Video Game / Rogue Legacy

"My duties are to my family... But I am loyal only to myself..."

Rogue Legacy is an action-platformer with Roguelike and Metroidvania elements developed by Cellar Door Games. The player must explore a procedurally generated castle full of traps and monsters. When they inevitably die, the player then has a choice of which of their character's descendants to play next. Each has a different class, subweapon and interesting genetic conditions. Over the course of a few generations, players will build up their base and armory, allowing each new generation to be a little stronger and press a little further into the depths of the ever-changing castle.

A demo is available and can be downloaded here. The full game was released on Steam and GOG.com on 27 June 2013, on PS3, PS4, and PS Vita on 29 July 2014, on Xbox One on May 27, 2015, and on Nintendo Switch on November 6, 2018.

A sequel, Rogue Legacy 2, was announced and entered Early Access on August 18th, 2020, and released officially on April 28th, 2022.

On April 27, 2019, a fan-made Game Mod titled The Lament of Zors by Cedric "default0" Schneider has been officially patched for free by Cellar Door Games into the Steam version as a separate game instance.

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I entered this page a swordsman, a writer:

Tropes in Rogue Legacy

• 24-Hour Armor: Everybody is always armor-clad including your lover and kids when you beat Johannes/The Fountain, as seen in the ending. It's done both to be practical in the graphics department, and to underline how this family is doomed to traverse the castle.
• Ability Required to Proceed: By design, some Fairy Chest challenges can only be beaten with the help of specific classes and/or traits. But even more so, a few of them can be technically considered as "cheating" the challenges.
  • A majority of the No-Damage Run challenges can only be solved using specific class spells such as the Assassin's Mist Form (which disables Collision Damage) or the Spellsword's Time Stop (which freezes enemies and spiked balls).
  • A room with several rows of spike traps? Heirs who don't have pulses on their feet can walk on them just fine. Alternatively, the Time Stop ability prevents spikes from coming through the platforms if you cast the spell before touching any of them.
  • A majority of obstacle-course rooms filled with permanent spikes? Dragons can fly on them just fine.
  • A room with spiked traps and wooden platforms? There is a trait that permanently activates wooden platforms by default. Or with the Hermes' Shoes item, you can simply walk on the spikes instead.
  • Reach the chest in less than 5 seconds? Use the Dash ability, equip Haste runes or the Shinobi/Hokage class for faster movement.
  • Defeating enemies that are out of reach or blocked by walls? Several of these are designed for a specific spell, such as a row of Plinkies that can be defeated with the Chakram, or two Plinkies placed in just the right location for each of the projectiles launched by Scythe to hit both. The Crow Storm weapon of the Lich class simplifies all of these by just launching birds at anyone in the room.
  • No Jumping? Just use the Dragon class to fly!
• Absurdly High Level Cap: It's not pointless since the New Game Plus will keep increasing in difficulty even past where you actually max out, but by the time you've finished upgrading your manor, your level will probably be four times than what you were at when you first beat the Final Boss. Even when you've bought absolutely everything, you can keep nudging your stats upward with no apparent cap (easily past level 500) by beating fairy challenges to collect stat up items.
• Absurd Phobia: Played with in the Steam Achievement titles, which are words consisting of "____phobia" that aren't that dangerous nor life-threatening. There are however, recorded definitions for most of the mentioned phobias, which give the achievement names some sense in context.
  • Biophobia - Die 20 times (fear of nature).
  • Decidophobia - Put at least one point in every manor skill (fear of making decisions).
  • Plutophobia - Reach level 50 or higher (fear of wealth).
  • Gymnophobia - Wear an equipment in every slot (fear of nudity).
  • Disposophobia - Find all blueprints (fear of disposing items).
  • Ommetaphobia - Defeat Khidr (fear of eyes).
  • Phasmophobia - Defeat Alexander (fear of ghosts).
  • Pyrophobia - Defeat Ponce de Leon (fear of fire).
  • Blennophobia - Defeat Herodotus (fear of slimes).
  • Paterphobia - Defeat your ancestor Johannes (technically, no such phobia exists, but with the definition of "pater", this phobia refers to the fear of fathers).
  • Zoophobia - Defeat all mini-bosses (fear of wild animals).
  • Geminiphobia - Beat the game twice (fear of identical twins).
  • Alektorophobia - Kill a chicken (fear of chickens).
  • Barophobia - Use the Dragon class (fear of gravity).
  • Atelophobia - Use a Knight without traits (fear of imperfection).
  • Somniphobia - Play the game for more than 20 hours (fear of sleep).
  • Syngenesophobia - Defeat the brothers (fear of relatives).
  • Chemophobia - Defeat the trademarked chemical (fear of chemicals).
  • Ostiophobia - Defeat the son (fear of bones).
  • Scotomaphobia - Defeat the doppelganger (fear of blindness).
  • Astrophobia - Defeat the asteroids (fear of stars).
  • Thanatophobia - Beat the game without using the architect and dying 15 times or less (fear of dying).
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Buying a castle upgrade or rune causes the cost of every other one to increase. The cost of your last few stat-ups and runes will be astronomical. This also applies to the gold donated to empower your ancestors in the Remix boss fights.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: The Blacksmith when you start building your castle.
  The Blacksmith can build the finest equipment in the world, turning you into a veritably virtuous violent-villain vaporizer.
• And Then John Was a Zombie: The fate of anyone who drinks from the Fountain of Youth. Johannes implies that the castle's bosses — Khidr, Alexander, Ponce De Leon, and Herodotus — were all heroes who drank from the Fountain, only to fall to its curse and become giant versions of the monsters they fought to reach it.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Any of the bouncing spiked balls will be defeated if they impact walls 12 times within a short timeframe. This is to prevent any small areas from being blocked off by them.
  • After beating a boss, it is also impossible to take damage from spike traps or spiked balls.
  • If you fail the boss fight against Johannes for the first time, the door to the throne room will skip the platforming segment and instantly take you back to him for the succeeding tries, even in New Game Plus.
  • Having a hard time against the Remix Bosses? You can empower them using the nearby donation box for a hefty price for up to nine times. This process increases their HP and damage output, allowing you to have a better chance in the fights.
• Anti-Grinding:
  • Liches don't get any HP from killing the weak mooks spawned during the Alexander fight.
  • The game's Optional Bosses force you to fight them with a preset character, making grinding your way through impossible. An update later introduced donation boxes which allow you to empower them for a hefty sum of gold.
• Anti-Hoarding: Charon takes away all (or a portion, with the Haggle upgrade) of your gold every time you enter the Castle. This makes it so that you cannot easily accumulate gold to unlock everything yet at your current playthrough. Not unless you find the Charon Obol artifact, which convinces him to let you pass him for free just once, keeping all the previous gold earned by your ancestor.
• Asshole Victim: The King, who essentially destroyed the kingdom he ruled for a chance at immortality. He's slain at the end of the tutorial, and fully deserved it.
• Asteroids Monster: The "Blob" enemy classes, which split into two smaller versions of themselves upon being slain. For bonus points, there's the Optional Boss Astrodotus, who highly resembles the Trope Namer by virtue of being fought in a space-like area with Wrap Around.
• Authority Equals Asskicking:
  • The Prince, AKA Johannes, came to rule the monsters of the Castle by defeating them.
  • Averted with the king, who was a coward and a weakling.
• Auto-Revive:
  • The Hyperion's Ring artifact grants this as a one-time effect.
  • You can also purchase a small chance of automatic revival with the Death Defy upgrade, but higher levels are ridiculously expensive and you won't exceed 15%.
• Awesome, yet Impractical:
  • Giants have larger range than other characters. They also have enormous hurtboxes, making it easier for them to get stunlocked.
  • Depending on class, Dwarves can be just as impractical as Giants - they have tiny hitboxes and can fit into secret areas, but their melee range is TINY, making it extremely difficult to progress later on in the game. This is much less of a limitation when using classes that rely more on magic than swordplay.
