Video Game / Spider-Man (PS4)

Be Greater.

"People see me and think they're safer. But it's not really me they're seeing. Probably for the best. Knowing that everything hinges on a guy from Queens sounds as scary as it feels. No pressure, right?"

— Spider-Man

Marvel's Spider-Man is a Wide-Open Sandbox Superhero Action-Adventure video game, developed by Insomniac Games and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment exclusively for the PlayStation 4 on September 7, 2018. The game marks the first non-crossover Marvel Comics console game after the end of their relationship with Activision. It is the first entry in Insomniac's Spider-Man series of games.

After 8 years of crime fighting and web-swinging, 23-year-old Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man^note of Earth-1048, finally manages to subdue and arrest Wilson Fisk, the biggest crime boss in New York City. While initially anticipating a time of peace, instead the web-head finds out that many smaller parties are eager to fill the void that Fisk left. With a new gang called "The Demons" on the rise, and new villains emerging from the shadows, Spider-Man faces one of his biggest challenges yet as a crime wave sweeps throughout the city, forcing him to fight as hard as he can to maintain peace.

In terms of gameplay, the game takes noticeable influence from the open-world exploration and free-flowing combat popularized by the likes of Assassin's Creed and the Batman: Arkham Series. In terms of story, it's notable for integrating numerous lesser-known characters and concepts from recent Spider-Man comics (Mr. Negative, Yuri Watanabe, Miles Morales, the F.E.A.S.T. project, etc.) with many "classic" elements from the early years of the Spidey saga (Norman Osborn, Otto Octavius, Mary Jane Watson, the Sinister Six, etc.), while also putting a new spin on many famous aspects of the mythos for a fresh feel. Among other things: Peter is a professional scientist instead of a news photographer, Norman Osborn is the Mayor of New York City, J. Jonah Jameson is now an Alex Jones-esque talk radio host, Peter befriends Miles Morales before the latter takes up the mantle of Spider-Man, and the story begins with Peter and MJ having long since broken up.

A prequel novel Marvel's Spider-Man: Hostile Takeover was published by Titan Books on August 21, 2018.

The game released on September 7, 2018. There is also a series of post-release DLC campaigns, collectively known as The City that Never Sleeps:

• The Heist, which focuses on Spidey's on-again off-again rival and paramour Black Cat, was released on October 23, 2018.
• Turf Wars, which sees Spider-Man go head-to-head with the crime boss Hammerhead, was released on November 20, 2018.
• Silver Lining, which sees Spider-Man and Silver Sable team up against a common threat, was released on December 21, 2018.

This version of Spider-Man was later inducted into the Marvel Multiverse as the Peter Parker of Earth-1048. He made his comic book debut in Spider-Geddon by Christos Gage (co-writer of the game's script). It was announced that in March 2019, the events of the game, along with behind-the-scenes paraphernalia and commentary will get a comic book adaptation in Marvel's Spider-Man: City at War, a 6-issue series written by Dennis Hopeless and illustrated by Michele Bandini.

A remastered version of the game, as well as a new Interquel, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, were launch titles for the PlayStation 5 in November 2020. The remastered version was released for Microsoft Windows on August 12, 2022, with noted support for the Steam Deck (via Steams' Proton compatibility tool).

A direct sequel, Marvel's Spider-Man 2, released in October 2023 as a PS5 exclusive. Insomniac is also developing a Wolverine game which will be set in this universe with a tentative release date of 2024.

This version of Spider-Man makes a cameo appearance in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

Previews: E3 2016 Trailer, E3 2017 Gameplay Trailer, PGW 2017 Trailer, PSX 2017 Behind-The-Scenes Trailer

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Marvel's Spider-Man contains examples of:

Tropes A to D

• 11th-Hour Superpower:
  • Shortly into the final Mary Jane stealth segment, she picks up a stun gun, allowing her to taze enemies from behind.
  • Just before Peter goes off to fight the Final Boss, he returns to Octavius Industries and constructs a powerful suit to help him in the struggle. It comes with the suit power Resupply, which continually resupplies your gadgets as long as the ability is active, acting as an Infinity -1 Sword. Said suit is the "Anti-Ock" suit, a metal suit seemingly made out of the same materials as Ock's arms.
• Absurdly High Level Cap: The game has a base level cap of 50, which is already pretty high, but after you reach Level 50, you start to gain "Superior Levels" after every 25,000 XP, each of which gives you an increase of 1 HP and 1% melee damage. Hitting the base level cap is fairly easy to reach (especially with the DLC), maxing out Superior Levels (which also cap at 50) is a massive grind.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Several in the name of gameplay and staying true to the Spider-Man brand.
  • While it's harder to web-sling in areas without tall buildings or construction towers, Spidey can almost always manage to find something tall enough to get himself back into the air, and the player can web zip (basically an air dash) without worrying about needing something to latch onto for it to work. One of Spider-Man's attacks is to kick enemies in mid-air swinging from a strand of webbing, and this can occur anywhere even if there's no reasonable place he could web in order to swing at the right angle to land the kick.
  • Knocking enemies off of buildings will have them get webbed to the side of the building in a manner similar to the Trip Mine gadget. Not only will this happen throughout the game long before that gadget is unlocked, but it will happen even if there's no plausible way for Spider-Man to have attached such a gadget to them (for instance, using the Concussive Blast to knock them back without touching them). But Peter is not one to kill criminals, and it would really stretch the Willing Suspension of Disbelief to claim that that Mooks he regularly kicks off fifty-story buildings into the streets didn't die from the impact.
  • Some gameplay sequences require usage of the Electric Web gadget to short out fuseboxes. In such scenarios usage of the Electric Web is entirely unrelated to the actual combat gadget and won't consume charges.
• Action Prologue: The start of the game has Peter Parker assault Fisk Tower and manage to take down Wilson Fisk, one of the most iconic villains of the Marvel universe. It sets up the plot as well as establishes this version of Spider-Man as a complete badass. The fact the Wilson Fisk fight is one of the better boss fights gets the feeling of being Spider-Man down pat.
• Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene: The action is there, and it's suitably flashy and dramatic, but there are plenty of quiet, emotional moments which serve to flesh out and greatly humanize Peter, the villains, and other people involved in the story.
• Actually Pretty Funny: When Otto's new prosthetic prototype fails and he angrily blames Osborn, Peter jokes that he knows who Otto isn't voting for in the election. When Otto reacts less than amusedly, Peter apologizes for his habit of making bad jokes in tense situations, only for Otto to chuckle and tell him it was actually a good one.
• Adaptation Deviation: The game is set in a clear Alternate Continuity from the comics, with many characters going in wildly different directions, largely taking them from various other universes or adaptations. Peter became a laboratory assistant after leaving his job as a newspaper photographer, Mary Jane works for the Daily Bugle rather than acting or modelling, Norman Osborn is mayor of New York City alongside heading Oscorp, Otto Octavius starts out as Peter's boss and mentor, Miles Morales knows Peter personally and gains his powers while Peter is still alive, mainstay characters die, and The Stinger heavily implies that Harry Osborn is a host of the Venom symbiote. It never being even referenced outside of its cameo makes it likely the symbiote, like in the then-upcoming movie, has not met Spidey yet.
  • In most continuities, Doctor Octopus is one of Spidey's first major bad guys. Here he shows up 8 years into Peter's superhero career.
  • The same goes for Norman Osborn, who despite working on a few gadgets and weapons, has not yet become the Green Goblin.
  • When the game opens, Peter and Mary Jane have broken up after dating for many years, but Norman Osborn hasn't become the Green Goblin yet. From those details, it can be inferred that Peter never met Gwen Stacy — and if he did, she wasn't killed by the Green Goblin.
  • Mr. Negative being a member of the Sinister Six. Mysterio is usually one of the core member of the Six (the exact lineup has fluctuated), as is Sandman. And though they are mentioned and referenced a few times, they are not seen in the game. Doc Ock, Rhino, Vulture, Scorpion and Electro are all fairly frequent members of the team (though Rhino in particular tends to be more frequent in adaptations of the team) so it makes the replacement conspicuous.
• Adaptation Distillation: This game is set in an Alternate Continuity with no direct connections to any prior canon, instead using Broad Strokes from other portrayals of the character a la the Batman: Arkham Series, and thus contains many examples of this trope.
  • Spider-Man himself is a composite of several different versions of the character, having the same general backstory to the comic canon in his postgraduate years (bitten at age 15, has moved out of Aunt May's house and into his own apartment, is friends with Harry Osborn and has dated MJ). Background details imply that his relationship with MJ and Harry Osborn as a Power Trio is based on the Spider-Man Trilogy and the Ultimate Spider-Man series, in that they know each other since middle school and high school respectively, with MJ as both his best friend and first confidant.
  • Peter is based on the John Romita Sr. redesign, and as such resembles Andrew Garfield, his actor in The Amazing Spider-Man Series who resembles that era of Peter the most, compared to Tobey Maguire and Tom Holland who are both based on the Steve Ditko Peter. Likewise, his voice actor is from previous video game incarnations like Spider-Man Unlimited.
  • The PS4 costume is a blend, inspired by the Marvel Cinematic Universe version, with black lines on the joints and a mechanical Expressive Mask with built-in gadgets and a VR Headset, but with white accents that seem to be taken from the black symbiote suit, while the scary-looking large spider logo is based on the Sam Raimi outfit.
  • Peter and MJ have an on-again and off-again relationship much like their relationship during the Wolfman-Stern-Defalco era, the Ultimate comics, and the Raimi films. Like always, Aunt May is a Shipper on Deck for them.
  • Mary Jane is based primarily on her Ultimate incarnation; she has an interest in journalism^note and in the game has actually become a respected reporter for the Daily Bugle, she's Peter's First Love and has been his Secret-Keeper since High School, and her Plucky Girl personality is more in-line with Ultimate MJ than classic MJ's Stepford Smiler party girl personality.
  • Aunt May is given a slight Age Lift in line with the Ultimate Spider-Man and Amazing Spider-Man series retool (Sally Field being the first screen May without a single gray hair).
    • She also works as an activist helping the poor like her Noir counterpart.
  • Like regular comics and the MCU, Peter Parker exists in a world with other superheroes. Notably, the Avengers, Doctor Strange, Jessica Jones, Daredevil, Black Panther, and the Wasp are confirmed to exist in the setting, despite not appearing themselves, and Peter is implied to have had a bond with Tony Stark similar to their dynamic in the MCU.
  • Norman Osborn's turn in this game as Mayor of New York, is inspired by his turn as the leader of H.A.M.M.E.R. and the Thunderbolts which had him becoming a well-known political figure and operative. His rivalry with Dr. Octopus is based on the Ultimate version as well as The Spectacular Spider-Man. Him being involved in Venom and using it on Harry is based on the Ultimate cartoon.
  • The Rogues Gallery is a blend of different Spider-Man eras and creative runs. Some classic Ditko rogues (Norman Osborn, Doctor Octopus, Vulture, Electro, Scorpion), Romita era villains (Rhino, Shocker, Kingpin), Gerry Conway (Tombstone, Hammerhead), Dan Slott's more recent offerings (Mr. Negative, Screwball) as well as anti-heroines by Marv Wolfman (Black Cat) and Tom Defalco (Silver Sable).
• Adaptational Heroism:
  • Eddie Brock makes a name-only cameo as a former colleague of Peter Parker at the Daily Bugle, and seems to have a far more amicable relationship with Peter than his comic book counterpart — signing a card wishing him luck at his new job. However, he's not Venom in this continuity: the symbiote shows up in the stinger, but it's bonded to Harry Osborn.
  • Dr. Morgan Michaels isn't a vampire, instead being a normal scientist at Oscorp, who helps out quite a bit.
• Adaptational Nice Guy:
  • Mary Jane does acknowledge that her father was abusive, but it's implied that he was still better to her than their counterparts in the comic book.
  • Not only is Norman Osborn not the Green Goblin in this continuity - at least not for now - but the after-credits scene reveals he's searching for a cure for his dying son, Harry. Compare that to the Norman of the mainstream comics, who once tried to kill Harry to gain public sympathy.
• Adaptation Origin Connection: The plot has the two main villains, Mister Negative and Doctor Octopus, each driven by a desire for revenge against Norman Osborn; in both cases, this connection to Osborn and, as it turns out, to each other is a new thing created for the game.
• Amicable Exes: Peter and MJ start the game this way, having broken up about 6 months previous. There is some awkwardness as there is clearly still chemistry between them, but they learn to work together as partners and friends and end up getting back together by the end.
• Affably Evil: Martin Li, a mild-mannered, sharply-dressed man who runs a homeless shelter, is actually Mister Negative.
• Again with Feeling: during the final boss fight when Doc Ock reveals that he knew about Spider-Man's secret identity the entire time, Peter is left shocked at first, and then quickly grows mad when he realized that his mentor did all this things to him knowing who he was hurting.
  Otto: Such a disapointment... Parker.
  Peter: (beat)...you knew?
  Otto: I tried to warn you, Peter. But you didn't listen!
  Peter: ...you knew!
  
