Video Game / Bounty of One

Countless hordes of bounty hunters are coming for you. Will you survive and become a bounty of one?

Bounty of One is a Survival Roguelike by Optizonion that takes place in a fantasy Wild West. You play as a fallen legend with a bounty wrongfully placed on your head by The Undertaker, and are now hunted down by hordes of Bounty Hunters. Your goal is to survive them while upgrading yourself and your equipment as you take down the hunters and deputies, before facing off the sheriff at high noon. Unlike many others in the horde-survival roguelike genre, the game supports Co-Op Multiplayer.

The game is available on Steam here.

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Bounty of One provides examples of:

• Ability Depletion Penalty: Inverted with the "Running on Fumes" item, which gives you a boost of 20% speed, 100% critical damage, and 10% damage only when you are out of dashes.
• Achievement Mockery:
  • The "Beginner" achievement is obtained by getting killed, even in endless mode.
  • The "Dog Lover" achievement is obtained by getting killed by the sheriff "Rex, Cupcake, and Brutus".
• After Boss Recovery: Beating a Sheriff restores all your health.
• Aggressive Play Incentive: Natoko's legendary item Dark Revenge makes him a Close-Range Combatant who gets up to x3 fire rate if he's very close to an enemy, but down to 1/3x if he's too far from one. This, along with his increased movement speed, encourages the player to get close and dish out heavy damage while putting themselves in danger of Collision Damage.
• Agony of the Feet: The "Reckless Rush" item is depicted as a boot stepping on a nail that pierces right through it. In-game, it makes your dashes hurt you for 1 damage, in exchange for getting +5 base damage for doing so.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: The "Drinks Are On The House" item makes enemies' special attacks (Golems' and Orcs' charges, Darkins' and Brainsuckers' spells, Moles' Dynamite) go wide 70% of the time.
• All Your Powers Combined: One possible Daily Struggle modifier gives your character Bowgun, Sheriffken, Mezcal Staff, and Dark Revenge all at once, which are Serra's, Nigel's, Ollin's and Natoko's legendary items respectively.
• Anti-Regeneration: Bloodlust Idol gives you +3 Max HP and heals you to full upon taking it, but it causes all Hearts to now give you +3 base damage instead of healing you. You can still heal by other means such as First Aid Kit, Soothing Escape, Valiant Heart, or After Boss Recovery.
• April Fools' Day: On April Fools' Day, a new item becomes available and is an option in all Deputy Chests — "Undertaker In The Box". While its too-good-to-be-true description states that it doubles all your stats, makes subsequent upgrade choices legendary, and makes the Undertaker fight for you, all it does when picked is make your character exclaim "April Fools!"
• Artistic License – Biology: Subverted. The Mezcal Defiance cooldown symbol is that of a cactus. In real life, Mezcal is an alcohol obtained from an Agave plant, which is a desert succulent like cacti, but is not a cactus because it has leaves instead of spines. However, it's revealed in Ollin's backstory that Mezcal is actually the name of a hero or deity from long ago who specialized in Green Thumb powers.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Several items qualify thanks to dropping your stats in some way, or are clunky to use:
  • "Taunt" makes enemies within a radius from you take 50% more damage, which seems extremely powerful... but it also makes them 30% faster. If you lack a high fire rate to take out the enemies quickly or Intimidating Reward to slow the effect, it can get you in trouble when the enemies rush you down, especially when Goblin or Bat Deputies are involved.
  • "Tequila Bottle" gives you a 30% extra fire rate but makes every other shot deviate in precision. Against loosely-spaced enemies, this can cause half your shots to miss.
  • "Tesla Field" slows all projectiles around you. Including your own. While this helps against ranged enemies, your slowed projectiles means that it takes longer for your shots to connect. Finally, this doesn't help against they dynamite that Mole Men throw. It got a Balance Buff in an update, no longer slowing player shots.
  • "Soothing Escape" allows you to get a guaranteed heal whenever you dash... but also adds 30 seconds to your dash cooldown, making it far longer to recharge. If you lack any cooldown reductions, it is often not worth the extra cooldown time.
  • "Little Friend" quadruples your firing rate but cuts all your damage to a third. If you're relying on a build that's based on anything but basic shots, their damage gets cut too, and most ability cooldowns/charge-ups with the exception of Big Bertha aren't affected by fire rate.
  • "Sheriffken" is this if you're going for score. At first glance, this looks extremely useful, with your shot penetrating five enemies at a go and even returning to you. However, many of the more powerful enemy-clearing items require shots that don't return to you after a short period such as Guided Shots^note your shots home in on another enemy after hitting a first enemy and Pong^note Shots bounce off edges of the screen, which are wasted on Sherffiken. Adding to this, the limited range means you can no longer snipe enemies from afar without several area size powerups, which in turn affects the rate of enemy spawning and thus your score.
  • Similarly, "Dark Revenge" falls under this when it comes to playing for a high score. As it forces the player into becoming a Close-Range Combatant by massively increasing your rate of fire when you're close to enemies, but drastically diminishing it if you're far from them, it becomes less viable when you need to kill enemies at the edge of the screen to make them spawn faster for high scores.
• Backwards-Firing Gun: The "180 No Scope" item gives you the ability to shoot an extra projectile behind you whenever you attack.
• Bat People: Halfway through a run, the goblins get replaced by Bats, a hybrid of these and Rat Men in the form of humanoid bats with rat tails. They have the ability to gain a temporary but stacking speed boost whenever another Bat is killed.
• Booze-Based Buff: The "Tequila Bottle" item gives you increased fire rate but makes every other shot deviate from its path. Getting this makes your character remark "I feel dizzy!"
• Boring, but Practical: Some of the common items can be far more effective than items of higher rarities, and several defensive items can be a godsend compared to the flashy offensive abilities (which often have a drawback):
  • "FaithFull" is a common item that gives you an Orbiting Particle Shield of two shields that block and nullify all projectiles that touch the shields. This includes The Undertaker's spirit orbs, turning one of his most dangerous attacks into an utter cakewalk.
