Video Game / GemCraft

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GemCraft is a Tower Defense series developed by Game In A Bottle and distributed by Armor Games, a major source of Web Games. It has a distinct Fantasy setting with a rudimentary storyline that varies between installments. The earlier entries in the series are free-to-play.

Generally, An Adventurer Is You, assuming that said adventurer is always a noble wizard out to reach some goal on the other side of the world, come hell or high water—or in this case, come monsters by the bucketload. You, the Squishy Wizard, must protect your tower at all costs, by placing towers next to, and traps on, the path leading to it. However, a key difference splits Gemcraft off from other tower defense games—instead of being able to upgrade your traps and towers directly, you must power them with gems. Gems are mostly obtained with a spell named Craft Gem (which is basically the source of the game's name), and have distinct colors (which affect the types of powers they possess) and levels (which affect their strength). By combining gems correctly, you can create better ones to better fight those evil monsters.

The eight gem colors (and their special abilities) are:

• Red: Splash Damage in the first two games. Changed to "bloodbound" in Labyrinth: The gem gets extra power from a percentage of the monsters it kills.
• Orange: Mana Leech. Each time it hits a monster, you gain mana.
• Yellow: Multiple Damage. The first two games gave a flat rate to deal triple damage. In Labyrinth and beyond, the multiple damage rate can be turned up to 11 (starting with a chance for double damage).
• Lime: Multi-hit. Starts with one extra hit, but can be ramped up to be able to hit more than two monsters.
• Green: Poison. Ignores armor, so useful for armored waves as well as swarmlings.
• Cyan: Shock. Can stop the monster in its tracks.
• Blue: Slow.
• Purple: Armor Tearing. In the first two games, each hit has a chance to reduce a monster's armor by a set amount; in Labyrinth, each hit lowers a monster's armor by a given ratio, based on the gem's power.

The second chapter, Chasing Shadows, was released to Armor Games in April 2014 and was released to Steam later in 2014. It removes Lime gems (moving their multi-hit to Red) and adds two more colors, changing the colors thusly:

• Orange: Mana Leech.
• Yellow: Multiple Damage/Critical. Changed from Labyrinth a bit; the chance for multiple damage now maxes out at 80%, though the multiplier still abides up to eleven and beyond.
• White: Poolbound. Increases the gem's damage and specials when the mana pool levels up.
• Red: Chain hit (from lime, and moving it closer to its original Splash Damage role).
• Green: Poison.
• Cyan: Regeneration suppressing: lowers monsters' health regeneration rate. (A Freeze spell fills the Shock effect's role.)
• Black: Bloodbound (from red). Increases the gem's damage and specials based on the number of successful hits.
• Blue: Slow.
• Purple: Armor Tearing.

The newest game, Frostborn Wrath, which was released on 10 January 2020, reduces the number of gem types to six, while both Poolbound and Bloodbound becomes passive properties of each gem:

• Orange: Mana Leech.
• Yellow: Multiple Damage/Critical. The changes from Chasing Shadows stick here as well.
• Green: Poison.
• Red: Bleeding, a completely new gem type. Increases damage taken by the affected monsters from any source for some time.
• Blue: Slow.
• Purple: Armor Tearing.

It also introduces new Skills (notably removing Orblets from Traits and moving them to Skill), buildings such as Pylons and Lanterns, and objects such as Wizard Stashes containing various items, possibly even skill tomes, waiting to be collected. The monsters from previous games return, and new ones, such as Wraiths, introduce themselves here as well. The ways how to make your game harder was expanded as well, with possibilities from making every monster drop two swarmlings to raise their total number to speed up the monster ways, in exchange for higher HP.

The first three games (Chapters 0, 1 and Labyrinth) used to be available on Armor Games when Adobe Flash was still compatible with web browsers. Once support for Flash began to dwindle, the developers packed their older games for download from their own website for free, alongside other older games. Chasing Shadows and Frostborn Wrath are available on Steam.