• Air-Dashing: Pressing the jump button in the air causes Spider-Man to pull himself in the direction he's facing, giving him a sudden burst of speed and just enough height to slow his fall. This "web thwip" is great for building speed while traveling and closing the distance with enemies in combat, but you can only do this once before returning to the ground.
• Air-Vent Passageway: Practically a given for a Spider-Man game, this is frequently used by him to circumvent locked doors and silently take out enemies. Spidey even lampshades it early on, remarking how clean the vents are in Fisk Tower.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Mr. Negative and Dr. Octopus, the two main villains, both get this in the end.
• Alternate Company Equivalent: On account of its inspiration from the Arkham Series, whole parts of the game are patterned on story elements, gameplay, and side missions from that series with Marvel and Spider-Man substitutes in place:
  • The Taskmaster Challenges is essentially the Azrael of this game, based on Batman: Arkham Knight where Azrael copies Batman's abilities and skills and has to pass a trial. Taskmaster's hood and mask ensemble makes him resemble Azrael a great deal in this story.
  • The moment where you visit Black Cat's hideout in terms of the compositions and editing of the cutscene recalls the Hush mission in Batman: Arkham City especially as Felicia's voiceover pans over various items and objects you have investigated.
  • The game's premise is remarkably similar to Batman: Arkham Knight where numerous other members of the heroes Rogues Gallery step up to fill the void following the decline of his major rivals. Also, late in this game, New York is overrun with loose criminals and killer mercenaries, just as Gotham was.
  • Mayor Norman Osborn and Sable International is the Quincy Sharp and Tyger corporation of this game, complete with bizarrely extended authority, and an alacrity in declaring and enforcing martial law, and going totalitarian.
  • In the case of the villains, the Tombstone fight scene echoes Solomon Grundy's complete with wrecking ball that he twirls around the floor. Scorpion is Scarecrow i.e. poison-themed villain whose attacks induce nightmarish visions and features multiple copies to fight in the dream vision, while the vision after you get poisoned is inspired by the Scarecrow sequences of the Rocksteady Arkham games and the Ra's fight also inspires the second boss fight with Mr. Negative.
  • Much like Batman: Arkham City, the game kills off a mainstay character of the Spider-Man canon, one that most people would assume was immune to such a fate. In Arkham City, it was a villain (the Joker) but in this game, it's a heroic character—Aunt May.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: If Peter examines the cork board in May's office at F.E.A.S.T., he'll express his embarrassment at Aunt May keeping his childhood drawings posted there.
• Ambiguous Situation: Regarding the Venom symbiote. We don’t know if it's an alien, an artificial experiment, if Spider-Man and/or Eddie Brock have hosted it before, or how Norman got his hands on it. All we know is that Harry is its current host.
  • A conversation with Yuri does indicate that Spider-Man may have worn a black suit once...
  • Regarding Martin Li. We never learn where he ends and where Mr. Negative begins. The journal Pete finds implies it's a Split Personality of sorts and that Martin has been fighting his dark side for some time and has taken medication for it in the past. But his actions seem premeditated and he also seems to willingly embrace his dark side to get revenge on Norman. It all comes down to whether you think Martin and Negative are one and the same, if there's something else going on, or it's all the result of the accident from his childhood.
  • Does Black Cat have a son or not? And if so is he Peter's?
  • Was the cop with the Spider-Man watch killed by Hammerhead, or accidentally shot by Yuri in the confusion?
• Ambiguously Evil: Norman Osborn, Spidey's most infamous enemy, is the Mayor of New York in this continuity. But despite running on an anti-superhero platform, there's no indication in this installment that he's also the Green Goblin. He is, however, a Corrupt Corporate Executive and a Corrupt Politician on top of that, who's directly at fault for crimes committed by the big three villains of the game. While he is responsible for Li's split personality, the game makes it clear he didn't do it out of malice. He unwisely pushed the treatment schedule up, which resulted in the accident that created Mr. Negative. The game is more ambiguous about who is actually at fault for his and Otto's falling out, and also sets up the Green Goblin for the future, going by the weapon prototypes found in his penthouse.
• And I Must Scream:
  • Sandman is trapped in a vial, and can be found in a backpack webbed to Avengers Tower.
    Spider-Man: Still not sure if opening this would set the Sandman free. But I’m in no hurry to find out.
  • Also, Doctor Octavius' ultimate, implied fate, and the reason he builds his robotic tentacles in the first place. His body is shutting down while his mind is perfectly intact.
    Doctor Octavius: My doctors call it a "degenerative neurological disorder," probably caused by overexposure to toxic chemicals in my... reckless youth.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: Mary Jane Watson and Miles Morales are playable at multiple points in the game. Since neither of them have superpowers like Spidey, they have to rely on their stealth and hacking skills in order to get past the bad guys.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: There are 47 suits (45 in the original PS4 version) available in the game: 28 unlockable costumes in the main game, nine in The City That Never Sleeps DLC (three per story), eight added in as free updates, and two more added to the remaster via a free update. Each costume in the base game^note except for the Dark, ESU, and Homemade suits comes with a unique power, which can be applied to any other costume. In short, acquiring a new suit unlocks a new power as well. To avoid filling this page with a long list of suits, there's now a costumes section on the characters page.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Love the look of a suit, but hate its power or vice versa? Don't bother sticking to just one, as every suit power in the game is an equippable rather than a permanent fixture of that suit, and both are unlocked upon crafting the suit.
  • Like the look of Spidey's tutorial suit (a.k.a. his standard comics outfit)? You can craft a repaired version almost immediately out of the gate.
  • The Accessibility menu allows you to change or remove some optional gameplay features that you don't like or can't use due to disability, such as automatically skipping the circuit and wavelength puzzles, auto-completing QTE sequences, and turning rapid button pressing sequences into just button holds.
  • Both of the Collection Sidequests, finding Peter's old backpacks and Howard's pigeons, have their locations clearly displayed on map. The only mission like this that doesn't display their locations is a completely optional one that doesn't have any bearing on your 100% Completion.
  • If Spidey grabs an enemy's timed grenade that was just about to go off, the detonation of the grenade is delayed so it won't explode in his face, waiting until it hits the spot he threw it to.
  • You can unsubscribe to Jameson's radio broadcasts.
  • You don't have to ace Taskmaster's challenges in order to battle him, simply completing them at any score will do.
  • If you snag a throwable object or enemy and start spinning it around, you won't be a sitting duck. All other foes in the vicinity will pause and stand there while the throw animation completes, even if you use the extended version of the attack by mashing Triangle. The only time you might get punched or shot out of a Web Throw is if the enemy started their attack animation first.
  • During 'Wheels Within Wheels', if you craft the Electric Web after picking up the stun gun and reset the checkpoint before hitting the junction box, the newly-acquired gadget and any immediate upgrades made are not lost.
  • If you alert an enemy squadron of your presence, simply staying out of sight for a few seconds will reset them, allowing you to complete Stealth Takedown goals without having to reload the mission.
  • You don't have to go into the Map menu to mark optional quests or collectibles, simply pressing R3 will re-scan the city and show you the corresponding icons overlaid on the main game screen for a few seconds.
  • New Game Plus carries over all your tokens, allowing you to unlock Challenge Token suits and gadgets at your own pace without having to master the very difficult Drone or Bomb challenges in a single game.
  • Also, on starting New Game Plus, any unlocked gadgets, upgrades, suits and skills are not lost.
  • The New Game Plus also takes up a seperate save slot to the one that was used to create it, meaning you don't lose the original save.
  • For that matter, save games in general! Insomniac had done without them since 2009, but fan pressure on their now-defunct forums had them say they'd add it to their next title (which turned out to be this game). This allows easy replaying of the start of the game without having to lose your original progress (handy for tutorials), and has even resulted in someone 100%ing the game and its DLC on the hardest difficulty on all eight slots.
  • If you activate a focus or stealth takedown, and get attacked by another enemy during the animation, Spidey will become temporarily invincible until the attack animation is finished.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Peter thinks that the ability to bring out someone's negative feelings to turn them evil sounds outlandish. MJ points out how silly this sounds coming from someone who can stick to walls.
• Arc Number: This one's subtle, but it's the number 8. It has obvious significance due to being the number of legs a Spider has.
  • The game takes place 8 years into Spider-Man's career.
  • There are 8 Supervillains you must face as part of the main story: Kingpin, Shocker and the Sinister Six.
  • 8 is the number of limbs an Octopus has, which is the moniker of the main villain Doctor Octopus.
  • And in a meta sense, the game released in 2018.
• Arc Words: "Change the world."
• The Artifact: In the Remastered version on PlayStation 5, the subway loading screens can have this manually invoked by the player. The PS5 SSD load times mean that the game loads so fast there's no need for them, but you can manually enable them anyway, and the game will let the shots play out in full despite already loading everything in one or two seconds.
• Artistic License – Chemistry: The "Hiding in a Crowd" research station mission. No, Peter. Hydrazine is not just dangerous over a long period of exposure. Droplets and gas can cause severe skin and eye irritation, and also risk damage to a victim's lungs. As soon as the canister starting leaking the thief should have keeled over from trying to breathe the stuff.
• Artistic License – Geography: The game is set on Manhattan Island, and the broad geography is accurate (i.e. the Empire State Building and Ellis Island are in the right general area), but it makes numerous changes, while throwing in some additions (i.e. The Raft, Fisk and Oscorp buildings, Avengers Tower, Sanctum Sanctorum):
  • The buildings are proportionally much smaller and more compressed than the real things and some of the streets are much wider, probably due to accommodating street battles and other gameplay events. The map ends with Harlem rather than going further uptown all the way to Washington Heights. Likewise, within the city the geography is shortened by omitting non-landmark blocks — for instance, one block is marked 15th Street, while the next one is 23rd, skipping everything in between.
  • The game features an elevated railway which disappeared in Manhattan in The '50s. Its inclusion here is an homage to Spider-Man 2 and not reality.
  • The game does feature a number of real-life New York architectural landmarks like the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Flatiron Building, but many real locations are under copyright and need license for reproduction, necessitating a few tweaks. For instance, the Freedom Tower is altered and unnamed within the game. In addition, a number of other iconic and significant New York landmarks are missing from the game (most notably the giant Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is replaced with some fictitious museum) while Marvel stand-ins substitute for others. For instance, Trump Tower isn't where it's supposed to be, but the Rand Building is standing there.
  • In a rather funny one, several paper maps of the city you find throughout the story include Roosevelt Island; the only problem is that the island doesn't actually exist in the open world.
• Artistic License – Gun Safety: The taser used in this game still has the ranged cartridge in, but it's used like a contact taser. Perhaps the game's world has advanced models which can work in contact mode even with the cartridge.
• Artistic License – Law:
  • Osborn unilaterally suspending civil liberties with a private (foreign) army, and effectively establishing a police state in Manhattan would be struck down immediately by federal courts, and would probably make him liable for prosecution. In American law, mayors cannot declare martial law - that authority lies with state governors and the President, generally with the consent of the appropriate level of the legislature, and the troops brought in to enforce that law would be either members of the US Armed Forces or the state National Guard (which there are several units of based in NYC).
  • Flying an aircraft over a city without an approved flight plan is against FAA regulations - especially in a post 9/11 NYC. Doing so at street level, with an armed gunship, and actually using those guns would probably be called an armed assault on American soil. Especially since Sable's sole fig leaf for using military hardware in New York, her contract with Osborn, had expired or been revoked months previously. As an addendum, parking an invisible mini-carrier in the Hudson would probably also get Sable in trouble with the Harbor authorities for creating an undetectable traffic obstacle.
  • During the hostage situation at Grand Central Station, the Demons easily overpower the garden-variety cops with handguns. In reality, the station is guarded by straight-up US Army soldiers from Joint Task Force Empire Shield with fully automatic weapons - not ordinary police officers, or even SWAT officers for that matter, thanks to the sheer number of people who pass through it on a daily basis.
• Artistic License – Medicine: When MJ finds the hospital records for Harry in Norman Osborn's secret penthouse lab, it lists several lab results, including the common comprehensive metabolic panel blood test. The results listed were actually for a basic metabolic panel, however, as they did not include Harry's liver test numbers.
• Artistic License – Physics: One research station side mission takes place during a thunderstorm where lightning frequently strikes the ground despite there being tall buildings and metal towers everywhere.
  • If Peter gets hit by a lightning he takes damage even if he was falling through the air and thus not grounded to anything.
• Artistic License – Politics:
  • Two of the landmarks Peter can photograph in New York are the Wakandan and Symkarian embassies. Embassies are typically located in or near a country's capital, so they should be consulates instead.
  • The ceremony at City Hall to honor Jeff Davis apparently does double duty as a re-election campaign rally for Mayor Osborn, which is a complete no-no. Osborn is performing an official mayoral duty in his capacity as the Mayor, and elected officials are not allowed to use taxpayer-funded events as campaign events. Campaigns do use these events for their electoral benefit, but they do so by deploying footage in their commercials or taking advantage of positive media coverage. An incumbent mayor using an official ceremony as a campaign rally would be a major scandal, especially as it involves police officers essentially being treated as props.
  • After Octavius releases the Devil's Breath and unleashes a number of dangerous criminals (including a number of supervillains), Osborn turns over authority to Sable International, and declares martial law. Aside from him doing that being very illegal (as mentioned above), in such a situation (a deadly bioweapon being unleashed in a major city overrun by escaped convicts), authority would likely be turned over to the federal government, who would activate the National Guard and/or the armed forces (or perhaps SHIELD, given the setting), and deploy them to the city. Sable International would also likely be forced to leave, as they are a (foreign) private military company that doesn't have any authority in accordance with American law.
• Ascended Fridge Horror: In-story. One of the things Spider-Man can help out in is car wrecks. Initially, the car wrecks are often described as 'accidents', both by police dispatchers and by Spider-Man. However, the game calls them 'Hit and Runs' and classifies them under Thug Crimes, implying that these were not accidents. Sure enough, once you play enough of these 'Hit and Runs', thugs do start showing up, whether threatening a victim at the scene or being chased down by Spider-Man in the style of the Stolen Vehicle crimes after a survivor revealed them as the culprits.
• Ascended Meme:
  • As soon as the game went gold, Insomniac posted this in reference to the Spider-Man (1967) memes.
  • The announcement of the game's New Game Plus mode and Ultimate difficulty was accompanied by this tweet.
  • An October 2018 patch also included an update to Photo Mode which now allows players to add puddle stickers.
  • One of the posts on Spidey's social media feed in Turf Wars also references "PuddleGate":
    Betty_W: Are we experiencing a drought in NYC? feel like there are fewer puddles than usual.
• Asshole Victim: This is heavily Deconstructed almost to the point of that being a Central Theme:
  • Osborn has done horrible things and is by no means a good person, but the horrible things Li and Octavius have done to him and New York while rationalizing it with 'he deserves it' show how easy it is to justify horrible things once one starts using that excuse.
  • This is continued in the DLC with Yuri, whose Start of Darkness is letting her hatred and desire for revenge on the Maggia consume her. While they're horrible people that undoubtedly deserve punishment for everything they've done, it ultimately is her downfall. This is highlighted when she kills a Maggia enforcer and murderer: while the man was a Sociopath and unrepentant monster and Yuri claims it was justice, one of the first things she says is how much she enjoyed killing him.
  • To a lesser extent in the DLC, Black Cat, who is presented as a Manipulative Bitch playing off Spider-Man's emotional connection to her in order to steal all the Maggia hard drives and break the peace between the mobs. Hammerhead responds by blowing her apartment up while she was in it. Hammerhead who then proceeds to perform numerous acts of cruelty such as executing Yuri's men, trying to drown the rival Dons in cement, and commanding Silver Sable's torture in order to take over the city.
• Bad Influencer: Screwball is even worse than her comic book incarnation. Instead of relatively harmless pranks, she eggs her followers to commit crimes in order to film them, and in the Silver Lining DLC she escalates to committing domestic terrorism by setting up bombs that she threatens to detonate if Spider-Man refuses to play along with her insane games.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • When Dr. Octavius catches Peter working on his Spider-Man suit in the lab, it initially appears that he's connected the dots and realized Spidey's Secret Identity, but it turns out he actually thinks Peter is the one who designs Spider-Man's equipment, something Peter rolls with. It's later subverted when Otto reveals to Peter in the Final Battle that he did know that Peter was Spider-Man for some time.
  • In the bombing at City Hall, both Peter and Miles Morales are knocked unconscious and have distraught loved ones begging them to wake up. Miles does, and Peter doesn't. The next sequence you're playing as Miles while he tries to find his father, and Peter's fate is unknown. Those who have seen Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse are probably thinking Peter is dead and this is a passing of the torch, which is reinforced by the next cutscene at a funeral. However, it turns out the funeral is for Jefferson Davis, and Peter is in attendance, alive and well.
  • After Osborn cuts Octavius' grant, Otto finds other sources of funding. One of which is a company named Advanced Idea Mechanics (aka A.I.M.). One would think this would mean Otto is now working with A.I.M., especially after examining the new contents of the lab, such as advanced armor printers and plans concerning the security on The Raft, but nothing comes of it.
  • The genetically-engineered spider looks like it's going to bite MJ and make her into the Spider-Woman (which is actually foreshadowed by Peter), but instead it just latches onto her for a while then leaves to bite Miles Morales.
  • Peter's employer initially isn't named (and his picture isn't shown when he calls Peter) and is only referred to as "Doc", which would lead one to assume that it's Doctor Curt Connors, whom Peter has often worked with in previous incarnations. It isn't until Peter arrives at the lab that it's revealed that he's actually Dr. Otto Octavius.
  • When Peter enters the lab for the first time, he sees Otto Octavius wearing a harness that resembles his iconic arms. The harness immediately begins to malfunction, making it look like Otto will become Dr. Octopus right there and then. But Peter is able to fix the problem and Otto doesn't become a villain until much later in the story.
  • The Stinger shows Norman going into a secret room and unlocking a mysterious green tank. At first, you'd think that this would be the big reveal of the Green Goblin suit. Instead, it's the reveal of Harry's dormant body with a symbiote latched onto him for life support.
• Battle in the Rain: After the prison break at The Raft, Manhattan is overcast and rainy for a good part of the third act, leading to several of these between Spidey and the various criminals stalking the streets.
• Better the Devil You Know:
  • Discussed early on. Jonah curses Spider-Man for his takedown and arrest of Fisk, pointing out that a gang war to fill the void will inevitably happen; he's proven right when Mr. Negative and the Demons move in and cause far more damage to the city than Fisk's men ever did. Fisk himself declares as such as he's being taken away, shouting that he kept order in New York and that Spidey will be wishing he was back within a month.
  • Spidey will later snark to himself that he is beginning to miss Fisk since he's no longer around to keep his goons in line. And then when the Demons start to become completely unhinged in their attacks on the city, Spidey notes that as bad as Fisk was, he never let his villainy get this out of hand and actually cared about order in the city.
  • Defied at the Playable Epilogue if Spidey completed all the optional missions along with the main storyline. While the villains that tried to take over during the Evil Power Vacuum did do a devastating amount of damage, the city was ultimately about to recover from most of it after said villains were defeated. To a point were three months have passed and Fisk is still in prison and New York was able to get back to normal without him.
• Big Applesauce: The game takes place in New York, as usual, and Peter himself is explicitly from Queens.
  • One of the jaw-dropping elements of the game is how the game-makers incorporated much of the real city as much as possible. While a lot of the neighborhoods have been compressed to improve in-game travel, gamers have been looking out the window thinking "Hey that building across the street looks real familiar..."
  • Mary Jane also voices the typical New York condescension when commenting on Norman Osborn's tacky décor in his penthouse:
    MJ: Ugh, Norman would have a pool. New York is about subway rats and street pizza, not sunbathing and umbrella drinks.
• Big Bad: In the original story, Mr. Negative is the most central threat throughout the story, wanting vengeance on Norman Osborn. Doctor Octopus later takes over, who also wants vengeance on Osborn. The DLC The City that Never Sleeps has Hammerhead as its main villain, who wants to modernize himself and his crime empire to grow larger in the underworld again, by becoming a cyborg.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Mr. Negative and Doctor Octopus.
• Bittersweet Ending: Common as always to Spider-Man, where he has victories at a price and setbacks along the way:
  • Spider-Man saves the city, defeats the Sinister Six, and shuts down the Kingpin and other gangs, and proves he's a hero. However, Aunt May, Peter's only surviving family, dies leaving Peter completely orphaned and totally alone without any parental figures in his life. His mentor, Dr. Octavius not only went evil and unleashed a plague, but also cooled off and disillusioned Peter from working as a scientist out of guilt of aiding his transformation into Dr. Octopus and being used by him to unleash his terrorist plot. His Friend on the Force Yuri Watanabe in the course of the main game and first two DLC, has broken bad and gone vigilante, and like Dr. Octopus, Peter has to give up on another friend. His closest friend Harry is not only revealed to him to be terminally ill but unknown to him is slated to become Venom, while his father Norman Osborn has a long-term interest and fixation on Spider-Man, indicating that Peter will face another close friend on the opposite side of the law.
  • Peter and Mary Jane start out as exes but slowly grow friendly and become a couple at the end of the main game, as Peter learns to accept Mary Jane as a partner, and that her own heroic drive and initiative might bring her to dangerous situations that Peter might not always be able to protect her. By the final DLC, MJ has to go to Symkaria to cover a warzone where Peter might not be able to help her but he admits he trusts her and both of them affirm their love for one another.
  • Miles Morales starts out with a Downer Beginning. He sees his father killed before his eyes while powerless to do anything, by the course of the game, Miles finds in Peter a surrogate father-figure, and after gaining Spider powers of his own, and learning that Peter is the same person as his hero Spider-Man, cheers him up. Peter finally finds someone he can share the burden with, and at the end of the game, he starts training Miles to be his sidekick/successor, and after losing May, he finds someone else who is as good as family to him.
