Video Game / Void Bastards

The comic-styled cover art.

Void Bastards is First-Person Shooter/Strategy/Roguelike hybrid with Cel Shaded graphics, developed by Blue Manchu and released on PC through Steam and the Xbox One on 28th May, 2019, followed by ports for the Nintendo Switch and Playstation 4. In it, you control one of the nameless inmates of a space prison named Void Ark, which got stuck in space after its FTL drive broke down and several of its core components were stolen by Space Pirates, leaving the wardens with no options but to free an inmate at a time and send them out to scavenge the nearby derelict ships for parts.

Unlike most other shooter-roguelikes, it takes inspiration not from the fast-paced games like Doom and Quake, but from the slow, deliberate immersive sim gameplay of Bioshock and its spiritual predecessor, System Shock 2. That's no surprise, though, since its lead developer, Jonathan Chey, had co-founded Irrational Games and worked on both games.

See Deep Sky Derelicts for a 2018 game with a similar premise and art style, but with a party, card-based, Turn-Based Combat.

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Tropes present in Void Bastards:

• 1-Up: Heart Starters function as extra lives. The game starts a Client with one, then two depending on upgrades, and there exists a rare way to craft more Heart Starters.
• Action Bomb:
  • You can deploy Kitty Bots that'll distract your enemies before blowing up next to them. They can also be upgraded into Unstable Kitties, which will also release additional Clusterflak bombs on death.
  • Friendly Tourists are enemies that act in the same manner, chasing you down before exploding. Other tourist enemies merely explode in place.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Whether B.A.C.S. is an AI or not is up for debate, but it's certainly not as helpful as it could be.
• Air-Vent Passageway: Several. Small enemies can use them too. Mostly these are little more than crawl spaces right between two adjacent areas that let you cut through rooms on the map.
• Amazon Brigade: The Void Pirates are seemingly all women (if the generic pirate that's after you and the pirate captain are any indication).
• And I Must Scream: The fate of your poor client at the end of the game. Despite saving the Void Ark at the command of the onboard AI, they are forcibly de-hydrated again, poured into a bag, and released to orbit the prison planet forever along with billions of other bags.
• Badass Normal: Unlike the Citizens, the Pirates don't seem to be mutated and instead are just equipped with really good equipment. Doesn't stop them from being the most dangerous enemies in the game by far.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: Citizens can apparently survive just fine on derelict vessels with no atmosphere. However, given that fires can also burn just fine on the same vessels, it's entirely possible the vessels have perfectly functional life support, and B.A.C.S. just won't let you take off your helmet even if you run out of oxygen and start suffocating (which is entirely in keeping with his established behavior). Of course, said Citizens are all insane mutant zombies, so maybe you shouldn't breathe it...
• Bittersweet Ending: Leaning heavily towards bitter. The Void Ark is able to safely leave the nebula, but your current playable Client has their sentence extended indefinitely due to the crimes they committed in the process of activating the FTL drive, with only a pitifully small number of Merits added to their account. Not to mention any other Clients you may have played as are already dead. The only "sweet" part is that the remaining prisoners survive and may eventually be released. Of course, this game being what it is, it's all played for laughs. Additionally, according to the Space Pirates, if B.A.C.S. makes it back to WCG space and reports what happened to the Void Ark, the WCG should arrive in force to the nebula and blow the Space Pirates to kingdom come, finally putting an end to them stranding so many ships there.
• Black Comedy: The sheer comedy of errors caused by the obscene amount of regulations instilled by the local MegaCorp is one of the selling points of the game. The ending takes this to new heights.
• Blackout Basement: Some of the ships no longer have working lighting systems.
• Blessed with Suck: All modifiers are classified as either beneficial (displayed in green) or detrimental (displayed in red). Players may not agree with those classifications, though. For example, the Out to Lunch modifier makes it so that there are no Citizens on the ship to start but there are lots of Rifts (spawners), so while the ship is initially safer, it will be swarming with enemies after a few minutes. On the other end is Lockdown, which causes all doors to start off locked. Locked doors take a few seconds to unlock, but cannot be opened by enemies; while the modifier can be annoying, it makes it less likely that enemies will wander into you from an unexpected angle.