The whole series provides examples of:

• And Now for Someone Completely Different: Chapter 1: The Forgotten and Chapter 2: Chasing Shadows both see the player control the same character, but the other three games in the series use entirely different protagonists:
  • Chapter 0: Gem of Eternity, the prequel game, has the player control a wizard obsessed with finding the powerful Gem of Eternity, only to unwittingly release the Forgotten in the process, become possessed, and become the main villain of Chapter 1.
  • Labyrinth has the player control another wizard sent to a magical labyrinth in which The Forgotten hid the Gem of Eternity, and deliver the gem to the main character of 1 and 2. He fails to deliver it, due to the protagonist being possessed and therefore not being able to meet up with him.
  • In Frostborn Wrath, you take a control of a wizard who was frozen for a very long time, apparently even before the creation of The Forgotten. Thanks to a warmth spell casted by someone else, your future player character has thawed from the ice and thus the adventure can begin.
• Absurdly High Level Cap: There is no level cap; rather, cap on how much experience you can get due to the fact beating the same field twice gives you only difference between your new and old record—fail to beat it and you get nothing.
  • Downplayed in The Forgotten due to the fact it's much harder to grind than in the later games. You can reach the last level as early as late 50s, but if you go out of your way to grind on all levels, you will likely reach it with level somewhere in 80s, which will allow you to max out most of the skills.
  • As mentioned below, maxing out all skills in Gem of Eternity requires your level to somewhere around 200. This is much higher than the level required to beat the game, but also nowhere the level you can get by grinding as much as you can. This entry is unique in the fact that each of the level's battle modes are considered to be unique for the purpose of gaining levels.
  • In Labyrinth and Chasing Shadows, by stacking difficulty, talisman bonuses, and battle settings/traits, you can gain billions of XP per level. With 169 fields in Labyrinth and up to 191 in Chasing Shadows (including Magician's Pouch-exclusive and Steam-exclusive fields), your wizard level can get absurdly high. The soft level cap is generally considered to be somewhere around Level 10,000 in Labyrinth and 50,000 in Chasing Shadows.
  • This applies to Frostborn Wrath as well, in fact even more considering the number of various traits that increase EXP multiplier to ridiculous levels, as well more talisman fragments with XP bonus that can be equipped, a skill that explicitly raises the amount gained, and the fact each game mode has its own XP score this time as well.
• Airborne Mook:
  • Apparitions in Labyrinth and Chasing Shadows just fly over the terrain, and have a lot of health. Thankfully, they don't hurt you, they're slow, they're uncommon, and they give 3 free skill points when beaten.
  • Much nastier versions are the Shadow, Specter and Spire, all of which can fly anywhere on the terrain. Shadows randomly move across the battlefield until their health is low, at which point the Shadow will begin The Slow Walk right at your orb and instantly destroy it should you fail to kill it in time. Specters fly at the most valuable socketed gem to steal it; Spires head straight from a table edge towards the Orb and will instantly cause the player to lose if they reach their target.
  • Frostborn Wrath throws in Wraiths, who don't seem to do anything... at first glance. Look at their description and you notice each of them reduces damage to everything on field by 15% per Wraith, up to 90%. Worse is the Wizard Hunter, who can destroy towers with gems (which forfeits any gem that was socketed in said tower), giving you a moment to remove the gem from the tower.
• All Your Powers Combined: Crafting multi-colored gems becomes less beneficial until you combine all 8 colors into one gem. At that point, it gains the power of all 8 gem types rather than the 3 dominant ones, and its damage, range, and firing speed all skyrocket. Averted in Labyrinth and beyond.
• And Man Grew Proud: According to one of the journal entries in Chasing Shadows, the Forgotten was summoned because of this. The wizards of old, convinced that they were invincible and greedy for more power, began summoning and enslaving ever more powerful demons, until they finally pulled up one they couldn't control. In one of the Vision fields, you get to oversee the ritual that started the whole mess. In Frostborn Wrath you find out that the wizards opposing such experiments were exiled and hunted down. In fact, your PC is one such wizard from the time before the Forgotten who was frozen for this reason and was only thawed out by a fortuitous warming spell. Even in-game you're not safe from them, and there is specifically a creature called the Wizard Hunter that is stated to hunt down rogue wizards (i.e. you) that can destroy your towers and amplifiers.
• Big Bad: The Forgotten is a recurring antagonistic force across the series, and linked to a majority of its conflicts.
• Bonus Dungeon: Most games have them, with various different ways of unlocking them:
