Video Game / Zombidle

"Like the song says, good guys finish last, and in this case, they also finish homeless and on fire."

Tagline

Zombidle is an online Flash Idle Game made by the developers Berzerk Studio.

The continent of Goodlandia is under attack by Bob The Necromancer and his horde of undead and demons, who plan to destroy the towns and castles of the good folk! The guards have united to stop him from destroying the kingdoms one by one before it's too late...

...by the way, you play as Bob the Necromancer and his undead army.

The "enemies" in the game are the houses of good folk, which Bob destroys to obtain skulls as currency to upgrade himself as well as his legions of hell. Along the way, he can collect orbs and items to boost his damage and minions further. Progress is made by destroying enough houses, and at the end of five levels, a "boss" in the form of a blacksmith's union will attempt to stop him in a Time-Limit Boss fight. Once the kingdom is razed, Bob will then be able to dispose of the king and his wizard.

This game can be played here, on the iOS/Android, and downloadable here for Steam.

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This game provide examples of:

• Ad Reward: The game lets you watch an ad (in-universe, selling your soul to the succubus) every few minutes to boost productivity somehow (gaining extra skulls per house destroyed, increasing damage, reducing crafting times, etc.). Crafting times for items and Hell buildings can be reduced every four hours, with upgrades to the succubus increasing the amount of time reduced (up to eight). Ads can be skipped in exchange for bloodstones instead.
• Alcohol Hic: The Big Plague emits one while badly dressed as Santa on the Christmas 2017 loading screen.
  Have u *hic* been good this year?
• Amazing Technicolor Population: Bob and his zombies have green skin (presumably thanks to being undead), while the Succubus has red skin.
• Ambiguous Gender: The Red Knight's damage-boosting item is lipstick, but dresses as an office worker for Halloween 2016, and one upgrade refers to it as "him".
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • If you're unable to obtain an event item before the event ends, it goes into the Item Dump so as to avert Permanently Missable Content. That said, the items there cost a huge amount of diamonds to purchase.
  • Auto Ghost Crafting will not craft Ectoplasm Prisms from Ectoplasm Cubes, in case players want to use cubes for certain recipes such as Chaos Gems.
  • The game is Cross-platform, and the player is able to sync their saved game between various Web Game websites (such as the Zombidle website, Kongregate, Armor Games, Notdoppler, Newgrounds), Mobile Devices (iOS, Android), as well as the Steam app.
  • One update lets you hold down a key and move the mouse over villagers to kill them, removing a lot of tedious clicking from the game.
  • As there are no adverts on Steam, the player needs to use Bloodstones in order to get any Devil Deals. An update allowed players to collect 1 units of "blood" per 20 minutes with a cap of 3, meaning that they can get a free deal once every 20 minutes.
  • Two very early challenges were made to give a starting player two unique and helpful starting items, so they could progress faster in the early game.
  • Arcane Batteries were added in order to make crafting faster and less wasteful. Now, if items are fully crafted but not collected, the battery will charge, and when using "skip craft time" scrolls the "wasted" time now charges up the batteries.
  • Some of Maurice's items make life easier when it comes to Ghost collecting and Crafting, his first item allowing you to store 30 more ghosts, and his second makes villagers release two ghosts instead of one.
  • Multi-World farming along with the Chest Collector allows a more easy idle experience as the monsters you hire to farm for you will help with chest collecction.
  • The quick options bar was updated to allow several easy options besides going to the Arcane Laboratory or turning on/off Farm Mode. Things that were added were a "go to world map" function, a way to immediately go to the highest level portal you've unlocked, and to enter the Spectre Genie code without having to go to your mail.
  • Stat-boosting organs can be bought for dethcoins (obtained from chest monsters and kings) at wildly different prices. Or, if you're in a hurry, for 50 diamonds each.
• Anti-Grinding: Event Currency drop chance works this way. There is a base target drop amount per day and if you go over that amount, drop rate is greatly reduced. On the flipside, if you are way under that amount, the game provides a catch-up mechanic that makes drop rate increased.
• Arch-Enemy: The Angel, who is introduced as and described as Bob's Nemesis.
• Authority Equals Asskicking: The innocent villagers that escape from destroyed houses are One-Hit-Point Wonder fodder who die in droves. In contrast, the rulers of the kingdom can take far more punishment than the strongest structures of the kingdom. Once Bob turns them over to his side, all of the rulers are capable of taking on all levels of the country by themselves.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Chaos Gems add an orb to every boss fight rather than just those that already have orbs, greatly increasing the payout per level. Unfortunately it takes a lot of souls and time/diamonds to make a single one. Thankfully, one Challenge drop as well as a few other event-only craftable items do the same thing... multiplied by thirty. Even better is that this is now affected by orb drop multipliers, making it even more useful than before.
  • Many upgrades offer enormous benefits, but require huge amounts of diamonds (without paying, limited to 11 every four hours and whatever scrolls drop them) and/or days of waiting (with a 4-hour boost every four hours without upgrades).