  • "Magnetized Horseshoe" is one of the most coveted common items thanks to giving you an increased attraction range, allowing you to collect experience coins from afar without needing to jump into the enemy-infested fray.
  • "Far Sight" is a common item that lowers your attack rate by 20%, but gives you extra 30% damage and increases the velocity of all your shots. This is much more useful than it sounds since the 30% extra damage can turn a two-hit-kill to a one-hit-kill, which far offsets the slower attack rate drawback. Plus, the much faster shots also allow you to tag Shooters before they can fire or hit Chargers mid-charge, and waste less ammo by killing enemies quicker so you don't fire at them again during the shot travel time. It was in fact, considered way too good for a common item that it was changed into a Rare item.
  • "Warning Shots" is a common item that causes you to slow every enemy hit by 70% for one second, which is very useful for all Chargers (it makes their charge far shorter) and especially against the goblin deputies and Simple Tom by utterly crippling their speed.
  • "Shockwave" is a common item that not only allows you to damage enemies right before you perform your dash, but also gives you a free extra dash. This free dash comes in very handy, especially for those who do not want to buy more dashes upon level-up.
  • "Ninja Headband" is a common item with two effects, the first being rather limited (enemies you dash through take damage) but the second can be quite a lifesaver: It reduces dash cooldown by 30%. On Infamy Levels 1 and above, your dash cooldown is doubled, meaning that this 30% reduction can quickly lower the cooldown time to 1.4x instead of 2x, giving you a faster escape option when you're surrounded.
  • "Intimidating Reward" is a Rare item that slows all enemies around you. This makes you get a lot more time to escape from enemies surrounding you. It's especially useful in Daily Struggle missions with the modifier that makes both you and enemies 50% faster.
• Boss Battle: The sheriff fought at high noon of each subsequent day. Before the sheriff appears, every enemy on the screen will immediately scatter and leave the area, while the screen no longer moves around.
• Bounty Hunter: All the enemies trying to kill you are out to claim your bounty.
• Bullet Hell: Inverted, your characters are the ones capable of spawning lots of bullets on the screen with enough upgrades.
• Cactus Cushion: Ollin (as well as any player with the Mighty Mezcal Staff item) has the special ability to fire out cactus balls. They're surprisingly painful, dealing double your normal damage on hitting an enemy and exploding into a Spread Shot of spines in all directions. It can cause incredible damage if the ball and several spines hit an enemy. These replace your basic shots when the Staff's cooldown ends, meaning that 180 No Scope and Three is the Magic Number will multiply the number of cactus balls fired out.
• Cactus Person: The second version of the Golem enemies have a green, spiky cactus skin to invoke this trope.
• Cast from Hit Points: The "Reckless Rush" item causes all your dashes to damage you for 1 HP at the start of a dash, in exchange for a stacking damage bonus. It stops damaging you if you're at 1 HP. Fortunately, this can be mitigated with Soothing Escape, which heals you for 1 HP after each dash. This also triggers any effects that trigger upon taking damage.
• Challenge Run:
  • The infamy levels are these. Infamy Level 1 and above adds a restriction or an effect that makes the game more difficult in exchange with rewarding you with more points, stacking with previous infamy levels. Effects include doubling the cooldown of your dash, making you slower or making enemies faster, halving your Mercy Invincibility time, increasing the number of enemies or occurrence of chargers and shooters, decreasing the cooldown time of enemy attacks, or worst of all, increase the damage that enemies deal to you.
  • The Necromancer's Pact are modifiers that increase your infamy level up to 50 by adding difficult conditions that the player can select. These include increased enemy count, increased mook health, increased boss health, enemies dealing more damage (up to 5), faster enemy projectiles, making Shooters and Chargers spawn at the start of a wave, reducing or even nullifying health drops, or causing all enemy projectiles to bounce off the screen edges.
• Charged Attack:
  • Ollin's Mighty Mezcal Staff is a Collect-type. Every time the cooldown finishes, it grants him a stock. Using his basic attack consumes a stock and replaces his basic projectile with a cactus ball that deals double damage and explodes into a Spread Shot on destruction.
  • Madlyn's Scrap Gun is a Collect-type. For every 2 meters walked, she generates 1 stack of scrap. Her next shot then fires out all her scrap with her shot in a spray-based Spread Shot, with each stack firing 2 extra shots in the spread.
• Close-Range Combatant: Natoko (and anyone who picks up the Dark Revenge item) becomes one. While they still shoot projectiles, their attack rate increases up to 3x the nearer they are to an enemy, and decreases to 1/3x if they're far from the nearest enemy.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Most player-related stuff have a blue color or tint to them, while enemy-related stuff like crosshairs or projectiles tend to be red. This was one of the reasons why the Big Bertha was changed from orange to blue, and the Undertaker's shotgun bullets were changed from having a blue-green aura to a red one.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: Level-up powerup and item rarities come in five tiers — grey (common), blue (rare), purple (epic), yellow (legendary) and red (mythical, only obtainable via Godly Die or Blessed Ring).
• Comeback Mechanic: In Multiplayer mode, any characters that were downed can be revived during the level-up upgrade screen.
• Cooldown Manipulation: A possible but uncommon powerup decreases your cooldown times for dashes as well as other abilities that have a cooldown timer.
• Co-Op Multiplayer: A main draw of the game compared to other Vampire Survivors clones is the multiplayer, where up to four players can enter a game. The enemies do get health scaling to compensate for the increased firepower, and no two players can pick the same upgrade or item upon leveling up or opening a chest.
• Counter-Attack: The "Nitro Suit" and "Mezcal Mantle" respectively causes an explosion that deals 4x your damage and fires a Multi-Directional Barrage of your projectiles. Both only activate when you're hit.