  • Dragons have infinite flight but low health. They also have a fireball attack but it costs mana to use and it replaces your default melee attack. Mana does regenerate when playing as a Dragon but not usually enough to get more than 3 or 4 shots off at a time without spilling a lot of points into upgrading your mana pool, and enemies are invincible for a moment after being hit so you can't rapid fire it anyways.
• Badass Boast: Journal #3 depicts how the writer Johannes delivers one before entering the Castle.
  I will be victorious! There is no greater swordsman than I, even amongst my siblings.
• Badass Cape: Capes are one of your equipment slots, so there are plenty to choose from. The vampire-esque red Blood Cape is especially cool.
• Battle Aura: Spellthieves have a white outline that envelopes their body.
• Beef Gate: Nothing is stopping you from immediately descending into the bowels of hell. Nothing except for the fact that the enemies there will skewer you unless you're leveled up and prepared.
• Behind the Black: There are invisible corridors that can be accessed in some ways, often by having a darker wall outline. Your character is always visible, so you're not actually going behind the wall textures, but it's the same principle.
• Big Bad: Johannes, the prince whose diaries you find, turns out to be the lord of the evil castle, and the one who killed the King.
• Bittersweet Ending: Johannes is destroyed, thus redeeming your family for the King's murder, but your character is left with the knowledge that Johannes betrayed his king not out a lust for power, but as retribution for the King betraying him and his other heirs, which means that the quest for revenge your family sacrificed hundreds of its children to complete was a lie all along. On the plus side, Johannes' death also destroys the Fountain, preventing anyone else from being corrupted by its power.
• Black Swords Are Better: The final Sword Blueprint that you can find is the Dark Sword.
• Blob Monster: The aptly-named "Blob" enemy class, as well as the boss version, Herodotus.
• Blocking Stops All Damage: The class ability of the Paladins. Although, one must be facing the enemy's attack and have at least 25MP for the damage to be negated.
• Blown Across the Room:
  • The effect of the Hypergonadism trait. If you have the Ectomorph trait, this can happen to you instead. Barbarian Kings/Queens also have this as their special ability.
  • Shield-holding knights do this to you if you hit their shield.
• Blue Blood: The Prince, obviously. And the player characters, since they're descended from him.
• Book Ends: The Final Boss is the character you started with in the tutorial, Johannes.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Miners/Spelunkers don't have any flashy combat abilities, but they gain more gold than any other class and when upgraded they automatically mark all chests and bonus rooms on the map. On top of that, they can remove some of the Fake Difficulty from the Land of Darkness by using their mining helmet.
  • The Knife subweapon launches a single blade forward through the air until it hits an enemy or a wall, with no variation or fancy techniques available. That said, it's the cheapest combat spell available, easy to use, does solid damage, and makes an effective one-two punch in conjunction with your sword.
• Boss Subtitles: It's also notable that the player can still move around and get a few free hits on some of them when their subtitle is being displayed. To be specific, the Boss subtitles are as follows:
  • Khidr "The Gatekeeper" (Eye boss, Castle Hamson)
  • Alexander "The Forgotten" (Flaming Skull boss, Forest Abkhazia)
  • Ponce de Leon "The Sentinel" (Fireball boss, The Maya)
  • Herodotus "The Infinite" (Slime boss, Land of Darkness)
  • Johannes "The Traitor", and then Johannes "The Fountain" (Final boss, Throne Room)
• Bragging Rights Reward: The 1.2 patch adds five Superbosses that are more powerful versions of the regular bosses. The reward you get for beating all of them is overpowered, the Traitor class. But of course, since you've already beaten the hardest challenges in the game, all it's good for is tearing through the castle with much more ease.
• Broken Pedestal: Once The Reveal occurs, the family tree is shown zooming right back to the beginning with Johannes, whose portrait is knocked off, signalling that he's essentially been disowned by the family for his betrayal.
• Bullet Hell: Some monsters and traps spew these, and bosses turn it up to eleven. It gets even worse in New Game Plus (and then again in the second New Game Plus) when all enemies are replaced by versions that put out more projectiles, and in the latter, many more of these attacks can go through walls.
• The Caligula: The king faked an illness, subjected heirs to the dangers of the castle and emptied the royal coffers, bankrupting the kingdom. All for a chance at eternal youth.
• Call-Back: The room past the door to the throne room is the exact one you passed as The Prince in the tutorial. And the "Down Strike here" gameplay tip inscribed in the wall is still there! It gets much better if your heir has the Sepia trait active, which puts the sequence in the same monochrome color like before.
• Casting a Shadow: Knaves and Assassins are always followed by a black smoke. Then there's the latter's Mist Form ability.
• Chest Monster:
  • Sentient paintings will fly off the wall and attack you when you approach. You can spot them by the shaking beforehand, and their darker outline, or by pausing to reveal the stats of all nearby enemies. Several of the "?" rooms contain giant paintings remarking on the developers' past games. One of them is a boss, Sallos. What's worse, this one is smart enough to not shake when you're in its vicinity; you can only tell (short of jumping into it) if you check your stats first, attempt to 'read' it like the other giant paintings, or notice its darker outline.
  • Of course, there are also the traditional Mimics in the Maya. These have a lighter outline than the chests instead. Another far simpler way of checking if a chest is a mimic is to look at your minimap. Is there a chest there? No? Then the one in front of you is a Mimic (although the game can still throw you a curveball by having a Mimic sitting right in front of the actual chest to disguise itself).
• Chekhov's Gunman: Johannes at the start of your family tree from the very beginning of the game.
• Collision Damage: All enemies have this except for Guardboxes. The player can gain it too with retaliation runes, which can even destroy invulnerable objects like spikeballs. The Assassin's Mist Form can disable this mechanic while in effect.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: When you defeat a regular boss, its icon will glow blue in the throne room door. Defeating its Remix counterpart will produce a green icon instead.
• Color-Coded Time Stop : Done the same as the original Ur-example of the trope.
• Cool Sword: Spellthieves/Spellswords have a magic one which they summon whenever they swing it. Unlike the regular metal swords the other knights use, this one has a magic-sounding whoosh that plays as it swings.
• Credits Running Sequence: The credits feature you briefly running through every area in the game... despite the door to the final boss being located in the entrance hall.
• Critical Hit Class:
  • Knaves/Assassins have lower health, mana, and strength, in exchange for +15% critical hit rate and +125% critical hit damage. While they aren't the only class that can make use of critical hits, they're the only ones who can get them without investing into the manor or buying armor that increases the rate they occur. Assassins' bonus stats also stack with manor upgrades, meaning that even with maximum money poured in, this class will always get the most out of a critical.
  • Inverted with Shinobi/Hokages, who are the only classes who cannot perform critical hits, but have higher strength than other classes.
• Crutch Character:
  • Shinobi/Hokages have great stats initially, making them much quicker at killing things with normal attacks. Unfortunately their complete inability to get critical hits comes back to bite them in New Game Plus, by which point you've probably upgraded critical hit chance and damage to the point that other classes that can crit will exceed them.
  • Miners/Spelunkers. Early on, their +30% gold bonus is a huge help in powering up, but New Game Plus gives you a +50% money multiplier for each loop you make through it, making the Spelunkers' trade of lower stats for higher money a bad deal since you'll be able to make much more money with heroes who have better survivability.
• Cue the Sun: After you've beaten The Fountain Final Boss, the surrounding darkness disappears, allowing sunlight through the castle's windows.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Dragon characters handle rather differently to all others, swapping the usual jumping ability for unlimited flight. Their regular attack also shoots a ranged fireball that consumes MP, and not your typical sword swing. This requires you to at least put some distance between your target and limits aggressive gameplay.
• Dark Is Evil: The final boss Johannes, has a fighting style and attacks which are more powerful versions of yours but his armor is of a darker shade.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Assassins have nothing but darkness behind their visors (unless the Nerd Glasses add googly eyes) and hide in the shadows using their mist form to avoid attacks, but they're no more evil than any other player character.
• Dark Reprise: A more sinister version of the menu theme plays during the second phase of the final boss fight, aptly named "Rotten Legacy".