• Badass Transplant: The Surgery Lab allows Bob to get his organs transplanted with stuff like the brains of eldritch abominations. They boost his stats greatly.
• The Bad Guy Wins: As the Villain Protagonist, your main job is to make sure this happens by destroying the kingdoms of Goodlandia and assassinating their kings — or even better, corrupt them into destroying their own country for him. Also happens if Bob succeeds at beating the Angel, at least before the next Time Portal.
• Bag of Sharing: Averted in the shopkeeper's case: if you missed an event item and need to buy it, you might need to check all the available worlds before finding the one who sells it.
• Balance Buff:
  • The Magic Potato Baby was considered a Power Up Letdown since it only gave +30 orbs to all Common bosses, and one of its ingredients (the Potato Man) had a better ability that gave +20% orbs from all bosses. Since the latter was multiplicative, it quickly outclassed the Magic Potato Baby's effect. A later update changed the Magic Potato Baby to give +50% orbs from all bosses, which makes it a far more useful item compared to the Potato Man.
  • Several items greatly increase damage and skulls while Bob's asleep. Unfortunately, Sloth's Form now wakes Bob up, and as many people went for the Perma-Sloth build, makes these items useless.
• Bald of Evil: Bob and the zombies (except during Halloween) have nary a hair on their heads, and as mentioned, they're the Villain Protagonists.
• Bat Out of Hell: The Swarm of Bats are more demonic eyeballs with bat wings than actual bats.
• Beef Gate: If you can't get past a boss, you're stuck on that level until your DPS is high enough, turning it into a Cash Gate as well.
• Big Bad: Bob the Necromancer himself, who leads his horde of undead to destroy Goodlandia. In an interesting twist, you play as him.
• Bird People: Burbtopia is inhabited by humanoid parrot-people.
• Bling of War: The Spectral Knight's damage-boosting item is a brooch, the Swarm of Bats' is a fancy pin, and the Tomb King's is a golden collar.
• Body Horror: The Red Knight's comments imply Bob has termites in his teeth. And then there's the matter of his body parts being "infected" or full of tentacles... Granted, Bob is an undead necromancer as well.
• Boss Rush: The battle against the Kings has Bob and his monsters face off 20 waves of the King's Guard, each wave having boss-level health and being stronger than the last, before finally facing the King himself.
• Bunnies for Cuteness: Subverted by the 2017 Easter Bunny, who's grotesque enough to squick out Bob himself. Also played with, in that Red Knight finds it cute and even hugs it, as well as helping it find the lost Easter Eggs.
• Button Mashing:
  • Par for the course for most idle games. However, Bob sleeps most of the time, with a number of clicks before he wakes up. There are items that increase damage done and skulls looted while he sleeps, and another that increases how many clicks you get before he wakes up.
  • Challenges are smaller levels where the monsters don't attack, all damage is based on Bob's. Cue lots and lots of frenzied clicking, though investing in the appropriate Hell building helps by making his attack a sizeable portion of your total DPS, and you're allowed to use skills and scrolls.
  • One update allows you to use the keyboard instead of the mouse. Even better, holding down a key doesn't continuously deal damage, but it does count as clicking on peasants and scrolls.
• Butt-Monkey: The lich's attraction for the succubus has resulted in his being Forced to Watch her standing next to her crush Carl or taking a picture of her posing with Burrito Bison. There's even a Steam Achievement that involves having Carl's level over the Black Lich's!
• Brain Food: The Red Knight asks that you get the zombies to stop eating the brains in his surgery, those are expensive.
• Call-Back:
  • The Arcane Madness title screen shows the Lich using the forge and apparently being taken over by an Artifact of Doom as Bob tries to drag him away. The Arcane Madness Reloaded screen has the Lich juggling several items while Bob is playing with his phone, the forge's dangers clearly mastered.
  • The Burrito Bison event's title screen has the Lich looking very annoyed at the bottom left corner being Forced to Watch and photograph Carl and Burrito Bison hanging out with the Succubus. The Gonzoland event's title screen has the Lich in a similar posture at the bottom left, only that he's now grinning since he's about to fire Carl out of a Toss the Turtle cannon.
• Came Back Strong:
  • Starting with the Burrito Bison crossover event (Brutus and the Gummy Wizard), the last two bosses in the bonus world are repeatable fights. The catch is that each time they're beaten and a time portal is used, they respawn but gain 10 levels too.
  • The Angel is an even more extreme example. He starts at Level 500, but each time he's beaten, he gains 250 more levels.
• Can't Catch Up: Bob's damage is very quickly outstripped by his minions'. Even the upgrade that lets him deal a percentage of the total D Ps is more damaging. Subverted once you get enough Pearl Necklaces and levels in the Golden Shower of Deathness, which allows Bob to deal way higher DPS than his minions via Sloth's Form.