• Body Armor as Hit Points: The Carapace upgrade doesn't protect from harm, but provides X*300 HP, where X=Carapace level.
• Boss in Mook Clothing:
  • Screws are powerful Damage Sponge enemies that will never give up on a chase should you be unlucky enough to awaken them, and come armed with a difficult-to-dodge Spread Shot. Even the tooltips explicitly discourage you from trying to engage them. The Elite Mook version, the Trusty Screw, is even worse, with 3 times as much health and more powerful attacks.
  • Pirates are by far the strongest enemies in the game, having the best equipment and weapons, incredibly high health second only to that of Screws, and a tendency to swarm in large numbers once one of them detects you. Want revenge for what they did to you in the intro? Good luck with that, because even with the best equipment you can get, they can easily shred you to pieces. Tellingly, there's actually an achievement for beating just one of them, and it's currently one of the rarest achievements in the game.
  • Secbots are powerful robots that are switched on if you're spotted by a ship's security system. They do a lot of damage, actively hunt you down, and unlike any other enemy can unlock doors. The Elite Mook variant, the Warbot, has twice as much health as well as active Regenerating Health.
• Boxed Crook: Well, for a given definition of "crook" anyways, but "Clients" are offered parole for helping fix the Void Ark. The game makes it clear that your AI warden thinks you're a scumbag, referring to enemies as "Citizens" (implying it thinks more highly of these mutant crazies than it does you), keeps you stuck in a spacesuit with 11.5 minutes of air in ships that have a totally survivable atmosphere, and even reneges on its end of the bargain because it only has to honour agreements with actual people.
• British Humour: Built on it, or at the very least references to it.
• Canned Orders over Loudspeaker: Constantly, especially on CNT ships, and most of them in keeping with the Black Comedy theming. To roughly quote one example;
  Loudspeaker: "Announcement: this announcement is not currently in use."
  • If Pirates have boarded the ship you're on, one of their bosses will call out your location over the PA as you explore. She'll also yell at the other pirates if you manage to detach the tether.
• Cel Shading: The game looks like a sci-fi XIII.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Each corporation/faction has a simple set of colours associated with it.
• Concussion Frags: Banger grenades look like a typical frag, but act more like concussion ones, since their range is very limited. However, it is offset by their small size, which lets you carry dozens of them at a time.
• Contamination Situation: Three variants:
  • Oily, which lets you run faster but slide when you stop. Contracted from puddles of purple goo on the floor
  • Irradiated, which causes Damage Over Time. Contracted from yellow goo puddles.
  • Nauseous (technically, high on mushroom spores), which causes hallucinations and wrecks your aim. Contracted from piles of garbage found around the ships.
• Continuing is Painful: When your Client dies, you lose all your food, fuel, and ammo. Thankfully, you at least keep your crafting materials and acquired parts and are given a small "care package" of initial stuff to start your new Client off.
• Computerized Judicial System: every aspect of the justice system is overseen by an AI installed in clunky CRT computer monitors.
• Convenient Decoy Cat: The KittyBots are versions you can deploy yourself. They make (almost) every enemy nearby chase it while running around wildly. They also explode once reduced to zero health — their area of effect makes them quite useful against Patients.
• Cowardly Mooks: Scribes will use a powerful projectile attack and then flee. Veteran version leave exploding poop behind. Spooks will also vanish if the player looks directly at them.
• Crapsack World:
  • WCG Prisoners are arrested and given (seemingly) permanent prison sentences for offenses as benign as "Smells bad next to the wrong person."
  • XON ambulances allow you to buy and sell vital organs from vending machines. Body parts are commonly found in personal luggage and storage lockers. These ships also include stores with gacha-like machines full of everything from spare organs to entire people.
