eternal Torus wrapped around the world, or only long enough to flatten the surface in strips like a lawnmower. Forget that most planets have mountains and deep oceans as well, so flattening the surface would require more than just rolling over it; it would require completely redistributing millions of tons of matter from one place to the next.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Some of the more interesting mutations have little use outside puzzle-solving in shrines, such as the Entomophilous Skin that attracts Sack Flies or the Hypnotic Trunk that makes Glickbol follow you. The eye mutation allowing the player to control Trebhum statues probably takes the cake, as it is used twiceever in the game - once for the Infected shrine puzzle and hten again in acave in the same biome, after which it is never used again.
  • The Wheel Body mutation allows you to kill other creatures by rolling at them, but given the player risks injury going full melee with large creatures such as Tonglegrops the Mixer Body and Toxic Trunk ultimately makes for a better offensive Trebhum.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: The Servants of the Cylinder tend to have naked human bodies, but none display anything too inappropriate: the Mathematician's right leg's smaller torso originally had female breasts but this was removed for the final version.
• Behemoth Battle: The final boss isn't much of a boss fight bewtween the Trebhum and the Mathematician: it's mostly the Trebhum simply trying to survive the crossfire while the Mathematician and three of the Trewhaala duke it out.
• Belly Mouth: The Omnogrom, an enemy creature with a massive mouth that nearly splits its body in half.
• Bittersweet Ending: The planet is in ruins, many biomes and species are gone forever, and countless Trebhum and Trewhaala have died. But in the end, the Cylinder is destroyed when the Mathematician pulls a Heel–Face Turn and destroys itself with its master. While the possibility of the Cylinder returning could happen, the Trebhum and the Trewhaala now have a chance at a hopeful future.
• Bioluminescence Is Cool: The Luminescent Body mutation, acquired by Trebhum by eating a Glowfruit, allows them to light up dark cave areas.
• Bizarrchitecture: Pretty much the entire environment - there's no obvious reason everything looks the way it does (which gives natural processes the middle finger), but somehow, they exist. The final "???" Biome even has human faces carved out of massive structures that litter the landscape.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: All sorts.
  • The Trebhum can change their appearance by eating certain food, store food inside their bodies, and are very independent from birth, guided only by a Hive Mind.
  • The sauropod-like Great Gaaarh feeds through a version of filter feeding that creates sandstorms. Its long giraffe-like "head" is actually a proboscis that opens up by peeling open its lower half like a Helicoprion and its infants are born with their three legs fused together and move about by taking long, slow hops with their merged leg aided by a massive gas-filled sac.
  • Foosh gain energy by feeding off of the heat produced when they apply a chemical that reacts with generic rocks, causing said rocks to ignite.
  • And that's not even bringing up the Servants of the Cylinder who are bizarrely unnatural even for this planet. They're cyborgs that clearly incorporate human body parts in their structures.
  • The Zooshgarg is a flying predator that hunts prey using tractor beams.
  • The Grashtuub has a hollow body with its interior being a nightmarish mess of rotating teeth, with no defined mouth, stomach or ailmentary canal.
• Bizarre Alien Locomotion:
  • The Trebhums normally walk on two legs, but to move faster they curl up into a ball and roll at top speed. Somehow this works even for those with the "square body" mutation.
  • Glickbols are basically sentient eggs that can already roll around even before hatching, using their tongues to steer their egg membrane around.
  • Adult Tonglegrops have a large acid sac that can somehow roll independently of their body, allowing them to use it as a wheel to roll at high speeds.
  • The Great Gaaarh plods about on three giraffe-like legs, balanced upright by its flotation sac. This sac, while too heavy to lift an adult, can be used by juveniles to float about in the air.
  • Zooshgargs fly by gravity manipulation.
  • The Liberator, one of the Cylinder's servants, resembles a humanoid with no legs, and instead moves by spinning two enormous hoops held in its hands in a manner similar to a wheelchair. How they rotate while the Liberator is holding them in its hands is unclear.
  • Roondaslocks are ball-shaped creatures covered all over in eyes and mouths. They move by using their long projectile tongues to launch themselves from place to place.
• Bizarre Alien Limbs: The Mathematician's left leg is a smaller humanoid torso with two smaller legs of its own.
  • The Trebhum's trunk, which functions as an arm to compensate for their Armless Biped nature but can also have various uses from the different mutations, such as shooting fire, spraying acid and creating small tornadoes, among other things.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction:
  • The Tonglegrop has a fairly complex metamorphosis, which appears to be based on the one undergone by frogs.
    • Initially, Tonglegrops start out as eggs, but at a certain point in development, the developing embryos gain the ability to move said eggs via licking the amnion. These are known as glickbol. Eating a dead glickbol causes the Trebhum to lose its legs, though fortunately this is temporary (and glickbol heads are also needed to create some of the best bombs in the game from the Mixer Body mutation).
    • Eventually, glickbol become tonglegroplets, herbivorous bipeds that live in the Savannah. The main feature of the tonglegroplet's body is an enormous acid storage sack that takes up most of the creature's rear end.
    • Finally, the ones that survive to adulthood become tonglegrops. These creatures have acid sacks so large that they use them as an organic omni-directional wheel to roll around, Though they still walk around most of the time. Adult tonglegrops are omnivores (with a distinct preference for meat), and the apex predators of the savannah.
  • Another species with an interesting life cycle is the Great Gaaarh. Adults are sauropod-like tripods, but their young (which are still huge compared to Trebhum) have their three legs still fused together and instead float midair with their flotation sac, occasionally touching the ground and pushing off again with their merged limb.