  • In The Forgotten, achieving the glowing frame score on every level within a certain section of the map unlocks a bonus level, all of which restrict you to a single gem color.
  • In Gem of Eternity, completing maps on Heroic difficulty will eventually unlock bonus levels.
  • In Labyrinth, the four maps in the corners can only be opened by performing special field challenges.
  • In Chasing Shadows, Vision fields are levels that only need to be cleared once for full reward and lock you into specific challenges. Other normal levels will only reveal themselves if you beat a different level on Glaring or harder.
• Boss Battle: Each game has them:
  • Chapter One has five epic bosses, which have their own names, fought at the ends of five levels in the main story.
  • Chapter Zero has Arcane Guardians.
  • Labyrinth has one guaranteed Shadow battle without needing modifiers.
  • Chasing Shadows and Frostborn Wrath introduce the special non-boss enemies such as Spire or Wizard Hunter as bosses. And the Final Boss of Frostborn Wrath is the Forgotten's Gatekeeper.
• Brutal Bonus Level: Pretty much any bonus level either already is very difficult, or can be made into this with appropriate difficulty modifiers.
• Cast from Hit Points: Everything you build costs mana, which in turn is drained when monsters reach your orb. In other words, Mana is both Hit Points and money.
• Damage Reduction: Via Armour level. Some particularly annoying mooks gain armor every second. In Frostborn Wrath, the Wraith grants this to all monsters while it's on the field.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: Swarmlings do this. A single swarmling costs very little to banish, but if enough of them manage to slip past your defenses the combined cost can make giants look easy by comparison.
• Degraded Boss:
  • In Gem of Eternity, playing a level in Arcane mode will cause an Arcane Guardian to spawn after every wave has been cleared. This Arcane Guardian is much weaker than the Arcane Guardians fought as storyline bosses, and do not come with Arcane Minions or status effect resistances.
  • In Labyrinth, beating the final level unlocks the Shadow Clash battle trait, which pits you against a Shadow, a weaker version of the Grand Shadow already fought in field D4.
  • In Chasing Shadows and Frostborn Wrath, each special enemy is introduced as a boss, then starts to appear more frequently as a (still rather rare) regular encounter. Notably, the "Chasing Shadows" and "Ritual" battle traits from Chasing Shadows and Frostborn Wrath respectively raise the probability of these encounters taking place for a hefty Shadow Core reward.
• Demonic Possession: Seems to be a favoured tactic of The Forgotten. The first thing it did upon being released in Gem of Eternity was hitch a ride on the shmuck who inadvertently unsealed her. Once The Forgotten's protagonist came along to stop her original host, she jumped to him instead.
• Destructible Projectiles: Shadows can fire shadow projectiles at the orb, which drain mana on contact, but can be shot down by gems.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • One of the early stages in Labryinth has a tower surrounded by eight amplifiers. Place a gem in each of the amplifiers, and the tower gem will kick ass. This nuke becomes MUCH more powerful if the player has the Premium content and uses Endurance Mode with this strategy to get a ridiculous multiplier to their XP gain. A similar setup occurs in one level of Chasing Shadows.
  • Red gems in Labyrinth. They add a percentage of their kills to their damage, meaning a red gem that's been there since the first wave can have a damage of over 1000 by the final waves. The gem won't dominate the game by itself, but becomes much more powerful when combined with the lime or yellow gems (which multiply the offensive power). This power was nerfed slightly in Chasing Shadows. The black gems now multiply both damage and specials and count hits rather than kills, but use hit levels rather than raw hits.
  • A different Disc One Nuke in Labyrinth (the ability to juggle monsters over mana leech traps by building and demolishing walls to keep them going back and forth over them) led to the developers putting a hard cap on the number of demolitions one could perform per level.
  • For Frostborn Wrath, combining the Overcrowd and Parasitic Swarmlings traits. The first raises the number of enemies per wave, while the other guarantees that each enemy drops two swarmlings after it is killed. The number of swarmlings does not increase with rank of trait, so you can set it at one and still have little problem handling them if you can kill the monsters that spawn them. If you can handle this combination, you can rack up high amount of mana and XP rather quickly. In fact, the XP reward in the first version of the game was so egregious that the devs had to nerf it just a few days after the game's release.
• Early Game Hell: Your lack of skill points to distribute, along with limited access to skills you can put points in, makes advancement through the game difficult if you aim to breeze through each level as you go. Once you unlock the stronger skills and begin revisiting old levels for additional experience and multipliers, expect to gain levels a lot faster.