  • The only food in the entire nebula is cheese and onion sandwiches and the rare tea biscuit. In the Lux ships, the restaurant room even includes the menu: each of the dishes have refined cuisine sounding names, but they're just cheese and onion sandwiches described with fancy synonyms.
    • Players may also receive a surfeit of food by blowing up void whales. Mmm!
  • Prison ships include "Mandatory Gene Therapy" and various kinds of torture.
  • Krell cargo vessels have shifts lasting years.
  • Otori Corp enforces total obedience by spying on their employees through their robot pets. And once you reach Depth 5? The Otori ships start including brainwashing rooms where a chair festooned with restraints sits in front of a screen flashing images that A) force the person to start seeing their Kittybot as a normal cat and B) say that they should "Tell it about your day" (a phrase which is immediately replaced by "Tell it your secrets.")
  • CNT vessels have rooms containing office cubicles. These rooms will always have a gunpoint, a securitybot-summoning camera, or both. The kicker? The way to keep out of their line of sight is to crouch below the cubicle walls (re: stay seated in your cubicle).
• Critical Hit: You have a chance of scoring these, and some prisoners are innately better at it.
• Cursed with Awesome:
  • Some ships have a negative modifier that spawn live electrical wires all over the ship. The player can simply jump over them and only takes a little damage when shocked, but enemies that wander onto them will be stunned until they die.
• Damage Over Time:
  • Stumbling into leaked radioactive material inflicts you with a radiation status, which functions in this manner. While it'll eventually time out, the damage from leaving it unchecked is high enough to make you scramble for a radiation cleanse station ASAP. However, enemies who stumble into these spills will be affected in the same manner, and the radiation does not expire for them.
  • You can also fire poisonous bolts from the Spiker. This is useful for Scribes and Spooks, which spend a lot of time running away from the player. They're also silent, so target enemies won't know that they are taking damage.
• Deadpan Snarker: The demeanor of your drone handler, B.A.C.S.
• Decontamination Chamber: HAB areas have a kiosk that removes harmful status effects. Slipping them an appropriate number of Merits grants immunity to all of them for the remainder of your stay on the current ship, which can even have some tactical use.
• Deflector Shields: Zec enemies are protected with one from the front, which will soak up plenty of physical damage, and render the electrical zapper outright useless. However, getting an explosive behind them tends to immediately take them out, and the Rad Spiker just ignores the shield completely.
  • The Bouncer gadget generates a Zec shield in front of the player, except it doubles as an Attack Reflector for projectiles in addition to preventing damage.
• Delinquents: The Juve enemies. Apparently they're used to tormenting or assaulting adults based on their dialog.
• Difficult, but Awesome: The Clusterflack is challenging to use at its base design due to an extremely long fuze (something like 5-10 seconds once it's come to rest) but the absolute clusterflack of explosives it releases will make short work of most Citizens. Best used by hurling it into a mob of enemies or an enclosed space, then sprinting in the opposite direction and sealing the door between you and the imminent micro-apocalypse.
• Double Speak: Tons of it. Prisoners are called "Correctional Clients". The entire crew of a ship being massacred is called "A personnel shortage". Prisoner death is referred to as an "End of life event." Physical beating are called "Blunt Force Therapy", and so on and so on.
  • During the tutorial, when trying to make it back to the STEV, you're told that "dangerous occurrences" are happening. As it turns out, "dangerous occurrences" translates to "a space pirate vessel has just docked on the ship and you are about to die, been nice knowing you".
• Dude, Where's My Reward?: The client that risks their lives to restart the Void Ark's FTL drive is sentenced to eternal detention for all the theft and forgery required to do so.
• Early Game Hell: The game is at its hardest when you're just starting out, as you have almost no fuel or food and barely enough ammo to get the job done, even against the easy early game enemies. Once you've unlocked a few decent weapons and scrounged a decent amount of ammo, food, and fuel, things get easier and you have more leeway in choosing whether or not to raid particular ships.