• Blessed with Suck: A few Trebhum mutations are useless and harmful. Fortunately, they are temporary.
  • Eating a Glickbol head causes the Legless mutation, where a Trebhum can only roll around and is unable to jump.
  • The Tripobosh antenna grants the Antenna Eyes mutation, which gives a Trebhum poor vision and blurs the entire landscape.
  • The Omnogrom Pellet grants the Iracible Trunk mutation, where the Trebhum babbles incessantly in an incredibly-annoying, ranting tone.
  • The Iridescent body mutation makes the Trebhum shiny...and does literally nothing else.
• Body Horror:
  • The Servants of the Cylinder are some pretty bizarre and horrific beings all of whom are disturbing fusions of human body parts and machinery. One of them, the Cleanser, has the front half of a car and the back half of a humanoid upper torso with a pair of muscular arms, and an even bigger one glimpsed in the trailer (the Mathematician) is a Frankenstein-esque humanoid with a mass of metal shards for a head (consisting of something like an oil rig, a bisected train, and a bisected Greek bust) and an entire human lower torso for a left leg.
  • The Omnogrom may count as well, resembling a massive pair of buttocks with teeth and two eyes on opposite sides.
  • The Frozen Sklaa's heart dangles out of its chest on a fleshy cord and almost touches the ground.
  • Some Trebhum mutations look somewhat disturbing, such as the Mineral Processor mutation that causes organic pipes and tubes to sprout from their bodies, or the Regenerative Body mutation, obtained by eating the heart of the Frozen Sklaa, which turns the Trebhum's body into a pulsating heart.
  • The Great Gaaahr's mouth could also qualify: closed, it appears to look like a sauropod-like "neck", but then opens by peeling upward into a spiral like some sort of upside-down Helicoprion.
  • When the Mathematician is killed at the end of the Desert Biome, his innards look less like blood and guts, and more like a clear, amber jelly of some sort.
  • The Grashtuub has a disturbing-looking digestive system opened entirely to the air, and its hollow interior is essentially mouth, stomach and ailmentary canal all in one.
• Boring, but Practical: The Leaping Legs mutation is the first acquired mutation in the game and is later overshadowed by other mutations, but is vital for exploring caves and shrines aa many secret items and locations are placed high above on ledges and high places.
• Breath Weapon: The Flame Trunk mutation causes Trebhum to be able to breathe fire. Downplayed as it is less of a weaponized flamethrower and more of a tool for keeping warm in the Tundra, incubating Trebhum eggs, and killing the plantlike Gargadends as opposed to directly attacking.
• Canis Latinicus: Many of the creatures have surprisingly-meaningful latin names, such as the Omnogrom being of the genus Stomatotherium, meaning "mouth beast", the Tripoboosh being called Polyrrhinus pilosus, meaning "hairy many-nosed", the Zooshgarg being called Aerotorus trebhumuphagus, or "Trebhum-eating aerial ring" and the Trewhaala being called Cetovermis nebulae, or "whale-worm of the nebula".
• Carry a Big Stick: The Mathematician can throw Unifiers like javelins. One of them is shown to have struck and killed a Celestial Trewhaala.
• Changing Gameplay Priorities: Initially, you will want to avoid the Servants of the Eternal Cylinder, as they inflict high amounts of damage and can remove your mutations with their yellow light. From Chapter 3 onwards, though, you're more likely an able to light them, as by now you should have several mutations shielded from the Cylinder, including at least one offensive mutation. In fact, you're actually encouraged to fight them later in the game, because defeated servants drop Chaos Amber which can instantly shield one mutation from being stolen.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • Towers and their force fields are emit either red or blue light. Red light indicates that a tower is inactive or that there is something inside the forcefield that you need to examine before progressing. Blue light indicates that a tower is active and that there are no things that need to be examined in the current area.
  • Servants of the Cylinder emit either yellow or red light. Yellow light removes mutations, while red does the same, but also inflicts large amounts of damage.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Trebhum can not only walk and jump close to lava, but also swim in lava taking only minimal damage.
• Cosmic Horror Story: A group of tiny aliens at the bottom of their planet's food chain have their struggles to survive further added by an incomprehensible eldritch force slowly and inevitably destroying their planet. And accorindg to the website, the Eternal Cylinder has already destroyed multiple worlds with one of those destroyed worlds being Earth.
• Creepy Cleanliness: The inside of the Mathematician's head is a digital-like room that is pure white with distorted reflections. It is very unsettling.
• Creepy Good: The Celestial Trewhaala. While resembling serpentine Eldritch Abominations and having a Voice of the Legion they are actually benevolent once the Trebhum re-acquire the means to communicate with them.
• Cutting the Knot:
  • The Trebhums eventually manage to escape the Cylinder's reach by jumping over it... only to now have to face the Mathematician.
  • At one point in the game, you need to collect the yolk of an onkifurt egg. The intended strategy for doing so is to feed the egg to a nearby Omnogrom, which will break the shell but leave the yolk behind. In pratice, though, it's easier to just throw the egg into a hard object, which will break the shell outright.
• Death of a Child: Player Trebhum are literally newborns, and can suffer a variety of horrible deaths like getting eaten by various predators, crushed by the Cylinder, fall down ravines of poisonous gas or electrocuted by the Trewhaala...
• Depower: The servants of the Eternal Cylinder can remove a Trebhum's mutations via exposing the creatures to their yellow light.