• Death as Game Mechanic: When your character dies, he's gone, you have to start with a new one. However, the new character is the child of the previous one, and inherits stats and equipment from the parent, but allowing you to change classes and pick different genetic conditions. There WILL be times when you'll purposely kill your character because of convenience or to see if you get a successor with a less crippling genetic trait.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Usually. You have to pick a new character when you die, but you get to keep all your gear and have the chance to buy new stuff, meaning the new character will normally be stronger (or the same if you didn't pick up enough gold to upgrade). But if all three children have bad traits...
  • The last bit is partially averted once you earn the "Randomize Children" upgrade. You can re-roll your selection of children once to find a better selection. Good in the late game.
• Dem Bones:
  • Skeletons are enemies you'll see from the very beginning, either as moving bone-throwers or archers that fire bones.
  • As well as the common floating-skull enemies Fury, Rage, Wrath and Alexander.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • You can back out of and retry Fairy Chest challenges without any repercussions for as long as you don't fail some of the one-time-only prerequisites (i.e. getting hit or jumping). But the one that requires you to reach the chest in 5 seconds is an exception as it is a speed-based challenge. If you retreat the room and re-enter, the timer will not reset, giving you even much fewer seconds when you try this tactic.
  • The Lich class gets health from killing enemies. If a Lich fights Alexander, who spawns many skull-wisp enemies, killing them won't give you any health.
  • Zig zagged with the Final Boss. If you somehow manage to make it all the way to the final boss on the first descendant, Johannes will still treat them as if they came from a long line of descendants and say that he's lived for thousands or so years, despite the fact that Sir Lee should be his own son. That said, the game will pull from a list of pre-generated descendants for the cutscene that shows Johannes being removed from the family tree, showing the devs at least considered the idea someone would eventually manage to get to the Final Boss with Sir Lee.
• Die, Chair, Die!: One of the main ways to get loot is to destroy everything you see. Bookshelves get a free pass, apparently.
• Difficult, but Awesome: The Dragon class can be extremely powerful if used properly.
• Diminishing Returns for Balance: The Armor statistic does not flat out increase the damage reduction for every point. Instead, the reduction value increments exponentially. This means that while you can easily get up to 30% damage reduction in your first playthrough, having 99% damage reduction requires an astronomical Armor stat, which require hundreds of hours of Fairy Chest farming.
• Disability Immunity: Peripheral Artery Disease makes spike traps never trigger beneath your feet since they work by detecting pulse. Which your feet lack.
• Double Jump: One of the runes you can buy lets you do this, and a few pieces of armor also grant the ability. They stack too, so you can even jump more than twice if you want.
• Double Unlock: The runes and the blueprints. First you have to find them in chests, then you have to buy them to be able to use them. For the equipment, you'll also need a high enough weight score in order to wear them.
• Draconic Humanoid: The unlockable Dragon class has dragon wings and can breathe fire.
• Dual Boss: One of the secret bosses pits Johannes against the Brohannes, a pair of red-and-purple-garbed knights with the powers of the Traitor class.
• Dump Stat:
  • Strength, critical hit chance, and critical hit damage for the Dragon class, since their only attack is magical (which doesn't crit). This can also apply for Archmages if you can regenerate enough mana / Siphon to be able to rely largely on spells.
  • Once you're able to equip the heaviest armor, Weight Limit increases become completely useless, as they have no benefit beyond increasing how much you can wear. Despite this, you can still get them from chests in New Game Plus runs.
  • Critical Hit Chance and Critical Hit Damage for the Hokage class, since it cannot crit in the first place.
• Dungeon Bypass:
  • Some traits and blessings can make difficult rooms surprisingly easy.
  • The Dragon class can simply ignore the attacks of many monsters and even bosses.
• Early Game Hell: By design, per roguelike conventions. You will probably not make it very far in your first dozen or so generations, but things get easier with every upgrade, equip, and rune you manage to secure.
• Easter Egg: Painting Rooms contain a Developers' Commentary of the previous games they've worked on prior to Rogue Legacy including the development period, release date, and a general feedback or company notes about the game. However, the mini-boss Sallos may take up the place of a large painting.
• Eldritch Location: The castle. Its shifting layout renders maps useless and the Prince thinks it's alive, sensing him and possessing possibly malevolent purpose. Rogue Legacy 2 does imply it was due to that game’s Final Boss attempting to drown the castle in the River Styx upon his defeat, which also transported the castle to its current location.
• Enemy-Detecting Radar: A trait allows you to know and track where the enemies are on your minimap when you enter a room.
• Enemy Roll Call: After you defeat the final boss and leave the room, you're treated to a scene featuring each and every boss, miniboss, and enemy in paintings, along with their names and how many times you've killed them. Humorously, if your character has Vertigo, this entire scene will be upside down.
• Evil Laugh: Every time a painting is revealed as an enemy.
• Excuse Plot: It's rather light on story (as is standard for the genre) but does manages to have an interesting twist.
• Everything Trying to Kill You:
  • Even the health powerups spring up and come after you with a certain trait.
  • Exaggerated with a giant portrait enemy that masquerades as one of the large paintings that can be examined to give information about Cellar Door's past games
• Evolving Title Screen: Beating the game changes the title screen background from a castle shrouded in darkness and red clouds to one with clear blue skies and sunlight.
• The Faceless: The Assassin class only has a pitch black void in place of the knight's face.
• The Fair Folk: If the floating skulls are indeed fairies, they're definitely malicious enough to be an enemy class.
• Our Fairies Are Different: Where they are a type of enemies that are made up of floating skulls on fire.
• Fake Difficulty:
  • Dementia gives you literal fake difficulty in the form of enemies you can't hurt (but can't hurt you either). The biggest sign an enemy is fake is if they're out of place (like a dungeon enemy in the castle part of the game). As an added bonus, you also get to hear creepy noises from time to time.
  • The monochrome trait filters the colors of the game to the point that it could be very difficult to distinguish the color red, especially projectiles launched by the Pupil-type enemies. Consequently, it makes Bullet Hell dodging much harder.
  • As what the dungeon's name implies, the Land of Darkness is almost pitch-black, making it difficult to see what enemies and traps are near your vicinity. Fortunately, the Spelunker class can remove this using their mining helmet.
  • If an enemy is close enough to a wall, their projectiles may be able to go through it, even though only some projectiles are supposed to do so. ^note Intended wall-ignoring ranged moves include the projectiles fired by Rage and its upgraded variants (which are also used by Infernite and Plonky), the bones thrown by Skeletons and their tougher versions, the red shots from Scouts and the other Eyes, and the large fireballs thrown by Sollock.
• Fake-Out Opening: You never actually SEE the character you're playing in the tutorial level die...
• Familial Foe: You play as a generation-spanning family, with one descendant of each generation entering Castle Hamson to defeat the monsters that live there and fight the traitor inside, who is thus the enemy of everyone in the family tree. This traitor, Johannes, is actually the start of the family tree, and has been alive the entire time due to the fountain of youth.
• Fission Mailed: Apparently, the Death Defy effect from a Manor upgrade (or from the Hyperion Ring) still plays the character's death animation, even though you can still be revived afterwards. Justified as the name implies - You'll have to die first before you can defy it and resurrect on the spot.
• Flaming Skulls: The "Fairy" enemies are flying skulls surrounded by fire. Alexander is a boss version of them.
• Flavor Text: The nodes for your Manor upgrades have these aside from noting the stat increments and levels.
• Flechette Storm: Johannes the Traitor can throw several daggers at once. With the Traitor class, you can use this same ability as your normal spell.
• Fluffy the Terrible: Deep in the depths of the dark forest there lurks a giant skull, wreathed in flame. Its name is Alexander. Inverted if one interprets it as Alexander the Great, since Johannes implies the bosses are all legendary heroes, and Ponce De Leon - who is just as real Alexander the Great - is among them.
• Flunky Boss:
  • Alexander summons droves of his fellow flaming skull, to make up for the fact his own attacks aren't very complex. This becomes more threatening on New Game Plus when he spawns tougher mooks.
