Video Game / Ultimate Chicken Horse

Ultimate Chicken Horse is a Platformer Party Game created by Clever Endeavour in 2015, where the aim of the game is to build a course then jump your way to the goal. Up to four players contribute to building a course by each adding objects that can help, hinder, or both on each player's quest to reach it.

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Ultimate Chicken Horse provides examples of:

• Abnormal Ammo: The hockey puck shooter and flaming tennis ball launcher.
• Advancing Wall of Doom: The wave in The Pier, and rising lava if it is enabled in The Pyramid. The wave does not cover the entire screen, so you can climb on a platform and wait it out, after which it will respawn. Lava is not so kind.
• Air-Aided Acrobatics: One of the items that can be placed is a large fan that can keep your character in the air.
• Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: Played straight with character alternate skins. Blue skunks, green mammoths, and monochrome axolotls are all options. The standard Monkey is also blue, but most standard characters avert this trope.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Each character has a variety of accessories that can be unlocked through gift boxes.
• An Interior Designer Is You: The main draw of the game is building a level that you can kill your friends with.
• Automatic Crossbows: One of the "Shooty" traps is a crossbow that fires automatically, and they have the shortest cooldown.
• Booby Trap: One item is a platform that reveals spikes shortly after a player stands on it. Also be mindful of trap doors over bottomless pits or other dangers. The guaranteed coin in Jungle Temple sends a boulder to chase you if you collect it.
• Bottomless Pits: In most levels, there's no floor at the bottom to catch you if you fall.
• Buffy Speak: The Sciency and Shooty objects.
• Bunnies for Cuteness: One of the unlockable characters is a robotic bunny. The Transformidable update adds a non-robotic version.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": The stuff that acts like glue for attaching things together to build bizarre contraptions is called "Honey". It seems to fit the nature theme better.
• Comeback Mechanic: Comeback points, fittingly, if you gain completion points while losing considerably. Eligible players have "Comeback" written next to their icon on the score sheet. With default point settings, it's almost equal to the standard reward for completing a course, and it stacks on top of that reward.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Lava only hurts you if you touch it. Same with flamethrowers.
• Cool Gate: You can place portals the size of a playable character. They teleport various things, such as players and deadly projectiles.
• Cool Shades: A costume option for Sheep and Ram. The former has a notably unassuming appearance without the shades.
• Cute Machines: Bunny. It has a metallic exterior and treads, and is absolutely adorable.
• Damned by Faint Praise: You can enable point rewards for completing a course third quickest, which, at best, entails outspeeding one opponent and being outsped by two. Comically, rewarding for fourth place is an option in this four player-max game. At least you completed the course? The game also lampshades this trope with its trumpet sound effects for placing rewards. First gets a triumphant three-note fanfare. Second gets a more subdued but still positive two-note sound. Third gets two mockingly deflated notes. Fourth gets an extended four-note riff, the longest of the set, to rub in the insult.
• Dance Party Ending: Downplayed since it's just the ending of a run, but player characters automatically start dancing once they reach the goal. Even if they were dead at the time. The winner also dances when they reach the goal.
• Double Jump: Averted by default. This can be played with in the settings: everything from standard double jumps, to two tiny jumps giving less height than a normal jump, to infinite jumps is on the table.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: If everyone lives^note Too Easy! No Points! or everyone dies^note  No Winners! No Points!, no-one gets any points, save for any coins that were collected and dragged to the end of the level.