• Elite Mooks:
  • Many enemies have veteran versions that are encountered in the lower depths of the nebula. Some have a third version if you go even lower.
  • Ships with the "Boss" trait will have one Citizen with ten times their base health walking around. Pray you don't get a Boss Screw.
• EMP: One of the ways of dealing with the mechanical enemies.
• Enemy-Detecting Radar:
  • The helm room of a ship normally only reveals item locations. However, spending merits there reveals enemy locations as well.
  • One of the random traits also shows enemy locations on the minimap.
• Felony Misdemeanor: All Clients have a randomly generated crime that caused them to be imprisoned on the Void Ark. These can be as innocuous as "Causing Nasal Offense to CNT Executive" or "Using an Expired Coupon."
• Flying Face: Patients are swarms of these.
• Friendly Fire: Enemy attacks will hurt whatever they hit. This can be used as a last resort to deal with large numbers of foes in close quarters.
• Glowing Eyes: Enemies like Juves and Patients have these.
• Good Behavior Points: The accepted currency is "Merits," yellow tickets marked with a blue "m". It's implied they're corporate "Good Job!" stickers that evolved into money.
• Harder Than Hard: Hard Bastard difficulty; enemies do double damage, you burn through oxygen much more quickly, and ammo and resources are overall much more scarce.
• Headdesk: The protagonist's reaction when, after they've gone through considerable difficulty to acquire the Citizen Card required to restart the Void Ark's FTL drive, B.A.C.S. mentions for the first time that validating the Citizen Card will require a computer system that was lost in the attack and which the protagonist will have to go to even more trouble to replace.
• Hearing Voices: Prisoners with the Paranoid trait will hear random enemy voice lines, often ones that indicate imminent attack.
• Heavily Armored Mook: The Screws and Secbots have tons of hitpoints and are best avoided or subverted.
• The Hedonist: Tourist enemies. They are helpless blobs that can do nothing but scream for pampering and explode.
• Homage: The comic book style and Black Comedy Crapsack World plot hearkens back to darker British Comics, especially 2000 AD.
• Homing Projectile: Not in the primary, FPS portion of the gameplay, but the text for blowing up a pirate vessel with a torpedo always makes sure to mention it homing-in on and tracking the target. This (combined with the fact that the torpedoes are heavily implied to have nuclear warheads) is used to explain the gameplay conceit of a single torpedo always being enough to automatically destroy an enemy in space.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Downplayed. Eating food restores a chunk of your health, but it also makes an in-game timer to increase by a day whether you're moving or resting, so it's more like natural regeneration in this case. Still, it allows you to heal all and any wounds, provided you have enough food (and keep an eye out for anything nasty on the map that may head toward you as you rest).
• In Medias Res: You start the tutorial in the middle of a sanitation closet with an empty pistol and are told you need something called a Line Printer. Shortly after you find it, you're unceremoniously gunned down by space pirates. The next prisoner you control is then helpfully briefed on why they needed the Line Printer in the first place, setting up the main plot loop of the story.
• Interface Screw: Several.
  • The toxic garbage will make environment colors change rapidly, may add a wavy effect to the screen, and drastically reduces your weapon accuracy. Toxic Patients inflict the same effect with their explosive spit.
  • Caffeine makes the camera rapidly shake during its effect. It also speeds up the music.
  • The Colorblind trait makes the entire world grayscale.
  • The Overly Familiar trait replaces all enemy names with personal names like "Horace" and "Doug".
  • The Tunnel Vision trait removes the player's peripheral vision.
• Invisibility Cloak: Spook enemies can cloak themselves.
• Item Crafting: A key part of the game.
• Item Farming: You can scavenge ships for food, fuel, ammo, and recyclable junk for as long as you want, and it prepares the player to be more prepared to venture in more difficult depths. Since the separation between depth levels is merely an arbitrary line on the nebula's map than can be crossed at will as long as you have fuel, going back to the easier part of the nebula's map is the safest way to farm stuff.
• Just Add Water:
  • Items and upgrades are created from welding together obvious junk with odd bits of documentation.