• Determinator: The Cylinder absolutely refuses to give up its hunt for the Trebhum - in one instance, it even powers through a set of active towers to keep hunting the Trebhum.
• Demonic Spiders: Adult Tonglegrops can certainly qualify, being fairly common, unfairly powerful, faster than they look once they begin rolling, and are absolutely relentless.
• Developer's Foresight: While the desert region is only accessible via glitch in the beta, all of the species there are fully modeled and have their own entries in the database.
• Difficult, but Awesome: It is extremely difficult to kill minions of the Eternal Cylinder, but the rewards are worth it - they drop an item that instantly protects one of your mutations, permanently unlocking it without need to spend resources. Thus, you are highly encouraged to kill any servants you find if possible.
• Dire Beast: The now-extinct "Hypertonglegrop", mentioned in the Grashtuub's compendium entry.
• The Dragon: The Mathematician is the enforcer of the Cylinder's will, and is revealed to be pushing the Cylinder to make it move. However, after the Mathematician is killed the Cylinder is able to move under its own steam.
• Eats Babies: Tonglegrops hunt and devour every animal in the Savannah, even Tonglegroplets and Glickbols— immature forms of their own species.
• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • After the first set of towers, players can find a smell patch of Tundra with a single Blue Omnogrom located at its heart. More patches can be found later on until you finally reach the tundra (which, in the beta, occurred at the end of the beta).
  • A single Great Gaahr can be observed after activating the first set of towers, apparently drinking from a lake.
  • The desert can be observed at several points in the first chapter of the game, well before it can be accessed.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: It takes forever, but the Trebhum manage not not only escape, but permanently stop the Cylinder and free a significant portion of the life it absorbed to recolonize the wasteland behind it.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Eternal Cylinder is possibly something like this. It is a giant unstoppable force slowly crushing the planet into a wasteland inhabited only by massive cyborg monsters.
• Endangered Species: Never stated in the game, but it's implied that every creature you encounter is slowly dying out due to the cylinder destroying their world. Several actually seem to go extinct as you advance further in the game, because they stop appearing as you leave their biomes.
• Everyone Has Standards: Whenever the Cylinder is rolling, all animals will focus on fleeing from the Cylinder rather than trying to eat each other — they're not that stupid. The one exception to this rule, the Zooshgarg, is also the only animal in the game that is able to ignore the Cylinder due to how far up it flies. That being said, Omnogroms, Tripobosh, and Onogrosh may still try to attack you, but this is Justified — all three have poor eyesight and legitimately might miss the Cylinder's advance until it is too late to run.
• Evil Is Burning Hot: The Eternal Cylinder glows orange when in motion and the wasteland beyond it is full of smoke.
• Exact Words: The Eternal Cylinder cannot be stopped. That doesn't mean it can't be delayed. And there's no rule about simply jumping over the cylinder, either.
• Expy:
  • The Trebhum closely resemble the old video game character Q*Bert.
  • The Glickbol also resembles the Pokemon Solosis.
  • Many of the creatures, as well as the planet's landscapes, heavily bring to mind Expedition and its documentary-style special Alien Planet. The Great Gaaarh, in particular, being a towering Gentle Giant with flying airborne offspring, bring to mind the Emperor Sea Strider.
  • The Zooshgarg bears some resemblance to the Qu from All Tomorrows.
• Extreme Omnivore: The Trebhum - they can eat plants, fungi, animals, and, with proper mutations, even digest minerals.
  • Omnogrom are known to eat virtually anything their mouths can grab, be it plant, animal or Trebhum.
• Extra Eyes: Trebhums can get a third eye as a possible mutation, allowing them to see additional info from their genetic memory. Additionally, the Celestial Trewhaala and Zooshgarg also have many eyes (the Zooshgarg seems to have eight). The Grashtuub has twelve eyes, six on each end of its body.
• Eyeless Face: The vast majority of the Servants of the Cylinder lack eyes or even discernable heads of any sort.
  • The Onogrosh and the Tripobosh are ostrich-like predators that are blind and hunt by sound and smell, but do retain vestigal stalk-like eyes.
• Fan Disservice: The Mathematician is completely nude, and his bare buttocks (including the smaller one on his leg) are in full display seen from behind.
• Fantastic Fauna Counterpart: An interesting example: native wildlife are bizarre-looking Starfish Aliens looking nothing like Earth animals, yet exhibit behaviors akin to terran fauna. Onkifurts brood their eggs on nest in clifftops and swoop down on prey like predatory birds, Omnogroms are forest dwelling omnivores with an arctic subspecies much like bears, Tonglegrops have spawn-like young, herbivorous juveniles and predatory adults similar to the life cycle of frogs, and Hophopops are small common grassland herbivores that jump, being analogous to rabbits or hares.
• Faster Than You Look: Adult Tonglegrops may look like lumbering giants, but in a pinch they can use their acid sacs to roll at top speed, and being a commonly-encountered Super-Persistent Predator it's safe to keep distance to one as they can roll very quickly once they spot your group.
• Fartillery: Onkifurt are flying creatures that float with sacs of toxic gas that they spew in defense or to pick up speed as propulsion.
  • The slug-like Yackfurt of the Corrupted Biome also releases clouds of toxic gas in self-defence, and explodes into a smelly cloud upon death.
• Feed It a Bomb: The way to defeat Liberators: their tractor beam draws in nearby Trebhum, but will also draw in bombs, causing explosions that are the only way to damage it as its wheels make it too high to take on from the ground.
