Shout Out / Dust: An Elysian Tail

• Pretty much every time you break through a wall in the game, you will find a Mysterious Wall Chicken.
• The way to access the hidden room in the Blackmoor Mountains where Tim can be found with an hour-glass carved into the wall requires the Red Crystal so Dust can ride the tornado. Fidget even points out just how weird that entire transition was.
• The creator was planning to include another Castlevania II reference by having Fidget be disappointed about the items at the end of the mansions in Sorrowing Meadow you need to collect not being "some sort of a rib or a rotting body part".
• Fidget gladly lampshades how the Merchant will buy materials at a high price, even saying it in a similar speaking manner.
• One of the game's side-quests is called C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER.
• The side-quest of finding Gianni's laundry has two Achievements, depending on if you lace them with poison ivy or not. They're called Paragon and Renegade.
• There's one Achievement in the game called Blue Bomber.
• A lot of the areas where you rescue the friends are shout outs to the games they're from:
  • For Gomez, you have to traverse through several rooms with really weird perspective puzzles.
  • When you rescue The Kid, you do so in a room where the ground rises ahead of you as you move.
  • The Dishwasher and Yuki are both found in dark monochrome areas reminiscent of their own games.
  • Spelunker and Damsel, the former of which is in a cavernous area with one of the golden idols from his game positioned near him and the latter of which is up on a cliff with a rope hanging off it.
  • Tim who is in an area where the music will start and stop in accordance to your movements.
  • Bandage Girl has a small bandage floating in midair in the background in the area where you need to use aerial Dust Storm to fly up to the platform high in the air where she's located.
• The ending event, where you crawl along the ground to reach Gaius as he dangles from a cliff is a reference to a similar event at the end of Another World.
• One Achievement is titled Push and Turn.
• Dust's Double Jump animation is identical to Alucard's.
• One sidequest requires Dust to suffer a fatal wound in order to complete it. Fidget's response when she finds out about this:
  Fidget: You know what? I love this plan! I'm excited to be a part of it!
• Your main aerial combo to throw: XY → XXXY not only looks similar to Ryu Hayabusa's Izuna Drop, it shares the same button input.
• The ground Dust Storm ability strongly resembles the Prop (Shredder) ability from Devil May Cry.
• When you pick up Haley's Transmitter she will appear as a blue spirit and tell Dust that she's talking from beyond the grave. This is clearly a reference to Muramasa Senji, who is also the only NPC in the game who crafts weapons for you.
• Defeating the first boss will cause the screen to Fade to White and show a completely different scene from before as the boss lies dying, with a diffuse white glow at the edges of the screen. The two have a conversation ending in a funerary invocation. Afterwards, the two return to the "normal" world. This is a reference to Assassin's Creed. ^note In Assassin's Creed and its sequels, assassinating a story target will transport the assassin and the victim to an area inside the Animus—the computer running the simulation of the past—called the "memory corridor", which is an empty room in the Animus, where the two will talk for a while until the victim dies. It is unclear whether this conversation is real, a way to compensate for the simulation not matching real events, or merely symbolical.
• Reed's quest to find a missing box is titled "What's In The Box?". Upon returning it, Fidget says that she opened it hoping to find cupcakes, but inside was nothing. Absolutely nothing!
• Fidget's suggestion that Haley move her forge using "an army of mutant rats! With MAGIC!" is a reference to The Secret of NIMH.
• Jin's Design on the Steam Trading Card◊ looks an awful lot like a huge Highlander shout-out, specifically Connor or Quentin MacLeod as they appear in the Animated Adaptation because of the long red hair.
• The names of Gaius and Cassius bring to mind Julius Caesar. "Gaius" was his first name, "Cassius" was the name of one of his betrayers (though confusingly, this Cassius' first name was also "Gaius").

---