The Holy Kingdom of Manahill is the only safe haven for humanity in Aevi, thanks to its manastone-powered barrier that keeps wild monsters out. However, the kingdom regularly exiles anyone the ruling class deems criminal, leaving them to die in the monster-infested wilderness. The survivors formed the Settlement, a small encampment with their own barrier generator, but they struggle to find enough manastones to maintain the barrier indefinitely. Lambda, a recent exile, joins the Settlement and serves as a manafinder, whose duty is to scour the wilderness in search of manastones to power the barrier. Unfortunately, the Settlement is in conflict with the rogue goddess Illia and her followers, who want to destroy all manastones.
Has a Steam page here
and an itch page here.
This game contains examples of:
- Affably Evil: Illia is a renegade goddess who wants to force humanity to abandon manastones, since she believes their dependence on this resource makes them weak. However, she's genuinely polite when she tries to convince Lambda of her cause and accepts full responsibility for everyone her followers killed. She also acknowledges that her siblings have good intentions in providing manastones and magic to humans, even if she disagrees with them. She shows sympathy towards her followers for all the struggles they had to endure and believes her ideology will help them.
- Always Accurate Attack: The Manablast spell does medium AOE damage, but it never misses, making it useful against mobs with high evasion. The Nuke spell is an even stronger version with the same properties, but higher manastone cost.
- Ambiguous Ending: In the ending where Lambda sides with Illia, the player is left with an image of a caveman standing near a beast, making it seem like there is no more human civilization outside of Manahill. However, it's unknown if Illia and Lambda destroyed Manahill just like the Settlement or if they plan to. The ending doesn't specify what Lambda does outside of annihilating the Settlement.
- Appeal to Nature: Illia and her worshipers believe that manastone usage is wrong because it goes against nature, and that excessive human expansionism will harm the ecological balance of Aevi. They also believe people should accept their inner nature and gut instincts in general.
- Aristocrats Are Evil: The aristocrats of Manahill are corrupt and often use their influence to get people they don't like exiled. Priscila the barkeeper was exiled because the noblewomen spread false rumors about her while Qu was exiled for making a joke that the aristocrats didn't like, showing that one doesn't even have to commit an actual crime to be exiled under Manahill's class system.
- Assist Character: If one of the other manafinders is accompanying Lambda, they won't function as a full party member. Instead, they will occasionally use a regular attack on the enemy.
- Big Bad Ensemble: King Vikar is a tyrant who exiles anyone who fails to conform to Manahill's values, resulting the exiled forming the Settlement in order to survive. Meanwhile, the Goddess of the Night, Illia, also serves as a major antagonist due to directing her followers to destroy all manastones, including the ones the Settlement depends on.
- Bittersweet Ending: In the Frederick or Starkas endings, Lambda leads the Settlement citizens to a new home, either Tuonela or Manahill, and becomes the queen of her people. However, Landon, the Oracle, Frederick, and Starkas die over the course of the story. Additionally, Behra reminds Lambda that she's bound to her duty of ruling over her people forever, which hints that Lambda runs the risk of losing sight of her goals and becoming as tyrannical as Vikar.
- Blood Knight: Octavius constantly tries to goad the manafinders into fighting him and spits on any attempt to negotiate with him. After Lambda kills most of the other nomad leaders, Octavius acknowledges her strength and orders Azain not to destroy the manastones yet, since he knows Lambda will have no reason to fight him if the manastones are destroyed immediately.
- Bragging Rights Reward: The strongest optional boss, the Leviathan, drops one of its scales as an accessory. It grants Lambda 100 TP regen, allowing her to spam her Unleashes and trivialize the final dungeon. It also trivializes New Game Plus, since most bosses, including the Leviathan itself, won't last more than a few turns against Unleash spam.
- Can't Catch Up: While Scar can get some upgrades from Dama's quests, he'll never gain the power and versality that Lambda can obtain. In the final chapter, Lambda leaves him in the Settlement while she goes to the final dungeon alone, since her next task is too difficult for Scar to significantly contribute.
