Video Game / Night of the Full Moon

In order to find the missing grandmother, Little Red Riding Hood went alone to the Black Forest, where it was always dark and night. She is about to face the guardian of the forest elves, the ferocious werewolf, the sedentary witch, the strange villagers and the truth that slowly surfaced… On the full moon night, the mysterious veil of the Black Forest will be unveiled one by one…

The game's plot summary, translated from Chinese

Night of the Full Moon is a stand-alone mobile Deckbuilding Game/Role-Playing Game hybrid by Soulgame Information with a story based on the tale of Little Red Riding Hood. You play as Red herself and start the game with the discovery that your beloved grandmother has disappeared into the dark forest beyond her house. You make the inadvisable choice to follow her… into the dark… all by yourself. What were you thinking?

Luckily Red's got some game. You choose one of nine classes for Red (though you might need to pay money to unlock them), and each enables a different starter deck of cards full of attacks and abilities. The four base classes:

• If you want to get your hack and slash on, the Lady Knight is the way to go. Her play style is centered around Attack cards and racking up damage, while stacking armor for survival, as well as equipping a large arsenal of weapons, armour and artifacts.
• There's the Ranger, armed with a bow and quick reflexes. Her play style is centered on Action cards, status effects, and pulling off combos, though the Knight can do that too if you assemble your deck right.
• You can be a Nun, with powers of healing at your disposal. Her play style focuses on recovery, armor, and Prayers, effects that take effect in up to 5 turns (or less for some at your choosing), though she also gets cards that reduce the prayer counter.
• Finally, if Spell slinging is your game, pick the Little Witch, who can choose to focus on stacking up Pyro to sling huge fire spells, inflict the enemy with Chill to cripple their damage, zap them with chained lightning combos, or poison them to a slow death.

There are also five other classes locked in DLC: the Magician (different from the witch in regards to aesthetics), the Apothecary, the Soul Hunter, the Mechanic, and the Spirit Caller. There's also a totally different playable character available.

• The Magician also has spells at her disposal, though themed around cards and stage magic, with multiple means of reducing their mana costs. She is also a skilled saboteur who can lock down her enemies with Counter cards and dilute their decks with unplayable pranks.
• The Apothecary slings potions, of which she can multiply (a good thing, since some of these cards get Exiled), and have various effects, mainly focused on combos of debilitating status effects or temporarily increasing her maximum HP.
• The Soul Hunter manages a second resource called Judgment, which is used to create increasingly powerful spells. Some of your spells are Cast from Hit Points, but the Siphon mechanic allows you to steal health and mana from your enemies to make up the difference.
• The Mechanic is heavily Action-based like the Ranger, but has a lot of unique mechanics (based on ideas tried on earlier individual cards, now given properly codified keywords) such as Assembly (cost is reduced every time you do something else) and Exhausted (uses all of your remaining Actions for a increasingly powerful effect). She has an emphasis on armour and exiling cards from not only her deck, but her opponent's as well.
• The Spirit Caller’s spells summon elemental spirits to her aid. While individually weak, every third spirit performs a Fusion Dance with the previous two to create a true force of nature. She also benefits more than most from hand manipulation, with bonuses for searching through her deck and a unique Growth mechanic that triggers passive effects when certain cards are left in her hand.
• The Werewolf is, for a change, the Little Carpenter as he goes on his own journey and uses his Werewolf power to explore the forest and find his missing father. Gameplay-wise, he's oriented around Action cards and a Rage meter that delivers extra damage to enemies.

"The Red Hood Diary" DLC is an alternate campaign, a prequel story set five years before the present about a younger Red and the Little Carpenter running off together to have an adventure in a mysterious castle. It uses the same combat and deckbuilding system, but with a different, more linear gameplay flow and all new encounters. The available classes are the Lady Knight, Ranger, Little Witch and, oddly, the Apothecary rather than the Nun.

A massive new free DLC update, "Memory in the Mirror", was released in September 2022, featuring many new cards and encounters for the base game, as well as a new story campaign set in an entirely new autochess play mode. The new campaign is another prequel, this time telling the backstory of Princess Black Swan (Red's long-lost sister) when she got trapped inside a magic mirror.