  • Whenever you deal enough damage to make him split, Herodotus spawns a Gravisor, a mook who spawns stone towers at your feet. Unlike Alexander, they don't do anything to make him more than a minor annoyance.
• Food Eats You: The character trait Alektorophobia, which makes it so that any HP-restoring chicken drumsticks that spawn have a chance of turning out to be headless chickens that run around and can damage you and which you need to kill to turn them back into the drumsticks.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Each boss has a name relating to the Fountain of Youth.
  • Additionally, the fact that Charon relentlessly takes your money and laughs at you while doing so should hint at the fact that your goal is foolish and only death awaits. Not only do most die within the castle, but the original goal of saving the king has long since been invalid, and was invalid in the first place anyway!
• Fragile Speedster:
  • The Shinobi/Hokage. 30% faster than other classes and has their strength at 175% of the normal value, but only has 60% of the health of a Paladin.
  • Dragons have excellent mobility but very low HP, and you'll need to get used to flight controls to use them. Their damage output isn't that great either, unless you've boosted magic damage more than most players do. Their ranged attack does mean that they can use dwarfism to get a smaller hitbox without much attack range penalty.
• Funny Background Event: In areas where you can see the sky, you will occasionally spot silhouettes, such as Santa Claus, flying across the background.
• Game-Breaking Bug: If you manage to kill Skulls, Fireballs, and Painting enemies while they clip inside walls, their dropped loot may become unobtainable.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • Charon taking your money before you enter the castle? It's what kicks off the plot, as the King who entered had to pay the same price - all of his wealth, leaving Johannes with nothing and driving the prince's descent into villainy.
  • Also, some journal entries comment on various gameplay conventions like finding money and chicken in furniture. The writer thinks he's going insane due to how unrealistic it is.
  • Johannes also gets last words since he's your ancestor. And it is exactly the same dialogue he tells you before he collapses namely "The sun... I'd forgotten how it feels."
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • On the other hand, your descendants somehow get the money you earn in the castle after you die.
  • Despite Johannes getting a similar game over screen with his last words, the enemies he killed only shows the King, even though the Journal entries state that he also conquered the four guardians Khidr, Alexander, Ponce de Leon and Herodotus. It could be justified as you only get to kill the King when playing as Johannes in the tutorial.
• Gathering Steam: The "Down Strike Up" upgrade increases the damage of downward sword strikes when done consecutively.
• Gay Option: Homosexuality is one of the traits your descendants can have. It affects the post-credits screen and in rooms with two statues containing food, which side the food is on (for homosexual characters, chicken is in the right statue, water in the left).
• Gigantic Moon: The moon is always visible in the Forest, and while it's mostly normal, it's gigantic in size, which The Prince comments on in a journal entry. Given that you're allegedly still inside a castle, it's likely fake.
  Journal #12: ... Plus, what is up with the moon? It's HUGE!
• Girls with Moustaches: The female Mages and Archmages have beards just like the males.
• Glass Cannon: The Shinobi/Hokage classes. Their Strength stat is enormous enough to compensate for the lack of critical hits, but they have low HP. Crosses over with Fragile Speedster.
• Goggles Do Something Unusual: The Nerd Glasses upgrade corrects short or long-sightedness as you'd expect, but also all the other visual effect traits even when it wouldn't make sense such as Vertigo, Colorblind or Nostalgic. They also mark chests on your map and if you run into the guy who takes 25% of your money in exchange for tripling it if you pick the right chest, they show which chest is the right one.
• Gravity Screw: One trait your character can have is Vertigo, which flips the screen upside-down for the whole playthrough.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Johannes's father, the king, was the cause of Johannes's offscreen Journey To Villain. The Fountain of Youth being the biggest bad, due to its promise of immortality being the reason why the king became such a bastard.
• Guide Dang It!: In regards to the secret class's abilities: they have three different spells, but you're only told of one of them, the Dagger Spray. You'll probably figure out the second spell (the flurry Axe), as it's mapped to the same button that activates all classes' unique abilities (like the Paladins' shield or Assassins' Mist Form), but the third spell is a bit more obtuse to pull off. If you press the spell button while dashing, you summon a long-lasting Blade Wall, something you'll likely only figure out either by inputting magic too soon after a dash, or if you paid enough attention to Johannes to notice he himself only uses Blade Wall while dashing.
• Half-Human Hybrid: The secret class. Half-human, half-dragon. The name of this upgrade, "Bestiality", implies this is indeed the product of Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action.
• Have a Nice Death: When your current heir dies (and if the animation isn't interrupted by a Death Defy) you will be treated to a scene of him/her keeling over with a list of their kills and their last words. Johannes dies in the exact same way, with the King listed as his only kill.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: Every class uses one as their default attack, even Mages. The only exception are the Dragons. And even then, the dragons hold a sword anyway. They just don't use it.
• Heroic BSoD: The Prince's diary has an entry consisting of just blank pages, implying this was his reaction to discovering the King's treachery and realising it left him with nothing.
• Heroic Lineage: A descendant from your family will be chosen to continue the quest after your current knight dies. After all, your playable knights are all descendants of Prince Johannes.
• Highly-Visible Ninja: Shinobi and Hokages look normal apart from their headbands and cannot get critical hits. This is in stark contrast to the Assassin class which has boosted crit chance and hiding abilities.
• Hitbox Dissonance: All over the place.
  • Sometimes you can fall through platforms without enabling Quick Drop, take damage just because you attacked an enemy too close to you or get hurt from a projectile that flew through a wall when it normally crashes into them.
  • Even enemy projectiles that normally collide with walls will ignore them for a second or so after launch, allowing enemies to shoot you from complete safety.
  • The Fountain is notably guilty of this. One of its attacks involves summoning swords upwards from the ground, and these can hit you in positions where it should clearly be impossible.
  • There's also some clipping issues involving the items dropped by enemies on occasion; annoying when it's gold, but potentially frustrating with the Alektrophobia trait when the chickens clip through the ceiling (until you realize you can fix it by leaving and coming back).
• Hollywood Tourette's: One of the randomly-selected traits that can affect player characters is this, which causes them to shout profanities (via Symbol Swearing word balloons) whenever they're hit. A patch changed the name of this trait from Tourettes to the more-accurate Coprolalia.
• Homing Projectile: The GuardBox 2000 shoots projectiles which slightly curve towards you. The turning is very slow, though, so if you pass the missile it won't come back.
• Hyper-Destructive Bouncing Ball: Spikeball traps move this way, as do the spinning maces several knight enemies use when they die (unless the ball is in a wall at the time). One spell lets you summon a load of your own.
• Ignore the Disability: With the Bald trait, the loading screen says "Balding" instead of "Building".
• Immune to Flinching: If you have the Endomorph trait, you are immune to knockback from enemy attacks. Some enemies such as the zombie and horse enemies are immune to knockback as well, even if you have Hypergonadism or use the Barbarian Shout.
• Impoverished Patrician: Charon takes all the worldly property of those who enter the castle, including the Prince whose diary you find, leaving his family destitute, and that of the King. Since the Prince is your ancestor, this may explain the poor state of your manor at the start of the game.
• Instant Runes: Some of the floating wizards summon Earth pillars by using a magic circle. This is also your early indication on where they would appear, giving you time to evade them.
• Interface Screw:
  • Several character traits have this effect, including long-sighted, short-sighted and colorblind.
    • The "hypochondriac" trait is particularly amusing, as the damage display greatly exaggerates the amount of damage done to you (a 16-damage hit might show as 1654 damage instead), even though it actually remains the same.
    • The CIP (Congenital Insensitivity to Pain) trait removes any visible indicators of your health.
    • Alzheimers disables your full-map option.
    • Dementia creates enemies that don't actually exist.
    • Vertigo takes the cake. The entire screen is upside down. This includes the loading screens and on-screen text. You'd think you could just invert your monitor (or yourself) to read the text, but the letters are also backwards.
  • You can opt to defy this by finding the Spiritual Shrine. One of the special items they provide is the Nerd Glasses, which correct many detrimental vision-related traits.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • The "Katagelasticism" achievement's description gives away a big twist: "Mock the traitor."