  • In the course of the side-missions and the DLC, Peter manages to shut down the Kingpin's operations, that of the Demons, the Maggia, and Screwball who briefly fill in the Evil Power Vacuum. Peter gains the grudging respect of Silver Sable, finds out that Black Cat is not only alive, but also hasn't birthed his child, and she isn't entirely without scruples since she saves his life. Peter also has an unambiguous Good Feels Good moment when he and MJ help out David Obademi, a Token Good Teammate for Sable's mercenary company.
• Bland-Name Product: The products and Broadway shows advertised in Times Square and elsewhere are fake, presumably because the real things would have been too expensive to incorporate. Likewise the MetLife building is replaced with the Colexo building despite looking the same.
• Bloodless Carnage: Spider-Man gets pretty beat up over the last act of the game, with two separate hospital visits. Despite this, he is never shown with any visible wounds. He also gets impaled twice, but the amount of blood he loses is minimal.
• Book Ends:
  • The first thing Peter does at the beginning of the game is check his phone for a police report about Fisk. After he finishes making the Anti-Ock Suit before the final boss fight, he checks his phone and sees a news report about Octavius taking Osborn hostage at Oscorp Tower.
  • Doubles as a Brick Joke. At the start of the game, Peter's trying to save up for a new laptop. As the ending shows, he finally got that new laptop.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The suit power for the Advanced Suit "Battle Focus", which rapidly fills the focus gauge. This translates to three or six instant takedowns, a rapid full heal, or a combination of the two. It actually gains power as the game goes on, as the focus gauge increases as you go up in level.
  • The suit power for the Anti-Ock suit is "Resupply", which resupplies your gadgets. In the right hands this can be absolutely devastating, allowing you to spam your most powerful gadgets with impunity and take out dozens of opponents in mere seconds.
  • Spider-Man will pick up a bevvy of gadgets and powers over the course of the game, but you'll probably find yourself defaulting to the standard web shooter. It's easy to use, refills quickly and can immobilize bad guys, which is important once the size of the groups you face starts growing uncomfortably large.
• Boss Banter: Unsurprising, given the characters involved.
• Bottomless Magazines:
  • In contrast to most adaptations that use mechanical web shooters, Spidey will never run out of web fluid for traversal or shooting at bad guys (although the latter has to recharge over time). Lampshaded when Spidey finds an early model of his web shooter and remarks he's done a lot to improve the capacity since then.
  • Zigzagged with the gunmen. They can be seen reloading their guns in between barrages, but they never run out of magazines.
• Brain Bleach: When Spidey finds out that the bomb squad Dirty Cops on Fisk's payroll, he quips that he'll never be able to erase the image of them sleeping with Fisk from his head after a poorly timed "In bed with Fisk" quip.
• Broken Faceplate: Near the end of the final battle in the game, Doctor Octopus strikes Spider-Man's mask with one of his mechanical arms, ripping a portion of it off. Peter tries to turn his head and hide his face, only for Octavius to call him by name, revealing he knew Peter was Spider-Man for some time already.
• Broken Pedestal: This is a recurring theme with many of the game's antagonists.
  • Peter is pretty upset to learn that Martin Li, the founder of F.E.A.S.T., is in fact Mr. Negative who has become consumed by his desire for revenge against Norman Osborn.
  • Needless to say, Peter is heartbroken when he discovers Dr. Octavius is responsible for the villainous plots across the game. Their final battle sees Peter crying and shouting that he admired Octavius and expressing horror at the villain he has become.
  • In the DLC, Peter also has to see his former Friend on the Force Yuri Watanabe jump off the slippery slope and get on her way to becoming the vigilante Wraith.
• Brush-Off Walk-Off: Following the Final Battle, Peter furiously calls out his old mentor Otto Octavius (AKA, Dr. Octopus) for throwing away his brilliant mind and genius intellect in favour of revenge on Norman Osborn and infecting thousands of New Yorkers with the deadly Devil's Breath virus, including Aunt May. Otto, powerless to defend himself after Peter removed the neural connection between him and his mechanical tentacles, tries claiming that the AI running the tentacles drove him to commit evil, and begs Peter (who he thinks of as a surrogate son) not to let the authorities send him to prison, where the neurological disorder affecting Otto will eventually leave him with a still-working mind, but an immobile body. Of course, Otto then shoots himself in the foot by reminding Peter that he knows his secret identity, whereupon Peter disgustedly acknowledges that his mentor had always been vengeful and twisted even before the tentacles took hold of his mind, and decides to just abandon him in the wreckage of the building where they landed, to deliver the Devil's Breath antidote to the infected. All Otto can do is helplessly scream for Peter to come back whilst he walks away.
• The Cameo: Good old Stan Lee pops up as a short order cook at the diner where Peter and MJ have dinner.
• Casting Gag: Josh Keaton has gone from voicing the web-head himself to voicing Electro as part of this game's Rogues Gallery.
• Cap: Health has a soft cap; after reaching 200 health, you'll gain just 1 point of health per-level instead of the 10 you got previously.
• Central Theme:
  • The difference between justice and revenge and how people seek either/or. [[spoiler:Doc Ock and Yuri go off the deep end and right into unreasonable, savage murder, and it's heavily implied that they're using
  • As usual, "with great power comes great responsibility". One of the side-missions spells it out when a copycat Spider-Man shows up to do good works in Peter's name, but quickly finds himself over his head when he's not facing regular drug dealers and gangsters and comes face-to-face with Fisk's heavily armed and trained goons who bring rocket launchers to the party. Spidey acknowledges he's trying to do good, but he can't do what Spidey does and must to protect people from supervillains.
• Chew Bubblegum:
  Spider-Man: I came here to web bad guys and quip, and I'm all out of quips!
• Clothing Damage: After the opening mission, Spidey's classic suit becomes damaged, which leads to the creation of the Advanced Suit. The damaged classic suit is available as a suit option afterwards. During the Final Boss Peter's Anti-Ock suit gets heavily damaged, revealing the Advanced Suit and eventually flesh and blood beneath.
• Collective Identity: Discussed. When the real Spider-Man shows up to save the imposter in "Spider-Men", one of Fisk's thugs remarks "I always knew it was more than one guy".
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: All of the major enemy factions have their own signature colors, with most Mooks wearing at least one item of clothing (a shirt, a hat, shoes, etc.) in that color. Garden-variety street thugs wear red, Wilson Fisk's goons wear purple, Tombstone's goons wear blue, the Demons wear black, Sable International troops wear white, and escaped Ryker's inmates (appropriately) wear orange.
• Combat Parkour:
  • Spider-Man can leap around the battlefield with his agility and webs to keep enemies distracted.
  • Black Cat has a very similar fighting style when she teams up with Spider-Man in The Heist.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Under the mask, Peter looks like a cross between Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland (the latter even more so in the PS5 redesign), Norman Osborn bears a resemblance to Chris Cooper, with a bit of Willem Dafoe thrown in, and Mary Jane looks like Kirsten Dunst, to the point that MJ has blue eyes instead of her usual green.
• Coming of Age Story: The late bloomer variety for Spider-Man. Despite his intellect, Peter is still in a mental state of immaturity due to his guilt complex. As he had to grow up very fast and under heightened circumstances to be a hero. Ever since he got his powers, Peter blamed himself for not doing enough to help others and held onto this belief that he's responsible for everything that goes wrong as he can be the only one who can protect his loved ones. Peter's arc of the story is accepting that he can't do everything; Mary Jane can look after herself and he's not responsible for Octavius' actions, as Otto was always in control and didn't spare a thought about collateral damage.
• Company Cross References: And a particularly deep cut one too — One of the tricks you can pull off is the "Spidey McMarx," accomplished by spinning once in any direction before swinging or touching the ground. This is lifted wholesale from the very first installment of Insomniac's Ratchet & Clank series, where one can pull off the "Twisty McMarx" trick by doing the exact same maneuver on a hoverboard. By the same token it makes the trick a reference to the character Skidd McMarx from the same franchise.
• Cool Mask:
  • Peter's mask has mechanically adjustable eyes, helping him control the sensory input from his Spider-sense and emote. One science mission even mentions that Spidey has a lot of high-tech gear in his mask, allowing him to scan, analyse and talk remotely on the phone.
  • All members of the Demons gang wear Chinese-style demon masks.
• Cops Need the Vigilante: Spider-Man actively works with the cops at various points, and Yuri doesn't discourage him from raising a ruckus at Fisk's various bases because they give her a reasonable justification to arrest them. After solving certain crimes involving Mr. Negative's Demons, a cop remarks that he would have originally arrested Spidey for vigilantism, but they need all the help they can get.
• Cosmetic Award:
  • Averted for the main campaign. The majority of the suits unlock an associated special power, which can be equipped independent of whatever suit you have on at the moment.
  • Three suits don't come with their own powers: The Homemade suit, the Dark suit, and the ESU suit, all obtained by collecting a set of collectables (55 Backpacks, 12 Black Cat's cats, and 50 hidden landmarks, respectively).
  • The suits that are added via the DLCs also have no special powers associated with them.
• Cranial Plate Ability: The climax of Turf Wars, the second half of The City That Never Sleeps, sees Spidey's Friend on the Force, Captain Yuri Watanabe, growing increasingly vengeful in her war against Hammerhead, which rounds off with her breaking the law to show up and execute Hammerhead with a headshot. Luckily for Hammerhead (but unluckily for anyone else), he has, as his name suggests, a plate of carbon steel implanted in his skull that shields him from the bullet. That said, the impact of Yuri shooting him close up DOES nearly kill him via heart attack, and he only gets revived due to one of his mooks hiding in the police van with a defibrillator. In the next stage of the DLC, Hammerhead decides to make himself more invulnerable by converting himself into a Cyborg, but the plate in his head is made of weaker metal than the rest of his body, so Spidey is able to heat and soften it with Silver Sable's laser in order to actually hurt Hammerhead with his punches, thereby turning the plate into an Achilles' Heel and subverting this trope.
• Creator Cameo: A lot of Insomniac Games staff show up as fans in Spider-Man's social media feed, including CEO Ted Price. Also, their pictures are used as 'volunteers of the week' at F.E.A.S.T..
• Cross Hair Aware: In order to show when your spider sense is being triggered by an off-screen enemy:
  • Enemy snipers use color-coded laser sights based on what faction they belong to.
  • A shrinking cross-hair will appear over Spider-Man while a homing missile is locking on to him.
  • When an enemy with a firearm is aiming at you, the trajectory will appear as a while line, which turns red at the last moment before firing.
  • Sniper-caliber firearms will display the beam of either a red or a blue laser sight even from many blocks away, allowing you to approach from a more convenient angle.
• Crow's Nest Cartography: The Radio Towers Spider-Man needs to find and hack, which reveal all objectives in their vicinity and allow Spider-Man to respond to crimes in progress. This being a Spider-Man game, there's not that much climbing involved since you'll be web-slinging at rooftop levels to begin with.
• Curbstomp Battle: Spider-Man's first confrontation with the Sinister Six on top of the RAFT results in him getting absolutely overwhelmed by the combined might of the super-villains. The only reason they don't kill him is because they're under orders not to.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: Thanks to the game levelling up the street crime encounters to maintain a reasonable threat for Spidey's current level, you can see gangs of a dozen men with guns and clubs doing convenience store robberies and back alley muggings, which is serious overkill for the crime in question and unlikely to grab enough cash to be worth their time once divided among the whole group.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: In the opening mission, Spider-Man is able to disarm Fisk's goons using his webs, something that you're not actually able to do in the game until you level up and gain skill points to learn it after the mission (unless you're playing a New Game Plus game). Even then, you will only be able to disarm one enemy at a time, when in the opening cutscene Spidey can disarm multiple enemies simultaneously.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Just try to go directly from one of the Batman Arkham games to this one and not hit triangle to try to dodge when Spider Sense activates and perform a web attack instead, or for that matter, vice versa and do a Cape Stun instead of a counter when the enemy's head lights up.
• Dance Battler: A number of Spider-Man's attack animations are very reminiscent of the very dance-like Capoeira.
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to other Spider-Man games, which either had massive destruction but no notable deaths or saved truly dark stuff for alternate timelines, this game has realistic terrorist attacks, bioweapons, and mainstay characters permanently dying. It says something when this Spider-Man is the closest to an M rated Spider-Man so far.
• Darkest Hour: The final act. It begins with a massive riot at The Raft, a prison holding Spider-Man's greatest enemies, resulting in the escape of Electro, Vulture, Rhino, Scorpion, and the recently-incarcerated Mister Negative, who form the Sinister Six under the leadership of the now evil Doctor Octavius. Octavius releases the Devil's Breath virus into New York, infecting and killing many people. Osborn declares a state of emergency as gangs take over the city. Not even Sable is helping as they've created prison camps where they hold citizens hostage. To top it all off, Spider-Man is labeled a fugitive and will be shot on sight even by Sable, who at least tolerated him before.
• Death by Adaptation: May dies after being infected by Octavius' bioweapon. Jefferson is also killed by the Demons.
• Deducing the Secret Identity: Peter's tendency to act the same both in and out of the suit means that while an average Joe likely couldn't make the connection, those who know Peter can easily figure it out. Otto did have the benefit of seeing the broken suit, but his intelligence combined with the hints Peter gives him subconsciously without even noticing (Both Peter and Spidey joke in tense situations, for example) allow him to realize their connection. And since Aunt May raised Peter, she would have little difficulty noticing their similarities. Peter's small social circle is one of the main reasons why his identity isn't more widely known.
• Defiant to the End: See "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
• Degraded Boss: After the boss battle with the Kingpin during the tutorial, you start fighting "Brute" enemies who have similar move sets and require similar tactics.
• Demoted to Dragon: Mr. Negative goes from being the Big Bad of the Demons to The Dragon of the Sinister Six. Within the same game.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • If Spider-Man is talking to someone on the phone, he has two possible deliveries for each line: a "normal" version if he's standing still or walking, and a "strained" version if he's exerting himself by web swinging or in the middle of combat. The game naturally transitions between the two as the situation changes.
  • If Spider-Man is talking to someone on the phone and is interrupted by another event trigger, shortly after the event he'll resume the call that got interrupted, complete with custom dialogue to get them back to whatever specific line of the conversation they were previously at when they were interrupted.
  • A few side-missions use the Spiderbot gadget. If you haven't unlocked it yet, Peter comments they're still prototypes.
  • Just before Mary Jane's first stealth mission in the museum, if you take a photo of the Kakiemonbaku state with Rose Rosemann in the frame, she will blink and act visibly startled by the flash.
  • In 'Wheels Within Wheels', Spider-Man must open the door to a dockside hangar for Jefferson Davis. To do this, he must overload a circuit. Normally, Spider-Man says he doesn't have anything that can provide electric current, so Officer Davis slips a stun gun under the door, allowing Spider-Man to scavenge the capacitors to build an 'Electric Web' gadget. If the player resets the checkpoint for whatever reason after the gadget is crafted and before the circuit is overloaded, then when they get back to that point Spider-Man will say he already has electric webs.
  • During the Snipe Hunt side mission, Spider-Man must save a bunch of Mayor Osborn's campaign assistants from assassination attempts by Demon snipers. If Spider-Man does this mission during Act 3 and beyond where Mayor Osborn brands Spider-Man a criminal and priority target for Sable troops, Spider-Man lampshades that he's helping the very Mayor that branded him an outlaw.
  • During the mission inside Grand Central Station, Oscorp has a booth set up to show off their tech. One of their notable displays is an active-cloaking panel that makes whoever stands on it completely invisible. It's still plugged in when The Demons take over, and it's practically encouraged that you use it during Mary Jane's stealth section.
  • Likewise, the interactive display screens and pedestals with spoken ad copy for Oscorp technology will still function during that stealth section, and can be used to distract and lure enemy guards.
  • There's different subway animations for the third act when all Hell has broken loose; one has Spider-Man riding all by himself, the other two sees him on the outside of the car, while Sable troops check the inside.
  • Being The Cape that he is, Spidey will not attack innocent civilians or Sable troops while they are working together. Pressing the attack button will cause him to shoot finger guns or mock salute whoever he's facing.
  • During several Taskmaster challenges, he's somewhere nearby, watching through binoculars.
  • The conversation between Peter and MJ after completing all the research stations changes depending on if they're done before or after they learn what really happened to Harry.
  • The Iron Arms suit power is unlocked with the MCU Iron Spider Suit, and colored accordingly. Should it be paired with the original Iron Spider Armor from the comics, the arms will be recolored solid gold to match.
  • One series of side missions details Peter tracking down victims of Li who were corrupted at the university party. During the second one it is mentioned that the corruption had a delayed reaction, thus explaining how the missions event's could still happen if the player doesn't immediately tackle these missions.
  • It's possible to do one of Taskmaster's challenges before doing the story mission that properly introduces them. Spider-Man will comment on this, saying he's encountered the challenge boxes before.
  • Spider-Man will adopt a completely different fighting style when up against civilians corrupted by Mr. Negative, focusing on webbing them up as opposed to knocking them out. They're also much less durable, going down in one or two hits, since they're not trained fighters.
  • The turrets on Sable APCs can be disabled with electric webbing.
  • Jewish NPCs appear from time to time on the streets, identifiable by their clothing. If you play the game on a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, they will not appear. Similarly: the player will occasionally encounter Muslim women on the streets (identifiable by their hijabs) who will decline if Spidey offers to high-five them; Islamic culture strongly discourages non-family members of the opposite sex from touching each other.
  • During the mission "Back to School", where Spider-Man attends a Halloween party dressed as himself, one of the party guests will comment on some of the player's costume choices. For example: if you wear the default Advanced Suit (which was created for the game), he'll mock the white spider emblem for being a departure from the classic costume design.
    "Dude, what's with the white spider? Did you get that at the Dollar Store?"
  • During Act 3, when the city is overrun by Sable troops and escaped Ryker's convicts, groups of enemies usually won't respawn if the player takes them out between missions, allowing them to see the fruits of their labor as they slowly restore order to the city. The sole exceptions are the Sable troops guarding New York's bridges; part of Sable's mission is preventing Devil's Breath from spreading outside New York by stopping citizens from leaving the city without permission, so they always have troops guarding the bridges.
  • If the "Stark Suit" (the unlockable costume based on the one that Peter wears in the Marvel Cinematic Universe films Captain America: Civil War and Spider-Man: Homecoming) is equipped during cutscenes, the eyes on the suit's mask will have their own animations, just like they do in the movies—a detail that none of the other suits in the game have.
• Didn't Think This Through: Spider-Man points out that the escapees overrunning the city in the third act didn't think through attacking him very well, given he had no idea where they were and is busy with everything going on, and they'd likely have been able to escape clean if they'd just not attacked him. In addition, a separate quip points out that he arrested most of them in the first place, so they know exactly how powerful he is and their chances of actually beating him.
• Disk One Nuke: Web Blossom. A suit power where Spider-Man jumps in the air and spews web chunks to stick enemies to walls. It's very useful during Act 1, but mooks will carry more firearms later in the game that will easily shoot Spider-Man out the sky mid-move, especially Sable troopers where each individual has a firearm, jet pack, shield, or all 3.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • Norman Osborn is a Corrupt Corporate Executive turned politician who becomes an Ultimate Authority Mayor as the crisis in the city worsens and receives questionable aid from an Eastern European nation (Silver Sable). He also holds large rallies with his supporters, who wear baseball caps to show their support. Left leaning Americans may draw comparisons between Norman and their 45th President Donald Trump, and one of the photos of Norman pinned to Martin Li's Conspiracy Wall is basically a head-swap of a famous '80s-era photo of said president. While Osborn has always been portrayed as kind of an asshole in the comics, comparison to Drumpf does a good job shifting public perception of a mostly static character in the eyes of the target audience. Harsher in Hindsight in that both had to deal with major epidemics and were heavily criticized for mismanaging them.
  • The game features Silver Sable International as a shady PMC with a color-based name, deployed in a kind of war or terror. Much like the organization formally known as Blackwater.
  • The Demons and Doc Ock target large groups of people (Norman's rally at City Hall, Times Square) and transit hubs (the Grand Central Terminal). In a city that has suffered a real-life major terrorist attack in its recent history.
  • The rivalry between Norman Osborn and Otto Octavius strongly resembles the conflict between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple, with a charismatic, successful front man and a more dedicated but less famous hard worker behind the scenes. There's even a photo in the game clearly based on a famous pic of the Apple pair. Also, Otto's degenerating neurological condition will eventually leave him like Stephen Hawking.
• The Don: Several notable antagonists have all held (or tried to hold) this position/title throughout the game.
  • Wilson Fisk was the first to hold this position throughout most of the backstory, including the prequel novel Spider-Man: Hostile Takeover, until the game's first mission/tutorial which saw the arrest of most of Fisk, his gang and several crooked cops on his payroll.
  • Afterwards, Martin Li ended up succeeding him as undisputed crime boss of New York after absorbing the remnants of Fisk's crime empire into his own during the first Act, up until he started his ill-fated attack on Grand Central Terminal.
  • Finally, Hammerhead led a Mob War against the other Maggia leaders during the three-part DLC story, The City that Never Sleeps, as part of his plan to consolidate and expand his own power-base, but after failing to kill them on live TV and forced to convert most of his body to the Project Olympus armor after getting shot in the head by Captain Yuri Watanabe, he ended up terrorizing the city with his remaining gang until Spider-Man, with a little help from Silver Sable, finally ended his reign once and for all.
• Downloadable Content: Three extra "chapters", which feature new missions, new villains and each comes with a few new costumes. They will be released monthly after release, ending in December.
• Drama-Preserving Handicap: For one of the Miles Morales missions right after the rally bombing, Peter was knocked unconscious by the blast to prevent Spider-Man from saving the day as usual.
• Dramatic Gun Cock: Whenever a gun-wielding enemy is about to open fire, this serves as an accompanying audio cue.
• Dramatic Irony: The second Otto Octavius appears on-screen, it immediately becomes clear that he will eventually turn into Doc Ock one way or another, which makes the scenes where he bonds with Peter even more agonizing. Even worse, the circuit board and spectrograph minigames at the lab have Peter building components or researching materials that work towards the development of the cranial interface and the octopus arms.
• Dual Boss: Electro and Vulture as well as Rhino and Scorpion.