  • In a much more literal sense, the prisoners on board the Void Ark have all been freeze-dried and powdered, and are revived by having water poured over them.
• King Mook: The "Boss" modifier turns one Citizen aboard the ship into a Boss version, with 10 times as much health as the normal version of that Citizen would normally have. A Boss Screw or Boss Trusty Screw has a staggering 10,000 health and 30,000 health respectively.
• Lightning Bruiser: Pirates have incredibly high health second only to Screws, but are much faster and equipped with powerful rapid-fire weapons, and always attack in squads of 3.
• Limited Loadout: While you have a lot of toys to place with, the game balances it by limiting your character to three slots: normal weapon, explosive one, and a gadget. The Gun Nut perk lets you carry a random 4th weapon, which can make a huge difference.
• Locked Door: Played with, since now you are the one who can lock doors, which is enough to stop the most mindless enemies.
• A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away...: It's set in the fictional Sargasso Nebula. Humans are implied to live in other parts of the universe, but Earth isn't mentioned.
• Magical Defibrillator: Heart Starters shock you back to life if you're killed, and even restore all of your health as they do so.
• Mecha-Mooks: Many of the enemies are these. Like in Bioshock, a certain variety, the SecBots, only attacks if you get spotted by a security camera.
• Metal Slime: The PuppyBot. Constantly flees while making annoying sounds, but contains a valuable Part if destroyed.
• Mighty Glacier: Screws. They're slow, but easily detected by their loud STOMP STOMP STOMP footsteps and deep voices. They have many times the health of most opponents^note Screws have 1000 health, and their Elite Mook counterpart, the Trusty Screw, has a whooping 3000 health, while even tougher regular enemies like Toxic Patients or Veteran Janitors max out at 100-150 health, and the basic pistol does 10 damage (taking 3-4 fully upgraded bushwhackers to kill; most other enemies won't even survive 1) and attack by launching ricocheting shards at you. They can very easily ruin your day.
• Mind-Control Device: Scrambler is a piece of equipment that converts non-mechanical enemies to your side.
• Mini Mook: The Juves. Very low hitpoints, but they are fast and can move through vents to flank players.
• Mooks, but no Bosses: With the exception of a rare modifier that gives one Citizen on a ship a buff to their stats, which you can generally easily avoid at your leisure (both the ships AND the enemy in question), there are no unique bosses to be fought, and the game instead ends once you've constructed your final Action Item with no final resistance.
• Mook Maker:
  • Rifts in the floor of the derelict will spit out new mutant citizens on a timer. At best, you can seal them behind locked doors.
  • Certain ships have the "Out to Lunch" trait, where the ship starts completely abandoned... but after a few minutes, all hell will break loose as dozens of citizens start spawning at once.
• Money Spider: The ship modifier "Meritous Crew" causes all killed citizens to leave behind a single Merit. This can be especially useful when dealing with Tourists, who self-destruct at the slightest provocation.
• Mutants: B.A.C.S. seems to imply that the Citizen survivors aboard the various ships stranded in the nebula have all mutated into murderous mutants due to prolonged exposure to the nebula's gene twisters. The computer Judge still considers killing them to be murder when sentencing you in the ending.
• Nail 'Em: There are riveter and stapler weapons, which fire rivets and staples. In FPS standards, the stapler works like a shotgun and the riveter an SMG.
• Negative Space Wedgie: Gene Twisters will replace one of your traits with another at random.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: At the end of the game, the surviving playable client has their sentence extended indefinitely due to committing, at the instruction of B.A.C.S., the murder, forgery, and other illegal activities needed to activate the FTL drive.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: The whole plot revolves around this. The Void Ark's FTL engine is perfectly fine and undamaged, and there's no physical reason it can't just warp jump to its destination. However, due to bureaucracy, B.A.C.S. is programmed to only allow citizens to activate the FTL, and as a convicted prisoner your citizenship was previously revoked. The entire game is spent scavenging the Nebula for various parts needed to forge a citizenship card so you can activate the FTL. B.A.C.S. himself has to contend with an even more Obstructive Bureaucrat in the form of the citizenship registration computer, who tries to blow up the ship after you try to expedite your citizenship registration with an invalid procedure. The only time this plays to your advantage is when the unmodified self-destruct time turns out to be six months.