  • Likewise, going by the naming trend of the achievements, the "Paterphobia" achievement spoils that the final boss is your (great great great etc.) grand father.
  • Pausing the game reveals the stats of your character and all the enemies in the room. It's useful to determine whether the paintings are part of the scenery or enemies in disguise, and the same for mimics and treasure chests.
• Jack of All Stats: Knights/Paladins have average stats, making them decent at normal attacks and magic, and a shield ability. They become more of a Lightning Bruiser once you've reduced magic costs to let them use more spells and raised critical chance so their attacks will outdamage those of Hokages. Sir Lee, the first character after the tutorial, epitomizes this by being a Knight with no traits, who you play as before you have a chance to upgrade your manor or buy any armor or runes.
• Justified Extra Lives: When your character dies, they die; the next character is one of their descendants, meaning they can be completely different.
• King Mook: All the bosses except the final boss are giant versions of regular enemies, and many of the remaining enemy types get giant versions that function as minibosses instead.
• Knockback: Affected by both your character's traits and the enemy; having unusually high power here can be as much of a problem for you as none (it makes two-stroke kills harder). On the other side, you have no mid-air recovery, making both platforming and aerial swordwork significantly more difficult.
• Lampshade Hanging: Much of the humor in the diaries comes from pointing out the oddities of the game, like finding chicken legs in mushrooms.
• Lethal Joke Character:
  • Miners are crap when it comes to progression due to low stats without the Knaves' increased crit chance. They shine when it comes to gold grinding though.
  • Dwarves don't have as much range as other characters, and they may not jump as high. That said, they have the smallest hit boxes and can utilize some shortcuts normal characters can't which may lead to otherwise inaccessible treasure.
    • An Archmage, Spellsword, or especially a Dragon with dwarfism is especially lethal, since they rely more on spells and less on swordplay (so their reduced sword range is less of a hindrance).
• Lethal Joke Item:
  • The sword barrier spell theoretically does a lot of damage and can stunlock enemies against a wall, but its range is so pathetic it's useless as offense and only serves as a deterrent against melee threats (and usually the chakram can do that just as well). Unless you're playing a Spellsword, in which case you get massive swords that hit above and below and do possibly the most damage per casting of any spell. Plus the giant swords form a much more effective defensive barrier as well, allowing you to refill your MP bar via sword attacks relatively safely even against melee enemies.
  • The Alektorophobia trait seems like an annoying hindrance in that the headless chickens can knock you back to interrupt your actions, and slightly chip away at your health, but they have a hidden benefit of sticking around in a room if you don't kill them, just like other monsters. What this means is that, if you free a chicken while you're already full on health, you can just leave the chicken alone, and then come back to it later when you're low on health. For most other characters, regular chickens will just disappear if you leave the room, just like coins.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • You used to be able to cheat in the "hit the targets" challenges by using a Spellsword's supercharged spells and the Barbarian king/queen's shouts, but a patch disabled specials in challenge rooms.
  • In the axe target minigame, nothing stops you from hurling one or two axes before crossing the gate, clearing two columns before the challenge starts properly. This can pretty much guarantee a victory.
  • The Elf NPC gives you a minigame where you have 1 in 3 odds of tripling what you wagered... but your winnings are multiplied by your gold multiplier, so you'll actually get considerably more than that and will make large profits in the long run.
• Luck-Based Mission: Randomized dungeon layouts can furnish you with powerful new equipment or rooms full of fiendish monsters, depending on how the RNG is feeling. Fortunately your next character may be more lucky in their new castle.
  • Subverted with the Architect, who can pin down the previous castle layout, in exchange of 60% less gold earned for this generation.
  • Fairy Chest challenges take this a level further, however. Not only do they appear randomly and have varying levels of difficulty, many of them are only even possible to beat if you have the right runes or spells equipped (said spells being mutually exclusive and not always the same one)
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic: A late game upgrade allows you to re-roll your potential heirs once per generation.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Paladins can block attacks with their shield, or transform into a statue.
• Macrogame: Any manor upgrades, equipment, and runes you purchase will remain unlocked for each subsequent character. The same also applies to the permanent stat bonuses that you can accumulate from chests. Additionally, any bosses you defeated will stay dead for that playthrough.
• Magic Knight: Every class can do this since they have a basic sword attack and spell subweapon. Spellthieves and Spellswords regain mana when they attack and can use powerful summon magic.
• Magikarp Power: Liches start off with some of the lowest HP, strength, and mana in the game, but gain 4 permanent HP every time they make a kill. The upgraded version, the Lich King/Queen, takes this a step further, giving them the ability to convert HP to mana, eventually ending up with the highest mana pool in the game after several uses of their special along with their passive. They also get assigned powerful (and expensive) group-effect spells like Crow Storm and Conflux more often than other classes: of less use at first, later able to be spammed with wild abandon once the lich's mana pool is maxed.
  • Classes that can crit become this later on as you can easily raise crit chance to regular (maxing out at 50% before equipment), making the Assassin's crit chance and damage bonuses more useful.
• The Magnificent: When your current knight dies, a title will be prefixed to their name depending on your performance. The naming starts with "The" followed by an adjective which ranges in ascending order from Useless, Feeble, Stout, Determined, Valiant, Gallant, Heroic, Divine and Legendary.
• Make Me Wanna Shout: The Barbarian King/Queen's special ability is a shout (very much like the Dragon Shouts from Skyrim) that knocks back enemies and destroys small projectiles.
• Mana Drain: Siphon Runes and Equipment allow your character to recover mana every time you kill an enemy. The Spellthieves passively have this, but is a more powerful variant as they recover a proportionate amount of mana every time hit an enemy with their sword.
• Mass Monster-Slaughter Sidequest: Some Fairy Chest challenges require you to defeat all enemies in that room.
• Medieval Stasis: Over the course of what will probably be several dozen and up to to whatever generations, the world doesn't seem to change very much at all. Generation 100 will still be using swords and plate armor just like Generation 2, instead of, say, assault rifles.
• Mega Dungeon: The Family Castle is where all the action of the game takes place, except for your Hall of Records where you can view the Family Tree.
• Mercy Invincibility:
  • You're invincible for about a second after being hit, which doesn't amount to much, but one of the later upgrades allow you to extend its duration.
  • Enemies also have this, which prevents you from rapid-firing magic on them.
• Metal Detector Puzzle: One of the Artifacts is Calypso's Compass, which appears at the top of the screen and points in a direction towards an invisible door hidden somewhere on the map. Successfully finding the door will let you enter a secret room with two Golden Chests to open.
• Metroidvania: You'll get to explore a Castlevania-inspired castle in the mechanics of a roguelite. The Backtracking mechanic is still present, as you can lock a castle's layout of your choice with the help of the Architect, allowing you to re-attempt the same Fairy Chest challenges with a different character.
• Mirror Boss:
  • Downplayed with the Final Boss; he plays with tactics just like yours, but has access to multiple spells that behave as stronger versions of the Dagger, Axe, and Blade Wall spells. This is because he's your ancestor Johannes, the knight who you played as during the tutorial.
  • Johannes himself is playable in the Brohannes boss fight, using the Traitor class which is unlocked after defeating them. This class has the Dagger Spray (mapped to normal magic), flurry Axe (mapped to special ability), and special longer-lasting Blade Wall (used by pressing the magic button while dashing), making Johannes play just like he does in phase one of his boss fight against two renditions of that same boss.
  • The "Katagelasticism" achievement requires you to deliberately invoke this trope by facing off with Johannes using the Traitor class. This plays the Mirror Boss trope completely straight, as if you have any dashes available, the both of you will have access to the exact same movement options and spell pool.
• Money Is Experience Points: leveling up typically requires getting enough money from the castle in each life, in order to spend it on rewards, such as stat boosts, armor, and runes. The prices for each raise incrementally, requiring more money each time to keep getting stronger.
• Money Multiplier:
  • Equipment and Runes with the Bounty effect will increase the value of gold by 10% increments each. There's also a manor upgrade which can increase gold value by 10% up to five times. The Miners and Spelunkers increase all gold drops' value by 30% passively.