Tropes E to Q

• Early Game Hell: For a first-time player at least, the early stages of the game can be pretty punishing thanks to Spidey having low health along with few to no gadgets, the difficulty in recovering health when you're not experienced with the game's controls, and the complete lack of Mercy Invincibility meaning that even one screw-up against more than a small handful of enemies can lead to you losing most, if not all of your health in a matter of seconds. Once you've got more health, some gadgets, and learned some extra moves, however, the difficulty quickly levels out.
• Earn Your Fun: The game is fairly forgiving for casual players just wanting to follow the main story, but that won’t give the player enough Skill Points and Tokens to unlock Spidey’s entire arsenal. That’s where the side content comes in, and quite a few of the missions are more challenging than what mainline story missions can throw at the player.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Spider-Man completing all of the side-activities means that Peter Parker has managed to break the back of organized crime in the city. Subverted by the DLC which shows that it manages to attract even more bad guys to fill the role. A Spidey's work is never done.
• Enemy Chatter: Most base assaults and stealth missions will have at least one pair of enemies discussing their organization or recent events.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Early in the game, Otto Octavius walks in on Peter fixing his Spider-Man suit. Because Peter is a prodigy scientist with a particular knack for, as Otto calls it in an audio log, guerrilla science, Otto assumes not that Peter is Spider-Man himself, but that he's the designer of Spider-Man's equipment. The fact is that at the end of the game Octavius reveals he knows who Peter is; it's entirely possible that he figured out the truth to this early, but opted to give Peter an out in order not to make him uncomfortable.
• Equipment Spoiler: Averted. After you've unlocked and upgraded all of the gear and such, you will have a modest to significant surplus of tokens left over.
• Even Evil Has Standards: One Sable outpost has you go up against a squad of agents who use property seizure laws to effectively rob New Yorkers blind. Yuri's comments indicate that the Sable higher-ups aren't too fond of them, are perfectly willing to kick back and watch Spidey take care of them, and intend to prosecute them after he's done.
  • Jameson's tone changes a bit once Devil's Breath is unleashed on the city and Sable begins operating like an occupying force. He forcefully criticizes Sable's behavior and denounces their violations of constitutional rights. Still rants about Spider-Man, of course.
• Evil Power Vacuum: The basic plot. After Spidey defeats the Kingpin, several supervillains make power plays for control of New York.
• Evil vs. Evil:
  • Mr. Negative is in a gang war with Kingpin. On the milder side of things, Doc Ock and Mr. Negative have grudges against Norman Osborn, but that ultimately drives the former into villainy.
  • After the Sinister Six form and the entirety of the local supermax prison escapes, Sable International puts the city under martial law and proves to be just as bad as the criminals. As a result, the criminals and Sable often end up fighting one another, something Spider-Man lampshades, pointing out if he stops one side the other will definitely also try to kill him.
  • The titular 'Turf Wars' from the second DLC consists of Hammerhead vs the other other Maggia crime families. Spider-Man comments when finding pictures of them in Hammerhead's first hideout that all of them are horrible people in their own ways. Upon finding out Hammerhead intends to kill the other dons, Spider-Man's comment is less about protecting them because they in any way deserve it and more about preventing Hammerhead from having complete control over the Maggia.
  • Several of Screwball's DLC missions see the Maggia show up in the middle and start fighting her 'fans' as well as Spidey.
• Expansion Pack: The three-part DLC, The City Never Sleeps, follows the fallout from the main story. With the city once more at peace and the Demons no longer running roughshod, the remaining mob families are now trying to carve up Fisk's empire.
• Experienced Protagonist: This Peter Parker is 23-years-old, with 8 years of being Spider-Man under his belt.
• Expressive Mask: Spider-Man's eyes can visibly emote as the black outline seems to close over the white like a camera shutter. The brief glimpses a player gets of the inside of the mask show that this was an intentional choice by Peter. Using the "Selfie" camera in Photo Mode even allows you to select one from a multitude of possible expressions, like angry, sly, or surprised, if the suit's eyes follow the classic style.
• Expy: Mary Jane seems to have become one for Superman's love interest Lois Lane, right down to even looking quite a bit like Erica Durance who played Lois in Smallville. Notably, Peter isn't with the Bugle anymore as he's left to pursue science, so she ends up allowing for them to maintain a connection to it.
• Face Framed in Shadow: Done to Peter himself at the end of the game when he's about to use the Devil's Breath antiserum to cure a dying Aunt May even though doing so will doom thousands of New Yorkers to die without the vaccine it could create, his face is completely hidden in shadows to highlight the selfishness of the act. However, it's subverted when Peter realizes he can't go through with it and steps back with a pained cry, allowing Aunt May to pass away, and bringing himself fully out of the shadows.
• Fantasy Landmark Equivalent: The Avengers tower replaces the MetLife building in Midtown Manhattan. Furthermore, Fisk Tower, where the opening of the game takes place, is a stand-in for Drumpf Tower, fitting Fisk's Trumplica status in this game.
• Female Gaze: When pulling cars off of civilians, the game lingers as Spidey's rear is in center frame. Even In-Universe, you can spot several female citizens commenting on how good he looks in his tights on Spidey's own social media feed no less.
• First-Episode Twist: The first major plot development after the Action Prologue is that Peter is working for Otto Octavius, who is still friendly (for now) towards Peter in this continuity, something that was never so much as hinted at in pre-launch media.
• First-Name Basis: This version of Spider-Man nearly always refers to his enemies by their first names, at least when face to face with them. This is both to annoy the more belligerent ones, and to always try to keep a personal connection with the ones he hopes to redeem. He also consistently calls May by her first name when in nearly every other incarnation he always calls her Aunt May.
• Fisticuffs Boss: The final confrontation with Otto, after he crushes your web-shooters, has you square up on the side of the building and start brawling with him, occasionally dodging his remaining tentacles.
• Flunky Boss:
  • In the first and last fights with Mr. Negative he will continually spawn shadowy mooks to attack you.
  • Kingpin, Tombstone, and Hammerhead call in their subordinates at various points during their respective boss fights.
• Foe Romance Subtext:
  • When Fisk is webbed to the wall Spider-Man hangs from the ceiling and says "Is this the part where we kiss?".
  • Screwball by the time of the 3rd DLC seems to develop a one-sided crush on Spider-Man, saying lines like "I think I'm in love." every time Spider-Man progresses in her challenges or her attitude during combat challenges.
• For Halloween, I Am Going as Myself: The "Back to School" mission has Spidey looking for a professor at Empire State University during a Halloween party. Fortunately for Peter, he's already in costume.
• Foregone Conclusion:
  • That Otto Octavius' work in mechanized limbs will lead him to becoming the super-villain Doctor Octopus, known for his mechanical tentacle arms, will come as no surprise to anyone with cursory knowledge of the comics and their various adaptations. The game instead focuses on the interactions between Otto and Peter, and Otto's fall from grace.
  • Averted with Norman Osborn. Despite his lack of morals, unethical research, and obsession with biosciences being a core part of the plot, he doesn't become the Green Goblin during the game as audience might expect - though references to the Goblin abound.
• Foreshadowing: Plenty, especially when it comes to Otto Octavius.
  • When we're first introduced to him, he's shown wearing a harness that's connected to a couple of large, thick wires; they look just like tentacles.
  • For a genius, he sure seems incompetent, and Peter as a result is a Hyper-Competent Sidekick who fixes most of the problems Otto causes. Otto isn't in complete control of his body, as his muscles are slowly decaying, causing his arms to twitch and his joints to stiffen. Making small and precise adjustments are pretty much impossible for him.
  • When Otto re-opens the lab, Peter can see plans for the Raft, which Otto explains as a new security system he's working on as a side project. He also has new 3D printers printing out armor - which he explains is for a military contract which he took on the side to fund the lab. An overhead screen also shows his plans for a "rapid delivery" hypodermic, with Peter snarking on its huge size. Peter can also find a pair of circular welding goggles, and comments how fond Otto is of them as he wore them in his youth. At one point, he can even find a green, reinforced full-body suit, which Otto claims is also for welding. Come the reveal, it's obvious the plans were for plotting the escapes for the Raft, the armor pieces were him designing Electro's new armor, and the giant needle was for Scorpion's new and improved stinger. The goggles and suit, of course, complete Dr. Octopus's ensemble.
  • During the breakout on the Raft, Mr. Negative reminds the Sinister Six that their leader (Ock) told them not to kill Spider-Man. It doesn't make a lot of sense for him to be spared, considering what a danger to their plans the web-slinger poses, until the later reveal that he knows perfectly well that his assistant and only friend is under the mask.
  • While Spider-Man is frantically gathering antidote ingredients after Scorpion stabs him, Scorpion calls him. Spidey asks how he got his number. While Scorpion points out he may be part of the hallucination, it's entirely possible Otto gave him the number, a sign of him knowing Peter's secret all along.
  • Speaking of which, [[a hallucinatory Otto shows up once Spidey gets to the ingredients. While he at first laments the neural implant driving him crazy, before getting the second ingredient, Otto boasts that the neural implant allowed him to be his true self. This, one of Spidey's worst fears, winds up being exactly what happened.]]
  • Some of the research stations foreshadow the reveal that Harry isn't actually in Europe and that he's suffering from a terrible illness. In some of the messages he left for Peter, he can be heard audibly coughing and seems to choke up when he says that he's going away. And if all the stations are completed before the reveal, Peter and MJ will have a conversation about how they've had no contact with Harry ever since he left.
  • When Peter goes to ask Martin Li about the demon mask. Li makes a surprising jump from describing the mask to claiming it could belong to dangerous people, and that Peter and MJ should drop the story. Peter attributes this to the mask stirring old memories of Li's parents and spooking him, while MJ (correctly) suspects he's hiding something.
  • In the first battle with Mr. Negative, he tries to cut a deal with Spidey, "one life for a city of souls." At the end of the game, Peter gets forced into weighing that bargain, albeit without Li. However, instead of it being Norman Osborn for the city, it's Aunt May.
  • Black Cat's side mission directly foreshadows The City that Never Sleeps DLC, with Felicia having financial records of the Maggia crime families.
  • In The Heist DLC, for someone whose son was kidnapped by a crime boss, Black Cat seems a bit too relaxed about the whole thing. Either coyly flirting with Spider-Man or balking at the mere idea he wants to help her. After defeating a group of thugs looking for leads, while Spider-Man is trying to ask about her child (who could possibly be his own son) Black Cat can only talk about how much she missed spending time with him and trying "go straight" for his sake. Most of this is easy to spot during a second playthrough, since it foreshadows her lying about having a son to trick Spider-Man.
  • The name of the fake weapon that Spidey learns Mr Negative is supposedly using to steal the antiserum, that is truly just to get Spidey into position for the trap at Ock's hideout subtly foreshadows the fact that Vulture is lying in wait as a failsafe. The weapon's name is Icarus. The legend of Icarus is of a boy who built himself wings that allowed him to fly, which is what Vulture did as well.
  • After the RAFT Breakout, May calls Peter for help with thugs laying siege to F.E.A.S.T, a task someone like Spider Man would be more suited to handling than Peter, and never calls him about never showing up, all foreshadowing the reveal that May knows that Peter is Spider Man.
    • Also, May has, in addition to Peter's childhood drawings, several crayon drawings of Spider-Man in her office. Assuming Peter did not make six-year-old-level drawings of Spider-Man after the age of 15 when he became Spider-Man, these drawings are by children who are fans of his. Their presence hints that not only is May aware Peter is Spider-Man, she's extremely proud of him.
• Fragile Speedster: Spider-Man needs every bit of his speed and agility to avoid taking hits to his rather fragile health pool.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: While Peter is certainly sympathetic towards Otto Octavius & Martin Li, he still makes a point to them on how what they are doing is also wrong, and they still have the blood of innocent people on their hands.
• Friend of Masked Self: When Dr. Octavius concludes that Peter is the guy who supplies Spider-Man with his gadgets, Peter is only too happy to play along, since it's better than admitting that he is Spider-Man.
• Friend on the Force:
  • Yuri Watanabe serves as this to Spidey, keeping in contact with him as the story progresses.
  • There's also Officer Jefferson Davis, father to Miles Morales. He battles Demon gang members alongside our hero, and even saves Spider-Man's life at one point. Davis' death is the main catalyst that brings Peter and Miles together.
• Friendly Fireproof:
  • Hilariously averted for the Mooks. They will happily toss grenades and fire rockets at Spidey in the middle of combat while he is surrounded by their cohorts. Spidey can either fling them back at someone or dive out of the blast radius and watch it open up the Mooks for a beatdown. Armed enemies will also not bother to avoid hitting other enemies while shooting at Spider-Man. Enemies armed with rocket launchers will shoot at Spider-Man even if he's standing next to them, a move that will affect them as much as him. It is fairly common for a thug to get shot by his teammates, and little blotches of blood will spurt from him for every bullet.
    • You can even use this in the boss fight with Rhino and Scorpion and listen to them argue with one another over it.
  • Similarly, when Sable first enters the city, they will happily unload into the Demons, even if Spider-Man is in the way, despite supposedly being on the same team.
  • Occasionally, the game will spawn a Demon ambush on a rooftop next to a Fisk construction site. If a thug or a Demon happen to walk within engagement range, they will happily shoot at each other while you watch from a distance. In the game's third act, Riker escapees and Sable troops will do the same thing—and they WILL kill each other if allowed, with Spider-Man gaining experience from each defeated unit.
  • No matter how much a player may want to, Spider-Man cannot intentionally harm the innocent bystanders of New York.
  • An actual instance of friendly fire-proofing: PDNY officers cannot harm Spider-Man (or hostages, if you interrupt a bus hijacking and a gunfight ensues) even if he stands directly in the path of their gunfire, but they will easily take down Demons or Riker inmates. Police officers themselves are also immune to enemy gunfire.
• Friend-or-Idol Decision: Spidey gets hit with one near the very end of the game: Aunt May is dying from the Devil's Breath and is hanging on by a thread. Peter can give her the cure, but there is only one sample of said cure, and it would take more time than she has left to synthesize more of it to aid the thousands of other infected. Pete's choice is twofold: cure Aunt May and condemn thousands to die, or let Aunt May die so thousands can be saved. Ultimately, he chooses to let Aunt May pass away, saving New York in so doing.
• Full-Conversion Cyborg: The City That Never Sleeps DLC focuses on Hammerhead undergoing cybernetic conversion following a brutal shooting at the hands of Yuriko. Apart from his head, the majority of his body is a gigantic heavyset mech.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • Mr. Negative's first boss fight is very easy, with very telegraphed and easily evaded attacks. In-Universe, Li hasn't been a super-villain for very long at all and never fought another superhuman before, so him making novice mistakes fits with his experience level.
  • During the first Scorpion fight, Spider-Man is actually hallucinating, revealing many of his personal issues and mental trauma to the player. If the player has the perfect dodge upgrade then every time the player dodges, perfect dodge activates. Even if the player is not being attacked. Sometimes projectile acid will appear under Spidey's feet. This helps create a sense of paranoia, as per the effects of the toxin.
  • Electro and Vulture have a Villainous Friendship, while Rhino and Scorpion hate each other. In their boss fights, the former pair will attempt to rescue each other when Spider-Man is attacking them, and can only hurt each other when Spider-Man actively redirects their attacks or themselves into each other, while the latter pair's attacks can hurt or even defeat each other. The latter pair even have special voice lines when harming or KOing each other.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Both MJ and Miles can go into Selfie mode, and use the selfie light, during stealth missions where they're surrounded by death troops and murderous criminals.
  • Many side quests changes the time to either day or night. You are free to complete as many of these quests as possible, even when there's something urgent you have to attend to in the story.
  • Midway through the game, Peter and MJ's relationship hits a rocky point where they aren't communicating, but there's nothing to prevent the player from taking on the Demon bases during this point in the story, where Peter and MJ communicate with witty banter as if nothing's wrong between them.
  • Spidey starts Act III with fourteen broken bones, and his injuries continue to get worse from there. There are absolutely no changes to gameplay to reflect any of this.
• Gender Flip: A minor one. Peter's landlord Mr. Muggins was actually a woman, Mrs. Muggins, in the comics.
• The Ghost: The Avengers, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Iron Fist are mentioned by Spider-Man and other characters but never appear in the flesh. Their respective headquarters can be visited in-game.
• Giant Mook: Brutes will block most direct attacks and need to be either webbed up or slid under for you to land hits on them. If you attempt to zip into them with a Web Strike, they will just pull YOU in and clothesline you. They also need 2 focus bars for a takedown, much like other special enemy types.
• A Glass in the Hand: Norman is listening to the news after Devil's Breath is released in Times Square, as Mary Jane reveals Oscorp developed it. Moments later, the whiskey glass in his hand shatters, drops of blood hitting the floor.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: The "Devil's Breath" is a revolutionary medicine to target and correct genetic disorders. Unfortunately, Oscorp hasn't been able to get the part about correctly distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy DNA strands working yet, so in its present state it's functionally a horrible bioweapon.
• Gratuitous Foreign Language: The Demons speak within a spectrum of perfectly good Mandarin and awkwardly-strung together Chinese words. Fitting given that most of them aren't actually Chinese since they're just a bunch of random people Mr. Negative brainwashed.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Spider-Man can learn a skill that lets him hammer toss enemies after they've been webbed up or electrified. They clear other enemies out from around him while he's spinning them, then do extra punishment upon being thrown. Another skill allows him to judo-throw enemies, which will hurt any of their buddies if they get in the way.
