Video Game / The Hex

In a dark, forgotten corner of the video game universe, a storm is raging...

One dark and stormy night, the bartender at the Six Pint Inn gets a phone call that one of the patrons is planning a murder. He announces this discovery to his six guests, and then the mystery begins as we spend time with each of the six guests, learn more about them, and try to piece together who's planning to kill who and why. The six suspects also all happen to be video game characters, each from a different genre, including platforming, fighting, RPG, and others — and each of their respective franchises have crashed and burned in some way. This may be some sort of game world, but the truth behind it may be far more complicated than that would imply.

The Hex is a 2018 PC game made by Daniel Mullins. There is absolutely No Fourth Wall, having characters go through identity and existential crises. The game changes genre the longer it goes on, with a central point-and-click structure for the Six Pint Inn segments, and each flashback switching to a different genre of game for each of the different characters, managing to use a unified WASD and left click control scheme for every different style of play.

The characters and games are:

• Super Weasel Kid, the titular protagonist of the Super Weasel Kid Platform Game series.
• Chef Bryce, a character from Cooking Granny who became a guest fighter in the Fighting Game series Combat Arena X.
• Chandrelle Stormblaze, a character from Combat Arena X who went on to star in her own fantasy Role-Playing Game, Secrets of Legendaria.
• Rust McClain, a character from the post-apocalyptic, Wild West, Strategy RPG game Waste World.
• Lazarus Bleeze, a Space Marine from the Vicious Galaxy top-down shooter series who strangely seems to know Chandrelle.
• ???, a Heroic Mime from the Environmental Narrative Game / Puzzle Game Walk.

As you explore the world of each of these characters, you begin to discover their potential motives for murder, and the decisions that led them to this point. Will you accept the conclusion you are given? Or will you seek out the whole truth... even if you should probably just turn back?

There is also Beneath the Surface, a short fishing game serving as a sort of epilogue. In-Universe, it was developed by carla51, a developer mentioned within the original game. It consists of you, a cute little creature in the ice cold, fishing stuff from a hole in the ice. As you catch more fish, you will earn more money you can use to buy upgrades. But is that all there is to this game? Or is there something more... waiting beneath the surface?

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It is recommended that you play the game first, even though this isn't Spoilers Off, as there are major spoilers below, you've been warned.

The Hex gives examples of:

• Absurdism: A lot of the game's dark comedy comes from video game characters being aware of their lack of choice in their own identities and fates. Eventually deconstructed, as Lionel's implicit control over their lives results in them becoming embittered enough to participate in a murder pact.
• Addressing the Player: Happens several times from the characters, especially in the end where Reginald implores the player to activate the Hex so that he can kill Lionel.
• Advance Notice Crime: At the beginning of the game, the bartender Reginald receives a phone call informing him that somebody in his bar is planning a murder, which he then announces to his patrons and, by extension, the player. In the end, it's revealed that the murder was being planned by him all along, with all but one of the patrons in on it, and the phone call was most likely staged.
• After the End: The Waste World setting is a standard post-apocalyptic wasteland.
• Alternate Reality Game: Many of the game's secrets can only be found by first getting hints in it, and then exploring the net outside it. Finding the locket and getting it translated will eventually lead you to a completely different game with a hidden file, for example.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: Rebecha is a mechanic from a fantasy video game and has dark green skin. Rocky is some sort of irradiated mutant from a post-apocalypse world and as such is green from head to toe. Irving is an advanced AI and has blue skin. Lazarus has greenish skin after he gets turned from a knight to a space marine.
• Animated Actors: All video game characters, down to even the basic mooks, are portrayed as fully sapient beings working as actors for Gameworks.
• Apocalypse How: Planetary when Vallamir wins in Secrets of Legendaria. Multiversal if you free him in the Six Pint Inn.
• Arc Number: Six. The Six Pint Inn. Six guests. Six game segments. Six sides and six angles on a hexagon. And in some instances, Sado as a spider has six legs instead of eight.
• Arc Symbol: A hexagon, tying into the Arc Number of six. The main characters use The Artifact (a six-sided gemstone shaped like a hexagon) to open the Hex, which is a hexagon-shaped portal.
• Arc Words: "Sarsaparilla" pops up frequently throughout the games. It probably references how the protagonist of the unreleased video game Rootbeer Tender is behind everything.