• Capitalism Is Bad: Invoked- one of the buildings in Hell is the "Corporate Bank of Capitalism", run by a demon banker. Building and upgrading it gives a permanent Money Multiplier.
• Captain Obvious: The bat swarm might tell to increase dmg points to increase dmg.
• Cash Gate: Shards double your money/DPS, but take 3 days to craft and have an (aha) exorbitant cost in white orbs that only increases the more you make. Splinters increase it by 10% and are capped at 50 and 75 white orbs (a laughably small amount), but they also take 3 days to craft, and it takes 3 to make a Shard. Furthermore, you can only craft one Shard/Splinter at a time even if you have free slots in the Arcane Forge.
• Cat Folk: The inhabitants of Malgar Realm are cat-people.
• Chest Monster: One of the unique challenge bosses is a Mimic. Defeating it gives you the nifty Chest Collector that allows you to auto-collect Chest Guardian rewards once you surpass their difficulty.
• Compensating for Something: The giant zombie has this as a skill, and has a giant mace as its damage-boosting item.
• Cool Crown: Killing a king for the first time gets you their crown, which can be worn and removes the tenth house (which has a lot more HP than the other nine) per level in their territory.
• Cooldown Manipulation: Each skill's cooldown starts as soon as the skill is triggered, even counting down at the same time the skill duration counts down. Thus, amassing enough Pearl Necklaces will increase the skill duration time, and eventually even surpass the cooldown time of the skill itself. Certain items like the Crunchy Candy Cookie also reduce cooldown timers.
• Cooperation Gambit: Essentially what the Corporate Ladder does in regards with Chest Keeper bosses and even the kings. By handing them a bribe of items (usually one rare crafting ingredient, a rare crafted item, and a good amount of orbs), you can get them on your side and they'll automatically clear the world for you up until their max power level. That still doesn't stop you from beating them up to obtain the chests they guard, however.
• The Corrupter: Bob himself is capable of bribing the rulers into helping him destroy the very country they're protecting.
• Creepy Crossdresser: During the Halloween 2016 event, the Big Plague dressed as an old lady, with the loading screen displaying some truly unnecessary Show Some Leg on its part... and every single one of Bob's minions retching or looking disgusted (yes, even the helmet-wearing Red Knight).
• Crossover:
  • There's a Burrito Bison event thanks to a collaboration with Juicy Beast. In it, Bob destroys the houses of gummy bears as well as fighting the gummy bear bosses and their wizard.
  • Another event with GonzoSSM (creator of Toss the Turtle) has TTT characters as well as art and other characters from Gonzo's works. The villagers that flee from the houses are Toss The Turtle turtles.
  • A third event crossed over with newgrounds animator Sexual-Lobster. The area, characters, and some of the artwork are based on Pleasure Island.
  • A fourth event crossed over with Berzerk Studio's latest game, Just Shapes & Beats.
• Cyclops:
  • One of them runs the Item Dump, and he trades you limited-event items that Bob missed in exchange for diamonds. He's also a Super-Stoic Shopkeeper.
  • Another Cyclops who may or may not be the same guy is the one running the Christmas Event Item Dump, who exchanges presents for unique items.
  • Pretty much all the citizens in the Western Swamps are these.
• Damage Is Fire: When a structure is damaged enough, it will catch fire, and the flames on it get more intense as its health depletes.
• Deader than Dead: If Bob successfully kills the Wizard of a kingdom, they will be permanently replaced by their ghost during bossfights- even after subsequent Time Portal travels.
• Dead Weight: The Big Plague is noticeably fatter than the normal zombies. The Giant Zombie on the other hand is also largely built, but that's due to being muscular.
• Deal with the Devil: Invoked, clicking on a scroll causes the succubus to give the player an offer. It's a pretty one-sided deal, since the player gets an incredible but temporary status buff in exchange for watching a 15-second advertisement. A later update changed this so that the deal can also go through by instead trading a Bloodstone (or in the Steam version, some blood that replenishes every 20 minutes).
• Death from Above: Bob's Sloth's Form spell allows him to cast a rain of meteors on the houses/enemies, and if boosted by Son of the Lich the meteors become massive sized. This functions like an auto-click ability, allowing him to perform very rapid clicks without waking up.
• Deceased and Diseased: The Big Plague's name and abilities are all based on diseases, and he's one of Bob's undead minions.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • The "Infinite Sloth's Form" trick. To do this, you need to craft 59 Pearl Necklaces^note 56 with the Crunchy Candy Cookie item, so that the duration of Sloth's Form is extended to exactly five minutes, the same as its cooldown time. The trouble here is that in order to do so, one needs to obtain 59 power cubes, and each power cube requires nine Stone Tablets, which will take a good while to obtain. But once you achieve all this effort, Bob gets a very powerful DPS ability that crushes houses in seconds that he can use indefinitely as long as you're online.