• Critical Hit: Critical chance and critical hit damage are two of the stats, allowing you to deal multiplied damage when you score a critical hit. Certain items also give you benefits on a critical, such as "NitroCrit" causing a small explosion on enemies your shot crits on, or "Lucky Shot" allowing a One-Hit Polykill on enemies your shot crits. The "Eagle Eye" legendary item takes this even further — it adds 40% to your crit chance but prevents you from obtaining crit chance upgrades for the rest of the run, and the "Surprise Attack" item gives you 1.5 seconds of 100% critical chance when you dash.
• Critical Status Buff: The "Adrenaline" item gives you a 50% damage boost and a 30% cooldown reduction boost if your HP is at 50% or below.
• Crosshair Aware:
  • When a Charger's about to attack, a red line demarcates the area they'll charge forward to. Orcs also get a red circle around them at the end of their charge before they perform their Shockwave Stomp.
  • A Mole Man's explosive will have a red circle around it demarcating the area it'll blow up.
• Cthulhumanoid: Brainsuckers are expies of Illithids, being parasitic alien creatures that transform their host into an entity with a tentacled face (usually). They attack with Painfully Slow Projectile energy balls that increase in size the further they travel.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: Taunt makes enemies within an area around you take 50% more damage, but also makes them 30% faster.
• Damage Over Time: "Fanged Arrows" makes your character's projectiles poison enemies, dealing 10% of your damage per 0.3 seconds and this can be sped up via Cooldown Reduction. Enemies that die to this (and not from other damage sources) will explode into poison which spreads the effect.
• Dash Attack: Initially averted, as your dashes deal no damage. However, four different items allow your dash to damage enemies, and with the exception of "Ninja Headband", all of them give you an extra dash slot:
  • "Ninja Headband" allows you to hurt enemies you dash through while also lowering dash cooldown by 30%.
  • "Shockwave" creates a Splash Damage shockwave on your spot before you dash.
  • "Hero Landing" causes Splash Damage on your spot when you land.
  • "Parting Gift" places a 2-second-fuse bomb on your spot before you dash, which explodes in an area after that.
  • While Thunder Dance and Seismic Dance both activate after a certain distance is travelled, dashing does count for that distance and allows both to trigger.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: The Onion item gives the player a radius that deals 25% of their damage every half-second, allowing you to kill enemies with several weak hits. With lower Cooldowns and higher Critical Hit chance and damage, this becomes an "Instant Death" Radius.
• Difficult, but Awesome: There are several upgrades and strategies that are hard to pull off or use effectively, but are devastating once you can do so:
  • Cooldown Reduction upgrades will lower your cooldown for items and dashes, and if it's reduced to low amounts it can allow several powerful abilities to trigger very often while also allowing you to dash often. The difficult part is actually obtaining said upgrades, which are rare or epic and thus do not appear as often as things like damage or fire rate.
  • "True Survivor" gives you 10% extra fire rate per stack, up to 30%, and has no debuffs unlike Tequila Bottle. However, to get a stack, you need to avoid getting hit for 2 minutes (which can be reduced by Cooldown Reduction) — get hit even once and it restarts the timer. This means you have to be really good at avoiding enemies and projectiles if you want the full benefit of the item, otherwise it's useless.
  • "Bloodlust Idol" gives you 3 extra health, refills your health to full, and makes all Heart pickups give you a permanent 3 damage that stacks infinitely. The catch? Heart pickups no longer refill your health. If combined with Gluttony and you're adept at avoiding damage, you can gradually get your damage high enough to kill most things in one hit. Plus, Soothing Escape's effect still allows you to heal up.
  • "Machine Learning" gives you +1% critical chance for every 30 kills you make, but you lose half your current stacks if you take any damage. As long as you can avoid getting hurt, you can increase your crit chance to 100% which allows you to kill enemies super quickly especially if combined with Bloodlust Idol... which in turn makes you less likely to take damage.
  • "Bowgun" gives you an increasing fire rate multiplier the longer you stay still, maxing out at 2x after ten seconds, but moving resets this bonus. While this can easily make short work of melee enemies, ranged enemies will fire shots at you that are almost guaranteed to hit you if you don't move, forcing you to void the bonus often. It fortunately becomes more manageable with cooldown reductions, and a slight quirk of the game makes it such that dashing without pressing any directional button doesn't count as moving, allowing you to dodge an enemy shot while keeping the boost.
  • "Reckless Rush" seems detrimental at first glance, dealing 1 damage to you at the start of a dash in exchange for +5 base damage. However, it can be used effectively as long as there are health pickups around, and Plot Armor can block the damage. Furthermore, there are five items that trigger a powerful effect but only when you take damage, and the self-damage allows you to control your health with Adrenaline, which gives a very powerful boost but at 50% health or below. It's thus difficult to use well, but is extremely powerful if paired with the right items.
  • "Fanged Arrows" makes your projectiles inflict a poison effect that deals 1/10th of your damage every 0.3 seconds and if that enemy dies from poison, they explode in a radius to poison nearby enemies. It's normally difficult to use, since dealing too much damage with your shots will kill the enemy outright and prevent them from exploding, while having too low a critical chance or too high a cooldown rate will make enemies die too slowly, and the poison explosion starts out too small. With a very tailor-made stat build where one keeps damage just under the enemy HP, an adequate but not overly high critical chance, a very high amount of critical damage, a low Cooldown time, and a very big area size, the poison can kill quickly and spread to other enemies that spawn in, causing a nearly-sustained chain reaction that offs enemies before they enter the screen and allows you to rack up serious amounts of score.
  • One build that makes Ollin extremely effective requires a lot of Cooldown Reduction upgrades (itself a Luck-Based Mission) to increase the fire rate of his deadly cactus balls, but also requires Adrenaline and low HP to trigger it. This makes Ollin extremely glassy, often being killed in a few hits on higher infamy levels, but the 50% damage boost and 30% cooldown reduction from Adrenaline allow him to fire tons of cactus balls.