• Optional Stealth: You can sneak by many of the enemies.
• Our Wormholes Are Different: Entering a wormhole will make you jump to a random node on the starmap.
• Oxygen Meter: One is always present, since you are exploring wrecked spaceships which lost all their atmosphere a long time ago. There are rooms with stored pressurized oxygen that can replenish your supply, though, or even double it if you pay up in merits. You also get a small grace period between 'out of air' and 'HP starts draining rapidly' but it's best to not rely on that.
• Radiation-Immune Mutants: Whilst most of the enemies are hurt by radiation, the Glowtrotter (upgraded Tourist) is a source of it, and leaves pools of radioactive goo on the floor when they explode. A derelict containing them quickly becomes completely toxic.
• Secret Police: Spook enemies dress in a trenchcoat, sunglasses, and fedora. The coat is parted to reveal a mass of tentacles when they attack. Their dialogue implies they're mostly employed by Otori corporation to spy on the employees, particularly to prevent unauthorized tea breaks.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: The Juves' vocabularies seem to consist of essentially nothing but swearwords.
• Shield-Bearing Mook: Zecs protect themselves from the front with an impervious deflector shield. They have to be hit from behind — unless you have a Rad Spiker, or even better, a Scrambler.
• Short-Range Shotgun: The Stapler functions in this manner. Upgrading it tightens its spread however, making it more usable at range.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Spooks appear to be one to the S'pht Compilers from Marathon.
  • The fully upgraded pistol is called "Legislator," which is a synonym for "Lawgiver". Fully upgraded, it resembles the version from the first movie.
• Sleeper Starship: The Void Ark prison ship keeps all its prisoners in a state of suspended animation by dehydrating them. You control whichever prisoner the warden decided to rehydrate this time. If you die, a P.A.L. drone that acts as your backpack while you are alive will take all of the stuff you have collected and fly off back to Void Ark with it. The wardens will then rehydrate someone else, who'll be your next protagonist.
• Smoking Is Not Cool: Prisoners with a "Smoker" trait will periodically cough uncontrollably, which can alert nearby enemies.
• Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: Each Citizen or robot tends to have at least one weapon/gadget/utility item that works as a hard counter (example — the Riveter will mow through an entire group of Patients in a decent burst, no trouble), or at least sets them up to die from one of your other items (example — Spooks can't teleport out of your line of fire if they're too busy being stunned). The problem is that you only get to take one item from each category with you on any given ship, and enemies don't always mix together in ways that let you easily counter them all.
• Space Pirates: Some of the derelict ships will already have these doing their own scavenging when you arrive. Needless to say, they won't be happy to see you, and they give a much better fight than most of the usual ship denizens. Moreover, their ships will be tethered to the derelict, preventing your escape unless you can untether them… or, loot a torpedo beforehand, and blow their ship up with it.
• Space Whale: Void Whales are one of the greatest threats you can encounter, as they can straight-up eat the entire ship you are on (unless you blow them to hell with a torpedo). There are also Junk Squids, equally enormous Space Squids that are harmless to your small shuttle, but will eat every large vessel they come across, which can be a pain in the ass if you needed something from one of the ships in their path of destruction.
• Standard FPS Guns: Though they're all dressed up as put together from scrap, most of the bases are covered; Pistol (Regulator/Legislator), Shotgun (Stapler), SMG (Riveter), Grenade (Banger/Clusterflack), Mine(Bushwhacker), Sniper Rifle (Toaster), Nebulator (Rocket Launcher), Utility Weapon (Spiker/Rad Spiker/Zapper/etc.).