  • Taking it even further is the perma-all trick, to do this you will need to craft at least 108^note 102 with the Crunchy Candy Cookie item Pearl Necklaces, allowing all your skill durations to exceed their cooldowns. With this, one can constantly cast a rain of meteors and have a huge damage and money multiplier at a constant rate.
• Diminishing Returns for Balance: Most items stack additively, making increasing amounts of them far less useful. Shards are some of the few items that do not suffer from this, since they stack multiplicatively.
• Divinely Appearing Demons: The Succubus' Halloween 2016 costume is an angel.
• Dressed to Heal: The Surgery loading screen shows the Red Knight wearing a surgical mask and gloves over its armor, with an obstetrician's mirror that gives it a Scary Flashlight Face (and seen from the patient's POV).
• Drunken Master: One of the possible end-of-level is against a "Drunken Blacksmith's Union", no less able than their sober counterparts.
• Duck Season, Rabbit Season:
  • The Ludicrous Gem pack. The options all have a "yes"/"no" answer to them multiple times, with the "yes" proceeding along with the steps closer to the reward. At the end, however, the "yes" and "no" options are swapped around, leading a less-than-careful player to refuse the gem reward.
  • A similar thing happens when you're about to spend over half your current White Orbs on a Shard/Chest purchase, the confirm at the end again being swapped with the decline option in the very last dialogue.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Flying Squid is more of a multi-eyed tentacled monstrosity than a squid.
• Equipment-Based Progression: Unlike most prestige-based Clicker and Idle Games, there are no Skill Points, Tech Trees or Artifacts to use your prestige points (White Orbs) on. All your upgrades and improvements are based on the benefits from various items collected or crafted, and you use White Orbs to buy even more equipment.
• Every Man Has His Price: One update lets you hire the chest-guarding monsters in exchange for rare items (they only need to be paid once) and they'll farm (including chests) their respective worlds for you. A later update even allows you to hire the Kings themselves to do the work for you!
• Evil Versus Evil:
  • The Crossover event with Burrito Bison has Bob the Necromancer and his minions fight against and destroy the houses of the Gummy Bears, who are Burrito Bison's antagonists.
  • Nightmare Mode pits you against Cthulhumanoid entities in a tentacle-infested Dark World.
• Excuse Me While I Multitask: The Lich is able to simultaneously work the Arcane Forge in Hell and destroy buildings on Earth. One update makes the Forge upgradeable so it can handle multiple items being created at once.
• Face–Heel Turn: By bribing the kings themselves, it's possible to get them from fighting against Bob to helping Bob destroy the very country they rule over.
• Feathered Fiend:
  • The "boss" for the Thanksgiving Challenge is one huge turkey with a huge axe and a nice hat, and appears to be menacing even to Bob himself.
  • The chest-guardians of the 6th world are a flamingo, a toucan, and two parrots, and the Queen herself is a large parrot. None of them are friendly to Bob (until they're bribed).
• Flaming Skulls: The skulls that you normally collect are set on orange fire if they're multiplied by the Red Knight's Pillage and Plunder, or red fire if multiplied by a Devil Deal.
• Friendly Enemies: The Land of Turtles loading screen shows the Red Knight and the pepper boss playing guitars together.
• Gameplay Ally Immortality: The monsters' sprites don't take any damage from the soldiers defending the mages.
• Global Airship: The Frantic Frigate item lets you fly from one kingdom to another.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Activating a timeskip in the forge makes the Lich's eyes shoot red lightning.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: The Queen of Burbtopia is normally a good queen... until Bob bribes and hires her, after which she's more than glad to destroy her own country for him.
• Heavenly Blue: The Angel wears a light blue armor.
• Heavy Sleeper: Bob easily drifts off to sleep after a minute or so if you don't click. He also sleeps through 10 clicks before waking up, this can be increased via the "A Bad Seed" item. Not that this is a bad thing, certain items boost the damage of minions but only when Bob is asleep. He could even cast a rain of meteors without waking up before a patch removed it.
• Hell: Hell exists as a location in the game where Bob can travel to. Over there, he hires demons to build different buildings for him to boost his stats further.
• Hero Antagonist: The Angel, who is Bob's nemesis and hence this trope to Bob's Villain Protagonist.
• Hold the Line: The soldiers are there to slow you down while the wizard channels a spell to punt Bob and friends back a level.
• Holiday Mode:
  • All of Bob's characters got a Halloween costume during Halloween.
  • Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine's Day and Zombidle's first year anniversary introduced new loading screens, challenges and/or worlds with new loot.
• Idle Game: It's even in the title. However, the player needs to be more active if they want to gain higher levels and craft items. Having the Chest Collector while hiring (bribing) the Chest Guardians and the Kings will also allow the player to complete entire areas without having to enter them.
• The Igor: The Bats in the Surgery are responsible for finding organs and call you Master in finest Igor tradition (although Bob isn't the one playing in God's domain, the Red Knight is).