  • Natoko's ability makes him attack up to 3x as fast if he's closer to the nearest enemy, but down to 3x as slow if he's too far from one. Playing him effectively requires you to place yourself in a very risky position often surrounded by enemies, but he can easily clear them. His ability also allows him to shred bosses in seconds, especially Crazy Denzel who stands still for a good amount of the time.
  • R0B3RT's Steamtech Turret fires at 1.3x your fire rate... but cuts your fire rate by 2x. The turret cannot be repositioned and it has a high tendency to miss enemies as its shots aren't fast and it can't Lead the Target, unless you're very near the turret itself which can cause both player and turret to attack and waste shots on the same enemy. However, this allows you to break the Do Not Run with a Gun rule, giving you an opportunity to move around with area-based abilities (which are unaffected by fire rate), and it can fire increased shot counts and special ammo (Mezcal Staff, Big Bertha). Finally, the poor accuracy can be solved by picking up Far Sight to increase shot velocity. How well the player can perform with Steamtech Turret depends on positioning as well as getting the right upgrades, but if done well this unique ability will pay off handsomely.
• Disaster Dominoes: "Fanged Arrows" gives a version that's beneficial to the player. When your shots hit an enemy, it poisons them, dealing damage over time at a fast rate to the enemy. When that enemy dies, they explode into a poison explosion (affected by Area Size upgrades) that will poison other enemies in its radius. The poison can set off a chain reaction that can poison and kill all enemies on the screen quickly.
• Dishing Out Dirt: The "Seismic Dance" item causes your character to create a quake area around them whenever they move 1 meter, dealing 30% of their damage to all enemies in an area around them.
• Do Not Run with a Gun: Your character can only perform their basic attacks if they're standing still. The only exceptions to this are R0B3RT thanks to his turret which performs basic attacks for him, and Jody, whose ability allows her to stockpile knives while standing still and throwing them while moving.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: A poison build with Fanged Arrows requires the player to keep a middling critical chance and damage low enough to avoid killing enemies in a single hit, as enemies only explode into poison AoE if they're killed by the poison. If done properly, however, you can often kill enemies before they enter the screen in a toxic chain reaction, racking up insane scores as enemy spawn rate is dependent on how fast you can kill them.
• Drought Level of Doom: One of the Necromancer's Pact options allows you to reduce the amount of Hearts dropped, from 50% up to 100%, meaning no health pickups for you.
• Early-Bird Cameo: A number of characters were introduced in dropped items before being added to the game as playable characters.
  • Nigel appeared in both the Hero Landing and Gluttony items.
  • Ollin appeared in the Mezcal Defiance item.
  • In the update that introduced Madlyn, an as-of-yet unknown, knife-throwing woman appears in both the Knife Volley and Panic Attack items.
• Early Game Hell: The early game starts with the player having a mediocre fire rate, and around 40 damage without Black Market upgrades until they get a damage upgrade — which is not enough to kill the 50-HP Goblins in one hit. The first Deputy can also be a pain to take down if it's the 1000-HP Green Shadow who keeps chasing the player at a fast pace. With enough luck and upgrades, they player should be able to get past the first day. The mid- to late- game is usually far easier thanks to the player getting more upgrades, items, and especially the guaranteed Epic or Legendary items from Sheriffs, potentially getting a game-breaking combination of items and upgrades to wipe out the enemies quickly.
• Elite Mooks: Bat-men, Orcs and Brainsuckers replace the Goblins, Golems and Darkins halfway through the game and they have special abilities unlike their basic variants. The Bat-men will get a stacking speed buff whenever another bat-man is killed. The Orcs use a Shockwave Stomp with their weapon after they charge. The Brainsuckers fire out Painfully Slow Projectile attacks that increase in size as they travel and at a faster rate than the Darkins' fireballs, clogging up the screen with projectiles.
• Endless Game: Beating the final Sheriff allows you to continue your game, where the incoming enemies gradually increase in health every 30 seconds until you die.
• Evolving Title Screen: Every time a new outlaw is unlocked, they'll appear around the campfire on the title screen.
• Experience Booster: The "Lucky Belt" item gives you 10% more experience from all coins, retroactively including all those you collected before obtaining it.
• Explosive Stupidity: Crazy Denzel's death animation has him drop his sticks of dynamite right at his feet, and he gets a good Oh, Crap! expression right before they blow him up into nothingness.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief:
  • Out of the first three playable characters, Serra fits the thief, being a longest-ranged character with good fire rate and can gain an ability to rapid-fire her shots. Nigel is the Fighter, as his attack has limited range and lower fire rate but can hit twice and penetrate groups. Ollin is the mage who has low fire rate on his basic attack and instead relies on Cooldown-based abilities, further helped by his innate reduced cooldowns.
  • The three enemy types and the deputies based off them. Runners are the thieves, who move the fastest and chase you down but have the least amount of health. Chargers are the fighters, having the most amount of health and a charging melee attack that gets them into the fray, but are relatively slow. Shooters are the mages, who shoot fireballs from afar and generally have more health than Runners but less than Chargers.
• Fireballs: Darkins throw orange fireballs at you as a basic projectile. Deputy Darkins throw red ones at you instead.
• Fluffy the Terrible: Downplayed with the three-headed skeletal Hell Hound sheriff named "Rex, Cupcake, and Brutus".
• Flunky Boss: At set amounts of health, Rex, Cupcake and Brutus will spawn smaller versions of themselves with around 2000 HP each, each sporting the boss' attack.
• Gathering Steam:
  • The Relentless Momentum item allows the player to gain +5% damage and +8% area size per stack, up to a maximum of x1.5 and +80%. The catch is that you need to move 5 meters to gain a stack, and staying still will cause your stacks to deplete quickly.
  • Serra's Legendary Item is the Bowgun, which allows her to increase her fire rate up to 2x as fast over a period of 10 seconds (which can be decreased with cooldown reduction). However, she needs to be staying still, if she moves at all the bonus resets.
