The team is faced with a challenge unlike any they have faced before.
- Chekhov's Gun: The one covering the oddity of the park's residents uniting together at odd moments get's fired here - the epilogue reveals that the park itself is a sentient location, and actively controls the creatures living inside it.
- Formula-Breaking Episode: After numerous adventures into the past (and one that led to the future), the team ends up having to deal with time portal related problems in the present day. Later revelations indicate that change will be permanent.
- Genius Loci: It turns out the park itself is one, explaining how the residents were able to act as a unified group despite having no shared form of communication.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Downplayed, but this chapter reveals that Nigel is somewhat bitter than he can't join the team in investigating the far side of the park's mountains due to his injuries from the previous chapter. And this is despite knowing what's on the other side....
- Hidden Elf Village: It turns out there is a city on the other side of the park's mountain range inhabited by various cultures, implied to have been dumped their by anomalies.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: Due to a major reveal about halfway through the chapter, certain elements from Conquest in the Name of Advancement! are spoiled in this chapter, namely Vivian having joined Flame's forces and the cast currently being in a fusion of Horizon Zero Dawn and Monster Hunter.
- Leave No Witnesses: The reason that Null heads to the Land Outside of Time to kill the team - even if they pose no conceivable threat to the Infernal Machine's plan, they are still loose ends that need to be tied.
- Place Beyond Time: The Park itself is revealed to exist in one, albeit expanded to an entire world rather than just a single location.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: While the Team is sympathetic to Aloy and Commander Flame, they all choose to head home rather than assist in defending the Sacred Lands. None of them are mentally prepared for killing another human being, and they aren't trained warriors, either.
- Seen It All: The group is mostly unsurprised to meet Commander Flame and Vivian due to having already met creatures from a fictional universe. Once they realize that Flame being the hero of a fiction means that they could actually be fictional characters, though, they get very uncomfortable.
- Shown Their Work: One scene has a Dilophosaurus make a trumpeting sound using its crests, which support some kind of resonating chamber. Studies in 2020 indicate this may have been the true function of Dilophosaurus's crests.
- Simultaneous Arcs: The initial part of this arc takes place simultaneously to the Monster Hunter: World and Horizon Zero Dawn arcs in Conquest in the Name of Advancement!, with the two crossing over during the showdown with the future predators.
- Wham Episode: The author explicitly stated that the events of this chapter would shake a lot of things up (explicitly mentioning Jumping the Shark in an author's note), and he wasn't joking. Not only is it revealed that there is an entire city hidden North of the park's mountain range, but at the site of the time portal, the team encounters Commander Flame, establishing this story as part of the Conquest in the Name of Advancement! mythos. The end of the chapter also reveals that Nigel is aware that the park is inside the Land Outside of Time.