• Innocent Aliens: The citizens of the Recon Site are aliens from a crashed spaceship, and with a peaceful agricultural society. Unfortunately for them, the Villain Protagonist is the destructive and evil Bob the Necromancer who is certainly keen on destroying their houses, setting them on fire, and killing off their ruler.
• Item Crafting: The introduction of the Forge (a 3D printer with magic gems rammed into/taped on it) allows the creation of many stat-boosting items, though they take a while to be made.
• Joke Item: Necroswords are considered these since they boost Bob's laughably weak damage before any multipliers from Golden Shower of Deathness are added. However, they're Not Completely Useless — they can be crafted into the far more useful Spectral Scimitars, and with the addition of arcane batteries, they can also be used to craft rubbish which then turns into batteries.
• Kamehame Hadouken: The Big Plague's method of attacking houses or enemies consist of him taking a fighting stance and hadoukening green energy balls at them.
• Large and in Charge: The kings are absolutely huge, bigger even than buildings and wielding weapons as long as they're tall. The exception is the Kingtoid of the aliens- he's only around the size of the alien guards, but rides a Mini-Mecha that's really huge.
• Lazy Bum: Bob sleeps off often during his rampage of destruction. One of his abilities "Sloth's Form" even references the Deadly Sin, and appropriately enough it gives him an autoclicker-like effect (aka a lazy version of rapid clicking).
• The Legions of Hell: Most of Bob's minions are either undead or minions of hell.
• Level Grinding: Quite present in most areas of the game. Thankfully, the Money Multiplier and Quad Damage powerups can relieve this a bit.
• Light Is Good: The Angel, who is Bob's nemesis and fights against him. Since you play as the Villain Protagonist Bob, the Angel is your Hero Antagonist.
• Love Triangle: The Black Lich has a crush on the Succubus, and in the Valentine's Day update, it's revealed that Succubus has a crush on Carl the Monolith. The Birthday Anniversay update does reflect this in its background, with the Succubus standing right next to Carl and a rather ticked-off Black Lich gazing angrily at Carl.
• Magikarp Power:
  • Pearl necklaces increase the duration of all skills by 5 seconds, each one taking 9 tablets (to make a power cube, which greatly boosts your damage), a power potion and a ring to make. It's possible to make enough of them to have skills that last longer than their own cooldowns.
  • The Tomb King's active power is only available at level 100 (all others have them at level 25 or 50), but it doubles the attack power of all minions.
  • Bob the Necromancer himself. His DPS is quickly outstripped by his minions' as they level up, but if the player invests levels into the Golden Shower of Deathness as well as amassing enough Pearl Necklaces to improve the timer on all skills (which is a long and grueling task), he once again becomes the most powerful unit on the battlefield via the combination of Sloth's Form, King's Presence, Son of the Lich and Blackest of Plagues.
• Man on Fire: Oftentimes, a destroyed building will release flaming citizens who frantically run about. Clicking on them will put them out of their misery and award additional skulls and the occasional diamond.
• Meatgrinder Surgery: The Red Knight (implied to be a violent berserker) can install/replace Bob's toes, brains, and hearts once you find his scalpel, "Ol' Rusty".
  Remember when I used to wear white armor? Good times. Ok, hold still.
  • He also leaves socks in his patient's chest cavity, and has to ask whether he should use a chisel on those not made of stone like Carl.
• Meta Power Up: The "Son of the Lich" skill doesn't directly improve damage, criticals, or Skull gain, but what is does is to double the effects of every other skill that is active. Pillage and Plunder gives even more gold, Blackest of Plagues causes you to always Critical Hit, King's Presence triples damage dealt, etc assuming they're active.
• Minion Shipping: One of the Lich's random lines has him ask to be introduced to the Succubus.
• Money Multiplier:
  • Several of them, such as items, the Corporate Bank of Capitalism, Red Knight's "Pillage and Plunder", Devil Deal buffs, etc... One of the scrolls used to give a x10 multiplier, this was later changed to giving 10 diamonds instead.
  • Every kingdom has several time portals, which multiply broken orbs by an ever-increasing amount.
  • Every event has items that increase the drops of its unique currency by one, either bought or dropped by bosses. In the Turtles event, this makes it an Assets Adder.
• Multi-Platform: As of late May 2017, the game is now available on the web, on mobile devices, and as a Steam app. Best of all, the player can easily log into their account on each platform and transfer their saved game. There's even a Milestone Celebration where the player obtains three different badges via logging into each of the three different platforms.
• Necromancer: Bob the Necromancer. Appropriately enough, he has a horde of undead to do his bidding.
• Nepharious Pharaoh: The Tomb King is based on an Egyptian Pharaoh and he's one of Bob's evil minions.
• New Game Plus: Done by going through portals which send you back in time, with fixing all white orbs and keeping all items.