  • New Game Plus gives you +50% to your money for every time you beat the game again. This has little use once you've bought everything there is to buy in the base game, though. However, The Lament of Zors lets you find upgraded armor blueprints to upgrade the existing armors' stats, and has the Enchantress sell stat increases, allowing the multiplier to be useful once more.
  • The Helios' Blessing artifact increase the chance and quantity of gold coins dropping from enemies. Enemies who drop nothing now provide a little bit of gold, while ones who already did have drops will drop more.
• Money Sink: Even if you unlocked all Manor Upgrades and purchased all Runes and Equipment, you can still use your gold to power up your "ancestors" who are used in the Optional Boss fights. In fact, that is the final use of the currency. When you unlock the Traitor class, money no longer has any value.
• Mood Whiplash: The journal. A number of entries by the Prince are rather funny or silly, especially towards the middle. By the end though, the Prince's story takes a really dark turn and reading every entry in one go highlights the contrast between the comedy and tragedy. Also extends to the entire game, because even though there's a lot of death it's mostly just a slap on the wrist for you. With its humor and various video game shoutouts, the game could even be considered quite whimsical if you ignore the fact that you've likely sent numerous warriors over many generations to their deaths for a false cause.
• New Game Plus: You can replay the game with the difficulty increased when you finish, then do it again to make it harder still. Supposedly it keeps getting harder until the tenth time.
• New World Tease: It's entirely possible to stumble into the hardest section of the game with a low-level character. Enjoy the new tile set and music while you can because, oops, you're already dead. There are also teleporters that dump you into a random section of the game with no way back that can function as this.
• Night of the Living Mooks: Zombies, skeletons, and wisp-likes are all common foes.
• Ninja Log: The Hokage class can teleport, leaving one of these behind.
• Nintendo Hard: You start out with nothing, and every time you venture into the castle all your money is lost. You have to pick between three characters every time you die, who may have crippling disadvantages. Health restoration items are rarer than gold and give you barely enough restoration compared to the damage you'll be taking. Enemies become increasingly tough and powerful, and the more difficult areas turn into Bullet Hell with the amount of projectiles that enemies fire. An entire life's gathering of gold might be enough to buy one upgrade or piece of equipment, two if you're lucky. Obtaining useful runes to power up often involve navigating death courses without attacking or taking damage, and some cannot even be obtained without certain character builds. It gets a little better once you accumulate upgrades, but once you get into New Game Plus the game stops throwing its punches. Past New Game +2, the rare, very powerful versions of enemies that might guard treasure chests (Sollock, Visionary, Corrupted Lord) become standard enemies. It's no exaggeration that this quest can take thousands of in-game years to complete.
• Nobody Poops: Averted; one of the more colorful diary entries you can find mentions using a mysterious ravine as a latrine.
• No-Damage Run: Some Fairy Quest challenges enforce this objective, having you dodge traps, spikes or enemies until your reach the chest.
• Nostalgia Filter: If your heir has the "Nostalgic" trait the entire game will be given a literal Nostalgia Filter. The game will have a sepia color tone & fading around the edges of the screen (like it is during the tutorial), and instead of saying "Building" at the loading screen it will say "Reminiscing".
• Non-Ironic Clown: Booyan, the clown who runs a pair of minigame rooms where you try to hit targets with spells.
• One-Handed Zweihänder: The characters all wield broadswords as long as they are tall with a single hand, regardless of class.
• One-Winged Angel: After Johannes' physical form is destroyed, his soul merges with the Fountain, becoming a giant knight golem.
• Open Sesame: As he notes in his 9th Journal entry, Johannes tries shouting this phrase to the door of the throne room, but to no avail.
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Dwarves are just humans with the Dwarfism trait. However, if you combine that trait with the Miner class and have your spell be to throw an axe...
• Our Liches Are Different: For starters, they're playable. They start out weak but their max HP increases every time they kill an enemy, and the upgraded version can convert HP to mana.
• Oxymoronic Being: The Barbarian King, "the king of freemen. That makes no sense."
• Pacifist Run: A Fairy Chest challenge enforces "No Fighting" inside the room filled with a number of enemies. You can take damage, but if you cast a spell, swing your sword, or perform a down-strike, say goodbye to the chest.
• Permadeath: Every time. However, you can continue playing as a new character with the same base and equipment.
• Permanently Missable Content: The Thanatophobia achievement is one of the few that can't be gotten just by playing the game. In order to get it, you have to beat the game on a file within the first 15 heirs without using the Architect. If you go over, you'll have to try again on a new file.
• Photographic Memory: "Eidetic memory" characters have a perfect enemy radar showing where every one is, even if they've never been in the room before.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: The dwarfism trait doesn't stop you being a hardy physical class like the Barbarian.
• Player Death Is Dramatic: Every time you die, everything disappears into a black void except for your character, who has a Hollywood Heart Attack and collapses, their spirit departing from their body. Complete with Dramatic Spotlight. Inverted with the final boss; apparently, dramatic death runs in the family, and so he gets the exact same death as all the characters you've played as.
• Poison Mushroom: Among the (otherwise beneficial) random items the player can receive at a shrine is the Hedgehog's Curse, which causes the player to lose coins upon being hit. While you'll often end up with more money than you lost if you pick up all the coins, the fact that you still lose coins when you die means it's a net loss in the long run.
• Power Up Letdown: You receive a special item from the Altar and it turns out to be Hedgehog's Curse. If the "Curse" in the name doesn't give away its effect already, it is the only disadvantageous power-up in the game. Just like Sonic, you'll lose coins every time you take damage. And you may eventually be losing more gold than what you had before you obtain this item as coins will even drop when you die.
• Profane Last Words: If your character has the Coprolalia trait, if they die, they let out a long string of Symbol Swearing.
• Punny Name: Commonly present in the names of higher-tier enemies:
  • The name of the third variation of the Horse-type enemy is "Night Mare".
  • The large sword-wielding knight can evolve to "Graydiator".
• Purely Aesthetic Glasses: Averted with the Nerd Glasses, which correct the vision of nearsighted or farsighted characters and shows chests on the map.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: Basic abilities of both genders are the same, though time will tell what subtle effects the difference has.
• Pyrrhic Victory: The King achieved Immortality, at the cost of bankrupting the entire Kingdom. His son, Johannes, stopped him, at the cost of his sanity, and becomes the final boss.
• Rainbow Pimp Gear: Every piece of equipment made by the Smith is usually color-coded, for example the Sky implements are azure, the Ranger ones are brownish, and so on. Nothing stops you to wear any combination of items you please (e.g. Imperial braces with Sky Sword and Dragon armor), looking pretty clownish in the process.
• Randomly Generated Levels: The castle is randomized for each new descendant that enters. This can actually be toggled off by the Architect, but you gain only 60% of the normal gold so long as it is.
• Random Number God: But of course! It comes with the rogue-like genre. Aside from the ever-changing levels, some statistics and upgrades depend on lucky, such as the critical hit chance and the Death Defy upgrade.
• Regenerating Mana:
  • Mages regain some MP every time they kill, Spellswords do so on normal attacks. Dragons do this naturally at 12 MP per second.
  • Balance and Siphon runes let anyone regain MP on kills. The OCD trait awards you MP for "cleaning house," A.K.A. smashing all the furniture you see.
• The Reveal:
  • The Big Bad is Johannes, your first ancestor, who instigated the events of the plot in a bid for power and possibly godhood This also explains the entire reason for this family line going to such efforts to kill him over many generations is so they can regain their lost honor.
  • Also, there was never an assassination attempt on the King, nor was he ever poisoned. He faked his illness and spread rumors about Castle Hamson in the hopes that his heirs would destroy the Fountain Guardians, thus allowing him to take the Fountain's power for himself. This turned out to be Johannes' Face–Heel Turn.
• Roguelike: It's even in the name.