• Attack Its Weak Point: During Vicious Galaxy, you have to fight a giant armored monster. The only part of it that isn't covered by its shell is its tookus, which you need to shoot at.
• Audience-Alienating Ending: In-Universe example: Chandrelle deliberately sabotages her own game to ensure it never gets a sequel. Instead of the intended ending where she defeats the Big Bad Vallamir and saves the world, she teams up with him and causes the apocalypse.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Rocky and Rust share a joke after beating the Vurm, with Rust saying that a bit of "clowning around" is exactly what they need for morale right now. Sado shows up in the very next fight, curbstomping them both and deleting Rocky from the game.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Rootbeer Reggie is revealed to be the video game character who is planning to murder his real-world creator Lionel Snill, but the personal enemy of all the characters in the Six Pint Inn is Lionel Snill himself, who is personally responsible for ruining their lives and who Reggie seeks vengeance against. And opposing both of them is Sado, a Glitch Entity out to cause chaos and destroy the games for her amusement.
• Black Comedy: Everywhere, often by paralleling the stories of the various characters with real world game franchises and putting in a dose of reality along the way (such as Weasel Kid burning out after his terrible '09 reboot).
• Bury Your Gays: If you perform a very roundabout set of tasks, Mr. Squarrel will reveal to Rust that the deceased Mr. Shrewd was his lover. Mr. Squarrel can also die if you shoot him.
• But Thou Must!: You have to harm or kill a few characters to progress or you'll be stuck in an endless loop, like making Bryce hit Cooking Granny by accident and using Vallamir's tome to power up and kill the tutorial not-moogle as Chandrelle. Inverted in Vicious Galaxy, as Lazarus' not-moogle partner slaughters surrendering enemies if you refuse to.
• The Cameo: Crashing the game in Secrets of Legendaria shows ASMODEUS.EXE's full form for a few frames.
• Contested Sequel: invoked In-Universe, Super Weasel Kid 2: Radical Road was disliked by some fans of the original for the slightly Darker and Edgier atmosphere, the addition of a punching mechanic, and generally trying too hard to be hip and cool. Others either like or don't mind the changes and feel that the game still has some charm of the original. By contrast, the third game, Super Weasel Kid '09: The Revival, was a buggy invokedObvious Beta that almost everyone hated.
• Creator Killer: An In-Universe example. Lionel, the developer of all these characters and games, ended up losing most of his credibility upon releasing Secrets of Legendaria and Waste World, the first because of a complete game breakdown during a live stream premiere (and a The Bad Guy Wins ending that people hated), and the second due to it being unfinished and abandoned only for Lionel to go after modders who tried to finish the game for him because they added in stuff he disliked.
• Cruelty Is the Only Option: There are several instances where the player is forced to do something awful to proceed.
  • In general, you have to help Reginald carry out his destructive revenge plot to get the true ending.
  • In the finale of Bryce's story, Irving will attack Bryce, and hitting back will cause Bryce to unintentionally strike and possibly kill his own grandmother — but even if you know what will happen, you have to take the action anyway to progress the plot.
  • In Secrets of Legendaria, you have to give the 3 Orbs of Power to Vallamir and have him destroy the game world. Also, in the tutorial, you have to use your spells to kill Moji, the Ridiculously Cute Critter and tutorial character, or else his tutorial will never end.
  • At the very end of Waste World, you are given control of Sado and are prompted to shoot Rust — you must do so or the section will not end.
  • Downplayed in Vicious Galaxy — at one point, Lazarus and Moji Jr. will come across some surrendering enemies. You are given the order to kill them anyway — you can choose not to, but Junior will gun them down himself and call you a pussy. Either way, they die.
• Dark Secret: invoked Lionel made a game before Super Weasel Kid called Rootbeer Tender and became ashamed of it after his second game became a huge hit. So, Irving crippled Reggie and buried his game so nobody would find out about Lionel's earlier work.
• Darker and Edgier: Super Weasel Kid: Radical Road, as a nod to Sonic the Hedgehog's own dark and edgy period. The first entry in the franchise was light and cheery. In Radical Road there's combat mechanics, the color palette is grittier, and there's a Totally Radical undertone to the whole thing.
• A Day in the Limelight: The player briefly controls Rebecha the mechanic during Walk, since all the other characters from Secrets of Legendaria are either dead or at the Six Pint Inn.