• No Fair Cheating: Parodied with one of the Steam Achivements, called "SIX SIX SIX THE NUMBER OF THE BOB". To get it, you need to beat level 666 or higher... with Bob's click damage only, and no minions. This is not an easy task as Bob's damage is very low otherwise. As such, the Flavor Text for the achievement is:
  "Autoclicker detected, deleting game"
• No-Gear Level: Challenge Levels disallow Minions for their duration, and only allows Bob to participate. Thankfully, one of the buildings in Hell allows him to add a small percent of Bob's minions' total DPS onto his own, but this does mean that lots of Button Mashing is going to be involved.
• Non-Indicative Name: One of the possible adjectives for the buildings is "Indestructible".
• Not Completely Useless:
  • The Blue Specter and Flying Squid's skills only affect their own damage, meaning they see no use once the Tomb King is unlocked. One update adds a high-level item for each that increases the Specter's damage / skulls dropped while their respective skills are active.
  • Necroswords might boost Bob's laughably weak damage, but they can be made into spectral scimitars that boost the amount of skulls that villagers drop. This villager drop multiplier stacks multiplicatively with your skull bonuses, meaning that it's a good idea to obtain several scmitars.
  • Rubbish itself used to be completely worthless until they became part of a recipe that allows you to upgrade the Arcane Battery to store more charge time for crafting.
  • The alien chest guards require rubbish heaps as bribes.
• Number of the Beast: Referenced in the Steam Achievement "SIX SIX SIX THE NUMBER OF THE BOB". You get this by beating Level 666 or higher with Bob only. Carl's allowed if you have an Empty Turtle Shell or Sticky Satchel, but you can't upgrade him once.
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • Having the Empty Turtle Shell (lets you start out with 1 free level of Carl the Monolith) initially prevented the player from getting the "Six Six Six, The Number of the Bob" Steam achievement, which involves beating Level 666 or higher with Bob only and no other allies. The following update made it such that you would be able to obtain it even if you had the Empty Turtle Shell and 1 level of Carl.
  • When the Arcane Battery which allows you to store charge time for crafting was introduced, it needed Arcane Power Cells (2 Rubbish and 1 Ectoplasm to craft) to upgrade. The recipe for rubbish was changed to no longer include Ghosts or Ghost-related crafts, so as to prevent easy obtainment of Rubbish, as obtaining rubbish for this was meant to be an unwanted items sink and Ghosts were easy and free to obtain without much effort as compared to unwanted items.
• Optional Boss: Several areas have optional bosses that drop sweet loot when defeated. The angel also counts — he's not required to be defeated to advance, and his level goes up by 250 when he's defeated each time.
• Our Angels Are Different: The Angel, who is is Bob's Nemesis, and appears as a handsome blonde winged man in Heavenly Blue armor wielding a blue spear. Defeating him gives Bob some very nice rewards but also makes the angel gain 250 levels each time.
• Our Centaurs Are Different: The Tomb King's Halloween 2016 costume is a centaur.
• Our Liches Are Different:
  • The Black Lich is one of Bob's trusted minions, and a pretty powerful attacker on his own right. He also helps to create items for Bob at the forge.
  • Bob himself counts as an example too, having green skin due to undeath like the other zombies. He's quite a proficient spellcaster as seen by Sloth's Form essentially being a rain of meteors.
• Overshadowed by Awesome:
  • While averted for the first few runs, it's eventually pointless to invest in/craft items for any but the strongest monsters (and the items can even be sold for orbs). The one exception are Zombie Eyes, since these are used to craft Chaos Crests and subsequently the useful Chaos Gems.
  • Investing money in Bob other than his level 25 spell is laughably misguided, as investing a few diamonds in Hell makes him do a healthy fraction of your DPS (even on Challenge levels). Of course, being a necromancer, getting people to fight for him is kind of the point. This gets inverted later on once Bob gets enough Pearl Necklaces and levels in Golden Shower of Deathness, allowing him to use skills to easily outstrip the damage of all his minions- even the Tomb King's!
  • The Piggy Bank of Doom gives 50k starting Skulls whenever Bob takes a Time Portal. It's completely outclassed by the Doom Safe, which gives Bob 1000 skulls each time he takes a time portal, but this amount is multiplied by his skulls multiplier unlike the Piggy Bank of Doom. Simply investing in the Corporate Bank of Capitalism a few times and/or having some Greed or Fortune Shards is enough to make the skulls amount from the Doom Safe far more than hundreds or even thousands of Piggy Banks.
• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • The Lich's Halloween 2017 disguise is a pair of Groucho Marx glasses.
  • Spam occasionally shows up in your mailbox, usually from the shopkeeper wearing a mustache and trying to scam you out of your diamonds.
• Play Every Day:
  • Item crafting can be accelerated by four (up to eight) hours every four hours, encouraging players to craft items with long creation times.
  • Having Maurice the demonic snail lets you carry out missions (like beating a certain level without a certain monster, collecting diamonds or even taking selfies) that lets you gain permanent bonuses or diamonds. Once completed, a new mission is only available four (sometimes two) hours later, and there are up to four missions available at a time.
  • The Organ Shop randomizes its stock every 24 hours for free (randomizing it earlier costs diamonds).