• Save Scumming: Closing the game via the pause menu and resuming will respawn your character in the first area of the castle. This trick can allow you to retreat from a dangerous room without risking the death of your current heir.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • Lore-wise, the whole castle seems to be one. Heroes must make a Deal with the Devil with Charon and give up all their belongings to enter (leaving their families penniless) and none ever return. The fountain's promises of youth and immortality may be another; if Johannes's millennia-long stay is anything to go by then those who reach it will be trapped inside, their endless youth rendered worthless.
  • In gameplay, rooms with chests are often more difficult than ordinary rooms and many fairy chests (mostly those requiring you to navigate a complex series of spikes/fireballs or to kill all enemies in a huge room) are especially dangerous. To say nothing of the fact that minibosses always drop a gold chest that can contain stat items or blueprints and you get more money for adventuring in harder areas.
• Scratch Damage: It is perfectly possible to kill one of the shielded enemies by bashing on its shield over and over again, doing minimal damage each time. However, this does knock you back, so be careful it doesn't knock you out of the room, since leaving a room returns any enemy left alive to full health, and it will undo all your hard work.
• Shield-Bearing Mook: One type of knight enemy carries a gigantic spiked shield. It reduces damage done to them when struck from the front as well as flinging the player backwards. Their backs are vulnerable, though.
• Shown Their Work: The Steam Achievement names may be cases of Absurd Phobia at first glance, but the developers did actually research on their meanings and how can they be related to specific in-game tasks like collecting items and defeating enemies and boss.
• Silly Walk: All of the descendants walk in a bizarre fashion, holding their sword out prominently while kicking their legs in a fashion similar to the Rockettes.
• Sins of Our Fathers: The realization of the Prince after knowing the King died from seeking the Fountain of Youth, without even allowing someone to inherit the throne.
  As I look down on the body of the king I realize that it is inevitable: children will always answer for their father's sins.
• Smart Bomb: As well as knocking enemies away, the Barbarian's shout also cancels out projectiles. It deals no damage however.
• Sound-Coded for Your Convenience: Several enemies have sounds that indicate their presence or attacks.
  • Skeletons have a cracking sound that plays when they throw bones.
  • Zombies make a swishing noise when rising up from the ground, and also moan as long as they're active.
  • Corrupt Knights whoosh when dashing, and swish when shooting projectiles.
  • Wall Turrets and the Plinky family make fairly normal shooting sounds.
  • All of the robe-wearing magic-user enemies have a distinct sound that plays when they're about to fire off their magic. Flame-using ones have a low-pitched burning, ice-using ones have a sound akin to ice freezing, and earth-using ones have a runic charging noise.
  • Rages and other floating skulls emit a loud whoosh as long as they're in the room.
  • Wargs make a skittering sound when they dash, and make a bark-like noise when jumping.
  • Archers have a loud, hollow sound when they nock their arrows.
  • Buds make a spitting noise when attacking.
  • Headless Horses make prancing sounds as long as they're alive, and the Headless Horse has a flame sound when it spawns due to the fireballs circling it.
  • Ninjas have a metallic "clink" and a circling whoosh when throwing stars.
• Spikes of Doom:
  • Many floors feature retractable spikes that will detect and try to stab you if you walk on them. Characters with no foot pulse will not be detected.
  • In addition, many surfaces in the castle are covered in permanent spikes. Unlike most examples, these can damage some enemies as well. Certain Fairy chests require you to make it across spike-laden rooms without jumping. To get across, you need the rune that allows flight when you hold the jump button after falling or the rune that allows you to dash.
• Spontaneous Weapon Creation: Spellthieves don't start out with a sword in hand. Instead, they summon a spectral copy of the default sword whenever they attack. But the replica still maintains the effects and stats of the equipped sword.
• Spread Shot: Several enemies in the game tend to attack with a burst of shots or a rapid-fire spray.
• Square Race, Round Class: Nothing stops you being a roided-up Mage with gigantism that uses throwing knives as a subweapon, or a fragile dwarf Barbarian.
  • Ironically, giant assassins/hokages are one of the more viable combinations—their size doesn't inhibit their ninja skills, but their ninja skills help them avoid exactly the kind of dangerous situations giants are most vulnerable to.
• Squishy Wizard: Mages/Archmages. Liches start out as this, but soon outgrow the squishy part throughout their turn.
• Stab the Sky: A downplayed variant occurs in-game as your characters will always point their swords above their heads, but at a 45-degree angle to the top-right. The title screen also features a knight on top of the castle holding this pose.
• Stat Grinding: The core progression that the game encourages you to do. While your character has a Level statistic, it is nothing more than an indicator of how many stat upgrades have you already purchased. And in the New Game Plus, expect to do this a lot as you collect individual Stat Upgrade items from chests to indefinitely improve your character past the Level 507 Cap.
• Stat Sticks: For classes who doesn't rely on strength to deal melee damage (especially Dragon), they can choose which sword to equip for their other effects.
• Stone Wall: Barbarians. They have the highest HP in the game, but with abysmal strength and mana stats.
• Superboss: A content update added optional bosses. They are quite difficult as they are more powerful than the regular bosses they're based on and you're forced to use a preset character for the fight, so no amount of Level Grinding will help you. On the merciful side, losing to them won't kill you, just dump you outside the boss door, so you can try again as many times as you wish.
• Super Smoke: Assassins have this ability which makes then intangible and receive no damage from collisions, attacks, spike traps and projectiles.
• Suspicious Videogame Generosity: There are always two statues that drop HP and MP restoring items in dungeon and boss entrances. Additionally, boss rooms are easily identified with two treasure chests, allowing you to at least take something even if you fail the boss fight.
• Sword Beam: After a delayed animation, the Graydiator can produce a wind slash from its third consecutive swing.
• Taken for Granite: Paladins can do this to themselves.
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: Females wears pink bows on their helmets.
• Theme Naming:
  • The castle guardians all have names relating to the Fountain of Youth. All minibosses are named after the demons of the Ars Goetia.
  • For some reason, all of the music tracks made by the artist A Shell in the Pit are named after aquatic animals in some way. Including "Trilobyte", "SeeSawHorse", "Pistol Shrimp", "Narwhal", "Lamprey", "Manta", "The Fish and the Whale", and "Whale. Shark."... except for the death cutscene track.
• Time Stands Still: The Time Stop spell, available only to wizards/archmages. It works even on bosses, provided you have a big enough mana pool to hack them down to size.
• Title Drop:
  • In the last journal entry:
    Johannes: I entered this castle a swordsman, a savior...but all I have left is a rogue's legacy.
  • The title of the theme played on the title screen is called "Rogue Legacy". You wouldn't know this unless you played the song on an in-game jukebox.
• Toilet Humour: It's possible to have the trait IBS, which causes the player to fart randomly when jumping.
• Tomato Surprise: The intro leads you to assume that the player is going into the castle to cure the King after the guy from the tutorial attacked him. When you actually get to the end, you learn that that's not quite what's going on—but your character should have known that before entering.
• Turns Red: Killing either Berith or Halphas will make the other literally turn red and attack faster than usual.
• Twinking: Technically what the game is all about. Every time you die, you choose one of your character's children to play as. They inherit their parent's castle and all of their stuff.
• Underground Monkey: Almost every enemy type has three normal versions and a boss or miniboss version, with the stronger normal versions being encountered in later areas or fairy rooms and the minibosses hidden throughout. The upgrades almost always get some kind of new attack.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: The Astrodotus is fought as a flying hero in a wraparound room, highly reminiscent of Asteroids. On top of that, the Dragon class turns the game into a Danmaku.
• Unwinnable by Design:
  • Many of the fairy chest challenges are impossible to beat if you have the wrong character class, subweapon or runes when you find them. One even seems designed to specifically require the giantism trait.
  • Many regular chests are only accessible to dwarves.
• Vampiric Draining:
  • Runes can add this effect to your attacks, replenishing your HP or MP when you kill.
  • So does the Blood equipment. Unfortunately, equipping them all takes a nasty toll on your max HP.
  • Lich characters permanently increase their Max HP every time they kill (up to a point), and will have the same HP as a Barbarian when maxed out.