• Dead Man Writing: Following a long trail of clues throughout the game reveals the victim's final words to the other characters. Carla buried it in the files of Beneath the Surface after he died, per his request.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Dying at all in the games where you can die has very little consequences. The worst thing that will happen is that you will return to a checkpoint with all of the progress you made intact.
• Deconstruction Game: Well, it was made by the people behind Pony Island. Here, the topic is the old Creepypasta idea of game characters who become sentient and murderous towards their creators; it examines exactly how a game character might become lethally mutinous and what kind of jackass a programmer would need to be to make his creations essentially want to Kill the God, making them all out to be Sympathetic Murderers.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • In the Walk section, you can learn of a built-in Classic Cheat Code in Wasteland, that allows you to cover the field in mines, clone friendly characters, and instantly kill enemy characters. These new cheats are always available, even during the Hardcore Mod section where you don't have access to your normal cheats, and they're meant to be used to obtain the achievement for crashing Wasteland.
  • If you use the cheats to make a clone of Rocky in the first fight against Sado, the second Rocky will express confusion when the first one dies. However, Rust himself will remain oblivious to the fact that he has at least one other Rocky still left — after all, we do need to keep the plot going.
  • Attempting to use the cheats to kill Sado results in the screen filling up with red-tinted versions of her face, all staring maniacally at the player.
• The Dog Bites Back: Bryce tries this against Irving… and it doesn't go well. Lazarus succeeds. Carla also succeeds in getting back at Lionel through Sado, her actions possibly creating the situation Rootbeer Reggie needed to make his plan succeed.
• Dual-World Gameplay: Lazarus' segment has a part in a research lab where he has to switch between top down shooting and the RPG graphical style he had in Secrets of Legendaria in order to progress.
• Easter Egg: Plenty, both big and small.
  • One example: You can fish up a bottle in Secrets of Legendaria that has a line of code in it which, when entered into your save file, launches a brief Dating Sim parody called Fantasy Island.
  • Also in Secrets of Legendaria, if you complete the ankh quest without cheating (which is quite time consuming), the quest giver is so impressed that they reward you with a new skill, and later a boss fight against them is skipped. Funnily enough, the game doesn't check the locations of the actual ankhs, but instead checks how many you have — if you have exactly the requested number, it thinks they're legit. This can lead to hilarious instances where the door says they're all legit, Lazarus comments on how it took forever to get them, and all the while, there's an uncollected ankh right at the player's feet that should be a smoking gun.
• The Ending Changes Everything: The game's ending reveals that everyone (except Rust) was in on the ritual to kill Lionel Snill from the beginning, and that pretty much everything that happened in the Six Pint Inn was orchestrated to manipulate the player into participating in the ritual.
• Ensemble Cast: In-universe, each of the six player characters was the star of their own game. And so was the Innkeeper.
• Everyone Is a Suspect: Simply because the crime doesn't actually happen until a way into the game, leaving everyone suspect early on. Becomes Everybody Did It, when every character in the Six Pint Inn works together to open the Hex and kill Lionel.
• Existential Horror: The Waste World segment ends up devolving into this, once Rust is left alone to contemplate his place in the world as it spirals into chaos.
• Expy: Each of the six player characters and some of the NPCs are meant to roughly correlate to real world video game characters:
  • Super Weasel Kid is probably the straightest example, being a Captain Ersatz of Sonic the Hedgehog with a similar appearance to Crash Bandicoot.
  • Chef Bryce is a nod to fighting game characters and seems to be specifically styled off of Street Fighter. He was originally from a game called Cooking Granny, a pretty clear Bland-Name Product for Cooking Mama.
  • Chandrelle is somewhere between a gender flipped version of Link from The Legend of Zelda and Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII.
  • Rust McClain would be right at home in Fallout, down to his son Rocky looking just like a Super Mutant.
  • Lazarus is initially a heavy from the JRPG of your choice, and is later repurposed into a very Warhammer 40,000 looking space marine.
  • ??? is the faceless non-character of a walking simulator, specifically The Beginner's Guide. ???'s section also features a segment of gameplay reminiscent of Quake II.
• Fate Worse than Death: Inflicted on Chandrelle and Lazarus for their actions during the course of Secrets of Legendaria. Both expected to be destroyed. Instead, Lazarus was sent to Vicious Galaxy, while Chandrelle became possessed by Vallamir.