• Ground-Shattering Landing: It's possible to pull this off if you jump from a great enough height.
  • Spider-Man can also learn a skill where, if he's high enough in mid-air, he pulls himself down to the ground with his webs, creating a shockwave that stuns enemies and delivers a small amount of damage. Upgraded versions of this skill allow it to be used from any height, increasing both the damage and range of the shockwave.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy:
  • During stealth segments, bad guys have really bad peripheral vision, but most are wearing vision-hampering masks and helmets. However, they fail to notice their pals vanishing unless they actually see the bodies, or until someone asks for a status report only to get no response. The police who failed to see multiple Demons in plain sight in Grand Central also have no excuse.
  • It's bad enough that they can't notice Spider-Man, but when Mary Jane, a twenty-something with no superpowers or infiltration training, and Miles, an everyday teenager equipped with nothing more but a souped-up phone app, are able to sneak past supposedly elite mercenaries? Osborn clearly wasted his money hiring these clowns.
• Hard Truth Aesop: You can't save everyone, some people can't be reasoned with and can't be saved from themselves. You can't take responsibility for someone else's wellbeing and you certainly aren't responsible for the choices they make, the best and only thing you can do in this situation is to just stand up to them and leave.
• Hate Plague: Mr. Negative's "corrupting touch" is said to bring out the 'negative' part of people and make them do things they would never normally do.
• He Knows Too Much: One of the side-missions has Spider-Man be informed by a female bird-watcher of strange activity at Belvedere Castle, which will turn out to be Fisk thugs installing a worm into the Central Park Wi-Fi system. The bird-watcher aids Spider-Man stopping the worm from uploading, first when he tries to chase down pigeons for a flash drive containing all the information on what is going on, and then when he has to defeat Fisk thugs at three junction boxes to prevent the worm from uploading remotely. Eventually, the thugs get wise to what the bird-watcher is doing and try to kill her, forcing Spider-Man to deal with them.
• Heist Clash: The "City That Never Sleeps" DLC has the Maggia crime family attacking an art museum to obtain a rare painting. Spider-Man shows up to confront them, only for Black Cat to break in and grab the painting while Peter fights waves of Maggia Mooks. As it turns out, Black Cat isn't interested in the painting itself but what is inside the frame: a flash drive which she plans to use to gain access to the entire Maggia's wealth.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: As revealed by the story trailer, Spidey will face opposition from both criminals and law enforcement. Actually subverted for the most part in gameplay: both the public and the police force regard Spider-Man as a hero despite J. Jonah Jameson's constant attempts to tarnish his rep, although a few individual cops you meet in optional missions waver back and forth in their opinion.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: Peter considers himself to just be "a guy from Queens". Which happens to be a Shout-Out to Captain America: The First Avenger, where the eponymous hero says a variant of this quote.
• Heroism Won't Pay the Bills: As usual, Peter loves crime fighting but it interferes with his daily life enough that he barely manages to make ends meet and ends up severely behind on his rent. In the middle of the story, his landlord ultimately kicks him out and he's forced to crash on Aunt May's office couch at the F.E.A.S.T. center for the remainder of the game. He does manage to get a new place once the events of the story pass and everything settles down.
• High-Altitude Battle:
  • The Final Battle with Dr. Octopus takes place at the top and on the side of Oscorp Tower.
  • The fight with Electro and Vulture takes place in the air above a factory, with Spider-man swinging between smokestacks.
• High-Five Left Hanging: In the Silver Lining DLC, after Spider-Man and Silver Sable take down a bunch of Hammerhead's thugs, Spidey tries to solicit a victorious high five from Sable twice. She relents on the third attempt and gives him a pretty hard high five.
  • Doubles as a Visual Pun. Spidey is hanging upside down the first time she leaves him hanging.
• Hollywood Law:
  • A downplayed version. One mission, Internet Famous, has Spider-Man hunting down QR codes and completing challenges so a streamer going by the name "Screwball" can get more views. At the end when the police clean up she states she technically didn't do anything herself so she shouldn't be in trouble and the officer seems to agree from a legal standpoint. She gets Spider-Man to do this by pretending there is a kidnapping victim, legally having coerced Spider-Man into helping her by claiming a false crime when it's revealed she's the one she 'kidnapped', one challenge is 3 separate cases of coordinated assault by her fans which, even if she didn't encourage them to fight, she still doesn't say anything to try and get them to back down and even praises them for their "devotion" which would easily get called for a minimum of "disorderly conduct" for her broadcasts inciting violence from people who are clearly fans of hers even if there is no legal proof of encouraging the act itself, but it could still be ruled "accessory before the crime" for encouraging them to assault someone who is technically a civilian who had done nothing to aggravate them. Finally one of her fans dropped three bombs in an urban area, a terrorist act, which she shows knowledge of and never reported to the police, meaning she'll most likely get another accessory charge for it. Due to these incidents being live and Screwball announcing them it's almost a sure bet they'll have more than enough evidence to arrest her and take it to trial.
  • Yuri needs Spider-Man to recover data from Fisk's servers in the prologue in order to make his arrest stick. This is while Fisk's security forces are attacking the police with assault rifles and rocket launchers, and also having bombs planted all over the tower, which is shown to have killed both civilians and officers, while Fisk also has plans to escape the whole scene by helicopter. Just the resisting arrest charge on top of shooting at the PDNY in broad daylight with full news coverage would be enough to put Fisk away for life. This is lampshaded on Spider-Man's social media feed, where Fisk's lawyer claims there's no evidence he did anything wrong, only to have someone point out the private army engaged in a massive firefight with the police. When Fisk's lawyer tries to say those men had nothing to do with Fisk, the other user retorts that they were wearing shirts that said "FISK".
  • Osborn shutting down Octavius Industry's grant funding in his position as mayor while simultaneously holding the position of CEO of a company that includes a division that is in direct competition with OI (to the point where he blatantly and openly steals away the man testing Otto's prototype prosthetic for Oscorp Robotics right in front of him) is legally and ethically dubious. However, it's doubtful that Otto would have had the resources to sue over this.
  • Peter's eviction in Act 1 is more or less a direct violation of New York housing law. In the state of New York, a landlord must take a tenant to court if they wish to evict them. Peter's landlord simply serves him a written notice that his rent is overdue (about the only thing he does right) and then proceeds to change the locks and throw out Peter's personal belongings about a day later. Changing the locks and taking Peter's belongings out of the building is technically a Class A misdemeanor.
• Homeless Hero: Peter gets evicted midway through the game after not keeping up on his rent. He spends the rest of the game either sleeping at the F.E.A.S.T. Center or MJ's apartment. Or the hospital.
• Honor Among Thieves: The idea that The Mafia has a "code of honor" is shouted down by Jameson, of all people, who got his start as a journalist breaking big stories about The Maggia. He points out that The Maggia was more than happy to ignore its code the moment it became inconvenient for them, and they're basically just a group of thugs and criminals like any other.
• Hope Spot: After finding the flaws in the neural link, Peter manages to talk Otto into going slower and removing it in order to fine tune it. Unfortunately, as soon as Peter leaves, a news report about Norman Osborn claiming responsibility for Li's defeat comes on and sets Octavius off, resulting in him turning the link back on and smashing the television in a rage.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Silver Sable is portrayed throughout the game as a smart, capable badass, to the extent that she even beats Spider-Man in multiple cutscenes. Which makes it pretty amusing that it seems like she exclusively hires men for her security firm whose brutishness is exceeded only by their incompetence.
• Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: The game is obviously set in October/November, given that one of the missions takes place at a Halloween party that Mr. Negative turns into a riot by corrupting several students.
• Hypocrite: Many of the goons that are being fought tend to say Spidey is "unfair" when he uses his gadgets (especially the Spider-Drones) at them. This is coming from a group of people teaming up to attack against ONE person, with some of them wielding batons, guns and rocket launchers.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels:
  • Friendly, Amazing, Spectacular, and Ultimate. Yes, adjectives used to describe Spidey.
  • Similarly, the achievement levels from challenges are Amazing, Spectacular and Ultimate.
  • Level-ups after level 50 are called Superior.
• Impressed by the Civilian: Miles' first encounter with Spider-Man (in costume, at least) happens as Miles is attempting (and failing) to subdue some thugs. After defeating the thugs, Spidey complements Miles on his bravery and gives him a few quick fighting tips before swinging off.
• In-Universe Game Clock: The game's clock and weather are determined by the story, so a traditional day/night cycle doesn't exist, but once the game is beaten, the player gets to control these options via a separate laptop in research stations.
  • A few specific Challenges, side-missions, and Research Station minigames, automatically change the time of day to a more dramatically-appropriate one, then revert to whatever conditions you were in before the side quest.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Pretty much all of the major characters with the exceptions of Peter, MJ, Yuri, and Fisk are modeled after their voice actors.
• Instant Cosplay Surprise: When Spider-Man finds Black Cat's hideout, he's puzzled by the black suit she left on the workbench. Then he listens to her recording, and as soon as she mentions leaving the suit for him to wear, he's suddenly —and to his great surprise— already wearing it, regardless of what he had on before.
• Interface Spoiler: Averted: a cutscene during the Raft breakout mission has a whole line for Spider-Man listed if you have the subtitles on, but he only gets to say half of it before being attacked by Scorpion.
• Ironic Echo: "You knew?" Two instances concerning someone who figured out that Peter is Spider-Man:
  • First said to Doc Ock, with Peter enraged that Otto had been trying to kill him despite knowing that his friend is under the mask.
  • Later said to Aunt May, with Peter heartbroken that she's dying and he can't save her while she glows about how proud she and Ben are of him for being a superhero.
• It Always Rains at Funerals: Officer Davis' funeral is coated in pouring rain, and the grim weather covers the open-world landscape as Spider-Man perches somberly afterward.
• It Was a Gift: At the beginning of the Turf War DLC, one of the cops on Yuri's team is wearing a non-regulation watch with a Spider-Man face. He sheepishly admits his son gave it to him. Unfortunately he's also the last cop to die in the initial raid to capture Hammerhead.
• It's Always Sunny at Funerals: Aunt May's funeral occurs on a sunny day as Anti Serum vaccines are distributed to add to the bittersweet feeling of a city at peace at the cost of Peter's only family.
• It's Up to You: Despite the game featuring references to the Avengers, Doctor Strange, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Daredevil, and Jessica Jones, Spider-Man is completely on his own when it comes to saving the day. None of the other heroes actually show up no matter how high the stakes become.
• Jerkass: The ESU student dressed as Rhino during Back to School who acts like a meathead jock and insists on fighting Spider-Man under the assumption that he's another student in costume despite Spidey wanting none of it. Even once he clues in that it was the actual Spider-Man in the in-game social media he just stubbornly insists he could've taken him, completely blind to the fact that him holding up Spidey cost him valuable time he could've used to save Dr. Delaney from Li and the Demons, costing the man his life.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Has its own page now.
• Joke Item: A literal example. One of the late game suits comes with the "Quips" power, in which Spidey makes a terrible dad joke mid-fight that staggers nearby enemies.
• Just Giving Orders: After Screwball is arrested, she cries out to the police that she did not actually commit any crimes and that it was her "fans" (the goons she hired). One of the officers thinks she has a point.
• Karma Houdini: Heroic variant. Mary Jane's journalistic methods involve impetuous and outright deceitful tactics, such as when she lied to the woman at Fisk's auction by claiming to be from a completely different news source than the Daily Bugle. Mary Jane states that her antics repeatedly get the Bugle into legal trouble, but instead of getting fired she's promoted several times.
• Keep the Home Fires Burning: Averted with Mary Jane, as their relationship-ending conflict was, instead of her being sick of Peter being in danger, she was sick of him trying to stop her being in danger in her efforts to be an Intrepid Reporter.
• Kung Fu-Proof Mook:
  • Thugs with crowbars, Demons with scythes, and Taskmaster/Sable troopers with shock batons will block all attacks, and even if their guard is broken they can counter-attack after being hit this way. Air launchers (or, if you purchase it, the Shield-Breaker skill for your Swing Kick) will leave them vulnerable.
  • Brutes will block a majority of your attacks, throw you off balance if you try to web strike them, and cannot be thrown without a late-game upgrade^note which requires you web them up first, whereas you can throw every other enemy on this list. It will cost 2 focus bars for you to perform a finisher on them^note Which you don't unlock until mid-game, and they are immune to the chain finisher upgrade. You should web them up or throw an object at them to break their guard.
    • Minigun brutes have all the immunities of a normal brute. Their mini gun cannot be disarmed, and they cannot be thrown period. No upgrade allows this. They have an unavoidable counter-attack ready should you try to web strip them, break out of webbing easier, and will block everything unless you throw something at them or electrocute them.
  • Demon, chain, and plasma Whip-men will destroy all webbing and gadgets thrown at them and dodge all Spider-Man's attacks. They will also pull him out the air anytime he attempts to air combo or web yank them into the air. They can also restrain Spider-Man's arms allowing other mooks to beat up the superhero. They also take up 2 focus bars for a finisher. Make them vulnerable by throwing something at them.
  • Demon swordsmen are weaker than Whip-men, but will still dodge a majority of Spider-Man's attacks and also take up 2 focus bars for a finisher unless something is thrown at them.
  • Sable troopers have Powered Armor that increases their HP and makes them immune to webbing. They must be electrocuted, hit by their own shock grenades, or have their armor broken with a throwable item, to be made vulnerable.
    • Sable gear Hammerhead thugs share this same trait.
• Lampshade Hanging:
  • One of the backpack pickup has Peter stating that rather than taking the cash reward for winning the Wilson Fisk Science Award, he instead accepted a "lifetime supply" of backpacks.
  • Electro's attack on the Upper East Side police precinct is an elaborate set-piece requiring Spider-Man to disable a series of electrical transformers that Electro apparently had transported to the site for the occasion, including several being flown about under helicopters. Most of Spidey's quips during the fight are about how needlessly complicated the set-up is and how much specialized preparation it must have required.
    Spider-Man: I have so many questions.
• Laser-Guided Karma: By the end of the game, Norman Osborn is forced to resign from the Mayor's Office due to the severity of the Devil's Breath scandal, and his company is badly damaged, (and some dialogue lines from MJ in The City That Never Sleeps insinuates that it might be irreparable) due to its handling of the virus. The only thing that prevents from being put in a prison cell is because the evidence that really shows him personally engaged in illegal actions were destroyed by him and Silver Sable, are items that only Spider-Man has knowledge of, which would be impossible to show to a court, or were gained from knowledge by MJ illegally entering his personal property.
• Laser Sight: Sniper enemies utilize an unusual variant that emits directly from the lens of their weapon's scope.
• The Last Straw: While Peter worked for J. Jonah Jameson for years with little complaint, it wasn't until he started smearing Spider-Man for a string of cop-murders by Electro did he put his foot down and leave.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Dwight Schultz reprises his role as the Vulture from Spider-Man: The Movie (released more than 15 years before this game), and his first line is "Long time no see."
• Left Hanging: One side mission has Spider-Man trying to track down Felicia Hardy/Black Cat who has left taunting recordings and clues for him to follow in the form of small cat figures. Eventually Spider-Man finds her hideout with lots of stolen goods and finds out she distracted him in order to break in and steal her old gear while he was occupied, meaning she's planning a come-back for unknown reasons. However, she doesn't appear again in the core content; that's kept for the DLC.
• Legion of Doom: The Sinister Six, composed of Mr. Negative, Scorpion, Rhino, Electro, Vulture, and a mysterious leader later revealed to be Dr. Octopus take a major antagonistic role for the final part of the game.
• Lensman Arms Race: A number of backpack items are bits taken from his super-villain foes, and analyzed to create a counter... but Pete laments that they "always upgrade, don't they?".
• Lethal Joke Item: After completing the main game, the Undies outfit is unlocked. While having Spider-Man in only his mask and underwear is utterly ridiculous, the costume's ability is to knock enemies out with a single punch, but at the cost of Spider-man dying if he were to get hit even once.
• Loads and Loads of Sidequests: Not only are there a lot of side missions, endless crimes return. However, crimes do not respawn until you stop 5 crimes from each of the 4 gangs in the district. After that is done, the game will endlessly create random crimes in that district.
• Logo Joke: One half of the "O" in the Insomniac Games logo floats away before being pulled back in by a web.
• Made of Iron: Even by Spider-Man standards, Peter resuming heroing the very next day after taking a savage beating at the hands of the Sinister Six, leaving him with fourteen broken bones, is astonishing. Also speaks to his Determinator level of dedication to saving the city and Dr. Octavius.
• Make Way for the New Villains: The Demons as compared to the Kingpin and his cronies. Justified, as the Kingpin's empire was in tatters due to Spider-Man's efforts, and Mr. Negative wanted to make use of Kingpin's extensive arsenal and resources.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Lampshaded. Scorpion calls Peter during his mad dash for antidote ingredients, but wonders if he's really part of the hallucination.
• MegaCorp: Oscorp Industries, as per usual (although different in its origins, being a joint venture between Otto Octavius and Norman Osborn when they were coming out of college as business partners). This fact grates on Dr. Octavius, as he thinks that the success its had is due to Norman's cynical capitalist approach to science as opposed to the work that he does through Octavius Industries; beneficial to mankind but leaving him largely in obscurity and relative poverty.