• Stealth-Based Game: Much of the game has the player outclassed by enemies on a ship, and security cameras will summon powerful bots.
• Static Stun Gun: A rare and slightly more realistic interpretation; the Zapper only stuns enemies unless they're very small/fragile. The duration is quite long, but the Zapper's inaccurate past a couple meters and only holds three shots at a time. The only things it can explicitly kill are Patients (in which case it only pops a single head from the entire swarm) and Peepers/Watchers (which require one or two shots). It stuns mechanical targets for much longer than organic ones though, making it a very effective way to get around or close to Gunpoints and their upgraded variants — or to mercilessly gun them down with your main weapon while they shudder and vibrate helplessly.
• Tactical Door Use: Doors are a strategic resource on derelicts. Closed doors break line of sight at the very least, and can be locked to prevent regular enemies from passing through. Useful for making impromptu jails for dangerous foes or sealing a room with a Nebula Rift inside. Just be warned that locking and unlocking takes a few seconds and you can wind up on the same side as the monster, and that Secbots/Warbots will just open them right back up and come on through.
• Teleport Gun: There's the Rifter, whose first shot instantly sucks the enemy into hyperspace. Then, the weapon continues to hold it there indefinitely, until its next shot deposits it back onto the ship. The usual tactic is to scoop up the tough enemies with it, and then place them into inaccessible vents, locked doors and the like, which they'll never escape from. Or into a launcher bay so they can be shot out into space.
• Throat Light: Patients are floating heads with bright blue lights emanating from their wide-open mouths and eyes. Scribes get the same.
• Throw Down the Bomblet: Bushwhackers, Bangers, and the Clusterflack;
  • Bushwhackers are retrievable proximity mines. They can also be set off by shooting them.
  • Bangers are bouncing, rolling grenades.
  • Clusterflacks are essentially a bundle of Bangers on a stick. Best thrown into enclosed spaces before promptly locking the nearest door.
• Timed Mission:
  • Every ship has a limited amount of oxygen available. If the client runs out they will take health damage very quickly until they die, refill at an Atmosphere room, or leave the ship.
  • There is also the "Out to Lunch" ship modifier, where the ship starts empty of enemies and spawns a huge number after a period of time elapses.
• Universal Poison: The Spiker's projectiles are tipped with one. You can upgrade it to massively increase the potency, too. Radiation also counts as a poison… of which only you can potentially recover from it, but its sources stick around (unless you applied it via direct hit with the Rad Spiker).
• Unstable Equilibrium: If your Client dies, you don't get their ammo, food, fuel, or other exploration items back, and if they were loaded up with useful traits, too bad for you. Have fun fighting your way back up to spec with the bare minimum of all of those, and hope your care package gave you ammo for SOMETHING you're good at using!
• Vicious Vac: The DLC introduces the roaming Tydy bots, which use a vacuum to swiftly drain your Oxygen Meter. You can repurpose their equipment to create a weapon that transfers health (or slag, if the enemy is robotic) from an enemy to you.
• Violent Glaswegian: Contrasting the English accents most common in the game, the blood-thirsty Space Pirates come with Scottish accents so thick a player might take a bit of time to sort out exactly what they're yelling about.
• Weird Currency: Money is referred to as "Merits," which may actually represent a Social Credit system (read "'Good Boy' Points"), as a highly-decorated crew is given one each. They're represented by yellow carnival tickets with an "m" stamped in the middle.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: Running out of food makes the player lose a lot of health every day they go hungry, until they starve to death.
• Written Sound Effect: Played straight as part of the game's sci-fi comic style. You can even guess which enemy is awaiting behind a closed door based on the word describing its unique sound effect. Even silent enemies make the "Hover!" sound effect, oddly.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: The initial briefing suggests a relatively straightforward problem: you need to acquire a couple of items to make the ID card needed to restart the ship's FTL drive and go home. However, once you have the ID card, B.A.C.S. reveals another ship system that needs to be replaced before the FTL drive can be restarted, requiring a new round of item acquisitions. And so on.

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