• Green Thumb:
  • The Mezcal Defiance item allows you to shoot a Multi-Directional Barrage of cactus spines after standing still for a while. The Mezcal Mantle allows you to shoot an even bigger spread of cactus spines but only when you take damage.
  • Ollin attacks by shooting cactus spines from his Mighty Mezcal Staff and also has a unique cooldown-based move that shoots a cactus ball which explodes into a huge Spread Shot of cactus spines on impact.
• Hard Levels, Easy Bosses: The level itself is a long survival gauntlet with never-ending enemies that keep coming in until the next noon while increasing in strength, making it tricky to thin down the horde while avoiding fireballs from ranged enemies. The bosses on the other hand dismisses all other enemies on the field. Rex, Cupcake and Brutus only spawn minions at set HP intervals, and both the boss and minons have a predictable attack that prevents them from moving until all heads have been shot out, and can only be used again once they retrieve all their heads. Simple Tom's rolling pattern can be exploited to make him only move left and right, eliminating most of the threat he poses. Crazy Denzel has bomb attacks that hit large areas of the field, but are thrown in predictable patterns, have a warning radius before exploding after a short while, and are very easy to avoid once you learn the areas he hits. The Undertaker's first form has a single predictable attack, and while his second form has tricky-to-dodge moves, they're still manageable with careful movement.
• Hell Hound: Skeletal Hounds are one of the enemies that will appear as the first noon approaches, and they attack by shooting their heads out which return back to them. The Sheriff "Rex, Cupcake and Brutus" is a three-headed one, who summons smaller versions of himself as he takes damage, and both are capable of firing their heads out thrice.
• Hellish Horse: The Undertaker comes into battle riding a skeletal horse. In the second phase of the fight, he can also summon them to run in from the sides of the screen.
• Hidden Elf Village: Nigel's backstory had him being saved by the native elves who lived in a hidden village after the Undertaker set him up and left him for dead. These elves are also the ones who taught him how to use Sheriffkens, and its also where Natoko hails from.. Unfortunately, The Undertaker had a traitor from said village in his group, and after learning about Nigel's recovery, he got said traitor to lead his armies to the village, and raze it to the ground.
• Homing Projectile: Guided Shot makes your shot home in to the nearest enemy on its first pierce.
• Hyper-Destructive Bouncing Ball: The "Pong" item makes shots that hit the edges of the screen bounce off, up to two times.
• I Fought the Law and the Law Won:
  • Even though it's very possible to defeat all the Sheriffs including The Undertaker, the Endless Mode that opens up after that will only end if you get killed by the endlessly-spawning, increasingly-durable hordes of bounty hunters, or if you quit the game.
  • On the flipside, you can inflict this on the bounty hunters, the Deputies and Sheriffs and the Undertaker himself by having the good sheriff Nigel defeat every last one sent after him.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: The "Drinks are on the House" item makes enemies' special moves to go wide 70% of the time. Ranged enemies will shoot their fireballs or throw their dynamite at an inaccurate angle, and Chargers will charge at a wide angle.
• "Instant Death" Radius:
  • The Onion item deals 25% of your damage to enemies in a radius around you. At first, it's weak, but with enough Area size, Cooldown, and damage upgrades, and combined with Intimidating Reward (which slows enemies in a radius around you), many enemies will die before they can even touch you. The attack can also crit, meaning that with enough Critical Chance and Critical Damage you can one-shot enemies that dare to enter your radius.
  • The Seismic Dance item allows you to deal 30% of your damage to enemies in a radius around you in a similar manner to the Onion, except it's triggered when you move a certain distance. It too is affected by Area Size, Critical Chance and Critical Damage, allowing you to kill enemies that get within your radius in a jiffy.
• Kaizo Trap: Normally defied — The victory screen takes 2 seconds or so to appear after The Undertaker dies, but during then you have constant Mercy Invincibility and any remaining projectiles or minions vanish as soon as he dies. However, using a dash will decrease your Mercy Invincibility time to that of a post-dash and it will wear off fast. While the Undertaker in his death animation doesn't cause Collision Damage, there's a bug that allows him to still fire projectiles in his death animation, which can hurt you once your invincibility wears off. If you get killed by this before the victory screen pops up, it counts as a defeat.
• King Mook:
  • All Deputies are boss versions of the regular enemies, with much more health and faster movement or attacks. The skeletal hound deputy in particular has two heads which allows it to attack twice in succession instead of once.
  • The Sheriff "Rex, Cupcake and Brutus" and its minions are this to the skeletal hounds and their Deputy equivalent, having three heads which allow it to perform three attacks in succession.
  • The Sheriff "Crazy Denzel" is this to the Mole Men, with the ability to throw multiple bombs at one go as well as dig underground while leaving bombs behind.
• Klatchian Coffee: The "Espresso Frenzy" item give you +1% attack speed and 20% move speed for 0.3 seconds every time you pick up a collectible, the effect stacking up to 50 times. This can allow you to move extremely fast especially since the 0.3 seconds stack whenever a collectible is taken.
• Level-Up Fill-Up: The "Valiant Heart" item allows a character to recover 1 HP on a level-up.
• Luck-Based Mission: Like many others in the action survival roguelike genre, the powerups you get on level-up and the equipment you gain from beating a boss is randomly selected, with some powerups/equipment being more common than others.
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic:
  • The Black Market has the Lucky Star and Four Leaf Clover which give a chance to find an extra upgrade or item slot respectively, and the Loaded Die and Fated Die, which give extra rerolls on upgrades and items respectively.
  • One of the possible but rare powerups on level up adds one extra selection choice (to the default of three) of upgrades or items when you level up or obtain a chest.
  • The Bronze Loaded Die and Silver Loaded Die give you three rerolls on upgrades and items respectively.
  • The Golden Loaded Die not only adds an extra selection choice to both your upgrades and items, but also makes that extra choice Rare or better quality.
  • The Godly Die not only gives you four rerolls on upgrades, but using a reroll on a selection of upgrades will instead increase all their rarity by one. This even allows you to get upgrades of normally-unobtainable rarities (like Legendary critical chance), including the Mythical rarity.