• Featureless Protagonist: ???, who only has defined feet and arms. Justified as he's the player character of an Environmental Narrative Game.
• First-Person Shooter: A small segment during Walk, specifically the section based on Vicious Galaxy, has ??? shooting at Crypton aliens from a first-person perspective.
• Foreshadowing:
  • There are some pretty big ones if you do the side quests for the cat woman during Super Weasel Kid, in which she hints towards major twists only explored in the ending. She reveals that the game was built on the "ashes" of another (Rootbeer Tender), and tells of a prophecy of the revenge of Reginald/Rootbeer Reggie (the bartender) and the opening of the titular Hex (a portal to the real world so Reggie can kill his creator).
  • Some of Weasel Kid's early dialogue. He recognizes Lazarus, and he seems to recognize a crashed ship in the basement as belonging to someone named Jeremiah we haven't met yet. It makes far more sense during Vicious Galaxy.
  • The order you play the characters is the same order as their games were made. You control Reginald briefly at the very beginning before switching to Weasel Kid.
• Former Child Star: Super Weasel Kid looks very much the worse for wear in the Six Pint Inn compared to his portrayal in his own games, sporting a full sleeve of tattoos and a nihilistic attitude that leads him to conspire with Lazarus to blow up the Gameworks building.
  • Much of Lionel's commentary during Walk paints him in the same light; a manchild who achieved notoriety in his early teens and is now a has-been.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Lionel, as his characters and the player open the hex and allow Reginald to kill him.
• Game-Breaking Bug: Each segment has a glitch in it you can exploit to crash the game and get an achievement.
• Game Mod: The Waste World segment has modders changing and adding to the game as it goes, like adding the Crypton aliens and a Boss Rush. Mods even become a mechanical feature, as you gain six you can switch between, two active at a time, to win battles strategically.
• Genre Roulette: The game constantly switches game genre and play style, with everyone using a point-and-click set up during the Six Pint Inn sections, and switching to their game's style of play upon starting their given flashback.
  • Super Weasel Kid is a 2D Platform Game, complete with hopping on enemies to defeat them, spike pits, and secrets in the clouds.
  • Combat Arena X is a classic 2D Fighting Game that includes special hidden moves alongside basics like low, mid, and high attacks, blocks, and dodges.
  • Secrets of Legendaria is a full blown Role-Playing Game with a The Legend of Zelda set-up.
  • Waste World is set in a Fallout or Wasteland style setting, though it's not a normal Western RPG and instead a turn-based Strategy Game.
  • Vicious Galaxy is a top down Shoot 'Em Up, even working in a homage segment to Hotline Miami, complete with breaking down doors to topple enemies.
  • Walk is an Environmental Narrative Game that particularly parodies The Beginner's Guide.
  • The Rootbeer Tender segment is a reference to Tapper.
• Glory Days: Weasel Kid's segment shows him at his most popular, and then the decline after. Lionel is also pretty obsessed with his old fame and power.
• Golden Ending: Sorta. There is a very very hidden ending to the game that requires completing multiple sidequests, putting together a very long code gained from various ingame aspects and from the names of all of the achievements gotten for crashing each game (and the actual game itself), which you put into a file that you have to create out of game and put into the game's folder which reveals a final conversation between Lionel and Carla. And this is a hint to make you go and download a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT (and free) game off Steam apparently made by Carla about fishing. Upon getting far enough into it, you gain another clue that you use the cypher file you created to figure out one final command that you type into the fishing game. Doing so puts you into an unfinished version of the final segment of Walk where Lionel reveals the truth about what he did to Reginald and why. At the end you find that he recreated Rootbeer Tender in 3D and states that he misses Reginald. After this, the game crashes as Sado.exe "downloads" itself onto your computer...
• Good Bad Bugs: A few In-Universe examples, like the glitched ankh in Secrets of Legendaria that grants infinite ankhs, allowing you to bypass an obnoxious fetch quest. But only give the glitched ankhs and you will trigger a mandatory boss fight later on.
• Gonk: The enemies in Secrets of Legendaria all have ugly, scowling faces. Even the so-called "tempting" lamias. In fact, every Gameworks monster, from the Groondas of Super Weasel Kid to the aliens in Waste World and Vicious Galaxy, has that very same face. Even Jeremiah has a variant of it.