  • The Grashtuub can be killed by triggering an explosion inside its body orfice, either with bombs or by a Trebhum with the Unstable Body mutation.
• Fling a Light into the Future:
  • Played with, in that it wasn't planned on their part while they were still alive, but what's left of the consciousness of humans after being absorbed by the Cylinder gladly do whatever is possible to help give the Trebhums a future, in spite of their own destruction in the past.
  • The very end of the game (read: the last scene in the credits) reveals that this was what the Elder Trebhum you found at the very beginning of the game did before expiring - they are the one who put the egg you begin the game as in the first nest.
• Foregone Conclusion: The opening narration describes the Age of the Eternal Cylinder as being in the past, strongly implying that the Cylinder will eventually fall.
• Foreshadowing:
  • When players first encounter the Cleanser, they find it sleeping by a human hand formed out of earth near a toxic pit. The final biome of the game is an area filled with toxic plants and human-like rock formations, with the implication that it was created by the Cylinder.
  • It's possible to glimpse the desert, tundra, and savannah biomes when looking across an ocean, but players will never see the Infected biome until Chapter 4. This is because until that chapter, said biome did not exist.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: The Glickbol, small, common egg-like creatures that are found in abundance and are harmless to the Trebhums, eventually grows to be the towering, acid-spewing apex predator known as the Tonglegrop.
• Friendly Fireproof: Averted by the Unstable Body mutation, though it only hurts your Trebhum minimally.
  • Very averted by gas bombs made by the Mixer Body mutation: these can and will kill your Trebhum and even the Filter Trunk cannot protect them.
• Gathering Steam: The Cylinder speeds up as it chases you, eventually moving at break-neck speeds to run you down, though you'd have to glitch the game for it to reach truly insane speeds.
• Gigantic Adults, Tiny Babies: Newly hatched Trebhum are no bigger than glickbols, with fan-measurements putting their height as that of an adult human's knees. Adults are on the same size range as the apex predators in most regions they are encountered in, which would put them as being in the size range of hippos.
  • Glickbols themselves are the offspring of the far larger and deadlier Tonglegrop.
  • Subverted by the Great Gaaarh. Adults are towering giants that feed on sandstorms: but its floating, bomb-dropping young are noticeably smaller but still massive when compared to a Trebhum.
• Green Hill Zone: While not green on account of the Trebhum living on an Amazing Technicolor World, the Savannah fulfils this role - the area has a variety of foods to eat, most of the creatures encountered are either docile or can be repelled fairly easily, and the few creatures that cannot be scared off are fairly easy to avoid.
• Good All Along: The Mathematician is actually The Narrator himself all along under the Cylinder's influence, and after he is defeated in the last boss fight he manages to rebel against the Cylinder and destroy it for good, and himself with it in the process.
• Guide Dang It!: The game offers minimal advice beyond what is needed to progress further in the story.
  • At the very start of the game, near where the first Trebhum hatches, there is an easy-to-miss lake containing Pouchfish, which grants the Storage Body mutation that will come very useful in the earliest parts.
  • Getting a Tonglegrop Acid Sac is high priority to get the Toxic Trunk mutation that gives Trebhum the ability to defend themselves and even kill large predators for parts. The easiest ways to do it are:
    • In the Trewhaala level, lure a Tonglegrop over to zapping range of the Trewhaala.
    • If you possess the Filter Trunk mutation you can lure the Tonglegrop over to a pit of toxic fumes.
    • The easiest way is to get two Tonglegrops to collide while rolling, which will kill both and yield two acid sacs. With Tonglegrops being a Super-Persistent Predator it's quite easy to initiate a chase and then lead them into a trap.
  • Sometimes incubators are hard to find when you stumble upon a Trebhum egg. However, the towers that stop the cylinder have a small room at their base, which can be used to hatch an egg even after the blue glowing symbol dissipates.
  • The Leaping Legs ability is very important for shrines and temples as there are many secrets and mutations hidden on high ledges. Remember that once you leave a temple it will be locked permanently and any treasures it contains will never be accessible again.
  • Never bring Trebhum eggs inside elder caves and shrines: the egg will disappear when you enter and will not respawn ever again in the overworld.
  • While the game does tell you which items can be converted into Minerals by the Mineral Processor Mutation, it doesn't specify the amount that each mineral provides. As a rule, mineral items that contain or function as mutation catalysts (Iridescent Pearls, Floating Crystals, and Klaborok Pearls) given significantly higher amounts of Minerals when processed - each gives a whole Mineral when fully processed, though they take much longer to process in the first place.
  • The Crystalline Skin mutation's description indicates it is only for story purposes. It doesn't tell you that it also provides a cold resilience bonus that exceeds even the furred skin mutation, being enough to shield you from damaging effects of freezing water. This is extremely helpful for the final part of the Tundra chapter, where you have to cross a small ocean of freezing water.
  • It's impossible to shield all mutations via upgrade shrines, as there will always be nine left over mutations even if you visit every upgrade shrine. To shield all mutations in one play through, you need to kill off servants of the Eternal Cylinder and collect the Chaos Amber they drop.
• Heel–Face Turn: After it is defeated by the Trewhaala, the Mathematician turns on its master the Cylinder and pounds it with its fists: destroying them both and ending its destruction once and for all.
• Heroic Sacrifice: The Mathematician, after his Heel–Face Turn, destroys himself and the Cylinder to end the threat once and for all.