• Elite Mooks: Any so-called non-monster enemy in Chasing Shadows and Frostborn Wrath, like Shadows, Spires and so on (except Apparitions), are much more dangerous than regular monsters, but killing them nets a handful of valuable Shadow Cores.
• Evil Virtues: The Forgotten has Patience. It's The Ageless at the bare minimum, utterly immortal at worst, and it takes full advantage of that in its schemes to access the Spiritforge. It's willing to wait out being sealed, released and re-sealed by wizard-kind at least a half dozen times, no matter how long that means it's trapped, because it knows that some day they'll forget about it as a problem, rest on their laurels and stop warning the newer generations about the Forgotten. This will eventually result in some new, greedy young wizard seeking out the Gem of Eternity binding the Forgotten and releasing her when trying to claim the gem, and the fact that it keeps happening allows the Forgotten to steadily build up a stash of corrupted replicas of the Gem Of Eternity, ready to sabotage the Spiritforge's shields.
• Expansion Pack: Labyrinth and Chasing Shadows both feature five-dollar "premium" versions which unlock extra modes, skills, and battlefields. There are many achievements, levels, and skills that can only be found by completing certain maps in certain sectors, and those that require completing a Premium-only level are thus inaccessible. Labyrinth's premium version has since been released for free on the developer's website, due to complications that have arisen with buying it properly years after release.
• Factor Breakdown: Hovering over a gem shows its base damage alongside mana pool and hit count damage multipliers.
• Flawless Victory: Defeating a map in Labyrinth without letting any enemy touch your orb gives an XP-boosting medal for that round. In Chasing Shadows, the orb gives extra experience for each flawless wave.
• Fragile Speedster: Swarmlings are small, quick and numerous monsters that have low health.
• Gemstone Assault: Gem towers fire energy, and the Gem Bombs can be dropped on a bunch of Mooks.
• Giant Mook: The appropriately-named Giants are bigger versions of normal enemies. They have more HP and deal more mana damage to your orb than normal mooks, but move very slowly.
• Grand Theft Me: The Forgotten possesses the bodies of wizards. First, she takes the body of the protagonist of Chapter 0, turning him into the antagonist of Chapter 1, then takes the body of 1's protagonist, though she's removed from his body before the start of 2, thanks to a magical trap called the Scythe Gate.
• Infinity +1 Sword: Inasmuch as gems can be considered swords in this series, then the Gem of Eternity certainly counts. It's the strongest gem wizard-kind has ever forged, such that only one true gem of its type can exist at once (any Gem of Eternity crafted will turn the previous one into a far weaker replica). It's immune to the influence of, capable of imprisoning and fighting The Forgotten when no other gem can even target it. Best seen in the ending of Labyrinth, where The Forgotten actually shows up to try attacking you right after a new Gem Of Eternity is forged. It starts smashing down the wall between it and you, with all your towers, no matter how amped up they are, unable to stop her...until the Gem Of Eternity activates and drives her off twice, all by itself.
• Instakill Mook:
  • In Sudden Death mode, no banishment is possible: the game will instantly end in a loss if an enemy reaches your tower. If Swarm waves weren't annoying enough before, now any one of them can kill you, no matter how tiny and pathetic they are.
  • In Labyrinth, the Shadow will perform The Slow Walk towards your orb as a Desperation Attack. If it touches your orb before you destroy it, your lose instantly regardless of how much Mana you have left. In Chasing Shadows, this ability is given to Spires. In Frostborn Wrath, Wall Breakers can do this as well.
• Kill Sat:
  • A Focused tower, a gem tower accompanied by 8 supporting amplifiers in a 3x3 box, qualifies for this trope. As you amass powerful gems in each amplifier, the tower gets a massive boost that lets it fire across the map, disintegrating anything that simply spawns into battle. While Amplifiers alone are expensive, skill investment can be the only thing that stops you from making one. There's at least one level that just gives you this setup at the start for you to fill, acting as a minor Player Nudge when you see it in action.
  • The Watchtower from Frostborn Wrath is this as well, as it can hit anything on the field, including your towers.
• Level Grinding:
  • Lots of it. In Gem of Eternity, you'll have to level up to 200 in order to max out all your stats, and in Labyrinth, there is no level cap for 3 of the skills. For the premium version, the Ritual skill will let you gain one starting and maximum mana for a set number of battle amulets you possess, based on its skill level.
  • Chasing Shadows averts it with Iron Wizard mode. The levels of your character are gone, instead you get 5 skill points per field beaten. While plenty of fields are optional, you will probably grind as many as possible for more skill points.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • Enabling Random Waves instills this trope in exchange for increased experience. Two different runs on the same map can generate different sequences of waves — one may overwhelm you with several Swarm waves in succession, while the other could slam multiple Giants on you.