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • Consciously averted. Limited Edition equipment cannot be accidentally forged into junk^note the game prevents the player from doing so if a bad combination is selected with a Limited Edition item in the mix, and if the player misses on them, they can always find such items being sold in the Item Dump.
  • However, it's still played straight if one forges limited edition items into a craftable recipe for another limited edition item. For example, if one crafts Witch's Shoes, Haunted Potato, and Evil Candle into The Potato Man, they will be unable to obtain the three items again.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child:
  • Several craftable items require the souls of dead villagers in their recipe, usually in the form of Ectoplasm, Ectoplasm Balls, Ectoplasm Cubes and Ectoplasm Prisms. Taken more literally in the form of Arcane Power Cells that are used to upgrade the Durahell batteries for crafting, which require Ectoplasm to craft.
  • When the Wizards get defeated, they get turned into the Black Orbs that Bob collects to power up his DPS and money multiplier.
• Power Floats: Wizards and the Lich float above the battlefield.
• Powers Do the Fighting: Before a patch removed it, Bob doesn't even need to be awake to cause a rain of meteors to crash onto the buildings. Incidentally, the spell is called Sloth's Form. Power potions and scimitars even increase the damage/skulls if Bob is asleep.
• Power-Up Letdown:
  • The succubus gives a deal every 5 (diamonds, reduce craft time) or 10 (double damage, reduce number of houses per level, double skulls) minutes, and rarely the one that would be useful at that moment. Though, there are ways to make her have a higher chance of getting what you want (e.g. she'll have a higher tendency to drop the reduce houses scroll if the player is advancing at a fast rate, and the damage multiplier if the player is progressing slowly due to high enemy health.)
  • Many late-game players consider the Magic Potato Baby to be this before it was reworked. Sure, it gives a whopping 30 orbs to every boss including those that normally don't drop orbs... but one of its crafting ingredients, the Potato Man, gives a 20% bonus to orbs dropped from all bosses. This might seem small compared to the 30 orb drop, but since bosses begin dropping more orbs later on, it becomes Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards and the 20% extra orb drop offsets the 30 orb drop gain from the Magic Potato Baby. The devs certainly knew this, and after a Balance Buff it now gives a whopping 50% extra orb drop instead.
• Psychopathic Manchild: The Squid's damage-boosting item is a teddy bear (that looks like a skeletal statue).
• Quad Damage: Four of the special skills multiply the damage of certain minions or all of them, but the effect is temporary.
  • Blue Specter's special skill "Spectral Repossession" temporarily adds an extra 400% to his damage.
  • Flying Squid's ability "Pastafury" temporarily adds an extra 700% to its damage.
  • The Tomb King's ability "King's Presence" temporarily adds an extra 100% damage for minions.
  • And finally, The Black Lich's "Son of the Lich" ability temporarily doubles the boosts of all of these- meaning that Spectral Repossession adds 800%, Pastafury adds 1400%, and King's Presence triples damage dealt!
• Rape, Pillage, and Burn: Minus the raping of course, since this is a family-friendly game and Bob and his minions have no desire for that at all. Ransacking and burning villages for skulls and killing their inhabitants are essentially what Bob and his minions do to every area of every kingdom.
• Reset Milestones: Defeating some bosses lets you start with a set number of skulls after resetting. This is only really useful in the very early stages of the game, after which passive bonuses multiply skulls by exponential amounts even at the start.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: While you can bribe chest guardians and even kings to fight for you, you can still kill them yourself (and doing so is one of the quests Maurice can give you).
• Righteous Rabbit: The inhabitants of Talar Country are rabbit-people, and their guard, king, and wizard actively fight against Bob... until Bob bribes their king to destroy his own country.
• Rule of Three: The forge combines three items at a time to create a better version or an entirely new one.
• Samus Is a Girl: Subverted. The Red Knight is implied to be a female demon under all that armor, since their respective boosting item is lipstick. Their birthday gift to Bob is a necklace. However, the description for the Surgery Lab reveals their gender as male with "The Red Knight needs his tools before he can practice medicine".
• Serial Escalation: One update introduces items that more than triple the effect of several items, including chalices (extra skulls), rings (longer boss timers) and power cubes (extra damage).
• Slasher Smile: The succubus looks a bit too happy to offer a Deal with the Devil.
• Shout-Out: Here.
• Sold His Soul for a Donut: Pulled on the player: Devil Deals (powerups or bonuses every 5 or 10 minutes) are offered in exchange for your soul... or watching an ad for 15 seconds. And sometimes the ad doesn't even show up.
• Squishy Wizard: Inverted- while the enemy kingdom's wizard only participates in bossfights as a bystander, they can actually be fought if the kingdom is brought down- and they're the most durable enemy within the kingdom, several orders of HP higher than the kings themselves.
• Starfish Language: The Flying Squid occasionally speaks in emojis.
• Succubi and Incubi: The succubus, who offers the player a Deal with the Devil (gives a boost if they watch an advertisement or trade a Bloodstone).