• Hive Mind: While the Trebhums have individual minds and personalities, they are able to access the genetic memory of their ancestors, as is the case of the newly-hatched one at the beginning that "remembered" its race's special abilities moments after birth.
• Hold the Line: The final boss battle with the Mathematician ultimately boils down to just avoiding its attacks until the three Trewhaala with you take the giant Servant down.
• Honorable Elephant: The somewhat elephant-like Trebhums are noted for their intelligence, loyalty, and their ability to span long memories.
• Hostile Terraforming:
  • The landscape behind the Eternal Cylinder is a burning wasteland which, oddly enough, is completely devoid ofanything, with not even the crushed remains of the trees it flattens being visible. This explained as the Cylinder harvesting things that interest it, meaning that the area behind the Cylinder has literally been picked clean of anything of value.
  • The damage the Trebhum inflict on the Mathematician results in a reverse of the above happening in Chapter 4, with various creatures and plants spilling out to create the corrupted plains that make up the Infected biome.
• Hope Spot: Having obtained the mutation to summon the Trewhaala, the Trebhum now need to summon them to destroy the face-shaped structures to retrieve their memories. They succeed with two, and are just about to get the third: and then the Mathematician appears and spears the Trewhaala, badly wounding it and forcing it to retreat.
• Hugh Mann: Treghrums are desert predators that mimic Trebhums, pretending to be one of them until they find the right time to strike, at which point they unfurl their centipede-like true forms and attack.
• Humanoid Abomination: The Servants of the Cylinder all have human body parts. Disturbingly this is the only place in the game where anything resembles something from earth. It's eventually revealed that this is because the Servants are created from humans, as humanity was one of the many civilizations destroyed by the Cylinder.
• Humanity's Wake: One of the civilizations destroyed by the Cylinder was Earth itself— and the Servants were fashioned from the remains of humanity.
• Impossibly Graceful Giant: The Mathematician, despite being nearly as tall as the Great Gaaahr, is capable of feats of agility such as doing parkour-like leaps over and behind the Cylinder.
• It Can Think: The Cylinder is much smarter than its appearance would suggest - it has the ability to create creatures that serve it and will chase down the Trebhum, and in one instance, generates an inescapable thunderstorm in an effort to trap the Trebhum closer to itself.
  • Trebhum are quite smarter than they look: lore suggests their civilization was once advanced enough to have genetic engineering.
  • When first encountered, the Celestial Trewhaala seems more of a belligerent, aggressive creature zapping anything that comes within range. It's revealed later on that the Trewhaala are actually an intelligent species who were once friends of the Trebhum, and when the player gains the Master of Song mutation they once again are able to converse with the Trewhaala and learn their secrets.
• I Will Only Slow You Down: Elder Trebhum in Trebhum shrines will refuse to leave even though this will mean that they will be crushed by the cylinder, as they are too old to keep running and too large to fit through the doorways. Additionally, it's implied that they can't leave the shrines due to growing too large to use the exits.
• Just Before the End: The game occupies an interesting place between this trope and After the End — the Trebhum civilization has already fallen, but life on their planet is still around, if teetering toward collapse. The final biome fits this best, being a barely habitable set of plains covered in toxic gas, with creatures from clashing enviromnets all trying to eek out a living as the Cylinder moves to finish destroying the Trebhum's world.
• Justified Tutorial:
  • Whenever the player receives a tutorial or hint, it's indicated this is because the Trebhum is acting out of curiosity or remembering something from its Hive Mind.
  • Trebhum Shrines (at least those encountered from Chapter 2 onwards) provide you with recipes that permanently unlock mutations. The first recipe you receive, for the Filter Trunk, is acquired when you are trapped on an island surrounded by toxic gas, with a servant of the cylinder looking down on you, meaning you NEED to get that mutation permanently to escape.
• "Just So" Story: Trebhum culture seems to have had plenty of these, as seen in the minerals flavor text: the three minerals Gnakka's Guide, Gnakka's Shield and Gnakka's Heart tells the story of a Trebhum folk hero who ventured into the underworld. Another item is Barbagar's Foot which is a plant that grants the Meteor Feet ability and is named after another figure of Trebhum mythology. And there even seems to be a fable titled "The Tripoboosh and Onogrosh Go Hunting Together", though sadly only its title remains in the Trebhum memory cluster.
• Kidnapping Bird of Prey: Vuushlops look like some nightmarish fusion of bat and shrimp but otherwise fill this role in the Tundra, snatching away Trebhum and carrying them to its nest. The Wheel Body mutation can make Trebhum lethal for Vuushlops to grab, as they die of collision damage.
• Large and in Charge: The Trebhum elders are far bigger than the playable ones, though probably justified as the player Trebhums are newly-hatched.
• Living Gasbag: The Onkifurt, a flying creature propelled by a gaseous sac. The titanic Great Gaaarh also have a gaseous sac on their backs, though they can't fly as adults: juveniles are able to float and drop explosive bombs in self-defense.
• Leitmotif: Several enemies have unique musical cues that herald their presence:
  • The Tonglegrop has fast-paced drums playing ominous chase music when it aproaches.
  • The Zooshgarg has a harsh and grating techno beat.
  • The Exonerator has an energetic rock-music electric guitar riff.
  • The Mathematician is accompanied by a loud noise akin to a boat horn or tornado siren whenever he appears.
• Logical Weakness: The Servants of the Cylinder are all partly mechanical, and thus are vulnerable to short-circuiting in water. Witnesses can be felled temporarily by squirting them with water, while Cleansers will die if they are tricked into driving into a lake.
• Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: The Trebhum used to have a fairly advanced civilization, with the game implying one species you find was a type of pet. Now, they're reduced to scattered tribes trying to escape the cylinder. However, it's strongly implied the Cylinder is destroying the Trebhum not as punishment for hubris, but just because it can.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Roondaslocks explode into messy chunks of flesh when killed.
• Meaningful Name: Omnogrom seems to be a play on "om nom" and "omnivore", a fitting name for a ravenous mostly-mouth creature that eats virtually anything.
• Misplaced Wildlife: Justified example with the final biome — the final biome was created due to the creatures and beings within the Cylinder being released haphazardly after the Trebhum crippled the Mathmatician, so it's possible to find Ocular Orthopods and Gargadends (native to the Tundra) alongside Tetracrabs and Treghrums (native to the Desert) in the biome, which is a mutated version of the Savannah.
• Mix-and-Match Critter: The Trebhums look like a cross between an elephant and a frog.
  • The Tripobosh resembles an ostrich with three tentacled snouts like a starnosed mole, with its cousin the Onogrosh replacing the two lateral trunks with elephant-like tusks.
  • Omnogroms are hinged creatures vaguely resembling clams with oddly human-like teeth and tiny clawed birdlike feet.
  • The Great Gaaahr looks like a mix of a giraffe, an elephant, a Helicoprion and a hot air balloon.
  • Grolluscs closely resemble snails. However their shells are pearl-bearing and hinged like an oyster, their ability to leave their shells resemble hermit crabs and their flippered, exposed bodies are somewhat reminescent of a seal.
  • Onkifurts are flying creatures with somewhat pig-like snouts, chameleon-like eyes and squid-like tentacles, that float in the air using gaseous sacs. Strangely, they behave a lot like birds.
  • Tonglegrops are top predators resembling a mix of an octopus and a frog, with two taloned bird-like feet, catfish-like barbels and eyes like a hammerhead shark, and a glowing green spherical sac that can somehow rotate like a wheel.
  • The Articulated Angstok looks like a fusion of a coral, a carnivorous plant, a stick insect and an antlion.
  • The Yackfurt looks like a cross between a snail and some variety of insect.
• Mordor: The final biome in the game (referred to as "Infect" by the website) is filled with strange plants, toxic clouds, and what appears to be wiring and human-like statues. It's the result of the Trebhum apparently killing the Mathematician at the end of Chapter 3, which causes the entities stored within to spill out into the world. Creatures from all prior biomes can be found here, with the land itself seemingly dying due to the extensive damage to its ecology. Tellingly, the largest animal found here, the Grashtuub, is a scavenger that feeds on the remains of Kaiju, with one observed eating a fallen Celestial Trewhaala.
• More Predators Than Prey:
  • Averted on the Savannah, which has multiple different herbivorous creatures who outnumber the carnivores by a fair margin. Even the carnivorous tonglegrop gets around this, as while their juvenile forms are fairly common, the tonglegroplet is explicitly stated to be herbivorous at this stage in its life, while glickbols feed via absorption. Only the uncommon adults are predators, and are omnivores as opposed to obligate carnivores.
  • The Tundra is a downplayed example, as while there are more varieties of predator than there are prey, the herbivores Ocular Orthopod, Tonglegroplets, and Foosh outnumber the predators quite a bit.
  • Played Straight in the Desert, where the number and variety of predators trumps that of their prey. It's a mystery how the ecosystem works.
  • Played straight by the Corrupted Biome where the predatory Roondaslocks are everywhere, along with Tonglegrops, Omnogroms and Onkifurts, and the Yackfurt being one of the few herbivores present. That being said, the Yackfurt has an insane populataion density (it's popular to find twenty in an area), so this is more of a Downplayed example.
• Near-Villain Victory: At the end of the Action Prologue, just as it looks like the Trebhum will get crushed when the gully they are in ends at an Insurmountable Waist-High Fence, the Cylinder is brought to a halt by a tower, after which the Trebhum eats a Hophopop pod, giving it access to legs that let it jump over the previously inescapable barrier.
• No Body Left Behind: Usually played straight with most enemies killed, which dissolve into smoke. However, the Trebhum do discover several intact carcasses of dead creatures, such as Celestial Trewhaalas (twice), a Great Gaahr in the Desert (near the Hand of Fate) and an eviscerated Onkifurt in the final Trebhum temple.
• Nobody Poops:
  • Averted with Springworms, which excrete small pellets that Trebhum can eat.
  • Played straight with Omnogroms, which can digest almost anything and instead cough up small pellets of undigestible matter somewhat like real-life owls.
  • Given that the Great Gaaahr's dorsal sac is implied to be a digestive system, the pink bombs it drops are suggested to be its excreta.
• Not Quite Dead: The Trebhum managed to kill the Mathematician in the Desert by roasting off half his body with the lenses— however, he is resurrected in the Infected biome, at first still bearing his wounds, but later returns fully healed.
• No Name Given: All of the Trebhum elders are given names, save for the first one encountered immediately before the first set of towers (and this is justified - said Elder is very clearly dead).
• Non-Indicative Name: While most of the biomes in the game are properly named (the Tundra is a snow covered Slippy-Slidey Ice World and the desert is a Shifting Sand Land), the Savannah is more of a sparse woodland rather than a grassland.
• Nothing Is Scarier: In addition to the Savannah, the Tundra, and the Desert, the website indicates that there is one other environment, but absolutely no-information is provided on it. This is because the final biome is created during the penultimate chapter of the game after the Trebhum manage to grievously wound the Mathematician, causing the entities stored within the Cylinder to spill out into the Trebhum's world.