  • The trial on Field K1 of Frostborn Wrath depends on how lucky you'll be about Watchtowers targeting monsters instead of your towers.
  • The Beacon Storm trait adds random beacons in random unoccupied spaces of the level. Depending on your luck this can affect your run little to not at all, or be a catastrophic hindrance (such as placing a disrupting beacon next to your key towers, multiple speed/shield beacons at a chokepoint, or two protection beacons next to each other and also protecting a third, more dangerous one).
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic: Transmuting gems in the first two games allows you to take unwanted gems and transform them into those of a color you already have. If the level doesn't let you create gems of that color, it's one of the only ways to replicate the color that you otherwise won't get access to.
• Make My Monster Grow: You can use gem bombs to provoke more enemies to attack, which also causes them to become stronger but give more Mana as well. Use this effectively, and...
• Mana: This is needed to build things, craft gems, cast spells, and as a last-ditch Mana Shield to banish monsters that get too close. It builds up slowly every second, but largely comes from monsters you kill, and you can get more by using orange gems.
• Mana Shield: If a monster reaches your Orb of Presence, it's automatically sent back to the beginning by a banishing spell. If you don't have enough mana for that, it's game over.
• Marathon Level: Endurance, a mode in which you're supposed to try to survive for as long as you can before the exponentially stronger monsters inevitably kill you, is not actually infinite. The number of waves is limited to 510 (in Gem of Eternity), 1337 (in Labyrinth) and 999 (in Chasing Shadows), though in practice, beating all of them (in Chasing Shadows the completion icon on the map changes colour to reflect this) requires very extensive grinding well beyond what's needed to just complete the game.
• Meaningful Name: "The Forgotten" is so named for two reasons:
  • It's been around for so long that no living wizard knows where it came from or what it is. Until Frostborn Wrath, anyway, because that game's protagonist turns out to be one of the wizards who was opposed to those who originally enacted the summoning ritual for it. If anyone would know what it originally was, it'd be them.
  • It keeps getting sealed away under the Gem of Eternity for long enough that wizard-kind slowly forgets about it as a problem, and then some greedy shmuck inevitably decides that they want to go claim the Gem of Eternity for themselves.
• Metal Slime: Apparitions, introduced in Labyrinth, are uncommon foes that fly slowly across the map and have a ton of hit points, but they can't harm you at all and will just enter and exit the map. However, killing these gives the player 3 free skill points.
• Mighty Glacier:
  • Giants do more mana damage to your orb if they reach it and have much more health than normal mooks, but they're much slower too.
  • Wall Breakers from Frostborn Wrath can destroy any structures in their path barring barricades, and have even more HP, but are even slower.
• Multi-Mook Melee: It's a tower defence game, so this is a given. You can actually earn medals for having large numbers of monsters on the map at once, which generally requires you to summon and/or enrage multiple waves.
• Named After First Installment: The first game is called just GemCraft in its distributions, only adding Chapter 1 on the internal title screens. And it's the name of the series, because they all involve making gems from magic.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The Forgotten. Also, the epic bosses in Chapter 1, the Arcane Guardians in Chapter 2, and the Wizard Hunter in Frostborn Wrath.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!:
  • In Chapter 0, you spend the game searching for the Gem of Eternity. When you find it and capture it, it turns out to have been containing a monster (for eternity, hence the name) which then possesses you, setting the stage for the first game.
  • In Chasing Shadows, your character picks up a fake Gem of Eternity placed by the Forgotten and uses it in the ritual meant to seal the Forgotten. It ends up creating a blast that destroys the barrier protecting the Spirit Forge.
• Path of Most Resistance: Much of the game's strategy is based around deciding how difficult you want to make the level in the name of earning more XP.
• Pinball Projectile: Lime gems (red gems in Chasing Shadows) can strike chain hits.
• Randomized Damage Attack: Dropping Gem Bombs on enemy-spawning buildings may or may not actually destroy the building, due to randomized damage.
• Random Number God: Prior to Labyrinth, crafting creates a random gem among those available in the level. If you wanted a gem of a specific color, you had to keep on creating gems until you got it.
• Rewarding Vandalism: Using Gem Bombs on the buildings strewn about may let you uncover hidden relics or even gems to use for yourself.