• Gorn: There's a gore mod in the Waste World segment that makes enemies explode into gory chunks, much like in Fallout 3 and on.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Lionel Snill, he only appears physically in the ending getting killed by Reggie, but Irving was following his wishes and his actions shaped the lives of the patrons as well as Reggie. His falling out with Carla led to her creation of Sado.
• Guide Dang It!: Want the above-mentioned Golden Ending? Good luck finding any of the components needed to attain it without an extensive walkthrough, as some of the steps required are so ludicrously hidden and/or obtuse that they're virtually impossible for the typical player to find on their own unless by complete and total accident. This was intentional, as the act of finding the ending was meant to serve as an Alternate Reality Game.
• #HashtagForLaughs: One of the members of the Twitch chat watching the Secrets of Legendaria livestream (bandito7) gives the player answers to questions that would otherwise be impossible to solve, resulting in him getting banned for backseating during a blind playthrough. The other members of the chat rally against him getting banned via the hashtag "#freebandito".
• The Heavy: Sado is only a tool of Carla's revenge on Lionel, but ultimately the instigator for a large portion of the plot as Lionel overcompensates. Irving also acts as the most direct antagonist in the games even as he answers to Lionel and his creative decisions.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: The bartender is Reginald, aka Rootbeer Reggie, the first character Lionel ever made, and the mastermind behind everything. This also counts for Lazarus and Weasel Kid, who were both in on it before the game started, and possibly the entire cast as they could all be lying to the player.
• Hope Spot: When Sado deletes Rocky and activates Hardcore Mode, Rust is put through hellish trials all by himself. Suddenly, it all seemingly stops when Rocky lifts the alien mind-control device from Rust's head. Rust is happy that it's all over and tells his son he loves him, only for "Rocky" to reveal he's really Sado messing with him to tip Rust over the edge.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: The Sado fight during Waste World. Sado will teleport every time you target her, Rocky will disappear, and Rust will slowly lose his mind as Sado transports him to various battles, eventually shooting him.
• I Just Want to Be Free: Chandrelle wants nothing to do with The Gameworks deciding what role she has to exist in, so much so that she helps the villain of her own game.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Bryce, who originally came from a cooking game, wants to stop being a character in a fighting game roster.
• Ironic Echo: During Waste World, Sado tells Rust that when he is ready to start (Hardcore Mode), pull the trigger. When Sado turns up at the end of Hardcore Mode, Rust tells her that when she is ready, just pull the trigger. Sado obliges.
• Interface Screw: A few, like the option to subvert jumping and ducking controls in Combat Arena X. Most notable example is during the Rootbeer Tender segment, as the graphics break down once Irving arrives and the gameplay is interrupted by conversation cutscenes and eroding music.
• It's All About Me: Lionel's commentary during Walk is almost nothing but him whining about everyone he perceives as an enemy and talking about how great he is or how misunderstood his genius is.
• It Sucks to Be the Chosen One: Chandrelle feels like this in Secrets of Legendaria, because being the chosen hero in this case just means constantly going through the same events over and over for the entertainment of an audience who doesn't even realize she's a sentient being.
• Leitmotif: Sado has one, a chiptunes approximation of dreamy carnival music.
• MacGuffin: It's not clear for most of the game, but there is one in play: the Hex.
• Mind Screw: Rust. Maybe.
• Missing Child: During the Waste World segment, Sado makes Rocky disappear, which results in Rust losing his sanity as the mods get more ridiculous.
• Multiple Endings: The game has four endings achievable in the last chapter and two in Beneath the Surface.
  • The first ending is achieved when Lazarus shoots Irving and the bartender asks if you are satisfied with the answer to the mystery. If you say yes, the game ends there and the credits roll.
  • If you managed to get the hammer in the Waste World chapter and left the headlamp someplace, then ??? can free Vallamir from his prison and unlock a secret ending where he wreaks havoc in the Six Pint Inn and across the gaming universe.
  • Walk has a default ending where, if you reach the end and go into the white door as prompted, the credits roll, but of the In-Universe developers, Lionel Snill and GameFuna.
  • If you get to the end of Walk and follow the instructions of Jeremiah instead, you get the true ending. It is revealed that Lionel's actual first game was Rootbeer Reggie, but he hated it and had Irving destroy it, driving the angry protagonist to become the scheming bartender. The game ends with him pulling off a ritual to enter the real world and kill Lionel, all thanks to the player. Also, The Stinger shows that Sado escapes as well and is now on the loose.