• 1-Dimensional Thinking: Justified example - The Eternal Cylinder really does extend infinitely in the horizontal plane, so going sideways to escape it is impossible. Additionally, devstreams have confirmed that it fills in any ditches it happens to go over (with Word of God during these streams also indicating that it generates earthquakes that fill in underground caverns beneath it), meaning digging under it isn't an option either. Finally, the Cylinder is capable of generating an electric storm to take out fliers, and the land behind it is reduced to a barren wasteland unable to support life. Thus, the only way to survive it really is to just keep running and hope you can find something to stop it forever. The Trebhum eventually decide to defy this trope by using a starship to escape the Cylinder forever, but due to the Mathematician interfering and then some additional actions by the Cylinder, they have to seek the aid of the Celestial Trewhaala to escape.
• One-Hit Kill:
  • Anything hit by the Cylinder is, understandably given the Cylinder's size, Squashed Flat.
  • The Celestial Trewhaala can one-shot every creature with its lightning attack, though it takes two strikes to kill a Trebhum.
  • The easiest way to kill a Tonglegrop is to get two of them to collide while rolling, killing them both and granting two Acid Sacs to give the Trebhums the Toxic Trunk ability.
• Perpetual-Motion Monster: The Eternal Cylinder does not seem to eat or otherwise absorb energy in any visible way, but as its name suggests, it travels onward with no stopping unless blocked by a powered tower.
• Order Versus Chaos: A twist of this with the Trebhum and the Cylinder: while the Cylinder flattens the world and makes it "all the same", according to narration, the Trebhum are blessed with difference that enable them to grow and adapt.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: A playable Trebhum is tiny (it's shorter than an adult human's knees), but with proper mutations, they can kill just about anything in their home environment.
• Powerup Food: Trebhum gain all of their special mutations by eating certain items. Among others:
  • Eating a hophopop orb gives them longer legs and better jumping.
  • Eating a cubic mineral gives them a cubic body.
  • Eating a Weeping Tree fruit makes the Trebhum able to float.
• Puppeteer Parasite: One mission has a Unifier release bacteriophage-like spores to mind-control local animals, and the Trebhum need to destroy said parasites to defeat the Unifier.
• Rail Roading: Three examples!
  • If the ruins in an area contain story-relevant information, the barrier surrounding that area cannot be lowered until the Trebhum have accessed the ruins.
  • Speaking of barriers, a soft version of this is implemented with the towers - towers are only spaced so close together, and trying to progress too far will see the Cylinder overtake you well before you reach another set of towers.^note Examinations in beta involving bugs that stopped the cylinder (Which were deactivated by reloading a save) revealed that the cylinder can cover areas it took players hours to traverse in fifteen minutes).
  • Finally, when the player first encounters a Cleanser, they're stuck in an area where they are sandwiched between the cylinder and a pit filled with poison gas. There are no plants prior to this point in the game that provide the filter trunk mutation, nor are there any of these plants outside the pit, and the barrier the tower generates prevents the player from going around the pit. The only way to proceed is via a bridge whose entry point is held up by a seemingly unbreakable chain, forcing the Trebhum to wake up the nearby Cleanser and trick it into destroying said chain.
• Rare Candy: Two examples.
  • Defeating certain servants of the Cylinder from Chapter 3 onwards allows players to collect Chaos Amber from their corpses. When consumed, they instantly and permanently unlock a mutation on the mutation tree.
  • The Unifiers that corrupt towers use parasite called Control Nodules to control the local wildlife. Once killed (via spraying them with water), the heads of the parasites can be collected for further usage. They can be used with the Mineral Processor mutation to get extra wisdom, but some are required to permanently unlock the two story relevant mutations (Crystalline Skin and Master of Song).
• Redemption Equals Death: The Mathematician rebels against the Cylinder in the end: destroying both himself and the Cylinder to end its destruction once and for all.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: The protagonist Trebhums, being adorable Q*bert-like critters.
• Run or Die: Attempting to fight the Cylinder is not an option. They only way to survive is to retreat to an inactive tower, activate it, restock on food and water, hatch more Trebhums, and repeat the cycle.
• Sadistic Choice: This happens when the Trebhum talk with their second elder and learn there might be a way to escape the cylinder - they can either keep running from the Cylinder and possibly run out of places to retreat to, or try go over the cylinder and face the fury of the Mathematician. Ultimately, the Trebhum decide to go with latter, since that one isn't necessarily certain death.
• Shifting Sand Land: The desert, unsurprisingly. However, there is a fair amount of water to be found, and much of the desert is covered in rocky outcropping and plants to break up the monotony.
• Shown Their Work:
  • Any change in form that a Trebhum obtains from eating Powerup Food is explicitly referred to as a mutation, not an evolution.
  • While bizarre, the tonglegrop's lifecycle is taken essentially unchanged from a frogs: membraneous eggs turn into small herbivores that grow much larger and, as adults, become predators, and even then are stated to be omnivores that simply prefer meat but can make do with plants when prey are scarce.
  • The Omnogrom's blunt, vaguely-human teeth may seem odd for a predator: but it's actually a greatly-suited set of dentition for a durophage: an animal specialized for eating hard-shelled food, and the Omnogrom relishes Grolluscs, thus justifying its blunt teeth and powerful bite.