  • Eagle Eye gives you +40% Crit Chance, but prevents you from obtaining any more Critical Chance upgrades upon level up. This can actually be a blessing in disguise — by removing both a common and rare upgrade from the list, it gives you more chances to find the rarer upgrades.
  • The Surprise Attack item temporarily boosts your Critical Chance to 100% for 1.5 seconds after a dash. This timer stacks with each other, meaning that with Steam Boots and enough Dash Cooldowns you can keep 100% Critical Chance as long as you dash often.
• Made of Explodium: The "NitroCrit" item makes your shots cause an explosion upon dealing a Critical Hit, dealing 1/4 the damage of said critical hit as Splash Damage.
• Mercy Invincibility: You gain a brief period of invulnerability upon dashing or after getting hit. One Infamy Level (and those following it) halves the duration of this period, making things much more dicey if you ever get surrounded without Dashes.
• Mighty Glacier: There are a few items that can increase your damage output at the cost of lowering your movement speed or fire rate, turning you into this trope:
  • The "Gluttony" item increases your damage by an extra 10% times your current health, allowing you to achieve massive damage with high HP, but it also slows you down and increases your size (including your hitbox) per current health, making it harder to avoid enemies.
  • The "Far Sight" item increases your damage by 30% and doubles your shot speed, but reduces your fire rate by 20%.
  • The "Three Is The Magic Number" item makes you fire a triple Spread Shot at the cost of 40% of your fire rate.
  • The "Sheriffken" item allows you to pierce up to 5 extra enemies and makes your projectiles boomerang.
  • The "Mighty Mezcal Staff" allows you to fire a powerful cactus ball projectile at the cost of halving your fire rate, which the cactus ball doesn't depend on.
• Mini-Boss: Deputies are King Mook versions of the enemies you face and have their own healthbar above their heads. Beating them drops a treasure chest, which you can pick up to gain various items.
• Min Maxers Delight: The very first level-up upgrade that most players will want to go for is a Damage upgrade, which adds at least 10 damage to your attacks. This bumps Serra's and Ollin's damage from 40 to 50+ allowing them to one-shot the 50-health goblins, and Nigel's damage from 20 to 30+ allowing his boomeranging shurikens to damage them once then kill them on the return hit. The Ridged Barrel in the Black Market gives you a Common Damage upgrade at the start of the level, making it by far one of the best items to buy.
• Mixed Animal Species Team: Each one of the Sheriffs serving the Undertaker is based on an animal or is one. Rex, Cupcake and Brutus is a dog, Simple Tom is an armadillo, Crazy Denzel is a mole, and Ruthless Ruth is a bull/buffalo.
• Mole Men: One of the enemy types. They can move around by digging and attack by throwing explosives that blow up an area after a few seconds. Their Sheriff Crazy Denzel is capable of diving underground and leaving a trail of bombs as he digs around.
• More Dakka:
  • The "Little Friend" item quadruples your attack rate, but divides all your damage by a third.
  • Bloody Rage gives you +5 seconds of tripled fire rate whenever you get hurt.
  • The "Bowgun" item increases your fire rate gradually with a bonus that resets as soon as you move, going up to 2x if you stay still for 10 seconds. This stacks multiplicatively with Little Friend's quadrupled attack rate, giving you some insane firing rate.
• Multi-Directional Barrage:
  • The "Mezcal Defiance" item allows you to charge up one when you stand still, then fire a radial spread of projectiles when it activates.
  • The "Mezcal Mantle" item allows you to fire out an even bigger one than the former, but only when you take damage.
  • The "Panic Attack" item downplays this by making the player fire 3 daggers in random directions for every 4 meters walked.
• Multiple Head Case: The three-headed hellhound sheriff is implied to have its own personalities for its heads, as evidenced by having three separate names "Rex, Cupcake, and Brutus". Notably, the middle skull (presumably Cupcake) is that of a pug's.
• Multishot: The image for "Three is the Magic Number" shows a crossbow loaded with three bolts and functions as this for Serra. In-game, it's more of a Spread Shot since the other Outlaws can also obtain it, and none of them use a bow or crossbow.
• Nerf: Several items and upgrades had to be tuned down to prevent them from breaking the game or becoming One Stat to Rule Them All:
  • Cooldown Reduction used to be huge, even having a Legendary Upgrade that gave a huge 40% or so reduction and allowing several cooldown-based skills to become ridiculously rapid-firing. This was taken out, and both Rare and Epic cooldown reduction upgrades now give 10%/15% respectively.
  • With the Undertaker update, enemy health on the third day was high to the point where the only viable strategy was high Critical Chance and high Critical Damage. To prevent Critical Chance and Critical Damage from turning into One Stat to Rule Them All, rare Critical Chance upgrades were nerfed to add 7% instead of 10%, and Rare/Epic Critical Damage were nerfed from 100%/150% to 75%/100%, but enemy health was lowered too to compensate.
  • NitroCrit had to be nerfed four separate times. It initially caused all your shots to spawn a 25% damage explosion on a crit, with unlimited number of times it could trigger. Then, it got limited to three to prevent lag in endless. It later lowered your overall damage by 30% but increased explosion damage to 40%, making it more risky if you didn't crit. Finally, a new update made it no longer lower your damage, but the explosion now only deals 100% of your base, non-crit damage.
  • Mighty Mezcal Staff used to grant Cooldown Reduction and its cactus ball spread shots could decimate an enemy if it exploded in them. These were changed, and it no longer grants cooldown reduction (with Ollin having extra starting cooldown reduction instead) and the spread shots couldn't shotgun the enemy it hit.
  • Bloodlust Idol and Machine Learning were changed from Rare to Epic items, due to both allowing a player to snowball their attack and critical chance easily as long as they didn't get hit.
  • Far Sight was a Common item with an extremely useful effect (+30% damage, -20% fire rate, shots are 2x as fast) for its rarity. It was changed into a Rare item, making it much less easy to come by.