• Menu Time Lockout: You can swap out your suit, suit power, and gadgets at any point during combat.
• Mercy Invincibility: As has become increasingly standard for modern action games, completely absent. This means that if you take on any reasonably strong enemy without a firm grasp of the Perfect Dodge, you will get beaten to a bloody pulp in short order.
• Mind-Control Eyes: Hinted at in the lead-up to the Shocker boss fight.
  Yuri: Looking at the security footage, the guard [who let Shocker out] was in some kind of trance. And it might have been the lighting, but it looked like his eyes were glowing.
  Spider-Man: Well, that's creepy.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot:
  • In the main game, a robbery at an auctioneer's is followed by the Shocker robbing banks, a prison break, attacks on Fisk properties and the bombing of City Hall, in that order. Spider-Man discovers that this is all because one of the cities' most prominent figures wants to take down Mayor Osborn, and said person is perfectly willing to endanger others while doing do.
  • There is a side-mission where Spider-Man has to help a woman figure out why her husband is acting weirdly. He discovers that the man is being blackmailed, and it is soon discovered that a gang that the blackmailer and an old friend of the blackmail victim belong to are planning to rob a casino in Atlantic City. The gang were threatening to connect the man (who works at the casino) with a crime his friend had committed so he would give up the casino plans.
  • Another side-mission hints that the New York crime system going down before the events of “Keeping the Peace” was committed by Dirty Cops to cover up an attempt to spring Wilson Fisk from the Raft. The side-mission is unlocked by rebooting the Financial District towers, and involves Fisk henchmen jamming the system regionally in three locations. After destroying the jammers, Spider-Man is directed by a tower technician to a pier where Fisk agents are smuggling in equipment to disguise themselves as armored prison guards, then has to deal with both the smugglers and a group of henchmen who had arrived to collect the disguises and armaments. The possibility had been hinted at in “Keeping the Peace” itself, where Yuri says that her colleagues believe someone on the inside sabotaged the central server controlling the towers.
• Minus World: New Jersey. The bridge leading into it is incomplete, traffic u-turns back towards New York at a certain point, you can't swing onto any of the buildings (which are just cut-outs), the terrain is just seawater hiding beneath a ground texture, and you can only get around by "swimming" until you finally fall through the map.
• Mirror Boss: In the second fight with Taskmaster he will employ your own finishing techniques against you. Fitting, given his powers.
• Mission Control: A side mission involves Spider-Man being informed by a bird watcher lady named Stephanie about some thugs in Central Park, who it turns out want to hack into the park's Wi-Fi access to therefore hack into people's phones and the like to obtain all their personal info. From her vantage point, Stephanie serves as Spidey's mission control while he takes out the thugs.
• Moment Killer: Peter and MJ broke up at a point before the story starts, and for the first few acts of the game their relationship is fractious. After Miles and MJ save Peter's life during the evacuation of the Harlem FEAST center, Peter and MJ have a quiet conversation where they each apologize for how they've been behaving and are on the verge of opening up to each other and properly mending their relationship when Miles butts in to ask if either of them wants a drink.
• Moment of Lucidity: When Otto's mechanical tentacles are revealed to be affecting his mind, Peter immediately tries to talk him out of using them for fear that he would be driven insane. Otto violently lashes out stating that "for the first time, [he] doesn't feel like a failure" but is thankfully convinced to do more testing and deactivates the harness. Then Peter leaves, and Otto sees Norman Osborn on TV bragging about stopping Mr. Negative himself, leading Otto to angrily reactivate his harness and smash the TV with his arms, setting out for revenge.
• Mood Whiplash: The first part of the game is nothing out of the ordinary for Spider-Man (Spidey puts The Kingpin in jail then the power vacuum introduces a new antagonist who instigates a turf war). However, during Osborn's reelection rally, things take a turn for the dark when a suicide bombing breaks up the event, followed by the Demons converging on the scene and slaughtering any survivors. You play as Miles Morales during this section and he has to watch several innocents being killed in front of him, having to crawl through an overturned car with a dead woman's body hanging from the interior, and ends with Miles finding his father dead. Peter also takes a severe thrashing in this scene, which adds to the gravitas. For a superhero game, this sequence is a jarringly accurate depiction of a terrorist attack, with destruction, chaos, and death everywhere.
• Mook Chivalry: Nope. Enemies will happily mob Spidey and even street thugs will take him down quickly thanks to a lack of Mercy Invincibility. Spreading out crowds and spending time in the air are vital skills.
• Mook Debut Cutscene: Each new Demon mook is introduced with a brief cutscene where they stroll menacingly towards Spider-Man and show off their unique super-move. Spider-Man gets to duke it out with the mook one-on-one so the player can get an idea of their moveset, then one of the same enemy pops up with a wave of standard enemies for the real fight.
• The Multiverse: According to Spider-Geddon #0, the universe of this game has the official designation of Earth-1048.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: Reminiscing about when he used to work at the Daily Bugle, Peter says that his colleagues there included some really great people. And J. Jonah Jameson.
• My Suit Is Also Super: Most of the alternate skins that can be unlocked come with their own unique Suit Power. These powers can actually be switched if one prefers the look of one but not its power or vice-versa.
• Mythology Gag: Has its own page.
• The Needs of the Many: What Peter ultimately does with the cure for the bioweapon. He studies it and has it mass-produced, thus letting his Aunt May die. The other option was instead to save her with the cure, potentially letting everyone else die.
• Never My Fault: In one of his radio broadcasts, J. Jonah Jameson admits that he helped fund the project that created the super-villain Scorpion, but insists that he isn't to blame for how it turned out. He didn't know the Scorpion experimental subject would be crazy. And besides, says Jameson, "I was just trying to create an anti-menace to deal with Spider-Man!" Either way, Jameson refuses to accept any responsibility for Scorpion's rise.
• Never Trust a Trailer: In the trailer, Spider-Man learns that Martin Li is the leader of the Demons during the helicopter chase from Fisk's construction site. In the game, Martin is replaced by a random Demon Swordsman. As if lampshading this change, Fisk's answer to Spider-Man asking him who leads the Demons is changed from "You're about to find out." in the trailer to "Maybe he's there. Maybe he isn't."
• New Game Plus: Wasn't included at launch but Insomniac added it in v1.08. In patch 1.13, it was added that you can NG+ again from a completed NG+ file.
• New Media Are Evil: Zig-zagged. Screwball's dangerous and narcissistic antics make her the game's Hate Sink, due to her complete disregard for human life in the search for clicks, and JJJ is a Know-Nothing Know-It-All podcaster ranting without evidence about Spidey's supposed evil deeds. On the other hand, Peter, MJ, and Miles use their smartphones to talk and text normally throughout the game, and Miles even makes an app for his that helps him on his stealth missions.
• New York Is Only Manhattan: The island is the only playable area. Granted, it's gigantic enough to be a game world onto itself.
• Next Sunday A.D.: The story begins some time in October 2018, about a month after the game's release. The epilogue after the main story occurs three months later, which would take place roughly January or February 2019.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed:
  • J. Jonah Jameson has more than a few parallels to Conservative commentator Alex Jones, spouting similar rhetoric (though with his usual Spider-Man-related stuff added in, in similar deliveries as Jones), having his own radio show like Jones, and even showing similar political tendencies. He does, however, demonstrate genuine care for the people and, after initially supporting Norman and Sable, starts to express disgust when they devolve New York into a police state after the Raft breakout.
  • Norman Osborn becoming Mayor of New York seems like a nod to Michael Bloomberg, another billionaire turned NYC mayor. The police under his command are even criticized for stop-and-frisk policies.
• No Cutscene Inventory Inertia: Averted the majority of the time. Even the pre-rendered cutscenes show Spidey in whatever suit he had equipped going in, and each has its own "damaged" mesh. This trope receives an explanation when it looks like it'll be played straight: when Peter goes to gear up for the Final Boss, he's always wearing the Advanced Suit, but the boss itself reveals he's always been wearing his equipped suit underneath that one. The only time this trope is truly played straight is in the intro cutscene during New Game+, where Peter gears up in his original costume, but swaps to the one you were wearing on the original file once the cutscene reaches the part where he jumps out of his apartment window.
• No Fair Cheating: A savvy player may try activating a suit power and then quickly switching it to one that has a faster cooldown time to avoid the wait (for example switching from "Resupply" to "Quips"). However the game still forces you to wait out the full cooldown of the last power used, even if you switched abilities.
• No-Gear Level: One side activity is a Timed Mission sans your ability to web-swing, testing your other traversal skills.
• Nonstandard Character Design: In comparison to the other realistically-rendered costumes, the Vintage Comic Book Suit and Spider-Clan Suit are cel-shaded, making them clash against the rest of the game's aesthetics. The Spider-Clan Suit also gives Spidey more cartoonish body proportions.
• Non-Standard Game Over: In certain missions, there are non-lethal ways to fail, such as allowing an NPC to die or a particular enemy to get away. Should you do so in such a way, the screen suddenly fades to black and a special suit interface message will flash indicating the specific non-standard failure reason.
• Noodle Incident:
  • One of the Rhino's aliases is "Santa Claus". No explanation is given.
  • Spidey mentions encounters with several members of his Rogues Gallery that don't appear in the game, which include Chameleon, Mysterio, Sandman, and The Lizard.
  • One of the quips Spidey may spout against enemies with the "quips" suit power has him promise them cupcakes if they stand down; according to Spidey, it apparently worked before, but we don't learn the details of that incident.
• No Sympathy: Mary Jane does not react well to the possibility that Peter might be the father of Felicia's non-existent son, basically giving him a terse kiss-off and hanging up on him after he tells her. To her credit, when given time to think she recognizes that her reaction was unfair, as she and Peter were broken up when he was dating Felicia, and Peter must be tied into knots worrying about the situation (and we know he is). She later apologizes to him and Peter graciously accepts, an exchange which is used to demonstrate the strength of their relationship and the increased maturity of both characters.
• Not His Sled: The game throws a few twists to the usual Spidey formula.
  • Norman Osborn, while definitely a bit of a dick, isn't nearly as corrupt as usual, loves his son enough to dedicate his life to find a cure for his condition (to the point that he prepared a Healing Tank to keep him alive), and he isn't the Green Goblin yet. If it wasn't for his unethical business practices, his alliance with Fisk, and the human tests he's performed, he'd arguably be a good guy.
  • Aunt May, famous for avoiding death in most Spidey media, succumbs to the Devil's Breath and is Killed Off for Real.
• Not So Above It All: Yuri is mostly just exasperated by Spidey's "Spider-Cop" schtick, but in their first conversation during the post-game free-play, she's the one who spontaneously says that this looks like a job for Spider-Cop. (Then again, a few seconds later, she's regretting having encouraged him.)
• Obfuscating Stupidity: When Otto finds Peter in the lab with Spider-Man's suit, he seems to assume that Peter is only Spider-Man's suit and equipment crafter, and not the man himself. During the final battle between the two of them, Otto makes it clear he figured out Peter is Spider-Man, meaning he was acting dumb to calm Peter's nerves.
• Oh, No... Not Again!: Following the auction house incident, Robbie Robertson sends an angry message to MJ about her “antics”, and she tells Peter she’ll be seeing the legal team - again.
• Offscreen Villain Dark Matter: Averted. All of the major criminals in-game have extensive bankrolling, sure, but the various base missions display all the effort they've done to fund their plans, either through drug dealing, arms dealing, or taking things from other drug/arms dealers.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted with the game having three Eddies: the Eddie Brock who's referenced as having worked at the Daily Bugle in the past, and another Eddie who works for the sanitation department who Spidey contacts upon needing to locate some of his lost gear. The third Eddie runs a pizza shop from which Spider-Man orders pizza during The Heist DLC.
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot: There's a pretty jarring one right at the beginning of Miles' first day working for F.E.A.S.T., when one particularly ornery shelter resident belittles his father's heroic sacrifice. Thankfully Peter is in earshot and politely exposes the man, prompting him to immediately apologize.
• Optional Stealth: While Spidey does have some sneaky takedown options at his disposal, and using them to take out dangerous targets like snipers is encouraged, the only penalty for getting spotted is being forced into direct combat. There are only a few select missions that will fail if you're spotted, and the game makes sure you know which is which.
• Out-of-Genre Experience: Miles' final mission, where he's trying to escape from Rhino, has some elements of Survival Horror to it.
• Le Parkour: It's Spidey, after all, and an experienced one too. He can even run up the side of a building.
• Parodies for Dummies: One of the collectible backpack items that can be found is a book owned by Peter that's titled "Work/Life Balance For Idiots". the cover says it sold over three million copies.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": The clue for the keypad code to get into the secret room in Norman's penthouse is "Harry's Last Day", this being the day Harry went into treatment long-term when Norman was telling everyone his son went to Europe. MJ deduces that it is "0718" based on the last entry in Harry's journal, dated July 18th.
• Photo Mode: Can be turned on at any point and camera can be switched between "free", "orbit", and "selfie" types with a lot of stickers to choose from.
• Player Nudge: When you load up a save file, Peter will give a voice line summarizing the current situation and what he has to do next. He will also do this if you linger too long on side-missions or just exploring the city without advancing the main story.
• Please Wake Up: During "And The Award Goes To...", after the Demons blow up City Hall, we see from his perspective that Miles's mother is desperately calling his name in a desperate attempt to wake him up. On top of that, we see MJ frantically attempting to wake up Peter, who shielded MJ from the impact of the blast. Even when Miles awakens to look for his dad, Peter remains unconscious as MJ remains sitting beside him.
• Plummet Perspective: When Doctor Octopus has taken Norman Osborn hostage and is threatening to drop him off the top of the Oscorp Tower, there's a moment something falls out of his pocket and the camera watches as it falls toward the street far below.
• Pocket Protector: One of the mementoes Peter has stashed in backpacks around the city is a thick physics textbook with a bullet hole in it, which he says saved his life one time when the police were convinced Spider-Man had gone rogue.
• Point of No Return:
  • Enforced with the "Crimes in Progress" side missions. If you fail one, you don't get the option to retry it; the criminals just get away with the crime. And then, to really rub it in your face, J. Jonah Jameson will take a call where a civilian agrees that Spider-Man isn't that big a hero after all.
  • The game warns you when you approach the marker to begin the final mission, saying it's the last chance to level up skills or gadgets before the postgame.
• Police Are Useless: Zig-zagged. The police largely trust and ally with the masked vigilante, accepting his help to investigate criminal activity, act as a first responder and provide back-up where needed. How effective they are on their own is debatable: they make a decent showing against street-level gangs, but they're vulnerable as any mere mortal when outgunned, whether by heavy munitions or superpowered threats. Even then, they can at least hold them off long enough for Spidey to arrive.
• Poor Communication Kills: In "Uninvited", MJ, having sneaking into a Sable compound, approaches Charles Standish, who is being held there, and asks him about Dr. Michaels and Devil's Breath. Because of his previous experience of being forced to hand over information on Dr. Delaney to the Demons, Standish assumes MJ is working with Martin Li and points a gun at her. MJ defuses the situation slightly, but Standish holding the gun at her naturally causes Peter to think that a Sable agent has caught her when he comes looking for her, which leads to him unwittingly preventing Standish from warning MJ about a potential Demon threat to Grand Central that Sable are overlooking - a foreshadowing of the events of "The One That Got Away".
• Post-Script Season:
  • In an odd variant, this Spidey's adventure will continue over in the comic book event Spider-Geddon with an issue 0 being devoted to this web-head. He meets up with the Superior Spider Man, an Otto Octavius in a Peter Parker-ish clone body. It's revealed that Norman Osborn resigned as mayor after the events of the game and Peter takes Otto to meet his counterpart, humbling the man somewhat.
  • There's also the City that Never Sleeps DLC, which involves Spidey dealing with Hammerhead making a power play and starting a gang war amongst the Maggia.
• Powered Armor:
  • A lot of the villains have a high-tech, armored look. According to Electro, the gear is one of the perks of working with the Hidden Villain. "It's an exclusive club..."
  • Several of the unlockable suits are based on the "Iron-Spider" and "Spider-Armor" concepts.
• Precision F-Strike: Done with the word "shit" by one of Tombstone's goons. Other than that, there are a few "damn"s scattered about the script, some characters come close to finishing "Son of a...", and the F-word is avoided completely.
• Primary-Color Champion: As usual, Peter's superhero costume is red and blue, with black and white accents.^note With more white than black this time around.
• Prison Level: One sequence of the game has Spidey swinging in to help rein in a massive prison break on the Raft engineered by Doc Ock in which a number of his most infamous enemies escape custody.
• Prison Riot: Spider-Man first meets the Sinister Six during one of these, as Electro stages a mass breakout on the Raft.
• Projectile Webbing: Spidey's bread'n'butter. The basic gadget allows you to shoot off a volley of web projectiles that, if accumulated on a foe, will incapacitate them. A different gadget hits a foe with a web projectile so dense that it sends them flying backwards. A perfect dodge often results in Spidey pegging a foe in the head with a shot, instantly stunning them. One of the early-acquired Limit Break powers is "Web Blossom", which paints the room with webbing, ensnaring everyone around.
• Punk in the Trunk: One of the Thug Crimes you can complete is 'Kidnapping', where Spider-Man must rescue a kidnap victim from the trunk of a car, then beat up the criminals responsible.
• Quick Time Event: The game features QTEs during certain cinematics or side activities. However, unlike certain other titles that heavily feature QTEs, this one lets you turn them into cutscenes if you wish to do so.

Tropes R to Y

• Rage Breaking Point: One of the backpack collectables is a Daily Bugle article of Jameson accusing Spider-Man of being responsible for the deaths of five people Electro killed. Since he used Peter's pictures to "back up" the claim, that was the last straw that caused Peter to quit the Bugle.
  • His breaking point with Doctor Octopus is reached when he finds out that Otto knew the entire time that he was Spider-Man, and that their friendship meant nothing as he sacrificed countless innocents and knowingly put Peter's loved ones in danger in order to see his revenge through. Parker's initial disbelieving "You...knew?" has more hurt in it than anger, but the second ("You KNEW!") shows that Spider Man is absolutely pissed, and from that moment forward he's playing hardball with Doc Ock with no restraint.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Otto gives Osborn one as he dangles him over Oscorp HQ on national television upon refusing to tell the truth, right before dropping him and catching him again as a means to manipulate him via "fear, then relief". Osborn doesn't back down and gives Otto a brutal speech more scathing than any physical pain Otto or his fellow Sinisters had ever inflicted on Spider-Man since, angering Otto into dropping Norman for real.
  Otto: Everything you have is built on lies! LIES! [drops and catches Norman] You stole my company, my ideas. Now... the truth...
  Norman: The truth... okay. The truth is, you were only ever worth a damn when you worked for me! The truth is, you could never accept that I'm better than you. You're a failure, Otto. And you always will be.
• Reconstruction: Much like the MCU movie, this game reconstructs Spider-Man's relationship with the public. Yes, he has his haters and J. Jonah Jameson is still trying his best to defame him but for every person who hates Spider-Man there's a person who sees him as a hero and is inspired by him.
• Red Herring: A couple times, a conversation will have a group of six villain mugshots appear, implying that they will team up as the Sinister Six. The first time is after arresting Shocker, and it shows him, Kingpin, Vulture, Electro, Rhino, and Scorpion. After arresting Mister Negative, the same group is shown, only with Mister Negative instead of Shocker. In the back half of the game, The Sinister Six does assemble, but it consists of Mister Negative, Vulture, Electro, Rhino, Scorpion and Doctor Octopus. Shocker and Kingpin were both misdirections in those group shots.
  • After Spider-Man discovers Doctor Octopus' secret hideout, there's an invisible map where Otto details his plan to take down Osborn. The biggest arrow indicates that Mister Negative would take the antiserum with something called the "Icarus". Soon after, Otto reveals that there was no "Icarus", and it was simply a misdirection designed to stall Spider-Man long enough for him to blow up the hideout.
• Regenerating Health: Played with in that the only way you can regain it is by doing various combo moves to fill your focus meter, which can be used to either perform finishers or regenerate health you lost during the fight. It also refills a certain amount following side missions.
• Rejection Projection: As his Sanity Slippage continues, Doctor Otto Octavius begins claiming everyone is against him. He even begins rejecting the advice of his trusted lab assistant Peter Parker. By the end of the game, he directly accuses Peter of betraying him. In a twist, however, he isn't completely wrong: because of Peter's Chronic Hero Syndrome, he's constantly showing up late (if at all) to their lab, forcing Otto to do experiments on his own without Peter there to focus on safety.
• Replay Bonus: Some of Aunt May's dialogue takes on a new meaning after the reveal that she's known that Peter is Spider-Man for some time, particularly when she asks him if Mary Jane knows the "real" Peter after Mr. Negative is arrested.
• The Reveal: Two in regard to Harry Osborn. The first is that it's revealed late in the game his reason for going to Europe was that he developed the same degenerative brain disease as his mom and the second is that he never went to Europe at all. He was put in suspended animation by his dad... with the Venom symbiote.
• Revenge Is Not Justice: Dr. Octavius wants revenge because Norman Osborn ruined his career years ago and continues to cause trouble for him even after. When Octavius's tentacles begin to chip away his inhibitions, he becomes more and more desperate for revenge. At first, Peter assumes that it was the tentacles manipulating until he discovers that Octavius was always in control and he knew all along that Peter was Spider-Man. Finally realizing that his friend and mentor was willing to sacrifice countless civilians to hurt Osborn and that their friendship meant nothing to him, Peter finally drops the special treatment and defeats him.
  Otto: You should be on my side!
  Peter: I WAS!
• Reverse Escort Mission: One mission sees you play as an unarmed Mary-Jane and sneak around armed guards while Spider-Man distracts and silently knocks out whichever guards are the greatest threat to you.
• RPG Elements: Has a level up system and a skill tree, in addition to various skills, both active and passive that you can use to your disposal.
• Rule of Symbolism: When Peter is about to use the sole dose of anti-serum to cure Aunt May instead of using it to create more doses for the rest of New York, his face is covered in shadows to show this is his darkest moment. When he resists the urge, he reels away from the IV stand back into the light.
• Run, Don't Walk: A dead sprint is basically your default speed, and it can be actively hard to walk ten feet without overshooting your target.
• Sad Clown: Spider-Man remains steadfast as ever in this continuity. Not hard to understand with Peter's numerous personal problems including, but not limited to, his rent problems, on/off relationship with MJ, and his respected mentor, Otto, turning evil. He doesn't call it the ol' Parker luck for nothing. Peter even confesses his habit of making jokes in tense situations to Otto in one scene.
• Sadistic Choice: Peter is forced to choose between the life of his aunt or the lives of everyone else in New York. He chooses everyone.
• Save the Villain:
  • Spider-Man tries to save Black Cat from Hammerhead's trap despite her having just betrayed and lied to him. Black Cat is genuinely confused by the act.
  • During Turf Wars, Spider-Man repeatedly has to try and save the other Maggia dons from Hammerhead. Notably, Spidey outright states they're all horrible people, but can't allow Hammerhead to gain total control over the Maggia's resources, as he's plenty dangerous without them.
  • When Yuri attempts to execute Hammerhead, Spider-Man tries to save him. While it fails, he does end up deflecting the gun into Hammerhead's reinforced forehead rather than the unarmored part Yuri was aiming for, which is likely why he was able to be revived.
• Scenery Porn: Manhattan landscape in an Open Sandbox game. And you get to web swing through it.
• Scoring Points: Many of the short side-quests in the game give players a score based on how quickly they beat it, how many enemies they beat, and other factors relevant to the challenge. These side-quests include the enemy bases you have to clear out of Mooks and the fights and races enemies like Taskmaster and Screwball set up for Spider-Man to defeat. The higher your score, the more tokens you get, which you can use to buy upgrades and new costumes.
• Secret-Keeper: Played for Laughs when Otto catches Peter with the broken Spidey suit and determines that Peter works for Spider-Man. Played Straight with MJ who is the only person Peter told about being Spider-Man, however, Peter later reveals his secret to Miles when Miles develops spider-powers of his own.
• Secret Secret-Keeper:
  • As she's dying, Aunt May reveals to Peter she's known he's been Spider-Man for some time.
  • Otto figured out that Peter is Spider-Man some time after he caught Peter with a broken Spider-Man suit. At first, Otto says that Peter must be making gear for Spider-Man, but left it ambiguous if he knew Peter himself was Spider-Man. By the end of the game, he's definitely figured it out.
  • It's heavily implied that Matt Murdock also knows Peter's alter ego, when he gave Peter his business card and told him in case of Spider-Man needing a lawyer, to call him.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: During large brawls, it's possible to position yourself so that mooks get caught in the crosshairs of their gun-toting compatriots and taken out as a result.
• Sequel Hook:
  • While MJ is exploring Osborn's penthouse, she finds a helmet that can scan for structural weaknesses. When she gets into Osborn's hidden lab, she can also find some grenades that would look an awful lot like pumpkin bombs if they were orange. And if you slap some green paint on that helmet, it would definitely look like something this continuity's version of the Green Goblin might wear. It even has one icon in the HUD reading "Glider Tech Sync".
  • While we're on the subject of Osborn's hidden lab, you find some kind of tank that's shuttered. It's not until The Stinger after the credits that we learn Harry is inside it... And so is the Venom symbiote, acting as his life support.
  • Earlier when MJ goes to the Oscorp tech expo in Grand Central one of the displays is for drones that look like the goblin glider.
  • During the mid-credits stinger, Miles reveals that he has spider powers now, with Peter also revealing his to Miles.
  • One of side quests involves Spidey taking photos around the city of various locations both real and fictional including Avengers Tower, Heroes for Hire, and the Raft which confirms that other heroes exist alongside Spider-Man.
  • The Heist DLC ends with Black Cat seemingly blown up by by a Maggia trap, but several clues point out that she's just Faking the Dead. The leader of the Maggia, Hammerhead, is introduced in the final cutscenes and is set up to be a new major player in the criminal underworld of New York City. Walter Hardy, Felicia's father and the previous Black Cat, is revealed to be alive and is still up to no good in a side quest. Screwball is out of jail and becomes even more dangerous than before, basically forming a new criminal gang with her "fans". Peter notes Felicia is The Chessmaster, and we know there's absolutely no reason for her to walk straight into a bomb Peter told her about. Last but not least, Felicia might or might not be telling the truth that she has a son, and that Peter might be his father.
  • Turf Wars DLC ends with Yuri crossing the Moral Event Horizon and guns down Hammerhead in cold blood in front of Spider-Man and other police officers. It's most likely that Yuri is going to be fired from the police force at best, facing jail-time from her actions at worst, not to mention that her friendship with Spider-Man is all but ruined. Worst of all is it's All for Nothing: Hammerhead is still alive and is free to continue his plans.
  • Silver Lining DLC reveals that Black Cat was alive and well, and she turns in a USB drive with evidence of Hammerhead's crimes to Spider-Man. News reports reveal that Yuri is on "administrative leave" but declares that she's "not finished" hinting at her turn to vigilantism. A side quest near the end of the DLC confirms that Yuri has indeed turned toward vigilantism and that Spidey may have no choice but to bring her in the next time they encounter, indicating that Wraith will appear at some point in the future. Also, there's a lot of focus given to a civil war brewing in Symkaria (Silver Sable's home country). It's apparently serious enough that MJ is willing to go there to cover the story and raise awareness about the situation to the world. Lastly, the final ending shows Spider-Man taking Miles, wearing a red Spidey mask for his first web-swinging training session, fully embracing his mentor role.
• Setting Update: While Spidey in the comics has been updated through the decades with time-scaling, this game very much writes Spidey and MJ as millennials from the start, with the slang, dialogue, and concerns being quite on-point. The idea of Spidey being a Hero with Bad Publicity because of the Daily Bugle has changed, instead being more of a mixed-positive reaction, as civilians are much less prone to blindly trust news sources in the internet age. That's not getting into the fact that Spidey has his own official social media account with over 15 million likes, either. Both Peter and MJ also share millennial likes such as a fondness for public transportation (as evidenced by Mary Jane's remarks about New York being about subway rats and street pizza). Peter and MJ are both in their early 20s with Peter being 23.
• Shipper on Deck:
  • During the Black Cat side missions, the [#NYCWallCrawler] feed has some people who are into shipping Spidey and Felicia, even to the point of calling them Spidey-Cat.
  • Aunt May remains hopeful throughout the story that Peter and Mary Jane will get back together.
• Shield-Bearing Mook: Some enemies carry a ballistic shield that blocks most standard attacks from the front. The most straightforward way of dealing with these enemies is to perform a melee and dodge combo, which opens them up to an attack from behind.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: Presumably why before the Final Battle, whatever outfit the player wears is automatically reverted back to the Advanced Suit. Dressing up as Ghost Spider, wearing the homemade suit, vintage comic accurate suit or anything else solely included for funny instances of Unusually Uninteresting Sight would probably be giant Mood Whiplashes against the emotional boss fight with Otto and Aunt May's death. Inverted with the use of Photo Mode, which can be used to have the player character make silly gestures while horrifying events (such as the aftermath of the suicide bomb attack) happen in the background.
• Shown Their Work: A local Shibboleth can be heard in the police reports: Houston Street is pronounced the way a native New Yorker would say it, with the first syllable sounding like "house."
• Sigil Spam: When Fisk's lawyer takes to social media to try to decry people saying Fisk's goons were the ones who blew up Times Square at the beginning of the game, another user points out they were all wearing uniforms that had 'FISK' printed on them.
• Simple, yet Awesome: Over the course of the game, you'll acquire a lot of gadgets and suit powers, most of them pretty cool. But you'll probably find yourself relying most heavily on the simple web-shooter, which is invaluable in almost any combat situation, and the web blossom, which can pretty much end almost any combat situation. They're the first gadget and suit power you get.
• Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: Otto. Insomniac was likely aware that including him in the marketing would spoil Doc Ock's role as the main antagonist to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Spider-Man, and therefore spent most of the villain-related marketing focusing on the rest of the Sinister Six. Thus, The Reveal that he’s even IN the game qualifies as a Wham Shot. When he calls Peter during the prologue mission, he has a blank photo and is merely listed as "work".
• The Sociopath: Scorpion and Hammerhead.
• Space Compression: Manhattan in game is a scaled down version. Several neighborhoods are either missing, or rolled into adjoining ones. The north of the map basically ends midway through Harlem, explaining why the Apollo Theatre is missing, along with neighborhoods like Washington Heights, Sugar Hill and Hudson Heights. On a more general level, almost all buildings are actually slightly scaled down. It's most visible when Spider-Man is wall climbing and he's almost as big as entire stories. Several buildings have smaller footprints than they should have.
• Spider-Sense: This being Spider-Man, the infamous sixth sense is in full effect here, which manifests itself as either the trademark comic "lightning bolts around head" before someone is about to attack, an irregular red line emitting from someone about to shoot a projectile, and time just slowing down when performing various feats that involve avoiding obstacles. Unlike some other games, his spider sense does not help him find crimes in progress, backpacks, and other hidden items. That comes from high tech gear in his mask connecting to the police network.
• Starter Villain: Both Kingpin and The Shocker qualify with the Kingpin being the first villain you fight and being the culmination of Spidey's previous 8 years. Shocker provides your first chase, your first super villain boss fight, and giving the first glimpse into the danger of the demons and Mr. Negative.
• Status Quo Is God: Not in the terms of story, as Peter's life is permanently changed by some of the game's events. However, once you clear the city and reach 100%, you're where you were in the beginning of the game; stopping petty crimes around the city, only with better equipment.
• Stealth-Based Mission: These are what the levels where you play as MJ consist of, basically sneaking around various Spidey adversary lairs and areas. She can't directly attack enemies until her final segment and relies on either sneaking by them or luring them away. Miles similarly gets sneaking missions, with only a hacking app to aid him later.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: While speaking with Peter at F.E.A.S.T., May's attention is drawn to a television news report. When she turns back to her nephew to comment, he's out of sight.
• The Stinger: Two of them.
  • In the mid-credits scene, the freshly-bitten Miles demonstrates his new powers to Peter by leaping onto the ceiling. The latter responds by joining him on the ceiling, thus revealing his identity as Spider-Man.
  • In the post-credits scene, Norman Osborn unlocks the secret room behind his family portrait to reveal a dormant Harry, who's being kept in a tube with the Venom symbiote attached to his body. Locking hands with the symbiote through the glass, Norman promises that he'll find a cure for his dying son.
  • The DLC had some as well:
    • The post-credits scene of Turf Wars sees a Hammerhead thug disguised as a cop revive Hammerhead after Yuri shot him.
    • The post-credits scene for Silver Linings shows Miles and Peter atop a building, with Miles in a Spider-Man mask, and ends with Miles leaping off the building, into his first ^note off screen web swing.
• String Theory: A very grim variation, at the end of Yuri's investigation side quest in Silver Linings has purple cords connecting the dead enforcer to photos of his victims.
• Suicidal Overconfidence: Zig Zagged and Lampshaded via dialogue. The A.I. for enemies play it straight though.
  • Street and Fisk thugs (As well as Rikers thugs) constantly trash talk Spider-Man in fights, but once he starts KOing some they complain how unfair it is to fight a superhero. In some crime scenes, Street thugs will actually run in fear and you have to catch them all. Hammerhead Thugs in The City That Never Sleeps also behave this way but never run.
  • The Demons are not exactly confident and more so suicidal fanatical nega-enhanced terrorists.
  • Sable Troopers being heavily armed, well trained combatants, and nearly took down Spider-Man at one point, have a reason to be overconfident... in a group. A single enemy still lacks the common sense to not fight him head on.
  • If Spider-Man interacts with people on the side walk, there's chances he'll be attacked by a random Fisk goon in civilian clothes with a pistol who clearly thinks yelling at Spider-Man before shooting him will end well for them.
• Superhero Origin: Deliberately averted for this Peter Parker: while his standard origin definitely has happened (radioactive spider, Crusher Hogan, Uncle Ben, etc), they are never even directly referred to. Instead we start with Peter having seven years of Spider-Man under his belt and has a lot of history with his Rogues Gallery and various allies.
  • This trope is however stealthily played in the case of Miles Morales, whose emotional inciting incident (the City Hall bombing) and spider bite happen in this game. Peter takes him under his wing and starts to train Miles by the end of the City That Never Sleeps DLC, with the next game, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, serving less as his origin story and more as his first solo gig where he figures out his place as a Spider-Man.
• Superman Stays Out of Gotham: Many other superheroes exist in the setting, but do not appear. Landmarks like Avengers Tower, Alias Investigations, the Sanctum Sanctorum and the Wakandan embassy can be visited and photographed.
• Sword of Plot Advancement: The Anti-Ock Armor, a suit Pete builds to have any chance of defeating Octavius.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: One of the backpack collectables is a prototype of a Spider-Man plush toy someone presented to Peter offering to pay him royalties for the sale of the toys. While Spider-Man could capitalize on his likeness in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, he can't do so legally here without revealing his Secret Identity.
• Take That!:
