Axiom Verge / YMMV

Alternate Character Interpretation: The Sudran civilization. According to Athetos, they were incredibly xenophobic people who treated the technology around them as divine relics that no one should be allowed to use, no matter how noble the intentions. This however is brought into question by the events of Axiom Verge 2 which introduces another civilization of people called Sagigans; they were given the exact same kind of technology found on Sudra by an advanced AI named Lamassu (which presented itself to Sagigans as an emissary of the gods) to be used in a war against a dangerous foe, and were instructed to either seal away or destroy said technology after the war was over due to the danger it posed. Were Sudrans simply following the same instructions, or were they truly a race of fearful theocrats and xenophobes worshipping artifacts they didn't fully understand?
Awesome Art: Although some consider the use of retro-style pixel art to be overdone in indie games, the game has been praised for capturing the visual style of the era as well as the H. R. Giger-inspired designs of the Rusalki and the bosses.
Awesome Music: Most of the game's soundtrack is a nice mix of synthesizers, bass beats, and retro chip tunes that nicely creates the mood of each area, and is considered one of the game's highest points. Special mention goes to the songs "Trace Awakens", "Trace Rising", "Cellular Skies", "Amnesia", and "Without Place". Happ composed the soundtrack as well, and can be heard in its entirety here.
Demonic Spiders: Many. The surviving rabid Sudrans that jump wildly at Trace, the Metroid-like creatures that blend in with plants and drain Trace's energy, to the Purple Drones that fire a barrage of bullets at Trace, each taking off a chunk of energy. Speedrunners have learnt to detest certain enemies that have been described as 'disco balls' for their appearance and their ability to fire multiple damaging beams.
Goddamned Bats: The flying insect creatures that home in on you and retreat. In Edin you'll find them repeatedly knocking you off the rising steam platforms to prevent you from reaching the top of the area. It doesn't help that they often attack from off-screen, making it difficult to determine where to shoot them beforehand.
Goddamned Boss: Gir-Tab starts as a pretty easy fight. You just have to damage its underside and its projectiles are trivially easy to dodge. Then it lays flat on its underside. Its attacks become more difficult to avoid and it's basically invulnerable. Then you realize it can do this whenever it wants.
Most Wonderful Sound: Critical Annoyance beeping actually follows beats of in-game music.
Nightmare Fuel:
- The way the game itself depicts the reality-breaking effects of the alien technology of the game's world will unsettle any NES-era player who has had a chance to see the effects of some rather more exotic and terrifying glitches that often foretold a crash or even save data loss. The way some glitch effects appear to generate 'faces' will also unnerve players.
- Heaping doses of it, mostly connected to the bosses. Most of the early ones are horrifically deformed, starting with the Xedur variant which looks like a horrible cyborg bee all the way up to the Uhku variant, a massive wasp that doesn't even look partly human. There are even text messages that were written by some of the variants that show that their grip on sanity eroded as they transformed into the forms you fight them in.
- Athetos' aborted clone is equal parts Nausea Fuel and Nightmare Fuel, being a misshapen pile of organs with a still recognizably human face. Trace even feels pity for it and you get an achievement for letting it die on its own instead of shooting it.
- Athetos himself. A man who fully believes that the ends justify the means, committed genocide on an entire race in an attempt to bring their technology back to Earth, and is not immune to his own pathogen, requiring him to be hooked up to a machine for all the years he's been on Sudra.
- The piles of dead Sudrans you find very early on in the game. At first it's just a few small mounds of dead bodies...but in the next room it's an enormous hill of them, easily a hundred feet high. It's your first real sign that something's gone very, very wrong here.
Scrappy Mechanic: The Secret Worlds, which are a reference to the Minus World in the original Metroid, are naturally well-hidden, but the actual degree to which they're hidden is far too excessive: the 2 easy Secret Worlds have 46 known randomized spawn locations, the single hard Secret World has 47 and the 2 medium ones have 68. This would be fine if they were just interesting surprise locations for the players to find, but the 2 easy and medium difficulty Secret Worlds also contain upgrades and the hard Secret World contains a Purposefully Overpowered gun which is likewise a random one between a Heat Seeker, Scissor Beam and Fat Beam, meaning you can only find one of them per save file, whichever one you get is random and there's no way to guarantee that you'll get one of the other 2 on a different save file. The only real positive about them is that none of the items found in them count towards achievement completion and you only need to find a single Secret World for an achievement.
That One Boss:
- The Ukhu Variant, the wasp boss in Edin. It can only be damaged when its mouth is open, its stinger attack is very fast and does massive damage, and it periodically spawns smaller flying enemies throughout the battle. Many players also miss hacking the smaller enemies with the Address Disruptor when going for the trophy/achievement to hack all enemies.
- The Sentinel in Mar-Uru fires several bullets that fill the whole screen. For some players, the only strategy is to shoot at it hoping that it dies before you do.
That One Level: The hallucination section of Ukkin-Na. There is an effect over the screen that can make some enemies hard to see, and there's a few that are unique to this segment that deal a lot of damage. Also, this is the only non-boss segment of the game where you cannot use the Drone to "scout" the area and take hits for you; you're on your own here! As if that wasn't bad enough, there are no checkpoints between this area and the boss room, so you need to do it all in one sitting. Also, you cannot leave the area to gather more weapons/items until after you finish this section.

YMMV / Axiom Verge

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