• No-Damage Run: Encouraged with certain items:
  • True Survivor increases your attack rate by 10% with a 120-second base cooldown, up to 30%. The catch is that the cooldown resets if you take any damage (including Reckless Rush), even if blocked by Plot Armor, although you do keep any previous boosts.
  • Machine Learning gives you +1% crit chance per 30 enemies killed, but you lose half your current stacks whenever you take any damage (including Reckless Rush, and bypassing Plot Armor).
  • Bloodlust Idol gives you +3 HP and refills your health to full, but all hearts give you +3 base damage and no longer heal you, which makes taking damage exceptionally risky.
• No Fair Cheating: Using any of the enhancers to make your game easier will still grant you score and coins but it prevents you from submitting your score to the leaderboard, unlocking achievements, or unlocking the next infamy level.
• Non-Indicative Name: The title "Bounty of One" works for single-player mode, with your character being a one-person bounty. It's less accurate during multiplayer, where up to four players can play the game.
• Nostalgia Filter: Invoked. Obtaining the "Pong" item (a Pong cabinet that makes your shots bounce off the edges of the screen) will cause your character to exclaim "Things were better before!"
• Odd Name Out: The three-headed Hell Hound sheriff has names for each of its three heads, with two of them menacing dog names and one... less so: Rex, Cupcake, and Brutus.
• One-Hit Polykill:
  • Getting a Piercing upgrade allows your shots to pierce one extra enemy.
  • The "Big Bertha" item will allow you to fire a huge missile projectile every 30 shots you make. Said projectile travels slower than usual, but pierces infinitely and deals 3x your normal damage.
  • The "Lucky Shot" item allows your shots to pierce an extra enemy upon scoring a Critical Hit.
  • The "Sheriffken" item allows your shots to pierce up to five enemies, at the cost of having the shot boomerang back to you after a set distance. Nigel starts out with this by default.
• One-Man Army: Your character is capable of mowing down dozens upon dozens of Mooks without much problems.
• Orbiting Particle Shield: The Bulletstorm item causes you to periodically spawn projectiles that orbit you in a circle, dealing damage to enemies they touch.
• Our Goblins Are Different: Serra appears to be a female goblin, while the basic runner mooks and runner deputies are goblins with melee weapons.
• Painfully Slow Projectile:
  • The "Dirty Nigel" item slows the velocity of all your shots, turning your shots into these. The Tesla Field also slows the velocity of both your shots and the enemies' shots, and if (unwisely) combined with Dirty Nigel your shots will slow to a crawl.
  • The "Big Bertha" item makes you fire out a giant missile for every 30 of your regular shots. It moves slower than your regular shots, but has a huge hitbox, penetrates enemies infinitely, and deals 3x damage.
  • The Brainsuckers fire magic orbs that move much slower than the Darkins' fireballs, which makes them linger on the screen as a hazard for longer. These projectiles also grow in size as they travel.
• Physical, Mystical, Technological:
  • The first three heroes. Serra is the Technological, as she wields a crossbow gun for her weapon. Nigel is the Physical, as his weapon is a shuriken thrown with his might instead of a contraption. Ollin is the Mystical — not only is he a ghost, his weapon is a staff that allows him to cast cactus magic.
  • The Undertaker has attacks from all three categories — his first phase attacks by riding his horse and slamming the ground for a Shockwave Stomp (physical), and his second phase has him use a soul orb Orbiting Particle Shield (mystical) as well as using his shotgun to fire bullets (technological).
• Plot Armor: Invoked. One of the item names is named exactly this, which gives you a shield that blocks the next hit on you and recharges after 60 seconds (though this can be shortened).
• Poisoned Weapons: The "Fanged Arrows" item makes your shots poison enemies and deal 10% of your damage every 0.3 seconds to them. If an enemy dies to the poison, they explode into poison which infects enemies within their radius, causing a potential chain reaction.
• Power-Up Magnet: There are two ways to increase your pickup radius for experience coins and boss loot chests:
  • Increasing your Area of Effect on level-up increases your pick-up range.
  • The "Magnetized Horseshoe" multiplies your pick-up range by a set amount, stacking multiplicatively with the Area of Effect powerups.
• Practical Taunt: Two of them:
  • Taunt makes enemies in an area around you take 50% more damage, but also makes them move 30% faster. Your character will give the quote "Come at me bro!" if this item is taken.
  • Intimidating Reward makes enemies in an area around you 35% slower. Your character will give the quote "I double-dare you!" if this item is taken.
• Press Start to Game Over:
  • On Infamy 15 and above, enemies deal 3 damage to you. Most characters have 3 HP without Black Market upgrades. You can easily score a defeat if you run into the first enemy.
  • Roger starts with only 1 hit point without Black Market upgrades. In Daily struggle missions (which disables Black Market upgrades), if he's the given character and one of the modifiers gives Reckless Rush for a starting item, it's possible to simply dash once and die immediately. It's no longer possible to do so, however, since Reckless Rush no longer damages you (or gives you a damage bonus) if you're at 1 HP.
• Randomized Damage Attack: Normally, all your attacks deal a fixed amount of damage. However, the Fickle Bullets item causes your damage to vary from 80% to 180%, along with the size of your shots.
• Regenerating Shield, Static Health: The "Plot Armor" item gives you a shield that regenerates after 60 seconds (less with cooldown-decreasing powerups). Your health stays the same unless you find a health pickup, which are scarce.
• Resignations Not Accepted: Serra used to be a hitwoman for the Undertaker, but eventually decided to quit. However, the Undertaker isn't one who lets his subordinates leave, especially one who knows much. As such, he put a bounty on her head. Madlyn also had a bounty placed on her head for similar reasons.
• Rule of Three:
  • You start out with three health, meaning that you bite it if you get hit thrice without obtaining any health drops.
  • Invoked with the name of one item, called "Three is the Magic Number". This gives you a triple Spread Shot of projectiles at the cost of fire rate.