  • One of the Tweets on Spider-Man's feed (an in-game feature) talks about how a mother dislikes Spider-Man for not retrieving her child's balloon. This was one of the (most annoying) side quests of Spider-Man 2. May be Hypocritical Humor since some of the quests in this game are just as silly such as catching lost pigeons.
  • On the PC port of Remastered, if you go into the controller layout screen using an XboxWireless Controller, the chibi cartoon Spidey will swing in to mock you for using that over the DualShock 4 or DualSense.
• Take Your Time: The fate of Manhattan may hang in the balance, but that doesn't mean you can't take some time off to grab pigeons, perform environmental tests, or photograph local hot spots! Except with the fact that if you ignore a crime in progress then Jameson will chew you out for it on his podcast. You will also fail that crime mission.
• The Talk: In the mid-credits sequence, as Miles is helping Peter move in he says that he needs to talk to him about something, something he can't talk about with his mother. He closes the door and says his body is undergoing some weird changes. Peter assumes Miles is talking about puberty and starts to give him the Talk, panicking when Miles decides it would be simpler to just show him. To Peter's relief, said changes are that Miles now has spider-powers.
• Technicolor Ninja: Assuming you don't make Spider-Man change into one of his suits that is specifically oriented for stealth, you will spend a good deal of the game watching an acrobat in all bright-primary colors stalking goons.
• That Came Out Wrong:
  • Spider-Man describes some Dirty Cops as being "in bed with Kingpin", then adds that it's going to take some time to get that mental image out of his head.
  • After the battle against Martin Li is settled, this exchange between Peter and MJ occurs through text messages.
    MJ: Not rdy to talk yet.
    Peter: Ok. It's over, btw.
    MJ: Over? OK fine…
    Peter: [out loud] N-n-no-no-no, not that kind of over! [texts] I meant Li, I beat him.
    MJ: Oh…
  • In one of his rants, Jameson claims he's been a good influence on Spider-Man and tells Spidey he should act as if Jameson is watching him all the time. Then he backtracks and says, but not like in the bathroom or anything like that, that would be weird.
  Jameson: Jared! Cut to commercial!
  • One of the hideout missions starts with Spidey telling Yuri that he sees a bunch of goons with bulges. Er, gun shaped bulges.
  Yuri: (dryly) I can't get a warrant on "bulges".
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!:
  • Greeting a civilian may cause them to pull a gun on Spidey. Not everyone is a fan, after all. At first, it's a Fisk goon or two "sending a message" to Spider-Man; later on, it's innocent people who have been turned into sleeper agents by Mr. Negative's corruption, and Spidey will call an ambulance for them after he's webbed them up somewhere.
  • Later on, Mister Negative and his minions manage to infiltrate a Halloween party by posing as Halloween celebrators in masks. Everyone initially assumes everything is fine, until Spider-Man arrives and they start shooting. After Delaney dies, Negative corrupts the various partygoers into his minions to distract Spider-Man and then proceeds to calmly walk out with the rest of the fleeing party members, taking advantage of his powers to make it look like it is just a costume, allowing him to escape.
• Those Two Guys: Cam and Eileen, the two homeless people constantly locked in a game of Chess every time Peter visits F.E.A.S.T..
• Together in Death: After Aunt May dies from Devil's Breath, her gravestone is next to Uncle Ben's.
• Took a Shortcut: No matter how long you leave it after their arrival at the shipyard is first noted, the Demons manage to get into Fisk's vault, sell what weapons they can find and get out before Spider-Man and Officer Davis reach them.
• Tragic Monster: In fights with Martin Li and Otto Octavius, Peter/Spider-Man will plead with them to abandon the fight, insisting that they can go back to the way they were. It doesn't work in either case.
• Tyrant Takes the Helm: After the bombing of City Hall, Norman Osborn's power increases tremendously and he hires Silver Sable's mercenary company to put up checkpoints, detention centers, and outright battle the Demons in the street. New York swiftly becomes a Police State.
• Understanding Boyfriend: Peter funnily enough, even though his girl doesn't have powers and they're not exactly back together-together at the time.
  Peter: [after hearing MJ broke into Tombstone's office] Okay... I want to say don't ever do that again, but since I know you're going to anyway, here. [tosses her a noise lure] Take a few of those next time.
• Understatement: Peter tells Aunt May that he's been having troubles with the rent; this later proves to be more than just trouble, as he's perpetually late with payments and gets evicted.
• The Unfought: Despite Silver Sable being a major character in the last two thirds of the story and an obstacle for Spider-Man, she's never fought at all. Finally averted in the Silver Lining DLC, where you do end up fighting her.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Likewise, no matter how many times Spider-Man saves the city even from the greatest danger of all, J. Jonah Jameson will never be his biggest fan.
• Unique Enemy: The corrupt PDNY bomb squad in the prologue are the only instance of hostile police officers in the entire game.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: A Running Gag on the social media feed is people reacting to Spider-Man's heroics with a shrug and a declaration that this is just normal life in New-York. In particular Shocker's first chase with Spider-Man causes someone to react this way to the whole incident.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The guy in the Rhino suit in the costume party that Spider-Man infiltrates trying to get to Doctor Delany. Assuming that Spider-Man is just another person in a costume rather than the real thing, despite multiple warnings that it is the real thing, he and his friends ultimately force Spider-Man into a fight that causes Spider-Man to just barely fail to save Delaney from the Demons. This also results in the Demons getting their hands on the Devil's Breath from Doctor Michaels, which later inspires Otto to unleash it as a plague which results in a lot of death. Long story short, this guy's incredibly bad mistake winds up causing the rest of the game, and a lot of avoidable deaths.
• Verbal Backspace: During a rant on his talk show, Jameson complains about Spider-Man swinging about the city as if he owns the place. "It's not his city! It's mine! ... I mean, ours."
• Video Game Caring Potential:
  • Peter can sweep up messes at F.E.A.S.T. for no reward other than self-gratification on the player's part.
  • Spidey can share high-fives and hugs with the civilians of New York by interacting with them.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: While Spider-Man can't directly attack the citizens of New York for obvious reasons, he can still knock them over by throwing objects and slamming them with particularly high Ground Smashes.
• Vigilante Injustice: While J. Jonah Jameson is usually portrayed in the wrong for his prejudice against vigilantes, he makes a point that Spidey should have joined the Police Academy and got a badge. At least then, his heroics could at least be made legal and sanctioned.
  J. Jonah Jameson: It is not helping when a vigilante leaps into the middle of a crime scene or emergency situation with no training, expertise, or public identity. What if he injures someone? Who holds him accountable?
• Villain Ball:
  • During the Raft breakout, the escaped villains make it really obvious they're luring Spidey into a trap by taunting him with knowledge of a "surprise", informing him that the "Party's almost over", and outright telling him to "keep chasin'!" Problem is, Spidey has to follow them if he wants to get a lid on the situation.
  • The way both main villains go about their plan for revenge is exceedingly, and dramatically, villainous, but also much less effective than it'd be if they chose to be a little more subdued. It's flat out stated that the secret, illegal development of Devil's Breath would ruin Norman Osborn's entire life if it were exposed. Publicly leaking documents that link Osborn to the experiment (maybe also stealing the item itself to prove its existence to the world at large, without using it) would not only ruin his political career and likely shut down his entire corporation, but it'd explicitly get him tried as a war criminal. Instead, the villains choose to unleash Devil's Breath by themselves, creating criminal empires and chaos to help their plan along, hurting many more people in the process and making it so that Osborn can easily disavow any links with the experiment and making himself seem like the scapegoat for some terrorists with a cheap grudge. Of course given that Otto has at this point has well and truly Jumped Off The Slippery Slope and the other members of the Sinister Six are in for both something Octavius has offered them and a chance to kill Spider-Man and Martin himself is plagued by his own demons and a thirst for vengeance against Osborn at any cost possible, this is a Justified trope.
• Villain Forgot to Level Grind: Averted. Some of the backpack Easter Eggs have Spidey note that the villains he fights have constantly improved their equipment throughout his years of fighting them.
• Villain Pedigree: Played Straight with the street crimes and basic Mooks faced in the game: at the beginning they're simply random street thugs and Fisk's men, who then get phased out by the superpowered Demon gang, who in turn get traded out for Sable International's soldiers and escaped super-maximum security prison inmates armed with military-grade weaponry they stole while escaping. The DLC missions have goons swapped to Hammerhead thugs, then ramp up to Hammerhead thugs with stolen Sable equipment and finally the same but with bionic implants and armor.
• Villain Respect:
  • Tombstone shows sincere admiration towards Spider-Man's courage and skill; for Peter's part, Tombstone is notable as the only villain he feels regret for capturing, as he mutually respects the crime boss's brutal sense of honor enough to make multiple attempts to turn him straight in mid battle.
  • A Riker escapee compliments Miles' bravery after he decks his fellow cellmate unconscious and leaves Miles alone.
• Villain with Good Publicity:
  • Norman Osborn is running for re-election as Mayor in the game, despite the majority of the Osborn family being super-villains or accomplices for said super-villains in the comics. Even in this game, he's clearly up to some shady stuff. Ultimately downplayed, as while he does show gross irresponsibility as a researcher and has many moral failures as a mayor and businessman, he is not (yet) the Green Goblin and only wants to find a cure for his terminally ill son. His publicity also takes a sour turn, and by the end of the game, he resigns as mayor in disgrace.
  • As in the source material, Mr. Negative is considered a pillar of the community in his civilian identity, so it comes as a legitimate surprise for Spidey when he sees him turning photonegative while wielding a jian supercharged with dark energy.
  • Kingpin, except he loses his good reputation almost immediately.
• Voice with an Internet Connection:
  • Yuri Watanabe is Spidey's contact with the police, relaying important information about the goings-on in New York.
  • Mary Jane, to a lesser degree. She does a lot of the research help for Spider-Man.
• Wall Run: One of Spider-Man's many ways to get around. The player can hold the web-swinging button near a wall to run up it or aside it.
• Warp Whistle: The game has an oddly mundane fast travel system in Manhattan's subways. By either walking into a subway entrance or selecting the fast travel option on the map screen, Spider-Man will instantly transport over to there, with the only thing between being a brief loading screen showing Spider-Man waiting around on the subway.
• Wham Episode:
  • "And the Award Goes to...", where the game turns Darker and Edgier after several lighthearted missions. Martin Li, the friendly and benevolent businessman who's in charge of the philanthropy organization F.E.A.S.T. and Aunt May's boss, is revealed to be Mister Negative, the mastermind behind the Demon soldiers. He and his soldiers launched a suicide bombing attack on the City Hall, killing several people including the friendly cop Jefferson Davis, a recurring character in the Spider-Man comics. Also, it's the first mission where you get to play as Miles Morales, adding a third playable character to the game.
  • "Out of the Frying Pan..." takes it up to eleven and then some. There's a massive prison breakout at both Rikers Island and the Raft. Hundreds of prisoners escaped and started a city-wide riot throughout New York. Five of the most dangerous foes of Spider-Man: Electro, Rhino, Scorpion, Vulture, and the recently incarcerated Mister Negative, have all escaped and they laid a severe beatdown to Spider-Man, followed by the reveal that Otto Octavius - Peter's idolized mentor, was behind everything. Otto, now fully embracing his Doc Ock persona, then releases the Devil's Breath virus on Times Square, infecting the many New Yorkers. To recap, armed convicts are running around New York causing mayhem, not to mention Martin Li's leftover Demon soldiers and Wilson Fisk's underlings that Spidey hasn't taken care of yet. Mayor Osborn blamed the whole thing on Spidey, declares him a fugitive, and orders Silver Sable to take care of him by any means necessary. The majority of New Yorkers are infected by the Devil's Breath, including Aunt May. Finally, the Sinister Six is gunning to destroy everything related to Oscorp and kill Osborn himself, and all that stands between them are a heavily injured and exhausted Spidey and his very few allies. Whew...
  • "Step Into My Parlor", where MJ sneaks into Osborn's penthouse to find out where the Devil's Breath antiserum is being kept. MJ finds a hidden door and hints that Harry's journal, kept in his locked room, might have the code. She manages to find a key to it... And finds the room filled with hospital equipment. Harry's journal contains a letter addressed to MJ and Peter that reveals he's dying from the same disease that killed his mother, that he went to Europe for treatment, and that Devil's Breath was conceived to cure Harry and his mother. MJ finds the code to the door, which hides a lab filled with cages containing genetically modified spiders, much like the one that gave Peter his powers. MJ accidentally knocks one cage over and the spider ends up stowing away on her, before eventually biting Miles.
• Wham Line:
  • Otto revealing his status as a Secret Secret-Keeper halfway through the final battle.
    Otto: Such a disappointment... Parker.
  • Aunt May gets one after Spider-Man goes to see her.
    Aunt May: Take off your mask. I want to see my nephew.
• Wham Shot:
  • Peter walking into the lab for the first time and talking to Otto Octavius, due to him being a Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer and most Spidey fans knowing that he is the founder of The Sinister Six.
  • Peter walking into into the lab for the fifth time and asking Otto where the robotic arms are, only for two evil-looking robotic tentacles to sprout from Otto's back. As happy as Peter and Otto both are it's an even bigger Oh, Crap! moment for Spidey fans.
  • During the final sequence where you play as MJ, she manages to sneak into Harry's room... and finds it full of hospital equipment.
  • Towards the end of the game, a moment shows how serious things are getting. Both May coughing up blood after the spread of Devil's Breath and later, Peter seeing her dying on a hospital bed.
  • In The Stinger, Harry being in suspended animation... with the Venom symbiote.
• What the Hell, Player?: If you decide to not stop a crime in action, someone will call up Jameson's podcast and talk about how Spider-Man just left some poor innocent people at the hands of criminals, giving Jameson more fuel for the fire.
• Whole-Plot Reference: To Breaking Bad. May or may not be intentional, but the parallels between Walter White's relationship with Elliot Schwartz and Otto Octavius' relationship with Norman Osborn are uncanny. A brilliant scientist and his business-savvy friend form a company, the name of which references both founders' names (Gray Matter/OsCorp), the scientist leaves after a falling out, and the company becomes wildly successful, making the remaining partner obscenely wealthy. Meanwhile, the scientist labors in obscurity and relative poverty, seething with resentment and jealousy toward his former friend, and eventually uses his scientific brilliance to embark on a life of crime after he's diagnosed with a terminal illness.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: The island of Manhattan is Spider-Man's playground, and the player is free to swing through it, fighting crime and taking on challenges to their heart's content. Unlike most open-world games, the entirety of the city is open to you from the start; the only thing you unlock is maps for all its various neighborhoods.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: The two main antagonists of the game definitely fall into this territory in some capacity.
  • Martin Li, aka Mister Negative, is a man running a homeless shelter who also has a Superpowered Evil Side that threatens to take him over completely. For an unknown reason, he has a serious vendetta with Norman Osborn. Later on, it's revealed that Martin was the subject of an experiment at Oscorp, exposed to an experimental substance as a child that gave birth to the Mister Negative personality and powers as well as accidentally killing his parents. The moment that Otto Octavius (who was present at the experiment and was horrified by the results) contacted him, he didn't hesitate to jump into a Villain Team-Up to get revenge on Osborn; once he's defeated by Peter, however, only then does he realize and consider that revenge doesn't have to be his life... and then he gets knocked out by Octavius moments later. Behind the veneer of kindness as well as the sinister gangster is in reality a tortured soul with an equally tortured past.
  • Otto Octavius was a scientist who worked with Norman Osborn in founding Oscorp who formulated his own "company" and genuinely wanted to help others. However, he's regularly held back thanks to his Genius Cripple of degenerating motor functions, said to have been caused by toxic chemical exposure in his youth. He also harbors a major grudge against Osborn, as he allegedly stole his ideas and booted him from the company, forcing him into obscurity. Peter acted as his assistant in developing increasingly advanced Artificial Limbs (particularly arms), and they made significant progress in Otto's research. After Peter developed a special algorithm for neural interface, Otto decided to utilize it and create clawed robotic arms, but this came at the cost of his moral compass and the release of his inhibitions, all driven by his Norman-related vendetta. In this now-addled state, Otto decided to recruit a fellow victim of Norman's machinations, Martin Li, as well as four other members of Spidey's rogues gallery to distract the hero from his and Martin's revenge scheme, which includes unleashing The Plague on Manhattan. After tossing away Martin for his failure, Otto kidnaps Norman to attempt to reveal what the businessman did to the world, only to be spurned by Osborn himself as worthless. Going into a rage, Otto drops Norman from the top of Oscorp Tower and participates in a climactic battle with Spidey, revealing that he has known his secret identity for some time, and Peter is forced to tearfully abandon Otto to be sent to the Raft (potentially costing him his limbs over time). In the end, Otto was a victim of a corrupt business system and leapt at any chance to gain some semblance of a life.
• Wrecked Weapon: The Final Boss grabs Spidey's wrists and squeezes, crushing his web-shooters. He doesn't need them for the final showdown, which is all fisticuffs.
• Wrestler in All of Us: Spidey has a number of grapple moves reminiscent of Lucha Libre.
• Writing Around Trademarks: Some New-York specific landmarks and institutions are renamed to avoid copyright. The NYPD is now the PDNY. The Metropolitan Museum of Art becomes the Manhattan Museum of Contemporary Art.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: Every attempt by Spidey to stop the Demons from getting Devil's Breath ended in failure. Likewise, in the DLCs, Spidey completely fails to stop Hammerhead from getting Project Olympus.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: After Scorpion stabs him, Spidey figures out he injected him with a neurotoxin that'll "create nightmares that [his] body thinks are real."

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In memory of Steve Ditko, who, with the stroke of his pen, made the world amazing.
In memory of Stan Lee, who inspired us all to be greater.

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