- Canine Companion:
- Soren originally teamed up with his dog Scar to fulfil their manafinding duties. After Soren is killed by the Cataractadon, Scar teams up with Lambda instead.
- Octavius fights alongside his doberman, Hexa, in his boss fight.
- Create Your Own Hero: King Vikar exiles Lambda and several other citizens for unknown charges, most of which are implied to be false accusations or frivolous reasons. Lambda survives and gains the blessings of the gods. On Starkas's route, she uses this power to kill Vikar and and replace him as a benevolent ruler.
- Create Your Own Villain: The Oracle dismissed Adara's desire to see more of the outside world, causing her to feel like she didn't belong in the Settlement. She then defects to Octavius's nomad tribe and later helps them steal manastones from the Settlement.
- The Cult: Octavius's nomad tribe is an enemy faction that worship the fourth and traitorous goddess, Illia, and seek to destroy manastones in her name. This seems to be a recent development, since they apparently had their own religious beliefs before Azain introduced them to Illia, whose social darwinist ideals are similar to their own.
- Dark Is Evil: Illia is the Goddess of the Night who seeks to destroy all manastones to keep humanity from becoming dependent on the gods, whether humans want that outcome or not. During her Final Boss fight on Frederick's route, she uses Endark to add a dark elemental magic hit to her attacks.
- Despair Event Horizon: To get the ending where Lambda joins Illia, the player has to pick choices in the nightmare sequence that have Lambda succumb to despair. Specifically, despair over the fact that the colony can't find manastones without the Oracle, making their barrier unsustainable. In this scenario, Lambda's despair is so strong that she's willing to kill everyone in the Settlement, since they're not going to survive without the manastone barrier anyways.
- Developer's Foresight: If Lambda wears the Stone Helmet to trivialize Sol and Mar's final challenge, they'll call out Lambda for doing so.
- Disproportionate Retribution: A lot of the exiles happened over actions that offended the nobility or made King Vikar paranoid, regardless of how heinous said actions actually are. Since exile means being stuck in the wilderness with powerful and feral monsters, this means the Kingdom of Manahill is essentially sentencing people to death over petty reasons.
- Downer Ending: In the ending where Lambda sides with Illia, Lambda falls to despair over the Settlement's unsustainable barrier and decides that Illia's manastoneless vision for the world is better. She then slaughters everyone in the Settlement in order to destroy their manastones, leaving only the nomads to roam Aevi.
- Dracolich: The Edgekeeper is an undead skeletal dragon that is the boss of Aevi's Edge, and it stands between the manafinders and the manastone of the area.
- Drowning My Sorrows: While there is a bar in town, Father Nolwenn often goes into his basement to drink by himself due to his past regrets over failing in his anti-Vikar activism.
- Duel Boss:
- Before the fight against Lhania, she'll knock Scar out, forcing Lambda to fight alone.
- At the end of Chapter 3, Illia traps Lambda in a nightmare world without Scar to back her up. Lambda is forced to fight one-on-one battles against a manifestation of her doubt, a shadow version of herself, and Baphomet.
- Scar will get knocked out while destroying the Blue Dragon's wing, leaving Lambda to fight the dragon alone.
- Lambda will take on the final chapter by herself, and the bosses are Nidhoggr, Noosphere, Finaevi, Entity of Hate, and Illia on Frederick's route. On Starkas's route, she has to fight Nattmara, Vritra, Fenrir, Arthro, and King Vikar.
- Elemental Powers: Lambda and human enemies can imbue themselves with elemental ores, which include fire, water, thunder, earth, ice, light, and dark. This causes each physical hit from them to be followed by a magic hit and changes their elemental resistances.
- Enemy Mine: The living mountain, Mount Olov, blocks the path to Illia's Cauldron, so Azain forms a temporary truce with Lambda to defeat the mountain. This is because his allies, the Nomads, consider Olov to be a sacred being, so they're unwilling to have anything to do with its death.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Octavius is baffled that Lambda would fight to maintain the Settlement's barrier and protect the non-combatants within despite being strong enough to survive in the wild, since Octavius believes that those who are too weak to survive without a barrier don't deserve to live.
- The Exile:
- Criminals in the Kingdom of Manahill are exiled to the monster-infested wilderness.
- The Settlement is made up of those exiled from the kingdom, but they're willing to exile those who break the rules or cause conflict within the community, such as Azain.
- The rare beast, the Exiled Ape, is in Allaror's Wrath rather than the Evergloom Rainforest because it was exiled by its fellow apes.
- Fallen Hero:
- King Vikar was once a benevolent leader to humanity, but after receiving the blessings of the gods, he created the Kingdom of Manahill and eventually let the power go to his head. He ends up creating a lopsided legal system where he and his inner circle exile anyone they don't like.
- Azain was once a manafinder who helped the Settlement look for manastones to maintain their barrier. After his lover, Liria, died on the job, he attempted to research a way to bring her back. Eventually, the Goddess of the Night, Illia, contacted him and convinced him that humanity's dependence on manastones is to blame for this tragedy, and that he should help her destroy all manastones.
- Fantasy-Forbidding Father: Sir Gobit refuses to let his daughter, Gobithia, practice combat or become a Manafinder. He's overprotective because his wife was killed by a Mudrock before the family could make it to the Settlement.
- Final Boss:
- On Frederick's route, Illia is the boss of the Tuonela, where she renounces her divinity in order to fight Lambda herself.
- On Starkas's route, King Vikar is the boss of Manahill, and Lambda's goal is to dethrone him through force.
- Gave Up Too Soon: In the ending where Lambda joins Illia, she does so out of despair over the Settlement's unsustainable situation. However, if the player rejects Illia instead, they'll learn the next day that the Heavensreach could give the Settlement a means of either conquering the Tuonela or conquering Manahill, which would solve their manastone shortage.
- God's Hands Are Tied: Although Illia wants to prevent the Settlement from using manastones, she cannot directly fight mortals, since doing so would revoke her godhood. As such, she has to empower and guide her followers so that they can destroy manastones for her. When Lambda gains the favor of her siblings and clears a path to Tuonela's manastone, Illia decides that losing her divinity is worth it in order to stop Lambda, since Lambda is about to create another manastone-based civilization.
- He Who Fights Monsters:
- An NPC asks Lambda is she's willing to kill a Nomad, and if she states that she's prepared to do so, the NPC warns her that doing so will make her like a beast. However, the other response, that she's "been there and done that," implies that she already killed someone in the past.
- Illia believes that if Lambda receives her siblings' blessings and becomes an immortal leader for the Settlement, the latter will eventually become Drunk On Power like King Vikar.
- Hold the Line: Mount Olov is a mountain-sized golem, which means the party has no chance of directly damaging it. The only way to win is to use Azain's Rockpoison item on it and survive for 10 turns so that the poison will kill it. However, it has such powerful party-wide attacks that just surviving against it is considered a feat in and of itself.
- Hopeless Boss Fight: In the prologue, Vritra will attack Lambda near the exit of a cave. Unlike the previous battles, this one cannot be fled from, and it will deal about 40 times Lambda's current HP with one breath attack. The prologue version of Vritra is so strong that Lambda isn't meant to statistically win against it even with New Game Plus bonuses. Fortunately, its final chapter version in Starkas's route has much lower stats.
- Hulking Out: In the Final Boss fight with King Vikar on Starkas's route, he'll turn into a giant purple muscled humanoid.
- Hypocrite:
- Illia believes humans are too dependent on her fellow deities and on manastones, yet she's willing to empower her own followers to give them an edge against the manafinders. Azain in particular receives manastone implants to make himself stronger.
- Octavius claims that a society based around the safety of the manastones demands conformity, but his nomad society also forces people to conform to roles, as shown when Lhania is expected to give up on mingling with the weak commoners and focus solely on her role as a warrior.
- Hypocrite Has a Point: Frederick often accuses Starkas of being a reckless hothead, which is true because the latter dreams of invading Manahill and overthrowing King Vikar, who has more power and resources than the Settlement. In turn, Starkas points out that Frederick's goal of excavating the dangerous Tuonela is also a suicide mission, since the powerful manastones within mutated all life in the abyss into unstoppable beings, and anyone who dies in there will be turned into a zombie. The Oracle acknowledges both of their plans as incredibly unlikely to succeed, though he doesn't entirely rule them out due to the desperate situation the Settlement is in.
- Infinity +1 Sword: The Leviathan Scale is the best accessory, since it provides a massive stat boost and regenerates 100 TP every turn, allowing Lambda to spam her Unleashes. As its name implies, Lambda has to defeat the Leviathan to obtain it, and the latter is the strongest boss in the game.
- Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Azain is very insulting towards the recently deceased Soren, but he gives Lambda a manastone seemingly out of goodwill. It turns out he tampered with the manastone so that it would allow him and the nomads to breach the Settlement's defenses.
- Jerkass Realization: At the end of Sol and Mar's quest chain, they once again make a rigged challenge for Lambda to scam her out of her money. Sol nearly injures herself in order to ram into Lambda in the rock climbing course, causing her to realize that their scams are going too far. The two then relent and give Lambda the prize that they promised rather than running away again. It's implied that they were exiled for running similar scams in Manahill.
- Karma Houdini:
- In Frederick's ending, the Settlement doesn't go to war with Manahill, which means King Vikar will continue his tyranny without opposition.
- In Starkas's ending, Lambda kills Vikar, but Illia survives in this route, which means she can continue her plan to destroy all manastones.
- In the ending where Lambda joins Illia, they both succeed in destroying the Settlement and leaving the nomads as the only ones to roam the wilderness of Aevi, but it's unknown if they ever go after King Vikar.
- Knight Templar:
- Illia and her followers believe that the other gods are favoring humanity too much with manastones, causing the natural balance of the world to be lost to the detriment of other forms of life. They seek to destroy all manastones so that humanity will live according to their definition of balance. Illia also wants to prevent anyone from gaining the same power as King Vikar, since she believes that they'll eventually abuse that power too.
- Frederick and Starkas are usually able to tolerate each other to some extent despite their different goals for the Settlement, with Frederick seeking to excavate the Tuonela and Starkas seeking to reclaim Manahill. When they learn that only one person can gain the blessing of the gods at Heavensreach's summit, they become willing to kill each other, along with Lambda depending on whose side she takes.
- Large and in Charge:
- King Vikar's sprite is at least twice as tall as the average human, and he's the ruler of the Kingdom of Manahill. It's implied that the gods' blessing might have changed him physically.
- Illia's sprite is also at least twice as tall as the average human, though this could be due to her status as a goddess. She is also the one directing the nomads to steal and destroy the Settlement's manastones.
- Light Is Not Good: King Vikar refers to himself as a Holy King, but he's really a tyrant who exiles his subjects over petty reasons. As the Final Boss of Starkas's route, he use use Enlight on himself to add a light elemental magic hit to all of his attacks.
- Limit Break: Lambda and Scar have their own TP bars, which they can expend to use an Unleash skill. Lambda in particular gets an Unleash for each of her weapons.
- Love Makes You Evil: Azain was once a manafinder alongside Liria, but when she died in the line of duty, he became disillusioned with the constant struggle to find manastones. This made it easy for Illia to recruit him to her anti-manastone cause.
- Magic Staff: Savius drops his staff upon his defeat. It has no advantages against any enemy type and instead deals non-elemental magic damage. It also grants the Meteor Rain unleash, which deals four non-elemental magic hits to the entire enemy party.
- Multi-Melee Master: Lambda is capable of using a variety of weapons, each of which is effective against specific types of enemies. Her arsenal includes spears, swords, poleaxes, pickaxes, bows, daggers, a vacuum, a sunstone, a magic staff, a large studded club, claws, a scythe, tonfas, a hammer, and an ice-generating artifact.
- Multiple Endings:
- In Frederick's ending, Lambda conquers the Tuonela and kills Illia in the process. Lambda establishes a barrier around the chasm, moves the people of the Settlement in, and becomes the queen of New Manahill.
- In Starkas's ending, Lambda goes to Manahill and overthrows King Vikar. Despite the public distrusting her, she moves the people of the Settlement in and becomes the new queen of Manahill.
- If Lambda succumbs to despair within Illia's nightmare world, she'll join Illia and wipe out the Settlement, leaving only the nomads and their all-natural lifestyle to thrive.
- Non-Standard Game Over: The ending for siding with Illia has no Final Boss and doesn't grant access to New Game Plus, meaning the only way to continue the game loop is to reject Illia and properly progress through the other routes.
- Noodle Incident: King Vikar has several people exiled, including the player character, but game doesn't make it clear what crimes the exiled committed. In the Settlement, one of the rules is that the settlers can't ask each other about their pasts. However, some characters open up to Lambda about their pasts and indictments.
- Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: King Vikar uses a draconian legal system to purge Manahill of criminals and claims that his actions are keeping the country safe and holy. Later on, the Settlement citizens reveal that they can be exiled for political disagreement, researching technology that King Vikar doesn't like, and offending the nobility, showing that the legal system favors the upper class and is really used to abitrarily punish the lower class, regardless of the criminality of their actions. It later becomes evident that King Vikar is aware that the gods are displeased with his abuse of his powers, and he purged the Oracles specifically to keep them from publicizing this fact. In Starkas's route, Lambda gains the blessing of the gods and fights him, causing him to declare that the gods cannot undo the pinnacle of mankind, in other words, himself.
- One-Woman Army: Once Lambda obtains the blessing of the gods at Heavensreach, she'll automatically be boosted to level 70. She's also required to clear the final dungeon by herself, and is more than capable of doing so with her stats.
- The Poorly Chosen One: King Vikar was originally granted power by the gods to lead humanity, but in the present, they seek a new champion to replace him, since he is now abusing his power against his lower class subjects.
- Potty Failure: Frederick once ate a poison mushroom and soiled his pants as a result. In Leaves' Rest, his pants can be found and equipped.
- Powerful Pick: Pickaxes are effective against rock monsters or monsters with rock-like exteriors, and they all have the Excavate Unleash to deal three hits to a single foe. Lambda receives a pickaxe from her fellow manafinders, and she can obtain better ones by completing Gobithia's questline.
- Properly Paranoid: If Lambda votes against using Azain's manastone "gift," Frederick will later question her on her vote. One of Lambda's dialogue choices points out that Azain could have set a trap with the manastonesomehow, and Frederick will acknowledge that possibility. Later, Azain uses the tampered manastone to help the nomads breach the Settlement's barrier.
- Respawning Enemies: Enemies only respawn if the party rests in the Settlement tent or at a campsite. The only exception is in Allaror's Wrath, where enemies will endlessly spawn and home in on Lambda's location. However, the Plains' Crown accessory prevents the Allaror's Wrath enemies from spawning.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: Starkas believes the Settlement should reject the manastone that Azain gave them, mainly out of pride rather than logic. Later, it turns out that the manastone was tampered with to allow the nomads to invade the Settlement.
- Slap-on-the-Wrist Nuke: The final bosses of Frederick and Starkas's route, Illia and King Vikar respectively, will use End of Times and Exile from Existence at low HP, both of which vaporize Aevi in their animations. Fortunately, these only reduce Lambda to 1 HP while exhausting the users.
- The Social Darwinist:
- The nomads believe that those who cannot live without a barrier are weak and unworthy of life. Their society is also based on strength, where the weak must obey the strong. As a deconstruction, strong leaders like Lhania are not allowed to mingle too much with the weak commoners even if they want to.
- Illia believes that the other deities are spoiling humanity with the power of the manastones, so she orders her followers to destroy the manastones to force humanity to live without them and rely only on their natural power.
- Allaror believes that the world runs on survival of the fittest and that humans must constantly seek power to survive, but unlike Illia, he endorses the usage of manastones and divine blessings, since he sees them as means for humanity to adapt to danger.
- Sore Loser: Sol and Mar are upset when Lambda beats their challenges, since they wanted the challenges to be intentionally unfair in order to scam her out of her money. They always refuse to pay the full reward to Lambda and start blatantly cheating from the second challenge onwards.
- Speak Ill of the Dead: Azain mocks Soren for getting killed by the Cataractadon. He later expresses glee over Lambda killing his "ally" Octavius, since he's annoyed by Octavius prioritizing his lust for combat over Illia's agenda.
- Squishy Wizard: Savius is the least physically fit of the nomad leaders due to his age, but he can deal a lot of damage with his magic attacks. He also brings two mooks to his boss battle to make up for his low durability.
- Start X to Stop X: Illia wants to end humanity's dependency on gods and manastones, but she tries to accomplish this by recruiting and blessing her own followers. She is also willing to use manastones to power up her champion, Azain.
- Straw Hypocrite: King Vikar portrays himself as a ruler who is willing to use draconian laws to keep Manahill crime free and true to the gods' intentions. However, it turns out that he's really using the legal system to exile anyone who could threaten his power in any way possible. Of note is when he accuses the Oracles of serving the evil goddess Illia, which later turns out to be a lie because the Oracles actually receive prophecies from the main gods Behra, Vaethia, and Allaror. His true reason for exiling them is because they could reveal that he fell out of favor with the main gods.
- Superboss: The Leviathan is the strongest optional boss in the game and can only be unlocked after finding all the Heavenstones.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork:
- The manafinders, Starkas and Frederick, do not get along because the former is hotheaded and more inclined to violence while the latter prefers less violent methods. Despite that, the Oracle sends them to Allaror's Wrath to search for manastones as a pair. They also have completely different visions for the Settlement's future, as Starkas wants to go to war with Manahill while Frederick wants to seek the vast reserves of manastones in the Tuonela to turn the Settlement into a new kingdom. This comes to a head in Heavensreach, where they will fight each other to the death over gaining the power of the gods.
- Azain and the nomads worship Illia, but they don't always agree on their methods. Azain finds it ridicuous that they refuse to fight Mount Olov because they consider it sacred, since he believes destroying the manastones should take precedence over their traditions. In the Cauldron Core, Octavius orders Azain to stop destroying the manastones until the former finishes his fight with Lambda, and Azain considers him a brute for prioritizing his lust for battle over their mission. After Octavius's defeat, he remarks that he regrets working with Azain and Illia, which implies that Illia's ideals don't fully line up with his tribe's ideals.
- Took a Level in Jerkass: While Frederick and Starkas are often at each other's throats, they are still willing to cooperate to some extent and both respect Lambda for her feats as a manafinder. When the Oracle announces that the gods are looking for a new person to bless at the top of Heavensreach, Frederick and Starkas see this as an opportunity to fulfill their own ambitions, and will fight each other to the death to decide who gets to climb to the top. Whoever Lambda didn't agree with will kill the other, and they're willing to kill Lambda too when she stands in their way.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Illia seeks to destroy all manastones and prevent anyone from gaining the other deities' blessings, since she believes this power will cause humans to become complacent, leading to corrupt societies like Manahill. She also fears that the expansion of civilization will be detrimental to all other life on Aevi. In Frederick's route, she goes as far as to give up her divinity to stop Lambda from claiming the Omega Manastone in the Tuonela.
- Worthy Opponent: Octavius and Illia respect Lambda's combat skill and note that she's strong enough to survive in the nomads' barrier-less society.
- Would Hurt a Child: The criminal justice system of the Kingdom of Manahill is perfectly fine with exiling criminals, rightfully accused or not, along with their children, knowing that the monsters outside of Manahill will most likely eat them.