• Scare Chord: The Defeat Screen has a sudden creepy noise that plays right after the main game over tune is over, which can cause a Jump Scare in those not expecting it.
• The Sheriff: The level's bosses are referred to as Sheriffs, who acts as tough obstacles to your characters. Playable character Nigel was also a Sheriff of a small town before the Undertaker helped Crazy Denzel usurp his position.
• Shock and Awe: The Thunder Dance item makes a random enemy get zapped with lightning whenever you walk 2 meters, dealing a small area of Splash Damage.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Onion item has the exact same effect as the Garlic from Vampire Survivors. Getting this item also causes your character to inquire "Does it work on vampires too?"
  • One of the legendary items is the "Little Friend". Getting this item even causes your character to say the unique quote "Say hello to my little friend!"
  • Nigel's weapon is effectively the Shadow Blade from Mega Man 3, being a shuriken that boomerangs back to him after a set distance (its movement however is more akin to Ring Boomerang).
  • There are... quite a few Naruto references in the game:
    • If a character picks up the "Sheriffken" item, they'll say the unique line "I'll become the Hokage!"
    • The Ninja Headband item also looks like Naruto's headband.
    • The Hidden Elf Village with ninja elves is an expy of Konoha Village.
    • The elf ninja is named Natoko, while the goblin that betrayed the elf village's location is named Sasuto. If the two encounter each other, they'll dramatically yell each other's names.
  • The "Three is the Magic Number" item is a reference to De La Soul's song of the same name.
  • The Mole Men Deputy is named Darth Mole. He even shares Darth Maul's face color and markings!
  • One of the Black Market items is the Metal Plate that gives one extra hit point, which is a clear reference to the metal plate used as Improvised Armour by the Stranger in A Fistful of Dollars.
• Showdown at High Noon: The fight against a Sheriff takes place at noon.
• Spread Shot:
  • The "Three is the Magic Number" item allows you to shoot a spread of three projectiles forwards instead of one, but cuts your fire rate by a large amount.
  • Madlyn's "Scrap Gun" is of the Spray Burst variety, where charging up enough stacks by walking (1 stack every 2 meters) will cause the character to fire 2 extra shots per stack alongside their attack.
  • The "Spreadshot" item is of the Exploding Burst variety, where your shot will split forward into three 35% damage shots when it hits an enemy for the first time.
  • Ollin has a special ability where his basic projectiles get replaced by a cactus ball that explodes into a burst of spines in all directions. It can even stack with the "Three is the Magic Number" and "Spreadshot" items, causing a storm of projectiles.
  • Whenever Shiny Steve or Simple Tom roll into and bounce off the side of a screen, they release a spread of three damaging scales.
  • Brainsucker Deputies fire a spread of three Painfully Slow Projectiles whenever they attack.
  • The Undertaker himself has a shotgun that fires a spread of two projectiles in a V-shape... which can be dodged by simply standing still. However, he mixes this attack up with one where skeletal horses race across 4/5ths of the screen, forcing you to move and likely into the path of the shots.
• Take That!: When a character picks the Ethereal Flame item (spawns a small bipedal flame minion that runs around picking up coins/hearts), they will remark "At least it ain't yellow..."
• Taking You with Me: Defied with Crazy Denzel. When defeated, he drops two dynamite at his feet which do have the standard explosion radius warning... but since the player is invulnerable as soon as a boss goes down, these don't do anything.
• Technicolor Fire:
  • Deputy Darkins throw red fireballs instead of the orange ones thrown by the standard Darkins.
  • Rex, Cupcake and Brutus and its minions are wreathed in turquoise flames rather than the orange flames the normal and Deputy skeletal hounds have.
• Technicolor Toxin: Enemies poisoned by Fanged Arrows will have green skulls floating out of them, and when they die from poison they explode in a green circular explosion that poisons other enemies in range.
• The Turret Master: The Steamtech Turret item places a stationary turret that fires at enemies at 1.3x your fire rate, but cuts your fire rate in half. This allows you to break the "no attacking while moving" rule at the cost of your own fire rate, and confines your movement to an area around the turret.
• Three-Point Landing: The "Hero Landing" item shows an image of Nigel performing one, and allows you to deal Splash Damage at the end of a dash. Selecting this item even causes your character to say a unique quote "This looks like a job for me!"
• Throw Down the Bomblet:
  • On the heroes' side, we have the "Parting Gift" item that allows the character to drop a dynamite behind that explodes in a blast after 2 seconds, potentially hitting several enemies in one go. There's also "Mezcal Grenade" where your character tosses a bomb at an enemy that causes a blast radius on impact.
  • On the enemies' side, the Mole Men attack by throwing dynamite centered on your character that explodes in a radius after a few seconds, forcing you to move out or take damage. Darth Mole, the Mole Man Deputy can throw three dynamites before having to recharge. The Mole Man Sheriff Crazy Denzel's battle strategy consists of throwing bombs at set points all over the arena, or digging underground and leaving a trail of bombs in his wake.
• Unlockable Difficulty Levels: Each Infamy level is unlocked by beating the previous Infamy level, up to 18.
• "Wanted!" Poster: The character selection screen has four of these which change depending on the character selected, one for each player. In-game, these appear at the corners of the screen, the bounty of which is the particular player's score.
• Weaponized Stench: The "Onion" item causes your character to have a bad smell around them, which deals a fourth of your attack damage to enemies around them at a rapid rate.
• Weird West: The game takes place in a fantasy version of The Wild West, with one enemy type being fireball-throwing mages, another being a floating skeletal Hell Hound, and a third being Illithid-expies that throw magic energy orbs. One possible first sheriff is a three-headed skeletal Hell Hound, and the Big Bad is a skeletal necromancer overlord with a Hellish Horse.
• Wild West Armadillo: The Armarauders, their Deputy Shiny Steve, and their leader Tom are humanoid armadillo wild west bandits who attack by rolling around the area at fast speeds.