History VideoGame / DrownedGod

* [[UsefulNotes/{{Alchemy}} Alchemy]]: The Philosopher's Stone is one of the four relics, and the alchemist UsefulNotes/TheCountOfStGermain (or maybe an animatronic version of him) holds one half of it.

* [[Myth/ArthurianLegend Arthurian Legend]]: The fall of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table make up the background of the first part of Binah, which has you searching for the Holy Grail. At one point you meet Morgana Le Fay, who has become twisted into a monstrous form and is hooked up to modern-looking tubes.

* [[Myth/AztecMythology Aztec Mythology]]: The first part of Chesed takes place in some Mesoamerican ruins, and Quetzalcoatl turns out to be one of the many names of Osiris. Depending on who you ask, either Horus or Isis employed Tezcatlipoca (the Smoking Mirror), Xipe Totec (the Flayed Lord) and Yoaltepuztli (the Night Axe) to carry out the murder of Osiris.

* ConspiracyTheory: Too many to list.

* [[UsefulNotes/{{Kabbalah}} Kabbalah]]: Kether, Malchut, and the four realms Binah, Chesed, Din (a less-common synonym of Gevurah), and Chokmah are named after several of the Sephirot. In a nod to the Tree of Life, you meet Kether at the top of a staircase, and you meet Malchut on the floor below. A few other nods to Kabbalah are thrown in, but like with any other mythology in the game, a lot of liberties and inaccuracies are made for the sake of the narrative.

* [[UsefulNotes/TheKnightsTemplar The Knights Templar]]: Another one of the secret societies who protected the hidden knowledge of history. A drunk Templar guards the Holy Grail, and it is said that famous luminaries like Creator/LeonardoDaVinci and [[UsefulNotes/IsaacNewton Isaac Newton]] were members of their spiritual descendant, The Priory of Sion.

->’’Welcome, my friend, to the Bequest Globe, my gift to you. I have waited a long time for your return to this place. Go bravely on your journey, and use well your intuition and your wit. Many times have you lived before; now, step across the threshold and the boundaries of this locked door that separates this life from those before, and go amid the realms behind. A word of warning, and then I go: Trust too deeply, and you’ll know the wickedness in men’s hearts. As above, so below… ''As above, so below…'' This is the secret of the [[TitleDrop Drowned God]].’’

--> Your mysterious benefactor at the beginning of the game.

* BasedOnAGreatBigLie: In an unusual version of the trope, Horse was upfront from the start that the manuscript from which this narrative derives was a forgery made by himself in the early 80’s to make money before he got steady work as an illustrator; however, he still believed in the ideas that were posited within the manuscript, and so the game marketed itself as telling the real history that has supposedly been covered up.

* GratuitousLatin: In a very small and blurry section of the mural in Leonardo da Vinci's workshop, there's a Latin inscription which says ''"Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit"'', which translates as "Called or not called, God is present", and is the epitaph written on Carl Jung's grave. This both foreshadows Jung's appearance later in the game and seems to be referring to how even though Osiris's true history in this game was drowned, it still happened, and some people continued to pass on the knowledge.

* TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture: Going through the channels on the radio in Chokmah reveals a potential future in or after 1999, three years after the game’s release, where there are riots breaking out across America, the Star Wars project is still operational, a sinister corporation called Arcadia has wormed its way into many facets of life and culture, and [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking Bill Gates is a senator]].

** [[spoiler: The actual reveal involving the aliens is that contrary to Horus's claim that he is the last of his kind, there were other enclaves of aliens who call themselves Legion still remaining in outer space after the civil war which destroyed their original planet, and that the U.S. government managed to contact them after Roswell to make a sinister deal.]]

* DownerEnding: [[spoiler: You fail to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant, and regardless of which ending you choose, humanity is probably screwed. Two of the endings plunge the world into submission under either the Illuminati or the Nephilim Lodges, and the third, which is probably the canonical ending and doesn’t have the Earth immediately dominated, has a promise that the Legion will arrive someday, but they have already been shown to have collaborated with various world governments to influence modern history.]]