  • The standard ending of Beneath the Surface occurs if you upgrade your line to the max, then lower your hook all the way. Your hook enters from the top of the screen, and dragging it up pulls the screen upward, with a "Thanks for playing" message appearing.
  • The secret ending of Beneath the Surface has you enter Lionel.exe into the game, which opens a file Lionel asked the dev Carla (his ex) to program as a final request. He has realized that his characters are living beings and explains how he had Irving delete Reggie and his game, then apologizes to Reggie. The game closes- and Sado downloads herself onto your computer.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Bryce has this reaction when Irving goads him into accidentally striking Cooking Granny. Lazarus also has a mild version after he's sent to Vicious Galaxy as punishment for his role in destroying Secrets of Legendaria.
• Mythology Gag: If you've played Pony Island, you'll know that Satan is a Giftedly Bad programmer. Thus, it should come as no surprise a company notorious In-Universe for making Obvious Betas (such as Super Weasel Kid '09) is run by someone heavily implied to be him.
• New Job as the Plot Demands: NPCs you see throughout multiple games tend to have new jobs compared to their old roles. The mechanic fighter from Combat Arena X gets this most, later appearing in Secrets of Legendaria as a mechanic, becoming the shop keeper in Waste World, and the new hero of the Secrets of Legendaria segment in Walk.
• Ninja Prop: Sado's boss fight in Combat Arena X has Bryce's health bar come down to attack him.
• No Fourth Wall: The premise of the story is that it follows multiple video game characters displaced from their home games for one reason or another. Steam reviews are used as platforms in the first chapter, Ninja Props are everywhere, and things like Fighting Game balance, Let's Play streaming, and game mods are legitimate plot points. Also, everyone is aware of you playing the game, and you are addressed directly on multiple occasions. In the end, you are as complicit in Lionel's murder as the game characters who actually kill him.
  • The Player's Steam Friends also exist within the game; having written reviews for Super Weasel Kid and being in the stream chat during Secrets of Legendaria.
• Ominous Visual Glitch: Super Weasel Kid '09 is filled with them, as is any Sado encounter. Used during the Rootbeer Tender segment as well, as the computer screen ??? is using starts to graphically break apart.
• Outside-Context Problem: The Crypton aliens in Waste World, all enemies added by modders that neither Rust nor his son Rocky recognize nor understand.
• The Player Is the Most Important Resource: A much darker example than usual. Everyone needs the player to unlock the hex and kill Lionel.
• Pop Quiz: The fight with the Sphinx in Secrets of Legendaria is a series of riddles. Amusingly, the stream chat sometimes give you answers, and those who do get banned by the chat mods.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: "Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for me to meet my maker."
• Prison Episode: A brief part of the Vicious Galaxy segment, where Lazarus has to break in to release Sado for a distraction.
• Programming Game: The main gameplay of Walk.
• Public Domain Soundtrack: The music of Rootbeer Tender is "Oh! Susanna", a folk song from the 1840's.
• Punch-Clock Villain: Pretty much every bad guy is an employee for The Gameworks and just does their job as the bad guy in a given game. Subverted with Vallamir and Sado, the first simply just evil for the heck of it, and the other is a sort of virus that sabotages Lionel's games.
• Puzzle Boss: The Sphinx in Secrets of Legendaria that's done as a Quiz Show is the most obvious example. Most of the Boss Rush mode from Wasteworld counts as well, since the gameplay is as much about juggling your two mod slots as it is about your characters' limited action points.
• Rainbow Text: Since the game is about living video game characters, green text is used when a character is speaking In-Universe programmed dialogue, and black text is used when they are speaking from their own minds. Also, red text is used to emphasize things like Symbol Swearing or the Vurm's No Indoor Voice, while grey text is used for whispering.
• Rage Against the Author: Chandrelle chooses to destroy her own game to go against the desires of The Gameworks. Everyone ends up doing this against Lionel.
• Reality Warper: Sado, the strange "performer" character from Combat Arena X. Justified, in that she's a vector for a bit of malware made by Carla that's meant to mess with the very code of every video game Lionel made.
• Recurring Extra: bandito7, a minor human character. He first appears as a reviewer of Super Weasel Kid. He later gives you hints in Secrets of Legendaria, and it's implied he made the alien mod for Waste World.
• Recycled Soundtrack: "Sanctuary" from Pony Island is reused in the ritual room.
• Redemption Rejection: Lionel's hidden message in Carla's game Beneath the Surface is essentially too little, too late: he confesses the truth about Rootbeer Tender, expresses affection for Reginald (who he based on his own grandfather), and ends with an apology. But the long process of finding this message practically require the player to have completed The Hex first, meaning Lionel is already dead.
• Red Herring:
  • There appears to be blood on Bryce's bed. It's just strawberry from when he was making pie, his job at the inn.
  • Chandrelle has a giant sword in her room, and a strange letter talking about a ritual. The sword is Lazarus' old blade and a memento, while the letter details a deal to get rid of the demon inside her.
  • Rust is clearly the most suspicious character, what with the knife he carries around. After his segment, it becomes clear he's not even in on the deal.
  • Lazarus might be on a wanted poster in the kitchen, suggesting he's been up to something. Subverted as he is wanted for his part in a horrible crime and kills Irving later, BUT those killings weren't the planned murders mentioned at the start of the game.
  • Unrelated to the main mystery, but the Super Weasel Kid segment suggests that Mr. Shrewd was killed by Mr. Squarrel. If you manage to get Mr. Shrewd's glasses through a three segment process, it's revealed that Mr. Shrewd just died of old age, and Mr. Squarrel was his lover. He spiraled into depression because of this, resulting in his mean attitude in his other appearances. It's implied that Mr. Shrewd was killed off by Lionel when his pet shrew died in real life.
• Recurring Boss: Sado confronts three separate player characters as a boss battle. Rust simply can't win against her.
• The Reveal: The first one is a fake out where Lazarus kills Irving. The second one reveals once and for all the bartender is Rootbeer Reggie and him and the other game characters are using the hex and you to kill Lionel.
• Revenge: Rootbeer Reggie and the patrons decide to use The Hex to get their revenge against their creator Lionel for (accidentally) making their lives miserable. Noticeably, Rust isn't out for revenge as he has no personal vendetta against Lionel and genuinely seems to believe performing the ritual will bring his son back.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Rust goes on a very confused one after Sado makes Rocky vanish. Sado herself is this, a virus made by Carla to ruin all of Lionel's games.
• Run or Die: After you free Sado, Jeremiah calls you up with a single word: "Run."
• Scavenger World: Waste World takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting so as expected, items and clothing appeared to have been made from bits and pieces of others.
• Sell-Out: Lionel was called this when he sold Weasel Kid's rights to another company.
• Sequelitis: In-Universe example. The original Super Weasel Kid is an extemely successful and popular game getting a near universal praise. Super Weasel Kid 2: Radical Road did get some criticism for its art direction and fighting mechanics, but it was still generally positively received. Super Weasel Kid '09: Super Redux on the other hand was pretty much hated by everyone for being an unplayable buggy mess.
• Shout-Out:
  • TONS. Every single character, segment, and even piece of dialog is a reference to a different video game, including Sonic the Hedgehog, Zelda, Final Fantasy, Cooking Mama, Hotline Miami, The Beginner's Guide, and so so much more.
  • A recurring character from a fighting game is a steampunk robot named Steambot Willie.
  • Super Weasel Kid '09: Super Redux is a reference to Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), and not a very positive one. It's an invokedObvious Beta riddled with bugs, and is referred to by the date it came out. It's largely meant to draw connections to Weasel Kid and the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise.
  • If you One-Hit KO an enemy in Secrets of Legendaria, some of the Twitch chat members will say "OVERCONFIDENCE IS A SLOW AND INSIDIOUS KILLER".
  • Beneath the Surface has Carla adopt the moniker of carla51.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Lionel thinks of himself as a great developer, even refusing to claim responsibility for his own downfall.
• Space Marine: Lazarus is one as he comes from a sci-fi shooter Vicious Galaxy even though he was orginally a fantasy RPG knight and he wears a very 40k looking power armor
• Stealth Sequel: Satan from Pony Island may be involved, as Carla had a pentagram on her wall as she was designing Sado. Not to mention the document Lionel signs to sell his characters to GameFuna shows that that corporation's CEO is named Lou Natas. There's also a heavy amount of reused sound and visual effects from Pony Island, and on top of that, the most obvious link between the two games comes in Waste World, where Louie himself makes an appearance- and if you have the Old Ticket item, a clear reference to the Tickets you'd gather in Pony Island, he allows you to change the graphics of the wasteland tactics game to something a bit more 'friendly'. It should be noted that Wasteland's overworld works almost identically to the Adventure Mode section of Pony Island...
• The Stinger: After the credits roll, there's a brief shot of Sado behind Lionel in the real world.
• Stylistic Suck: Present in most of the games.
  • Super Weasel Kid, Combat Arena X, and Secrets of Legendaria all have very simplistic gameplay compared to real games in their genre. They also all have an Excuse Plot.
  • The original Super Weasel Kid and Radical Road are at least well-programmed and liked in-universe. Super Weasel Kid '09: The Revival, however, is a big reference to Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), and just like that game is an invokedObvious Beta with glitches everywhere.
  • Secrets of Legendaria is also riddled with bugs and would require tedious grinding if you didn't exploit them. The tutorial will not stop because Moji keeps healing more than you can hit, the first dungeon is a boring series of hallways and a tedious grindfest with hordes of enemies, the desert has you do an equally boring Fetch Quest, and some puzzles are unsolvable without outside help (which bandito7 is thankfully all to happy to provide). It is also the only game that you explicitly play from start to finish, yet is quite short.
  • Waste World is free of this until the mods start activating. Almost every mod introduces something that clashes with the game's tone (like aliens), some include sloppy dialogue or misspellings, they create plot holes, and most of the levels from that point on would be impossible or near-impossible without activating "cheats".
  • Walk features competent gameplay and production values, but the developer commentary undermines itself and presents the author in a poor light by making him come across as a pretentious, egotistical Jerkass who thinks he's God's gift to gaming.
• Sugar Bowl: The first Super Weasel Kid is a very cheerful and colorful game with every part of the enviroment smiling and giggling
• Surreal Humor: What if video game characters were alive? Turns out they'd treat being in games as a job they hate that they desperately want to escape by any means necessary. Cue cynical jokes.
• Symbol Swearing: In Bryce's segment, he fights against a foul-mouthed alligator-man in the second match.
  Bryce: You have a nasty mouth, sir.-
  Alley Gator: I've got a $%&@ nasty mouth alright. I'm a $%^@ nasty gator and I'll pop ur $&*@ spleen.
• Tragic Keepsake: Walk shows that Lionel kept Mister Shrewd's empty cage in his office while making Secrets of Legendaria, years after his death.
• Totally Radical: Weasel Kid's second game, Super Weasel Kid 2: Radical Road. The clouds say "tubular" when you jump on them, the background music has a rock remix and Weasel Kid acts like a Mascot with Attitude.
• Tuckerization: In-universe game creator Lionel Snill has a very similar name to real-life The Hex creator Daniel Mullins.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: During Secrets of Legendaria, during the boat ride, Irving appears to stop Chandrelle, forcing her into fighting him like she used to in Combat Arena X, while Lazarus continues to help through the turn based RPG combat you'd been using through the rest of this segment at the same time. These moments of genre mixing continue into each segment from here on.
• Unreliable Narrator: During the Vicious Galaxy segment, it's revealed that Lazarus and his friends changed what the player was seeing so the player would help them break into The Gameworks.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Walk, the game that ??? is from and final game made by Lionel Snill. It is a hybrid Environmental Narrative Game and hacking-puzzle game consisting of solving puzzles to make games in between short walking segments.
• Visible Silence: The way ??? "speaks". All his lines are just "..." but they are still vocalised by Voice Grunting that sounds like gasping
• Voice of the Legion: All of the characters in the game use Voice Grunting, but the sounds used for their dialogue are consistent...except Sado, who weaves between voice tones on a line to line basis.
• Wham Episode: The entire Walk segment featuring ???, where you learn just who Lionel really is and how and why the games he made turned out the way they did.
• Wham Line: The radio you turn on during the Walk segment says this;
  SUPER WEASEL KID WAS NOT MY FIRST GAME. THAT WAS A LIE. COME SEE MY FIRST GAME.
• Who Murdered the Asshole: Once we finally get their perspective, it becomes clear the story isn't about who murders Lionel, but which one of the people they victimized got to them first.
• Whole-Plot Reference: Walk is an extended one to The Beginner's Guide, but with Lionel's actions having much more dire consequences.

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