• Video Game Flight: A class of runes grant flight in any direction, but it's on a time limit that increases depending on how many of them are equipped. Dragons have infinite flight time, but can't jump.
• Villain Protagonist: The player character during the tutorial is Johannes, the game's Final Boss.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: Khidr, the castle's giant eye boss, will unleash Bullet Hell on you the likes of which you haven't seen anywhere in the castle. If you're the one who prefers getting up close and repeatedly attacking enemies to death, it will force you to evade and take potshots.
  • Warm-Up Boss: On the other hand, compared to the later area bosses, Khidr doesn't move from his position, meaning you don't have to balance constantly fleeing from him against staying close enough to attack, doesn't spawn a horde of lesser enemies to try and overwhelm you, and his Bullet Hell attacks, while initially intimidating, come in a fairly simple pattern you can learn with some practice. Later bosses aren't nearly so generous.
• Warrior Prince: The Prince who wrote the diary entries you find was an adventurer who overcame the dangers of the castle single-handedly.
• Weak, but Skilled: Spelunkers have generally reduced stats, but gain a bonus to gold and point out all chests on the map. These combined make it a good strategy to scout out the castle with a Spelunker, find the next boss door (made obvious on your radar with two chests right next to each other), earn as much gold as possible (to compensate for the gold loss of locking down), and then lock down and focus on fighting the boss.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • Just before the final battle, Johannes calls your character out on sending (most likely) hundreds of his descendants to their deaths in Castle Hamson just to kill him, pointing out that the whole reason he chose to betray the King was because he wanted to prevent having his family being destroyed by a quest that turned out to be a lie, as his quest was.
    • Except his family had literally no way of knowing this because his entire journal is all over the castle and the last and most important entry was literally in front of the door to the Fountain. So it wasn't so much their fault as it was, well, his, for not actually informing his descendants before any such effort would be pointless. Whoops. Chances are his rant is due to insanity, in these circumstances.
  • The 1.02 content patch also added an alternate dialogue if you fight Johannes with the unlocked Traitor class. He calls you out on mocking him and your ancestors by dressing up as the family traitor that you came to slay.
• Will-o'-the-Wisp: The fireball enemies, and the boss version, Ponce De Leon.

Additional tropes in The Lament of Zors

• Anti-Frustration Features: Most of which are quality-of-life updates to make the gameplay of the original much easier this time around:
  • The player's save files for this mod are separate from the base game, and the Steam platform allows switching between the two at launch, without risking data corruption.
  • Defeating the boss of the area allows you to gain access to the teleporter of the next area.
  • Gold and stat boost drops now automatically fly to the knight, rather than needing to be manually collected.
  • In addition to gold coins, gold bags and diamonds, this mod introduces the pearl, a money item with an even higher value than diamonds, cutting down on the time it takes to collect money at higher values.
  • Spiketors can now be redirected by swinging your sword at them. This allows for easier maneuvering when walking across a room filled by them.
  • Hedgehog's Curse completely removes the "money flying out of you when hit" mechanic. It instead doubles both the value of money and the damage you take.
  • The "Haggle" Manor Upgrade is now changed to reduce the Architect's penalty fee instead of Charon's. At max upgrade, this helps if players want to revisit a previous castle layout with uncollected treasures or undefeated bosses without suffering decreased gold gain rates.
  • The "healing" ability of the Lich class now requires the player to hold the ability button instead of simply tapping it. This prevents accidental swaps of HP and MP. Additionally, the swapping is now done per tick instead of a fixed value, allowing the player to freely manipulate their HP and MP bars at the cost of EVP.
• Balance Buff:
  • General Gameplay Adjustments:
    • Progression and stat boost effects in New Game Plus mode now scale exponentially instead of linearly, allowing the player to catch up easier against the exponentially-stronger enemies for succeeding playthroughs.
    • Siphon and Vampirism abilities now scale exponentially, instead of linearly.
    • Dark Chest now offers 0 health/70 armor from the original stats of 50 health/0 armor.
    • In order to prevent Money for Nothing, Armor Blueprints can be found multiple times, allowing armor to be upgraded to higher stats, while stat increases of all types can be bought from the Enchantress.
    • Mana cost now scales higher along with magic damage.
    • Silver chests drop gold based on percentage and no longer a constant gain compared to the regular chests.
    • The passive gold bonus manor upgrade goes up to level 15 instead of just level 5.
    • The gimmicky Alzheimers trait is removed in this version.
    • Hedgehog's Curse now gives you Power at a Price: you gain twice the gold, but also take twice the damage.
  • Buffed Classes:
    • Knights and Paladins now deal more damage if they have less health.
    • Liches have been reworked to utilized a new mechanic called "EVP" which allows them to increase all stats per kill, or trade them for healing.
    • Miners and Spelunkers now gain higher amounts of gold by increasing their bonus gold gain to 30% instead of a constant 3 gold per coin. They're also guaranteed to get gold from breakables and their base movement speed is also increased.
    • Spelunkers passively gain gold just from exploring, and they also upgrade chests into their higher tier versions from the start.
    • Mages now absorb damage to fill their mana meter, can spam spells more frequently and can critical hit with them.
    • Assassins' Mist Form cost now depends on room level.
    • Dragons now regenerate mana at 12% MP instead of the previous flat value of 12 MP.
• Cap: Player Level now increases with stat boosts, going past the initial Level 507 from the base game.
• Critical Status Buff: Knights and Paladins deal more damage the less health they have.
• Expansion Pack: The mod includes 4 new bosses, 3 new boss remixes, 3 new areas, a new chest type, and a lot more tweaks to the original game.
• Falling Damage: The detrimental trait "Acrophobia" has been added, which makes the affected knight take fall damage.
• Game Mod: The Lament of Zors is a fan-made mod by Cedric "default0" Schneider that tweaks a lot of the base game's mechanics, adding new features for more replayability factor and fixed some old bugs. A Game-Breaking Bug once occurred when a patch after version 1.2.0b broke players' ability to play the mod. Cellar Door Games then turned the mod into a free content on Steam.
• Life Drain: Barbarians can now heal whenever they attack something.
• Money for Nothing: This mod averts the base game's problem with this; if you've found the base blueprints for an armor, this mod lets you collect upgraded blueprints in chests, which allow you to pay the Blacksmith to upgrade the armors, granting them heavier weights but better stats. Additionally, the Enchantress will begin selling stat increases after NG+ 2, allowing you to invest money on boosting your characters directly.
• Money Multiplier: In addition to the ones in the base game, Hedgehog's Curse has been changed to double the value of gold, but also make you take double the damage.
• Nerf
  • McRib now throws 3 bones instead of 9.
  • The elf game does not scale exponentially off your Gold bonus anymore.
  • The game-breaking crow spell is now removed from the game.
• Padding: The mod makes the randomly-generated castle map larger, which means more exploration, enemies, chests, puzzles and the like within each character's playthrough. As a side effect, boss rooms are now farther from each other, and this makes no-death-runs more lengthy.
• Power Glows: Assassins' critical attacks can now be pre-emptively determined with a flaming sword, indicating that the next attack will be critical.
• Power-Up Magnet: The mod gives your knights an automatic ability to attract money when it spawns. This also fixes the common problem of being unable to reach money from an enemy that dropped within a wall.
• Readings Are Off the Scale: Hokage can heal past their max health, which fills the health bar with a blue, secondary health bar placed over the normal green one. However, they suffer from armor taking less effect on these higher health bars, which causes them to take more damage the more they overheal, but less damage as their health returns to its base value.
• Regenerating Mana: Mages passively regenerate mana, while also accompanied with a blue aura effect.
• Shows Damage: Unlike in the base game, spiked balls now indicate if they're hitting walls fast enough to trigger their breaking mechanic. If a spiked ball hits a wall many times in a short timeframe, it starts to turn red, becoming brighter the closer it is to breaking.
• Stat Grinding: The new EVP mechanics of the Lich class passively grant you bonus stats such as Attack, Magic Damage and Armor by accumulating a lot of EVP from killing enemies. The stats go down if you heal yourself instead.

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...But all I have left is a troper's legacy.