• Single-Biome Planet: Averted, the levels take place in various biomes that the Trebhum must adapt to. That said, the biomes are far from their earthly counterparts: the Savannah is filled with avocado-pinecone-like flora the size of tall trees, the Tundra harbors massive fungus-like red structures and the Desert has giant orbs in it that, based on descriptions of other items in the biome, appear to be pearls. The final biome, known only as "Infected" according to screenshots, has strange glowing green flora and humanoid forms dotting the landscape, which spilled out of the Cylinder after the Trebhum killed the Mathematician.
• Sinister Geometry: The Cylinder itself - there's no reason for such a thing to exist, yet somehow, it does, and is slowly grinding the world into a wasteland.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: The Tundra is a snow and ice covered area that, while certainly more life filled than other examples, is still very, very cold. Animals here tend to have abilities/appearnaces/behaviors that are themed around heat (Foosh heat up rocks for energy, Sklaas are covered in ice armor, and Tripobosh have fur to keep warm.
• Speaking Simlish: The Trebhum language seems to be comprised of muffled trumpeting noises, though it is conveniently translated by the Narrator in his commentary.
• Super-Persistent Predator:
  • The Cylinder itself, in a way. While its progress can be delayed by special magical towers, it can never be truly stopped.
  • Averted by most wild animals and servants — while they will chase you for a time, all of them will eventually lose interest in the Trebhum and break off their pursuits.
  • Played very, very straight with the adult Tonglegrop, which is absolutely relentless and will trail your group for unreasonably long distances. And even if you start rolling, the Tonglegrop can roll too. This thing will never leave you alone if you get anywhere near it.
  • Averted once the cylinder starts rolling: all animals will immediately flee for their lives and avoid targeting the Trebhum or each other. The Tripoboosh and Onogrosh, as well as the Omnogrom, are exceptions, though this is justified in lore by them having poor eyesight and not being very bright.
• Space Whale: The Celestial Trewhaala. They are normally found in the stratosphere and only descend to ground level to defend certain locations. The Trebhums' Hive Mind explicitly states they are not native to the Trebhums' world. Data-mining indicates the Trebhum will be able to acquire a potentially Mid-to-late-game mutation that can summon Trewhaala at will.
• Starfish Aliens: Most of the creatures encountered in the game do not look like anything that exists on Earth.
• Terrestrial Sea Life: The Klaborok is a giant predatory clam that lives in the desert. There are also Tetracrabs, small crustaceans that similarly live in the desert.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: Predators that swallow Trebhum whole will be unable to do much if you have the spiny-skin mutation, and most will outright spit you out after a moment.
• Tripod Terror:
  • Averted with the tall, towering three-legged Great Gaaargh, gentle giants that vacuum up soe much matter that it appears they feed upon sandstorms. Though they could also be unintentionally dangerous to Trebhums because of their size... and they also have a tendency to drop bombs from their dorsal sacs...
  • The Mathematician certainly counts, though in an odd way, as it resembles a humanoid with a lower body of a smaller humanoid forming its right leg, giving it a total of three legs. Its towering stride and glowing head certainly feel like the Trope Maker especially when it confronts the Trebhum after they jump over the cylinder.
• Underground Monkey: The standard Omnogrom in the Savannah is pink and hairless, but a blue-furred variant can be found in the Tundra. There's also a blue variety of Tonglegroplet found in the Tundra and a yellow version of the Tonglegrop found in the Desert.
• Uniformity Exception: The Servants of the Cylinder are extremely different from every other creature in the game.
  • Every Servant of the Cylinder is a Cyborg of some sort, as opposed to being a wholly organic being.
  • Adding on to the above, the organic parts of the Servants are distinctively Human.
  • Lastly, they all have human sounding names/designations as opposed to the more alien ones the native creatures have.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: You can pick up hapless Glickbol and manually feed them to predators such as the Omnogrom, and once you acquire offensive mutations like the Wheel Body and the Toxic Trunk you are perfectly able to go on a wildlife killing spree For the Evulz.
  • Grashtuubs are mostly harmless and generally ignore Trebhum, but one can go out of their way to equip a Trebhum with the Unstable Body mutation while inside the Grashtuub, triggering an explosion from inside that kills it.
• Visual Pun: The Cleanser is half automobile, half bodybuilder-like human torso. It's literally a muscle car.
• Wall Crawl: The Sucker Feet mutation allow Trebhum to climb up walls.
• Walking Wasteland: Well, rolling, but the Eternal Cylinder will flatten anything that gets in its way, up to and including mountains. Additionally, the land behind the Cylinder is covered in endless storms.
• Was Once a Man: The Humanoid Abomination Servants of the Cylinder once were humans— Earth was the previous civilization destroyed by the Cylinder in its quest to rid the universe of conflict by making it all the same.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: Trebhum need to eat and drink a fair amount of food/water to keep functioning. Given that they instantly transform after eating a catalyst, this is implicitly Justified by the Trebhum having a Hyperactive Metabolism.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Many of the Cylinder's servants are vulnerable to water, as they are mechanical and will short-circuit. Cleansers in particular can accidentally drive into a lake and kill themselves due to their very poor maneuverability.
• Wham Shot: After the final battle with the Mathematician, the Trebhum enter his mind one final time- and there they finally meet the Narrator face to face, revealing that he is actually a human and that it was him trapped inside the Mathematician's physical form.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: The Trebhum manage to kill the Mathematician with the lenses, but to little concern of the Cylinder— as the narrator explains, the Cylinder's servants were merely tools, and were cast aside once broken.

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