• Support Party Member:
  • Carl the Monolith. He doesn't deal any damage at all. He does, however, triple your entire DPS (and items that increase this amount regularly appear) each time he is purchased/leveled up, though his pricetag is multiplied by 25.
  • The cyclops sells event items if you couldn't get them during the event.
  • The succubus appears every 5/10 minutes with deals for Money Multipliers and other useful spells.
• Tagalong Kid: Carl appears to be one, carrying a bag, wearing a kid's cap, having only a single tooth in a kiddish goofy grin, and finally being really irritating even to Bob himself.
• Take That!: The Big Plague's skills are named after increasingly deadly poxes- in order: Chickenpox, Smallpox, Bieberpox, and finally Blackest of Plagues.
• Take That, Audience!: The bat swarm running the Halloween 2018 stand has this to say:
  It's Halloween again! Fun! We stocked the shop with masks to hide that ugly mug of yours! Hideous!
• Throw the Dog a Bone: The Black Lich finally manages to get one up on Carl the Monolith in the Gonzoland crossover event's title screen, where he's clearly smiling as he's about to fire Carl out of a cannon.
• Time-Limit Boss: Every boss in the game is like this, where a time limit counts down. If the boss is not defeated before the time is up, the wizard assisting him will teleport Bob and co back to the previous level for them to try again.
• Time Travel: A mechanic of the game to perform a New Game Plus. Using a Time Portal repairs broken orbs (which then add to your damage multiplier) but starts you back out at the start of the game with no minions. If all the levels in the kingdom are beaten, Bob will be able to fight the kingdom's wizard if he takes the second Time Portal of the kingdom.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: Subverted: The Lich's damage-boosting grimoires are apparently alphabet books.
• Tom the Dark Lord: Bob the Necromancer.
• The Undead: A good number of Bob's monsters, namely the Zombie Horde, Giant Zombie, Blue Specter, The Big Plague, Black Lich, and The Tomb King.
• Urine Trouble:
  • The Golden Shower of Deathness claims to be lava, but, well... It's even lampshaded by the Steam Achievement for constructing it.
  • One of the Christmas event items is "Lemon flavoured magic snow".
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: When a house is destroyed, villagers on fire may escape... and the player can click on them to end them and obtain extra money or even diamonds.
• Video Game Delegation Penalty: Bob falls asleep after a while if you don't actively click to deal damage, letting his monsters do the work for him (kinda the point of being a necromancer), and many items increase DPS or skulls gained as long as long as he's sleeping. Sloth Form is a spell that greatly increases DPS for a while, which most players have painstakingly increased to 5 minutes (the spell's cooldown). A much-hated update caused Bob to wake up when Sloth Form is used, reducing those item's effectiveness to near-zero.
• Viewers Like You: The rarely-seen Lachhh Scroll drops 10 diamonds after one of the developers Lachhh to pop up to thank the player for seeing enough advertisements that they had to put in to fund their game studio. A later update had him gratefully thanking the player that they have successfully managed to fund Just Shapes & Beats — and the scroll dropped 20 diamonds instead of 10.
• Villain Protagonist: This game is about Bob the Necromancer and his legions of hell destroying the lives and houses of innocent townsfolk. They're the protagonists.
• Weird Currency: The main currency that Bob the Necromancer obtains is skulls, with diamonds used for persistent upgrades. Events each add their own unique currency, which are turned into orbs or the next kind of money when the event ends:
  • Turned into pumpkins during the Halloween events, and the Christmas event adds presents as a third currency, which drops randomly from houses and are exchangeable for more useful items.
  • The Easter 2017 event uses alien-looking eggs, and segued into jellybeans for the Burrito Bison crossover.
  • A June mini-event has strange feathers that can once again be exchanged for more useful items.
  • The August Gonzoland event has Bob and co. collecting... cash. Actual money. Since these guys use Skulls to buy stuff, it counts as a Weird Currency for them, and the tooltip for the cash even calls it "this 'cash' stuff".
• Winged Soul Flies Off at Death: When killing villagers, they will sometimes have a ghost float upwards from them. Collecting a certain accessory will allow Bob to collect the ghost as an item, which can be used in various crafting recipes.
• Worthless Yellow Rocks: Bob and co. generally consider most larger forms of Rubbish as well, Rubbish. The Xeno on Recon Site and Greg the Flamingo on the other hand require rubbish piles to be bribed into fighting alongside Bob.
• Xenomorph Xerox: The first Chest Guardian in Recon Site is "The Xeno", which appears to be a green xenomorph expy... except its face is that of the cute, innocent green aliens found throughout the area. Its attack animation has it extend the xenomorph trademark Nested Mouth.
• Yellow Snow: The "Lemon Flavoured Magic Snow" item is a pretty obvious reference to this.
• You Do Not Want To Know: The bats request that you don't ask where they procure the various organs Bob can be upgraded with.