The next DLC update, "The Wishing Night", was released in February 2023, adding another new story campaign with a new play mode that combines elements of all three previous modes. The new campaign tells two stories depending on which of the two characters you choose, based around exploring a mysterious abandoned mine where it's rumoured a god exists that can grant wishes: Little Red (as a Mechanic) seeking to save her friend Jerry after the events of Chapter 4 of Full Moon, or a red-haired Queen trying to find a cure for her beloved king's mysterious illness. Memory in the Mirror also received an expansion, with a new chapter 11 and two new classes of allies to recruit.

The 6th anniversary celebration for the game added the aforementioned Spirit Caller to the Full Moon campaign, the Witch class to the Wishing Night campaign, and another two new classes of allies (Werewolf and Witcher) to the Memory in the Mirror mode. It also added a time-limited class and Collab in the Little Pig Monster, where you incarnate the same character from the short film "Little Monster's Summer", which is the first episode of a series of animations called "Chinese Strange Tan", or "Chinese Strange Stories", produced by Shanghai Animation Film Studio and Bilibili.

Now available for PC on Steam. The base game is free to play, so there's no reason not to try it.

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This game has the following tropes:

• Achievement System: This game has achievements you can meet, and these grant you extra cards in future runs.
• All of the Other Reindeer: The Little Carpenter was subjected to brutal bullying by the other village children when he was young, surrounding him in a jeering crowd and pelting him with rocks. Little Red was the only person to stand up for him.
• All There in the Manual: Most of the backstories of the bosses and enemy encounters are behind the achievements menu, and only after beating them at least once. This also includes the little Carpenter's real name (Jerry), and that his foster dad became the Crocodile, although Jerry's name is mentioned in the game itself if you complete the path that unlocks chapter 4, as Red finds his knife and realises he's the Werewolf.
• Another Side, Another Story:
  • Choosing the Werewolf class puts you in the shoes of the Carpenter, who is among the first combat encounters when you play as any other class. Naturally, Red becomes one of the early encounters in his place and is one of the available final bosses in Normal Mode, the other being the Cyclops Detective.
  • In the "Memory in the Mirror" campaign, you play as Black Swan rather than Red.
  • In "The Wishing Night" campaign, you can play as either Red, the Queen, or the Witch.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Cerberus' fear effect stops counting down if you play a card that requires you to make a decision until you've made said decision. This means if you do something that lets you search your entire deck, you can do so at your leisure rather than needing to find the card you're looking for fast or risk losing your entire turn.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Soul Hunter is capable of using the Soul Extraction action to steal any card permanently from an enemy's deck in exchange for it, which includes the Mad Apothecary's Deadly Virus, which will do 999 damage to its victim after 4 turns. Unfortunately, as well as requiring you to draw the Virus before it even starts working, this is often just too slow, with it usually being more efficient to simply beat the enemies up normally, making it only really even usable against bosses (and sometimes not even then). Additionally, there are multiple enemies it's just not a smart idea to use against — any enemy with an Auto-Revive effect or multiple phases will survive it (since It Only Works Once and all effects are cleansed when they revive) and any enemy who can reflect inflicted damage back at you will overkill you several times over even as they die.
• Beast and Beauty: The Little Carpenter was born out of a forbidden romance between Sophia the church hunter and Ray the werewolf she was sent to investigate but instead fell in love with.
• Bears Are Bad News: Rage Bear for obvious reasons. Another example is the Bear Mage. While more ambivalent, he's a formidable foe, especially if his HP is in the even digits since his attack doubles when that happens.
• Bittersweet Ending: If you complete the secret Chapter 4 added with the "Gear of Destiny" patch, Red rescues her grandmother and purifies the corrupted Nature Spirit that had cursed the Dark Woods — but Jerry the Little Carpenter sacrifices his life to save her from the ensuing explosion, and Red's tears fall on the book as she closes the cover.
  • The 6th Anniversary patch adds two additional alternate endings to Chapter 4 (three if you include the new variant added for playing as the Werewolf), depending on whether you find the magic seed and cause it to grow into either the Black Fruit or the White Bloom. Neither of them are much happier.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: The 6th Anniversary patch saw the entire game's script completely overhauled. The new script was apparently written by an AI and not double checked by anyone, as it is in every way a major downgrade from the original one (which was itself only "OK" to begin with)- phrasing of flavour text is more awkward, keywords are inconsistant (sometimes "Exile" is written as "Remove" despite Remove being a different mechanic), some names have been changed to make much less sense (every creature that was previously a "Spirit" is now called an "Elf", including the Forest Spirit), several cards just have complete bugged names that reduce them to simply "1", and they didn't even fix the awkward name of Grandma's boss form, the "Mystery Men".
• Burning with Anger: The Rage Bear, one of the bosses.
  My hands are on fury fire!
• Cannot Spit It Out: The Little Carpenter has been in love with Red since they were children when she protected him from bullies, but cannot speak a word of his feelings because he's secretly a werewolf. When he meets her in that form, he literally cannot tell her.
• Cast from Hit Points: A tactic used by two classes.
  • The Martyr's equipment set for the Knight give various bonuses at the cost of suffering from one point of damage every turn — except for the Martyr's Sword, which instead synergises with them by doubling the damage of your next attack card after taking damage on your turn. Some attacks and action cards also inflict self-damage, which can trigger the sword multiple times per turn.
  • The Soul Hunter has several spells which cost health instead of mana, and can easily build a deck around this tactic. Life Drain and regeneration help offset the risks, while equipping a Soul Link forces her enemies to lose the same amount of health she pays.
• The Cavalry: After finding her grandmother passed out in the depths of the Dark Forest, Red is surrounded by a pack of wolves who leap at her — but Jerry the Little Carpenter, in his werewolf form, leaps in to save her.
• Chest Monster: One of the enemy encounters is this. Thankfully, you can skip it, but the EXP and Gold it gives (not to mention a combat to help refresh your class-exclusive out-of-battle ability) can be worth fighting anyway if you so wish.
  Suspicious Chest: (when battled) Hey! It's your call!
  Suspicious Chest: (when defeated) Greed will lead you to death!
• Chuunibyou: The Magic Apprentice really, really wants to be a witch. She cobbled together a very witchy-looking outfit, made herself a staff from a branch off a dead tree, and even found herself a crystal ball and a genuine magic book. Unfortunately, despite calling herself a witch, she still has no actual magic powers (she can't actually read the book), so the other villagers treat her declarations with bemusement (although she does actually gain mana and use it to cast the Elemental Wave and possibly even Blazing Charge spells against you in combat).
• Combos: As in all card games, building strong combos is essential to succeeding in the late game, but the Magician in particular revolves around these. Her most basic combo is using the spammable spell Poker Dart (which does a small amount of damage and returns itself to her hand with its cost increased by 1 every time she casts it) repeatedly then finishing the opponent off with Lethal Stab (a cheap but powerful spell that does more damage for each spell you cast in a turn) for a large burst of damage, combined with mana cost reducing abilities like Magic Curtain and damage-enhancing effects like Frailty, Storm Strike, and Evil Crystal to ramp this damage up into the hundreds.
• Corrupt Church: There are a lot of hints leading to the fact that the church is like this, and there are several foes who have their issues against it. They're also responsible for turning people into monsters (some of whom you fight as bosses or simple enemies), as well as going after the Hope family. They already killed Red's parents and hoped to silence Red and her grandmother, too, in order to snuff out the legend of the chance of lifting the curse. If Red defeats the Priest, the curse on the forest and humans gets lifted, though the church's blind greed still remains.
• Counter-Attack: Most Counter cards, naturally. When played, they wait for an opponent to play a certain type of card^note With the exception of Hoodwinked, which either side’s Attack card can trigger before springing a trap to make them regret it. A handful of classes can use counters, but the Magician gets the widest variety and several options to exploit them.
• Cyborg: According to the Mechanic class's backstory, Red suffered from cardiac dysplasia from her birth, and was predicted to not live for even a year, so her mother demanded the Mechanical Magician replace her heart with a mechanical one, giving her an affinity for machines as she grew up.
• Dark Is Not Evil: The Fallen Priest. Or at least ambivalent and willing to give advice. Ironic, as the standard Priest is a Final Boss and a member of the Corrupt Church.
• Deckbuilding Game: As you play your adventure, you start off with around 10 cards, but you get means to earn more along the way, and even means to delete and swap some, and given that your deck gets shuffled every turn, you'll want to make sure to not have too many (useless) cards.
• Deck Clogger: Certain effects can cause your deck to become cluttered with useless Prank cards, which take up space in your deck and may prevent you from drawing a more useful card. Slightly less aggravating are the Freeze cards, which can at least be played at the cost of an action to replace them with a usable card, and rather more useful are the Fear cards, spell equivalent versions of Freeze exclusive to the Soul Hunter, used to clog the enemy's deck and potentially drain them of mana if they try to play them out.
• Difficult, but Awesome: The Spirit Caller is straight-up the hardest class to play properly, as you have to juggle its elemental materials to create the most powerful Spirits possible without overtaxing your limited mana pool. While some of the combos you can create are nauseatingly powerful, if you can't assemble the right pieces to make your deck work it's easy to find yourself spinning your wheels.
• Doorstop Baby: The Little Carpenter was abandoned at the door of his father the Lumberjack by his actual father, the werewolf of the woods, after his mother Sophia was mortally wounded Taking the Bullet for his father and was barely able to give birth to him before she died, forcing the werewolf to give him up before leaving to seek vengeance on the Church. This scene is represented in the Hard Mode class select image for the werewolf.
• Early Game Hell: While your first couple of encounters are a piece of cake, simply because your level 1 opponents only have 6-7 HP and will go down rapidly to almost any possible draw, the game is usually hardest shortly after this, when your deck still frankly sucks, weighed down by 1-damage Basic Attack cards and utility-deficient basic Mana cards which can often leave you with no effective way to do damage to the opponents. The Ranger in particular is absolutely crippled by most of their offence options involving Actions, but only having 1 Action per turn to spend, unless they get lucky on an early level-up option or luck into a card that can give them more actions like Accelerate or Agility. Once you filter out the fodder, acquire some decent cards and level them up a bit, increase your own level to get a bigger hand size, more actions/base mana/equipment slots and acquire some powerful equipment and blessings so that your deck actually starts to work properly, things generally become a lot easier.
  • The Apothecary has it particularly badly, as they're very combo-dependant and will struggle to be able to do anything more than throw a couple of weak potions at the early game enemies. Their multiple different build paths (lightning combo, max HP stacking, condition stacking) have absolutely no cross-synergy and their individual cards are extremely weak, meaning you have to get very lucky to be able to put together an even semi-viable deck before you get to chapter 2 and get to pick your second Fairy Blessing (and Sealed Memory if you have the Red Hood Diaries DLC), which can be almost impossible when you have to beat the chapter 1 boss and keep drawing nothing but junk 1-damage Basic Attack cards.
• Endless Winter: A curse makes it this case all year round in the Dark Forest.
  Lumberjack: It snows all year round in the Dark Forest. It is quite abnormal.
• Elemental Embodiment:
  • Five show up as enemies: Stone, Water, Fire, Earth, and Lightning, each with their own resistances (and weaknesses for two of them).
  • The Spirit Caller’s spells consist almost entirely of these, summoned for a one-time effect and fused in various combinations.
• Evil Chef: The Cook, who's willing to carve you up for dinner should you fight him (and you must, unless you explicitly go out of your way to not do that).
• The Evils of Free Will: The Tin Man has thoughts of this after being defeated.
  Tin Man: If there is no freedom, why be a human being?
• Final Boss: At the end of each run only in Normal Mode as Red, you reach The Final Truth, where you choose out of three later four final bosses to fight.
  • Disc-One Final Boss: Depending on whether or not you have more Courage than Reputation or vice-versa (or even roughly equal), you have to face either the Werewolf or the Witch.
  • Once you've defeated the Werewolf and the Witch (in separate runs), you get to unlock the third boss: the Priest of the Corrupt Church.
  • True Final Boss: The Mystery Men, whom you can only see after defeating the Priest. However, to even fight them the first time around (subsequent runs—once you beat them—no longer have this), you have to accumulate up to at least 8 Courage or Reputation. It's Red's grandmother, whom she's been looking for. As of Hard Mode VII though, they're more of a Disc Three Final Boss.
  • As the Werewolf, there are only two picks; the Cyclops Detective, and Red herself, who takes on a random set of skills pertaining to any one of the available classes.
  • In the Hard Modes, all of the above are fought at some point, except the Mystery Men, though while the Carpenter may get to fight Red, she instead may fight the Afterimage, who is mechanically the same. As of the latest patch, the Werewolf can also fight an Afterimage of his own, which is identical to the Werewolf boss that Red fights.
  • And when you reach Hard Mode VII, you get to fight the Cursed Werewolf, who proves even harder than the Mystery Men.
  • The True Final Boss can only be fought by finding the secret path to chapter 4: the corrupted Nature Spirit in the tunnels beneath the Dark Forest.
  • The Red Hood Diaries DLC also includes its own set of bosses like the Vampire Lord, the Snake Queen, the Cyclops, Black Swan (but never in Hard Mode), and the Donkey-Eared King (Hard Mode V only).
• Flowers of Romance: Tryst Man holds a rose, intending to give it to Tryst Woman upon their meeting.
  Tryst Man: Flowers and wine are for beautiful women.
• Forbidden Love: One of your encounters, the Demoness, has a love affair with a human.
• Fusion Dance: Every three “spirit” spells the Spirit Caller casts merge into a single card with the damage, costs, and other effects of all three added together.
• Gaia's Vengeance: Several encounters that aren't monsters comprise of native creatures who have dim views on humanity. The True Final Boss is also a corrupted Nature Spirit.
• Gathering Steam: A number of potential builds can work like this, usually by either drawing and equipping a set of synergistic items, or by ramping up a steadily accelerating effect like a debuff stack such as Burn or Poison.
  • Perhaps most notable is the Werewolf Rage build; the Anger Aroused blessing is essential for it, since it generates an amount of Rage equal to the current turn at the start of each turn, with each point of Rage gained that exceeds the Werewolf's current cap proccing a hit equal to the current Rage level. Combined with some of the more powerful effects that can raise your Rage cap, this can lead to horrific levels of multiplicative damage.
  • The Apothecary can do this in two regards: building stacks of Effective and increasing her maximum health. The first directly improves her potions, making for higher debuff stacks and better damage potential, while the latter can both help her survive and be weaponized by cards like Primitive Law^note deals 1/10th of her maximum health in damage each turn, Desperate Attack, and Dark Dawn^note both deal damage based on her missing hit points, which the health improvements rarely restore. Dark Dawn is also a potent healing spell.
  • Fittingly, the Mechanic tends to favor this strategy. Several of her cards increase her stock of Action point, which both offsets the high cost of her cards and gives her Exhausted cards more power. She can also upgrade her cards mid-battle, and increase the damage she deals by applying permanent stacks of Frailty to her enemies.
• Go Out with a Smile: When the Little Carpenter/the Werewolf jumps in front of Red and her grandmother to shield her from the explosion of the Nature Spirit, he looks back at her and smiles. This is the last image shown in the in-universe "Full Moon" book before Red closes the cover, weeping over his death.
• Guide Dang It!: Unlocking the secret final chapter can be tricky to work out. After defeating the Mystery Men for the first time, you have to use your Fairy Blessing from the start of Chapter 2 to choose the otherwise-useless Locked Diary card that appears as a 4th option. Then you have to use a card upgrade opportunity (such as from the Smithy) to upgrade it to the Unlocked Diary. Then you need to offer it to the Card Trader who appears in Chapter 2 to convert it to Painful^note it used to be even worse before the Memory in Mirror patch, with you having to offer it to him twice, costing you both opportunities to trade junk cards away. Then finally you need to use the Amnesia Tavern to remove Painful from your collection in exchange for the Silver Carver blessing, which will give you access to Chapter 4 after you defeat the first boss on Chapter 3. Notably, doing this causes you to miss out on a lot of useful upgrades, making you even weaker than you would otherwise be during the extra-hard final chapter and True Final Boss.
• Happily Adopted: The Little Carpenter knows the Lumberjack isn't his real father (he was a Doorstop Baby), but the two of them love each other like real family regardless.
• Health/Damage Asymmetry: Not initially, as Red starts off with about 20 HP while level 1 enemies have 6 or so, but enemy HP increases much faster than yours — a level 10 Red may have about 50-60 HP depending on how many max HP increases you picked up, while a level 10 normal enemy will have well over 200, and bosses several times that. Fortunately your damage accelerates faster than theirs as well (assuming you're playing correctly) as you build a deck that can use powerful combos to potentially do hundreds of damage per turn.
• Hero Antagonist: Some of the encounters you run into aren't even bad guys at all, but stop you anyway out of worry for your safety, such as the Little Carpenter, the Lumberjack, the Patrolman, the Guardsman (all at Act I), the Beggar (Acts I or II), and the Hunter (in Act III).
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • After Red defeats and purifies the Nature Spirit at the end of chapter 4, it violently explodes. Jerry leaps in front of her to shield her from the blast, smiling at her as he does. She lives, but he doesn't.
    • The above is Inverted if you clear chapter 4 as the Werewolf (patched into the game much later) instead; Red tries to shield her Grandma and the Werewolf from the explosion with her magic, but doesn't survive, and Jerry staggers miserably home through the forest carrying Red's torn hood.
    • It's also Averted if you're clear chapter 4 as Red after collecting the Black Fruit, where she succeeds in blocking the explosion and saving both herself and Jerry... at the cost of them both being corrupted instead.
  • In the Red Hood Diaries, Black Swan sacrifices herself to bring down Midas and let her little sister Red escape with her friend the Little Carpenter. Instead of dying, she apparently transforms into a real black swan after the battle.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The Frog King is prone to this due to his abilities. Doubling statuses allows him to build up huge damage boosts and substantial amounts of armor, but also means he can lose entire turns to a Sticky Potion and racks up Poison damage twice as fast. Since he also steals the first card you use each turn, a careless player may find him pulling this trope on them.
• Hypno Pendulum: The Hypnotist has one of these. If you choose wrong, he can even steal some of your gold, though not much as he's an early encounter.
• In Love with the Mark: Sophia the Church Hunter was sent to investigate the werewolf, but fell in love with him instead. Their child is Jerry, the Little Carpenter.
• Kaizo Trap: The Headless Horseman's "Obsession" buff causes any damage that overkills him to be reflected back on you (including the first two times you drop his HP to 0, when he simply auto-revives). If this reflected damage reduces your HP to 0, it's still a game over.
• Little Red Fighting Hood: Red herself, and in eight different variants.
• Long-Lost Relative: Black Swan is Red's long lost older sister.
• Mage Killer: The Soul Hunter can be a powerful counter to spellcasting enemies due to her signature Mana Drain, along with the abilities to increase spell costs and fill their decks with Fear spells to waste what little mana they can muster.
• Mana Drain: The Silence Card does this to mana (in addition to 3 damage). The Darkness Card does this and depletes Action. The Priest is notorious for having this in his deck, making fighting him in any class other than Lady Knight (focuses on Attack cards) and the Nun (primarily uses Prayer cards)… rather challenging.
  • Cards with Siphon as the Soul Hunter take mana from the enemy and add it to yours. If there's no mana to drain, health is taken instead and is added to your own.
• Mana Meter: You have one of these, and there are cards that restore or spend mana. These are requirements for when you play certain classes, especially for the Little Witch and the Magician, while you don't generally need to bother with this as the (Action-oriented) Ranger or (Attack-oriented) Lady Knight.
  • To a lesser extent, Actions are also locked this way, where you're only allowed to play a certain number of Action cards per turn (and all Classes use this), and which can even be drained or given extras of with certain cards.
• Mirror Match:
  • The Magic Mirror enemy copies your deck when you fight him. That said, he still has his own HP and hand size, and he doesn't copy your Blessings.
  • While not an exact mirror, there are a couple of enemies that use decks equivalent to one of Red's own classes. The Fallen Priest^note rather than the actual Priest, implying that as a Defector from the Corrupt Church he's the only truly holy man you'll meet in the forest plays exactly like the Nun with Prayers and healing magic/armour gain, and the Hunter plays just like an item/action-spamming Ranger.
• Multiple-Choice Past: How Red came into the role you start with has a different background.
  • As a Knight, she hardened herself into a swordswoman in spite of the rough, bully-induced childhood she had growing up.
  • As a Ranger, she learned her skills by joining the hunters into the forest, using her steadily growing agility to try and earn enough money to build a home for grandma.
  • As a Nun, she turned to piety, standing by the belief of healing the wounded as opposed to violence.
  • As a Witch, curiosity led her to learning black magic in spite of it being prohibited.
  • As a Magician, Red discovers her affinity for magic and cards as a young girl, being a descendant of the Hope Family.
  • As the Apothecary, she had a fascination for the natural world, experimenting on it and eventually developed potions in secrecy.
  • As a Soul Hunter, Red signs a contract with the Reaper and is out harvesting 100 souls to complete her side of the deal.
  • As a Mechanic, Red had her weak heart replaced with a Magitek one when she was a baby, giving her a natural affinity for machines.
  • As a Spirit Caller, she learns she can commune with spirits, learning how to call for their aid to chase out grandma's pursuers.
• Multiple Endings: Depending on which Final Boss you beat.
  • Defeating the Werewolf or Witch doesn't have a clear resolution. They're defeated, but it doesn't solve the issue.
  • Defeating the Priest stops the curse, but not the church's greed.
  • Defeating the Mystery Men leads to a Downer Ending. Red finds out she killed her grandmother whom she's been looking for. This opens up Hard mode.
  • Defeating the Forest Spirit leads to a Bittersweet Ending. Red found her grandmother, but her friend, the Little Carpenter, sacrificed his life in the ensuing aftermath. Alternately, if you do this as the Werewolf, Red sacrifices her life to save him instead.
    • Taking the alternate route to Chapter 4 by finding and nurturing the Black Fruit leads to Red using her magic to save her grandmother and the Little Carpenter from the explosion of the Forest Spirit, but she and Jerry absorb the corruption themselves and stalk the Dark Forest as werewolf and his sinister wooden wolf-masked companion.
    • After doing the above, you can instead take a different alternate route to Chapter 4 by using Red's magic to purify the seed to obtain the White Bloom. Red is pulled into the tangle of roots by the Forest Spirit and absorbed by it, but successfully purifies it. Red's spirit smiles down on Jerry as he sadly plods home carrying the White Bloom.
• Mystical White Hair: Red has this, as does the Little Witch you can fight in the first act. The same also applies for Black Swan — as well as her and Red's late mother, as can be seen in one of the jigsaw puzzle art pieces.
• Never Mess with Granny: Two of the bosses you meet are the Wolf Grandma and the Rat Grandma, and both can be pretty tough. The same goes for Red's grandma, a.k.a. the Mystery Men.
• No-Sell: The Frog Prophet is invulnerable to all damage. The trick is to hold out for four turns, after which the battle ends.
• Only Friend: Red was the Little Carpenter's only friend since childhood. It's why he's desperate to make sure she doesn't find out his secret.
  I have friends, as long as she doesn't find out the secret.
• Puppy Love: The Little Carpenter has been in love with Red since they were children, although he Cannot Spit It Out (because he's a werewolf, which makes for a rather grim Pun). The Red Hood Diaries campaign sees them going on an adventure together, which is quite adorable.
• Puzzle Boss: The Priest can be a tricky boss to deal with — when you reduce his HP to 0, he instantly transforms into a statue with about half the HP of his normal form. If you can't finish him off before the start of his next turn, he revives himself back to full HP again, requiring you to bring him low then save up a huge amount of burst damage to finish off his statue form in one go.
  • A lot of non-boss enemies have special strategies required to deal with their gimmicks, such as the Jungle Giant who does nothing but draw an ever-increasing number of high damage Crush attacks but discards them when you hit him, requiring you to spam out enough separate instances of damage to empty his hand before he can use them, or the Phantom Captain who causes your first two damage-dealing cards every turn to damage you instead of him, forcing you to consider the order of your cards very carefully, or use sources of indirect damage to beat him without killing yourself.
• Sadistic Choice: Zig-Zagged when fighting the Werewolf boss. You're forced to choose one of three effects that'll occur for the turn, which usually powers up the Werewolf or hinder you. Sometimes, however, it might deal you an effect that benefits you. However, you eventually have to pick all of them at least once (if you don't beat him by then) before the choices are shuffled again.
  • More minor ones include the Tryst Man's Enchantment and the Mystery Men's Wavering Heart debuffs on you that force you to surrender one of your cards to them every two turns, which they'll keep until the end of the battle.
• Story Breadcrumbs: Most of the game's plot, particularly related to the backstories of the Hope family, the Corrupt Church and the Little Carpenter and his Star-Crossed Lovers parents, can only be pieced together from the lore of the enemies and bosses (listed in the compendium after you defeat them) and the ending epilogues, with a few extra details picked up from enemy banter while you fight them.
• Summon Magic: The Spirit Caller’s specialty. Every spell she casts represents a spirit coming to her aid.
• Sword In The Stone: You get to fight one of these as a boss. It's explicitly not Excalibur, but apparently it’s Evil Twin.
• Roguelike: It has some elements of this, albeit rather light. You have one save file at a time, but the game isn't completely lost upon defeat. You can try again after dying, but if your current deck makes the next battle(s) Unwinnable, you have to start over.
• Taking the Bullet: In the backstory of the Little Carpenter/the Werewolf, Sonia the Church Hunter dived in front of a silver bullet to protect her lover, Ray the Werewolf. She was barely able to give birth to their son Jerry before dying.
• Technopath: It's implied that Red's Mechanic class is this because of her Magitek heart.
• Timed Mission: Of a sort. When fighting against the Cerberus, you're given 10 seconds to play your cards before you're forced to end your turn. And if your total cards in hand exceed your current hand size, you're forced to discard them without a chance to back out (which you normally could to play them).
• The Power of Hate: The Black Rose's heart is filled with it. Without it, she will cease to exist.
• Tragic Keepsake: In the true ending at the end of chapter 4, Red keeps Jerry's iconic silver carver as a memento after he sacrifices his life to save her and her grandmother.
  • On the other hand, if you clear chapter 4 as the Werewolf, he staggers home sadly carrying Red's torn hood after she sacrifices herself to save him instead.
• Tragic Monster: The Werewolf. He didn't want to fight you, and had went into the forest specifically to avoid harming the villagers. He's also Jerry, the Little Carpenter and Red's childhood friend, who's deeply in love with her. He never gets to tell Red this after she beats him.
  • Most of the bosses, really, as the church turned many of them into monsters to silence them. Additionally, the True Final Boss, the Nature Spirit, which was corrupted by the black magics of human greed despite its attempts to protect the forest.
• True Final Boss: In the secret 4th chapter added with the release of the "Gear of Destiny" DLC, you eventually meet the source of the forest's corruption, the Nature Spirit.
• Unwinnable by Design: Not always, but it can happen if your deck is not built to progress further, or if you don't have enough HP to survive the next battle, perpetuating the need to restart. Some opponents have gimmicks that make them almost impossible for certain classes to deal with, such as the Jungle Giant for the Nun, as she can't Spam Attack enough times to prevent him from smashing her head in with Crush.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Certain enemies can be absolutely trivialised with the right card. For example, any enemy who depends heavily on Poison (such as the Black Rose) or Burning (such as the Arsonist) to do damage to you will be almost entirely negated by the Nun equipping the Life Talisman (which makes you immune to damage on your own turn), while casters can be crippled by the Ranger or Werewolf's Phantom Swipe, which drains all their mana. Also, the Witch's Revive is actually a piece of equipment rather than a blessing, and can consequently be broken by a Knight with Destroy before it can trigger, or even swiped by a Ranger with Disarm.

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