• Elevator Action Sequence: The Mansion and Nuclear Plant levels have an elevator as their main gimmick. The Mansion's needs to be called with a button, while the Nuclear Plant's automatically starts at the beginning of a round.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Barbed wire, cannons, black holes, tidal waves, airship propellers, flowers, you name it. Even regular blocks can crush you in combination with a moving platform.
• Foul Flower: One of the hazards you can place is a big flower that punches anyone who gets close. For some reason, it's in the "Sciency" catagory.
• Good Bad Bugsinvoked: Implied by the developers with the "Wacky" option of Huge character size, which can lead to buggy and very noticeable collision interactions.
• Goomba Stomp: Conspicuously averted. Even with contact enabled, players cannot bounce off other players' heads or harm them by jumping on. However, jumping on a player can still hinder their momentum and jumps, potentially allowing for indirect kills.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Sliding down walls is intuitive, but you also can adjust the sliding speed with your control stick to try and sneak around traps, which the game originally did not indicate. It was later added in the in-game tips.
  • Holding the direction you want to go from a cannon dramatically affects your launch speed and trajectory.
  • Paper planes have several unintuitive interactions: you can test them freely in Free Play, but you'll have no hint to investigate unless luck or trial and error reveals a strange interaction. For example, they become much faster when fired from cannons, fail to go through portals (getting destroyed instead), and can be wall-jumped or even rode if rotated (but only on the original top and rear, not the bottom or point). Even getting the paper plane launcher alongside a cannon or pair of portals is a Luck-Based Mission for normal play.
  • Averted for explosive items. They explicitly highlight items you're targeting to destroy in red, so you don't have to guess what part of the wrecking ball or flower to target for removal.
• Handicapped Badass: Not-Robot Bunny is in a wheelchair (due to being a reskin of the "regular" robotic Bunny, which has wheels for feet), but this doesn't affect its platforming ability.
• Hollywood Chameleon: The unlockable Chameleon character flashes different colors while dancing.
• Homing Projectile: Specifically, homing bees. If you touch their hive, you better complete the course before they get you.
• Inconveniently-Placed Conveyor Belt: Conveyor belts are pretty slow, but they can make tight jumps and maneuvers harder and more distracting.
• Indy Escape: The Jungle Temple level has a special coin that respawns each round and gives you bonus points if you bring it to the flag. Picking it up also causes a giant ball to come out from the right side, killing everyone who touches it. Other players also have to avoid it, meaning it can be used to your advantage if you can avoid it.
• Instant-Win Condition: As long as you come in contact with the goal flag and at least one other player has died, you will get points. Even if you die, if your corpse touches the flag, you'll still receive 'Postmortem' bonus points, although these are worth less than finishing the level unscathed.
• Invisibility with Drawbacks: The Invisibility setting prevents other players from seeing your strategies to clear the course, but it more importantly prevents you from seeing yourself, making it much more harmful than helpful.
• Jet Pack: One of the new items added in the Transformidable Update. Pick one up and you can fly
• Level Editor: On top of the main gameplay itself, where everybody's adding more obstacles to a level, there's a full level editor so you can create maps from scratch.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • What items you can place every round are random. If you need an explosive item to remove an obstacle that makes the level unwinnable, or you want to utilize portals (which only function in pairs), this trope is in full effect. Each individual item's spawn frequency can be adjusted in settings. Determined players can defy this trope by only allowing one item type to spawn.
  • Meteors have unpredictable sizes, spawns, and paths if you enable them, but if you only let them spawn after a certain amount of time has passed, you can avoid the luck by completing the course quickly enough.

• Morton's Fork: Sometimes happens when enabling and using Dance Invincibility. If a meteor is pushing you off a platform into a Bottomless Pit, you can either stop dancing, letting the meteor kill you, or keep dancing and let it push you to your demise. If you dance to survive the wave in The Pier, it may push you past the final wall into a near-inescapable compartment. Near-inescapable, that is, unless you happened to put an escape portal there.
• Necessary Drawback: You can enable at-will invincibility in the settings. However, it's activated by dancing, so you can't move while doing it, stopping you from just running to the flag while invincible. You can also still be pushed, so you can survive a fatal trap but watch it push you into a bottomless pit. This downside is downplayed in Iceberg, where a boat does much of the movement for you. Enforced if players put blocks or traps in the way of boat-riding players, forcing them to climb or dodge the obstacles and, thus, forfeit invincibility.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: With the right settings and characters, you can have a Zombie Robot Monkey or Ghost Robot Bunny, for example.
• No Antagonist: Other than your friends, there's no bad guy.
• No "Arc" in "Archery": Played straight with the hockey puck launcher and actual crossbows, which fire horizontally, but averted with the flaming tennis ball launcher, which shoots in an arc.
• No-Neck Chump: Chicken and Macaw. Tilting the control stick up has them turn their heads ninety degrees upward with no visible neck.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: All of the player characters die in one hit from any hazard.
• Palette Swap: Handled strangely. All the player characters can switch between several colors, but only if they switch to their alternate forms first. For example, the horse must stay brown, but the zebra's stripes can range from white to orange to pink. Any character can further distinguish themselves with costume items, which are unique to each character + alternate form combination. For example, horses, black and white zebras, and pink and white zebras can all use any combination of the top hat, bowtie, and racing hood. These costume items then have their own palette swaps.
• Platform Hell: You and your friends design a level to be as hard as possible. And then you have to run through it...
• Playable Menu: The Treehouse, from which the players select the game options. It acts like a full level that players can jump and run through.
• Power Up Letdown: The time-slow watch. Slowing time can be useful to navigate obstacles with more control, but it only lasts a few seconds, disappears permanently once collected, and prevents you from placing more impactful items that round. It also gives the same time-slow benefits to your opponents, though they could panic if their gamespeed happens to change in a difficult spot.
• Prehensile Tail: During edit mode, each player is represented by their animal holding a mouse pointer. The chameleon holds its pointer by wrapping its tail around it.
• Press X to Die: It's helpful when a level is impossible but lethal hazards are impossible or bothersome to hit. The precise button varies by controller. The in-game tips explicitly recommend jumping to your death, running into a trap, or holding the give up button for impossible levels.
• Rise to the Challenge: The Transformidable Update adds an option to have rising lava appear if the players take too long to reach the goal. It doesn't have to come from the bottom of the screen, though.
• Saw Blades of Death: Buzzsaws that rotate around act as a deadly hazard.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: The Iceberg stage, which has slippery ice and falling ice chunks from a giant Iceberg. Adding the ice item to any platform gives the same slippery effect. Sadistic players can enable this effect for all surfaces. Silly players can add the ice item to the ice on Iceberg.
• Sniper Rifle: The hockey puck launcher isn't wielded directly, but its projectiles travel near-instantly across the map and though it doesn't deal more damage than anything else, it has the longest cooldown of any "Shooty" object.
• Spikes of Doom: In various forms: floating spiky balls, razors that go up and down a platform and small spiked platforms that flip over once in a while.
• Stalked by the Bell: The wave in The Pier. Optionally, rising lava and/or meteor swarms can be enabled on any stage.
• Stuff Blowing Up: In order of size^note 1x1, 3x3 and 5x5 respectively, a stick of dynamite, a Cartoon Bomb, and a realistic aerial bomb are the objects used to delete other objects.
• Symbol Swearing: One of the quick chat options is a series of non-alphanumeric symbols. Each time you use it, the exact set of symbols is different.
• Taunt Button: Holding R (by default) will make you character dance. Each animal has a different dance and accompanying sounds.
• Temple of Doom: The Jungle Temple stage is a South-American temple featuring Spikes of Doom and a Rolling Boulder trap.
• That Russian Squat Dance: The Monkey will do this dance upon reaching the goal (or if you press the dance button).
• Theremin: The soundtrack for the Old Mansion level includes a theremin, even though it's not really haunted.
• Tiebreaker Round: If two players were to win at the same time, those players have 60 seconds to finish the level again. First one to reach the goal wins.
• Tractor Beam: The Space level has a weak one. Make sure you rise up towards the center, where the flag is.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable:
  • Some new players will do this entirely by accident, either accidentally blocking all paths to the flag or putting one deathtrap too many to reasonably avoid.
  • The Waterfall stage. You start under a huge overhang which holds the flag with nothing but bottomless pit in front of you, and you have to go nearly the entire length of the level on props alone to get on top. It's entirely possible to reach the goal on the first turn in creative, but good luck doing it in a party game even coordinating with the other players.
• Unrealistic Black Hole: This is one of the "Sciency" objects. It doesn't attract blocks to itself, but does affect the paths of arrows and fireballs. Oh, and kills you if you get near it.
• Unstable Equilibrium: Played with. Players with a lead can try to stall rounds until the game ends. They can make the course impossible, making sure nobody gets completion points, or make the course so easy that nobody gets completion points (again). However, this strategy is harder the earlier it is attempted, and the game can award Comeback points to hopefully keep distant games more competitive.
• Unwinnable by Design: Some spiteful players may try to stop everyone winning by placing an obstacle in a particularly awkward spot. Defied by the game itself, as if everyone loses, not even trap points are awarded. Thus, it's not practical unless the player is already ahead.
• Variable Mix: Each stage has two versions of its background music: a calmer version for construction, and a more frantic version with more instruments for play. The game switches seamlessly between both versions as you switch modes.
• Wall Jump: If you're next to a wall while jumping or falling, you'll start sliding down the wall. You can jump off the wall from this position, and, due to the loose Jump Physics, you can turn around in mid-air and jump off the same wall multiple times, letting you climb walls.
• X on a Stick: Buzzsaws, specifically. They rotate in a circle, with the stick letting them threaten a fairly wide area.
• Zombie Gait: Zombie characters move and jump more slowly. They can dance just fine, however.

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