• Scenery Porn: A Flash game having this level of detail is absurd. Later games have maps with beautiful backdrops that the series gets much praise for.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The Forgotten is sealed away in the Gem of Eternity, but the mage from Chapter Zero is foolish enough to lust for it... and breaks it. The series-wide goal is to make a new can to re-seal the Forgotten into. The Forgotten actually gets her name from the fact that she's been sealed away and released/escaped so many times that nobody can remember where she originally came from.
• Sequel Escalation: The numbers get bigger and bigger with each subsequent game until by Chasing Shadows and Frostborn Wrath it's possible to have enemies whose HP is written in scientific notation.
• Skill Point Reset: Skill points can be reset for free at the skill screen.
• Sound of No Damage: In the earlier games, if an attack on an enemy was nullified by Damage Reduction, the impact would produce a metallic clink instead of the usual thud. Seemingly averted from Chasing Shadows onwards.
• Splash Damage: Red gems give splash damage in the first two games. Lime gems give a multi-hit version (which is likely why red gems were changed). Red takes the happy medium between splash and chain in Chasing Shadows, while the Barrage spell fires shells that do splash damage as well.
• Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: The Forgotten gives off this vibe, despite being a faceless skeleton.
• Twist Ending:
  • In Gem of Eternity, the protagonist finally unseals the Gem of Eternity... only to find that it was the one thing keeping the Forgotten sealed away. Now free from its prison, the Forgotten takes control of the protagonist, turning him into the main antagonist of Chapter 1.
  • After defeating the corrupt wizard at the end of The Forgotten, the Forgotten, who has been controlling him all the while, slips out of his tower and possesses the protagonist.
  • At the end of Chasing Shadows, the Gem of Eternity you claimed from the corpse of the protagonist of Labyrinth turned out to be a fake. It taps into the powers of the other replicas scattered across the map, and it all breaks open the barrier keeping demons away from the Spiritforge.
• Uniqueness Value: One of the reasons the Gem of Eternity is so valuable is because only one can exist at once. While a new one can be forged within the Labyrinth's centre at any time, this causes the previous Gem of Eternity to immediately degrade into a lesser replica. And renders it vulnerable to the Forgotten's influence, while the true Gem of Eternity is the one gem that can actually contain her or drive her back without fail.
• Veteran Unit: Bloodbound and Poolbound gems are two variants that revolve around this trope. Bloodbound increases the efficiency of the gem the more it kills (or in Chasing Shadows, hit) enemies. Poolbound, in Chasing Shadows, increases its power (or the whole gem as a component) the longer you stay in battle, provided that you continuously build more powerful gems as a result of the constantly growing mana pool. In Frostborn Wrath, both become an innate property of every gem.
• Waves of Enemies: Waves are represented by "wave stones", which slowly rise up the left-hand edge of the screen, letting you see the next few waves in advance. You can summon waves early for bonus XP, and even summon multiple waves at once; later games give you the option to power up waves with gem bombs, add extra waves, and even speed up the wave stones' movement rate, all of which boosts your XP multiplier even further.
• White Is Pure: The Gem of Eternity is a uniquely glassy silver-white colour, unlike the more full and opaque white of regular Poolbound gems, and it's the only gem pure enough to serve as a locking mechanism for the Forgotten. The lesser replicas, on the other hand....
• The Worf Effect: The Forgotten winds up on the giving and receiving end of this.
  • In both Gem of Eternity and Chapter 1, the Forgotten shows off just how far beyond anything you've faced up to this point it is by soaring right past all your souped-up, max-level gem towers, that have just got done ripping through colossal waves of monsters, right to your wizard tower to turn your character into her newest host. They won't even shoot at it, much less stop it. Gem of Eternity even has her possess your character so fast there's no time to do anything.
  • In the finale of Labyrinth, the Forgotten shows up right as you finish forging a new Gem of Eternity, beginning to hammer down the ice wall separating her from you...that is, until the Gem of Eternity charges up and unleashes two bright energy waves that actually send it reeling. When the Forgotten persists, smashes a small hole in the ice and begins exuding shadowy tendrils into the field, the Gem of Eternity shatters them by unleashing concentrated white lightning blasts. And the Forgotten backs off after that. Want to know why you need a new Gem of Eternity so badly? That's why.
• Zerg Rush: Swarmlings are the most notable example, but really "rush the enemy with enormous numbers" is the primary tactic of the enemy forces in general.

Individual games provide examples of: