"FLÄSHYN!" note
What has happened to this world is now forgotten. We do not know our past, who we are, and why we're here. We don't even remember our families or our homes, but we know one thing, we shall get to the Throne.
Nuclear Throne
note is a Bullet Hell Shoot 'em Up Roguelike by Vlambeer, creator of Super Crate Box, Luftrausers and Serious Sam: The Random Encounternote . The game is currently available on Steam, PS4, PS Vita, and Nintendo Switch. The game is focused on high-adrenaline shootouts in randomly generated environments with a large number of weapons available at the player's disposal. Every character has different passive and active abilities, ranging from blowing up corpses to spending their own health to spawn allies. In addition, as you defeat enemies you gain radiation, which allows your character to mutate, gaining new perks as you travel across the wasteland. But no matter how strong you or your weapons are, you must still be careful, because death comes quickly, and death means you're going on a one-way trip back to the campfire.
At some point in the past, humanity messed up. They tried their best, but they went extinct, either dying in the wake of the apocalypse or mutating to a point where they could no longer be called humans or anything even remotely close to natural life. Though the human race was destroyed, Earth was not; it merely changed. Life became a struggle for survival, but it continued ever onward. A long time has passed since the apocalypse, and stories about the legendary Nuclear Throne have led a small group of mutants together to a secluded campfire. They have very little in common, but they all have the same goal; seeking the Nuclear Throne. This will by no means be easy, however, as the path to the Nuclear Throne is guarded by murderous bandits, ravenous monsters, and the mysterious Interdimensional Police Department (IDPD), a heavily armed militia determined to prevent anyone from reaching the Nuclear Throne for unknown reasons. Using their uniquely abnormal superpowers, the mutants will do whatever it takes to claim their prize and rise above, no matter the consequences.
After Vlambeer's dissolution in 2020, it seemed like new content updates for the game had run their course. Then, after the company's reformation in 2024, Update 100 was announced in mid-2025, and released on December 5th of that year as part of the game's 10-year anniversary. This update brought some massive overhauls to the game, such as making it widescreen and run at 60 FPS, while also adding a large swath of extra content, including a new character and new unlockable C-skins.
Compare and contrast Enter the Gungeon, another Roguelike with Bullet Hell elements.
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A-M
- Achievement Mockery: Mixed with a little Self-Deprecation, killing yourself with a Disc Gun earns you the achievement "Sincere Apologies", with the description "We hereby sincerely apologize". Seems even Vlambeer are aware of how crappy the gun is.
- After the End: The game is set in the post-apocalypse, and every human is either dead or mutated.
- All There in the Manual:
- Almost all of the game's lore is given out by Word of God. Things like Fish having been a police officer, the Proto Mutant and even a few characters' genders are never mentioned during gameplay, or at best hinted at in the loading screen hints. Even the bosses have backstories that the game never even touches upon.
- IndieBox's Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition came with a manual that included a Trashtalk translation guide, allowing the players to understand just what the mutants are saying.
- Amazing Technicolor Battlefield: You fight Throne II inside of a swirling, purple portal.
- Ammo-Using Melee Weapon: Most melee weapons logically require no ammo whatsoever, but the Jackhammer, Laser Sword, Laser Hammer, and Laser Screwdriver all require ammo, the former using up Explosive ammo, and the latter 3 using Energy Weapon ammo. Ultra Shovel meanwhile costs no ammo, but requires to be fueled by rads which can limit its usage as well.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: Each character has unlockable B and C-skins that can be obtained through completing various tasks. These challenges' difficulty ranges from "stuff you will probably do by accident" to "pro players will have trouble with this".
- Anti Poop-Socking: One of the loading screen tips reminds you to take a 15-minute break for every hour you play.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- Robot will not eat its weapon if it only has one. This prevents you from accidentally ending up weaponless.
- If you open up the portal to the next level and a weapon is near it, it will get sucked in with you and be there at the start of the next level in case you wanted to pick it up. Same goes for rad canisters. This can actually be frustrating if you're trying to avoid weapon chests or rad canisters for the secrets you get by skipping them.
- Rebel sacrifices some of her HP in order to summon allies, but if you're low on HP to the point where the next summon would kill you, it just won't work until you gather more HP, preventing accidental deaths.
- Certain attacks from bosses, such as Big Dog's missiles, tend to drop ammo pickups, ensuring that you aren't completely screwed if you run out of ammo while fighting them. Due to the way pickups work, these drops may instead be health kits, meaning you also have a replenishing supply of HP for the battle.
- Awesome, but Impractical:
- Disc Guns, guns that fire, uh, discs (in this case, buzzsaws). They do respectable damage, but the ricochets will hurt you just as much as it'll hurt an enemy (and are hard to dodge), and if the game spawns a level with tight corridors amd you dont have a way to reflect them or Hammerhead, kiss your life goodbye.
- Nuke Launchers are an explosive-type weapon that is extremely powerful. Unlike every other weapon in the game, the Painfully Slow Projectile is guided by your mouse cursor; this isn't explained anywhere in game and isn't immediately obvious when you pick it up. Ducked behind a corner when you fired it? It's likely to swerve into the wall and take you out as well.
- The devs seems to be aware of this for the Disc Gun and Nuke Launcher, because finding a golden version of one of them grants an achievement called "Good Riddance".
- The minigun and gatling laser/plasma. Amazing for clearing out a large room or tight corridor in a hurry, but will chew through your entire stock of ammunition in just seconds. Not even the recycle gland mutation can rescue the minigun from becoming useless over any amount of extended use, unless you land most shots despite it's large spread.
- The Super Plasma Cannon can pretty much kill anything it hits in 1 shot, and can even down the final boss in only 4 shots. It also has a 9-second reload time and chews through ammo like nobody's business. note
- Artifact Mook: After looping, the game remixes areas by adding in enemies from different (usually "nearby") ones, even if it doesn't make much sense for them to be there. Justified by all the dimensional travel going on.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: The crystal spiders in the Crystal Cave, who behave much like the rats in the sewer but are faster and more resilient, and the flies in the jungle, which are twice as big as all of the player characters, and shoot out maggots at the player.
- Alternative version of crystal spiders, found in Cursed Crystal Cave, are even more fitting for the "Creepy" part.
- Bittersweet Ending: The true ending. The Captain is dead and the IDPD are all but destroyed, bringing an end to the annihilation of universes, but all of your friends that the IDPD murdered are dead and it's uncertain whether or not you can even travel to a dimension where your friends are still alive anymore now that the IDPD is dismantled.
- Black Swords Are Better: A secret weapon for Chicken, that can be obtained by leaving behind the Chicken Sword in 1-1, then looping the game, where it can be found in L1 1-1 (the first level of Loop 1 Desert). It does more damage than the regular Chicken Sword, outpacing early melees such as Wrench but paling in comparison to the Blood Hammer, Lightning Hammer, etc.; however, it also gains a much larger arc and tremendous damage while Chicken is headless.
- The Blank: Guardians (as well as Horror) seem to have a tiny, active portal where you'd expect their faces to be.
- Bling-Bling-BANG!: Y.V. starts off with a golden revolver, in keeping with his "money to burn" characterization. Other characters can also find rare golden weapons, which are versions of some early weapons and have minor improvements over the originals such as increased rate of fire. Entering a portal with a golden weapon sets it as an alternative to that character's starting weapon.
- Blood Knight: Plant's loading tips include things like "No mercy" and "Kill kill kill" and "Blood blood blood".
- Body Horror:
- Melting, Eyes, and a few other enemy mutants.
- The IDPD units suddenly change into a horrible cross with Freaks in the third loop.
- Boring, but Practical:
- Melee weapons. Compared to the other, more unique weapons, they can be fairly underwhelming. But they can block enemy fire and kill most enemies that you encounter in one or two swings.
- The Ultra Revolver. It has an extremely high fire rate, has the same ammo cost as a regular revolver (plus a trivial radiation cost), and deals around the same amount of damage as a slugger.
- The Heavy weapons are variants of weapons you'd find as early as the Desert, but with their damage drastically increased. Not the most destructive weapons around, but still a reliable choice for later levels, especially when playing as Steroids or Yung Venuz.
- The Second Stomach, Rabbit Paw, Bloodlust, and Rhino Skin mutations. They do nothing flashy, but will keep you alive and going much longer than you would have under your own power.
- The only thing the Plutonium Hunger mutation does is attract drops and rads from longer distances, but boy does that come in handy, especially if your character is wearing the Crown of Haste.
- Scarier Face simply decreases the max HP of all enemies, but that's essentially a damage increase to all of your weapons, making it universally helpful regardless of loadout.
- Boss Corridor: Unlike any other level in the game, the last level of the Palace has no enemies, as it is simply a massive hallway leading up to the Final Boss. Given how said boss operates, the hallway also doubles as a massive Boss Room.
- Boss Remix: All of the bosses (except for the Final Boss) have themes which remix the title music.
- Brutal Bonus Level: Starting from the loops, the IDPD Headquarters can be accessed through one of the vans. This area is full of IDPD units — regular and elite — and the True Final Boss provides a Bullet Hell that would give The Throne a run for its money.
- Car Fu: If a Snowbot (a yeti-like enemy) collides with a car while doing its sliding tackle attack, it will stop and pick up the car. There is then a small chance every so often that said Snowbot will throw the car at the player, at very high speed, and it will explode on impact. A rare but potentially devastating attack. Getting killed by this will also show a special spiralling car animation to let you know that, yes, you died by having a car thrown at you.
- Cast from Hit Points:
- Rebel can summon Allies at the cost of health — 1 HP for the first minion, and 2 HP for every Ally spawned when at least one is out (which also heals existing Allies, who otherwise die over time)
- If you run out of explosive ammo, the Blood Launcher and Cannon will use your health for ammo instead. Missing an attack with a Blood Hammer will take your HP as payment.
- Skeleton's special fires a shot without using ammo, but it has a chance of damaging you, depending on how much ammo the weapon shot would have costed.
- Character Blog: Yung Venuz's Twitter account. #verifyvenuz
- Co-Op Multiplayer: Nuclear Throne has a local multiplayer mode where up to four people can play through the game. Instead of player-specific Ultras, the Ultras are aimed toward helping both players (shared HP and shared ammo). A fan mod with Vlambeer's support called Nuclear Throne Together gives online multiplayer and fixes some of the co-op bugs.
- Collision Damage: Some enemies, like maggots and rats, can do this. Picking up the Gamma Guts mutation lets you do the same to your opponents.
- Conlang: The characters actually speak in a language called Trashtalk. Most characters say "FLÄSHYN!" at the beginning of each level, which translates into "Let's do this!"
- Company Cross-References:
- The Disc Gun, Minigun and Laser Cannon from Super Crate Box make a reappearance, and Yung Venuz from their previous game GUN GODZ is now a playable character.
- One of the loading screen tips for Hard Mode is a reference to Luftrausers' own Hard Mode:"What does SFMT stand for?"
- The Computer Is a Lying Bastard: The description for Gamma Guts merely says "enemies touching you take damage", a Useless Useful Spell in a game where you are usually a few hits from death, and many enemies deal contact damage. However, what the game fails to mention is that if an enemy takes lethal damage from Gamma Guts the player will take no damage themselves. This makes the mutation significantly more useful.
- Cowboy Cop: Rogue's rifle references this — one of the tips becomes "Loose Cannon". Fish may have also been one prior to his mutation, judging from one of his loading tipsnote and his B-Skin getup.
- Crapsack World: All civilization has been destroyed in the apocalypse, and the horribly mutated survivors fight relentlessly over what remains.
- Credits Gag: The Author Avatars of Vlambeer fly through the portal background as they're named in the credits.
- Crystalline Creature:
- Crystal is a sapient, playable humanoid crystal with the ability to adopt a larger inanimate crystalline form that protects her and reflects most projectiles.
- The Crystal Caves, Crystal's original home, are host to multiple enemies of this type, like crystal spiders and laser crystals.
- Cyber Cyclops: Almost all robots found in the game have this design, from the snipers in the Scrapyard to the snowbots in the Frozen City.
- Cyclops: All bandits (including Rebel) except for Big Bandit have one glowing eye visible underneath their bandages.
- Damage-Sponge Boss: The Final Boss and the True Final Boss both have over 1500 hit points, far more than any other enemy in the game. While the former is a big target that relentlessly chases you down a corridor, the latter is smaller and likes to bob and weave around their large, spacious arena. Better hope you brought enough ammo.
- Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
- Robot's special ability is to devour its current gun for ammo and/or health. This is incredibly useful, but if you had just played someone like Fish or Crystal who use their abilities much more liberally, you may end up chowing down on your gun in the middle of a firefight. To a lesser degree Chicken can do the same and accidentally throw a weapon away, thought at least she can pick it up again.
- Cuz can carry three weapons, which requires the player to press an extra key when switching weapons. His Ultra that makes him hoard a total of six weapons requires the player to press even more keys to switch weapons.
- Dark Reprise: The Captain's theme is a slow, ominous piece that reprises a few bars of the game's main theme.
- Deadly Disc: The Discgun from Super Crate Box makes a reappearance in this game, and functions more or less the same way.
- Developer's Foresight:
- In update 25 of the game, Vlambeer added footstep sound effects, which changed based on what sort of surface players walked on. In update 27, getting the Extra Feet mutation gave you more footsteps. Y.V.'s B-Skin, where he floats, doesn't make any footstep noises.
- Rebel has a B-skin which gives her a winter coat. What happens when you reach the frozen city with her? She puts on the hood over her head.
- Whenever Robot levels up, the "select a mutation" screen is rewritten to say "install an update". If you're picking more than one mutation, it also says "Do not turn off Robot".
- The hidden underwater "Oasis" zone has every playable character and bandit in it encased in a bubble except for Robot and Fish, who obviously don't need it to breathe. (Y.V. only has one to keep his money dry.) Additionally, weapon elements are kept in mind, with fire weapons fizzling out and lightning weapons hurting everything onscreen - including you.
- The clock hands in Crown of Haste will change with your computer's clock.
- Getting Y.V. to Level Ultra will change the "Generating..." text on the loading screen to "Verifying..."
- In Y.V.'s Crib, if you have Y.V. use his airhorn, Yung Cuz will cheer. In addition, if you destroy the television, Yung Cuz will cry.
- Entering the mansion as Cuz will instead have Y.V. play on a couch. He will also cheer on airhorn, but breaking his TV will make him ''slightly'' annoyed
- Pausing the game as Chicken while in a decapitated state will also display her headless avatar on the Pause screen.
- Dying to the final boss gives you a special message: "You almost reached the Nuclear Throne".
- Dying to the final boss via collision damage used to give you this mocking message: "You reached the Nuclear Throne". Subverted in that this didn't unlock the character who is described to be unlocked by "reaching the Nuclear Throne" — you have to actually sit on the Throne for that.
- Horror's passive ability of having an additional mutation choice is kept in mind in regards to its Ultra mutations, having a unique third option whereas every other character only has two. With Crown of Destiny, he also gets 1 extra choice at top of one random provided by the Destiny, for a total of 2 for both normal and Ultra mutations.
- The game's loading screen tips are reactive: almost every weapon, mutation, location, and character has at least one unique tip that can potentially appear when relevant.
- Desert Bandits: While the common Bandit enemies appear in nearly all levels, they feature most prominently in the first, desert area, with their leader being the boss of that part of the game. They also look the part, wrapped in white cloth and with their faces covered.
- Disc-One Nuke: On occasion, be cause of how the game's leveling system worksnote , it's sometimes possible for you to acquire a relatively strong weapon like a Triple Machinegun, Splinter Gun or even something stronger fairly early on. This goes double for Cursed chests, which have a much higher chance to drop relatively stronger weapons compared to the current level. Robot is designed to exploit this, with its passive ability causing weapons to potentially appear one level earlier than normal.
- Dual Wielding: The unique ability of Steroids; all other characters can only have one weapon in use at a time.
- Dueling Player Characters:
- Neglecting to pick up two levels' worth of Rad Canisters in a row will cause Horror to spawn in the next level and start attacking you. It drops a fair bit of rads upon death, and killing it is also how you unlock it as a playable character.
- If you access Y.V.'s Crib as Cuz, by destroying his television you can choose to fight Y.V. as the Gun God, a fully-fledged Optional Boss. Defeating Y.V. unlocks his C-costume.
- Dungeon Bypass: Completing the secret Oasis level takes you to the third Scrapyard level where Big Dog resides. It's possible to take this shortcut from the very first Desert level, meaning that you can skip the rest of the Desert, the Sewers and the first two Scrapyard levels. This makes unlocking Plant's B-Skin, where you have to reach the Throne in under 10 minutes, far more manageable than it otherwise would be.
- Easter Egg:
- Going into a Crown Vault while an area's B-theme is playing results in tiles that hint at the ambiguous story being scattered throughout.
- Pressing the 'B' key while playing as Y.V. will... produce an airhorn sound effect with a slight amount of screenshake. This does nothing beyond acting as a Taunt Button.
- Elite Mook: Some enemies have more deadly variants, such as the Golden Scorpion in the desert that shoots more bullets and in irregular patterns and explodes into them. All of them are dreaded, especially the Elite IDPD agents.
- Energy Weapon: Weapons that use energy ammo fall under this category, and the mutation Laser Brain increases the effectiveness of all of them.
- Equal-Opportunity Evil: The IDPD have masculine and feminine voice clips, which seems to indicate gender equality in their forces. The Captain is also a woman who speaks Finnish.
- Everybody's Dead, Dave: Completing a loop takes you to the campfire, where every mutant, barring the one you're playing as, is dead.
- Every Car Is a Pinto: Cars can take a few hits, but will explode after taking enough damage (or being thrown at something).
- Evil Weapon: Cursed Weapons have a small chance of spawning inside purple chests in every level. These weapons may be more advanced than what is possible for the given level it spawned in, but like cursed items in other roguelikes, they cannot be replaced except with other Cursed Weaponsnote . Carrying two of them at once may cause enemies to drop purple-colored Cursed Mini Ammo Chests which give more ammunition on pickup than regular Ammo items, but will explode if left alone, possibly killing players who take too long to retrieve them. Finally, loading screen tips suddenly begin turning into distorted messages which imply that the Cursed Weapons are alive and can see the player. Retrieving a crown from the Crown Vault, choosing the Last Wish mutation, or looping the game will cleanse the weapon. note
- Excuse Plot: The apocalypse happened, the Nuclear Throne is the mutants' salvation, go find it and die a lot trying. Almost all of the background information about the game's world and characters comes from statements from the developers if you're really curious, but practically none of itnote is told through the game itself, leaving things like why the player has to jump through portals to get between levels or why the Throne itself is actually a giant robot a complete mystery to anyone who doesn't seek those answers out. At most, the player will understand that the I.D.P.D. are the bad guys because they immediately start shooting at you when they spawn in (and even then, stuff like the acronym that "I.D.P.D." stands for is left up to the player making an educated guess).
- Extreme Omnivore: Robot can eat guns for ammo and HP.
- Eyes Do Not Belong There: Eyes has, well, eyes all over his head.
- Failure Is the Only Option: For most of its Early Access duration, the game had no "win state": reaching the throne and killing the final boss only loops you from level 1-1 except significantly harder, meaning that you'd die eventually. Update 92 finally lets you win the game.
- Flechette Storm: The Splinter Guns fire multiple smaller bolts like a shotgun. Seeker guns will fire multiple projectile that home in on enemies.
- Friendly Fireproof: Zigzagged. Most of the time, enemies can't hurt each other, but explosive damage will still hurt allies (which is justified, as it hurts everyone hit). A subversion comes with the IDPD. While the IDPD and normal mutant enemies don't try to gun for each other, IDPD attacks can hurt mutants and vice-versa. This last rule can come in handy in the Palace and on the loops, as it will help lighten the load.
- Funny Animal: Fish and Chicken.
- Gatling Good: This game features the Minigun, which consumes ammo like crazy and requires the wielder to stand still or get pushed back by the gun's intense recoil. The Double Minigun, which fires twice the bullets, consumes even more ammo and pushes the user back no matter what. The Laser Minigun is the Energy Weapon counterpart and doesn't suffer the same drawbacks, at the cost of energy ammo being scarce. In a similar respect to the Double Minigun, the Plasma Minigun offers more firepower at the cost of higher ammo consumption and recoil. Then there's the Gatling Bazooka, which rapid-fires explosives and comes with the natural drawback that explosions harm everything, including you.
- Gold-Colored Superiority: Golden weapons allow you to equip a stronger weapon than your default revolver from the start as well as having slightly better firepower than their less shiny counterparts.
- The Goomba: Bandits, the first enemies to appear and present as fodder for the rest of the game. While their shots are as dangerous as anything else, they have a very low rate of fire and don't move around much, on top of having very little HP. They're only dangerous in big groups.
- Gameplay and Story Integration:
- Y.V., being the Gun God, is immortal, so his death animation simply has him teleporting away out of frustration. The bodies of both him and Horror will also not be found in the IDPD attack at the campfire, having presumably teleported away and disintegrated into rads respectively. Same applies to his presumably semi-divine coding, Cuz.
- Alternate universes plays heavily into the backstory of the game, with the IDPD being from ones where the apocalypse never happened. Every new run that you start are justified to actually be alternate universes where all the characters are alive to justify your deaths and every loop starts in a new alternate universe.
- At first, Random seems like a standard option for loading up a new character every time you die, but there are loading screen tips exclusive to the Random option that imply that the option is actually the name of a mutant who considers themself the best of the bunch because they're always adaptable and can replicate someone perfectly.
- The Ghost: The Proto Mutant, a mutant in the game's backstory that was the first to set after the Nuclear Throne that sets off the idea of pursuing it. Not much is known about him, except that he also made the Proto Statues, the IDPD is hell-bent on keeping the playable mutants from everything related to him, and he could possibly be the skeleton sitting on the throne, but given the loops and alternate universes, who's to say?
- Graphics-Induced Super-Deformed: The game's pixel art style portrays every character this way the overworld. Character and boss portraits reveal higher-level details that the art style doesn't account for otherwise.
- Grievous Harm with a Body: One of the mutations powers up the on-death knockback enemies receive to such an extreme that other enemies take damage if the body careens into them.
- Guide Dang It!: The secret areas and the characters associated with them, and mpst of the B and C skins have bizarre unlock conditions that you can either stumble upon by accident or have to look up to find out.
- Hand Cannon: The Heavy and Ultra Revolvers, souped-up handguns that only appear during the late game (and post-loop for the latter).
- Harder Than Hard: Hard mode, which you unlock by looping the game twice in a single run. The fact that the game considers just reaching The Sewers as Chicken in Hard Mode as an accomplishment should give you a pretty good idea of how brutal it is. Enemy spawns start out at the same level as if you'd already looped once (including IDPD regular and elite), the difficulty of the enemy spawns increases twice as fast, the weapons increase in power at two thirds the rate of a normal run, health drops are rarer, and enemies drop half as many rads. The only mercy you get is that IDPD vans don't spawn, and you start out with a large weapon chest.
- He Who Fights Monsters: The IDPD attacks the player out of a preemptive attempt to keep the conditions of the apocalypse out of their universe. By the third loop, the troopers have spent so much time crusading against mutants that they turn into mutants themselves.
- Holiday Mode:
- If the player logs in on December 5th (Nuclear Throne's release date), there is a cake on the character select screen.
- If the game is played in the winter holidays, it will snow in the levels.
- Holy Halo: Strong Spirit gives your character a halo above their head that disappears after activation.
- Hub Under Attack: The Throne II boss fight takes place in the character select campfire, where the other mutants have already been killed by the IDPD.
- Hungry Jungle: The Jungle, a secret level where everything is trying to kill you.
- Hunting the Rogue: Rogue, who defected from the Inter Dimensional Police Department after stealing the Portal Strike. Insurbodination is not tolerated in the I.D.P.D, which manifests as I.D.P.D troops teleporting in at least once every level.
- Incendiary Exponent: The flame weapons, ranging from standard flamethrowers to even flaming shotguns.
- Instrument of Murder: A rare weapon is Fish's Guitar, which is about as strong as a sledgehammer but has fast reload speed, making it one of the better melee weapons in the game. It can only be found at the camp site if you loop as Fish or have it as a default weapon in the Weekly.
- Item Caddy: Several mutations work like this: Rabbit's Paw increases enemy drops, Open Mind adds an additional chest each level, Plutonium Hunger makes you gather items from a bigger distance...
- Joke Weapon:
- The Screwdriver. It has short range, can only hit enemies head-on (as opposed to the wrench, sledgehammer, and shovel, which hits enemies in a wider radius), and it's one of the weakest of the melee weapons. However, it can be used to repair a car in the scrapyard, which takes you to a mansion where you can find a golden weapon.
- The Pop Gun and Rifle, two guns that have stupidly high fire rates but pitifully low damage due to firing shells instead of bullets. Fun, but not something you would ever rely on past the first couple of levels.
- Toxic Bow and Toxic Launcher. Toxic damage relies on enemies that stay still, the toxic clouds can damage you, and it's pitiful against enemies you seriously want to use it on (aka bosses), and the Toxic Launcher takes a few seconds to go off after firing, which gives enemies just enough time to run over to you and take you down with them.
- Kaizo Trap:
- The Dog boss of the scrapyard goes out in a series of spectacular explosions. These can kill you.
- Also, if a next level portal appears next to a car, it can blow up the car while drawing you in, killing you.
- Lil' Hunter in the Frozen City loses control of his jetpack when you kill him, and he can crash into you and explode.
- Don't use a disc gun on the final enemy of a level if you're close enough to get sucked in immediately. The disc will grind you to pieces before the level can end.
- The throne itself.
- King Mook: Big Bandit, the boss of the first area. The loop bosses also qualify.
- Laser Blade: The energy sword, which is the most balanced of the energy melee weapons in terms of range, speed, damage and ammo usage.
- Last Chance Hit Point: The Strong Spirit mutation. Doesn't work if your character's maximum HP is at 1, naturally, and goes away after you hit 1 HP, but you can re-activate it by getting back to full HP in the next area.
- Lethal Joke Weapon: The energy screwdriver initially doesn't seem that impressive given that it has the same paltry range as it's underwhelming, non-energized counterpart. However, its lethality comes into play with the fact that it does the same damage as the energy sword and swings much faster, giving it some serious DPS even without Laser Brain.
- Limited Loadout: Despite the game boasting 50+ different guns and five ammo types, you can only carry two weapons at once, and only Steroids can use both at the same time.
- Loading Screen Message Gag: Exaggerated, as all of its loading screen messages are like this to some extent. Technically some of them do impart a bare minimum amount of helpful information ("Fish can Roll"note , "Crystal can Shield"note ) or are cryptic lore references/tangentially relevant to the current incoming level, but the majority of them are Word-Salad Humor phrases such as "Like Kevin Costner".
- Logo Joke: When the game boots up, the titular flaming bear that serves as Vlambeer's logo has three eyes as a means of complimenting how the game deals so heavily with Nuclear Mutants.
- Lonely Piano Piece: The theme of the I.D.P.D. Headquarters, which otherwise sounds quite menacing, is replaced by a much gloomier piano tune if you arrive there as Rogue. The song, called "The Place I Once Called Home", is meant to hammer in the fact that Rogue was once an I.D.P.D. member herself.
- Long Song, Short Scene: There's decent chance that you'll never hear the music of certain levels for more than 30 seconds even though they're all full length and around 3 minutes minimum, especially if it's a secret level where the music doesn't play between multiple portals (such as the theme of 2-?, which only ever has five enemies in it).
- Macrogame: As a Roguelike, there are little bits of progression that carry on between runs. The most major are the unlocking of characters, crowns and golden weapons.
- You unlock characters by performing a specific action or visiting a specific area. When unlocked, you'll see them back at the campfire after you complete your run.
- Crowns are harder; you must acquire them on your run and defeat the Final Bossnote . Since you can replace your once-picked crown at later point, you only get to keep the one you end the game with.
- A random golden weapon can be obtained through Y.V.'s mansion, or later by getting far enough, usually into loop. However, you can only have one golden weapon saved per character; getting another one replaces the first.
- Crown Vaults also contain a special proto chest if you enter them while already having a crown. That chest may store a single weapon – any weapon you manage to put into it can be then taken out on a different run. This has several different uses.
- Magikarp Power: Melting starts the game with 2 HP (for reference, a single bullet does 3 damage), but he gains levels much faster. If you can survive a few levels, he becomes incredibly powerful, especially if you can upgrade his special power to deal tons of explosive damage at no ammo cost.
- Mirror-Cracking Ugly: Referenced by the Scarier Face mutation's loading screen tip, which is "Mirrors will break".
- Mook Medic: The Necromancers in the lab, which revive fallen enemies as Freaks. The Technomancer takes this a step further by reviving dead enemies as Necromancers.
- More Dakka: Many weapons in the game have an automatic counterpart, which fires continuously as long as the attack is held, or an assault counterpart, which fires multiple rounds with each shot. Y.V.'s special attack also lets you fire two shots at once, and can be upgraded to four shots; his fire rate is also higher as a passive. Steroids can upgrade his special attack to get 20% of every shot free and his passive which makes every weapon fully automatic, making the normal auto (and less accurate) variants of each weapon redundant.
N-Z
- Nightmare Face: The Scarier Face mutation is apparently so frightening that it causes enemies to lose health.
- Not Completely Useless: On Hard Mode, the much-maligned Disc Gun is actually surprisingly useful. Since the weapon drops increase in power much slower, you won't have access to good AOE weapons for a long time, and the enemies are densely-packed enough that firing a few discs through a chokepoint into a big room is an effective method of crowd control, if you don't mind losing a few of the drops. Similarly, explosive weapons such as humble Grenade Launcher find much more use despite their high risk of self damage.
- Non-Indicative Name: The Crowns aren't actually crowns that the characters wear on their heads; they're little mechanical things that follow them around.
- Nuclear Mutant: Most of the cast used to be ordinary humans, animals or nonsentient beings who were mutated by the nuclear apocalypse. And with the rads that enemies drop, they can further mutate themselves to become stronger.
- Obvious Rule Patch: The Crown Vaults are automatically destroyed in the Weekly challenges, to prevent the player from switching out the crown forced on them.
- In Daily challenges, Proto Chest is separate from what you have on your save file, meaning you can't cheese it by taking a strong weapon you found normally.
- Less obviously, the fact that Hard Mode lacks vans on first "loop" means you can't use them to enter HQ in order to unlock a loop crown too fast or skip a level.
- Oh, Crap!: A few unique loading screen tips can display if the player is low on health, including "No no no" and "This isn't going to end well".
- One-Hit Kill:
- A few enemies will instantly kill the player if they touch them. Namely, all laser crystal variants, the Hyper Crystal, and I.D.P.D. Vans. Having Strong Spirit is the only way to survive such a hit for most characters. Cursed crystals can actively force such a hit at random.
- You can also do this to most enemies as well provided you have a strong enough weapon. You can even pull this off on the Final Boss by using Y.V.'s special ability (when upgraded with Throne Butt) while holding a Super Plasma Cannon, as long as you have Back Muscle with at least 96 energy and Scarier Face. Difficult, but Awesome, to say the least. Watch it in action here.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: Melting, in spite the fact he has 2 HP, still is this due to the fact that everything (except touching maggots, being in fire for a short period of time, and a few others) does more than 2 HP in damage. The only way to alleviate this is by taking Rhino Skin and/or Strong Spirit... which each makes him into a two-hit point wonder (three when both are found).
- One-Hit Polykill: Crossbows can pull this off with smaller enemies, while the Heavy Crossbow will pierce through just about anyone. Explosions and melee swings have similar advantage.
- One-Winged Angel: The Throne returns in 0-1 after killing the last IDPD unit as Throne II.
- Piss-Take Rap: The lyrics to the Y.V. Mansion Rap are wonderfully silly and over-the-top.Shoot you in the morning, get your blood on my eggs / Shoot you in the hand, head, face, chest, neck, legs / At Chrismahanakwanzica him hide under tree / Jump out mini-gunning down your fat family!
- Player Nudge: The loading screen sometimes advises the player with useful tips.
- Power at a Price: All the crowns come with a drawback. None of their effects are strictly beneficial.
- Prayer Is a Last Resort: Seems to be what the Last Wish "mutation" is, as the artwork depicts Fish in a Prayer Pose. Since the mutation restores health back to max and gives you more ammo, it appears that there actually is a higher power to answer that prayer.
- Promoted to Playable: As an April Fools' Day joke, Big Dog. Y.V also counts, as he was a Final Boss in his previous entry.
- Retirony: Fish was a cop one day from retirement before the apocalypse hit. He's not dead yet, of course, but this is a roguelike...
- Radiation-Induced Superpowers: Radiation is the name of the game: all enemies drop it except for the IDPD before the third loop, and it functions as the game's exp system, with you being able to select a new mutation with each level. In addition, the Ultra weapons all drain radiation on use but are insanely powerful as a result. Horror takes it even further by being literally living radiation and having the ability to blast enemies with it.
- Ribcage Ridge: Giant ribcages can be found scattered around the Desert levels.
- Rocket-Tag Gameplay: Inevitably what the game revolves around. You have strong guns and great abilities that can decimate enemies, but messing up once is likely to kill you. Defensive abilities and mutations can alleviate this, but not by much.
- Running Gag: All of the Plasma weapons (except for the Golden Plasma Gun, oddly enough) have a variation of "fun" as their unique loading screen tip; in particular, the Plasma Gun has "fun fun", the Plasma Rifle adds another "fun", and the Plasma Cannon adds another "fun" on top of that.
- Sad Battle Music: The final boss theme is a haunting guitar piece with a one-man wail over it.
- Sewer Gator: A slightly uncommon enemy in the Sewers level. Doesn't do any collision damage, but wields a shotgun that can be dangerous at close range. Fortunately, they move slowly and take a moment to react to the player once line of sight is established. There's also a rare chance for any alligator to spawn as an elite "Buff Gator" that has much more health, wields a dangerous flak cannon, and aggressively pursues the player upon spotting them. After looping, buff gators appear all over the Sewers, Scrapyard and Crystal Caves.
- Shout-Out:
- One of the late game weapons happens to be the Heavy Machinegun.
- A secret exit portal in the sewer level takes you to a bonus room where the only enemies are four turtles and a rat.
- One of the loading screen tips when playing as Fish is "Like Kevin Costner".
- A random loading screen tip will just display the word "Rosebud".
- Another tip references an infamous review of Doom (1993), where the reviewer lamented an inability to talk to the monsters.
- The Plasma Cannon and Super Plasma Cannon function like the BFG variants from Doom and Quake, firing green projectiles that explode into smaller energy balls on impact. The Lightning Cannon also behaves similarly to the Quake 2/4 BFG version, being a slowly traveling orb that damages enemies near it.
- Plant's B-skin was recolored to give him red vines and blue petals. Being the character with the fastest speed in the game, it comes to no surprise that he resembles a certain blue hedgehog. Better yet, one of its loading tips is "GOTTA GO FAST".
- Fish's B-skin is this to Old Snake and Snake Plissken.
- In a similar vein, Robot's B-skin was updated to change its purple coloration to a deep blue. This suggests that Robot was used by the IDPD, but the ear-like fins on its head and the new grimace it sports for its optic give it a passing likeness to said blue hedgehog's mechanical doppelganger.note
- Yung Venuz' mansion rap references Teen Wolf, Hakuna Matata, and Rudy Huxtable.
- One of the loading screen tips when playing as Horror simply says "In The Zone".
- The Flak Cannon and Ion Cannon work almost exactly like their Unreal Tournament and Unreal Tournament 2004 counterparts, respectively, being a shotgun weapon that fires a sphere of multi-hit death and a massive beam strike. The Nuke Launcher similarly functions like the Redeemer Missile, being weapons that fire a remotely controllable nuclear rocket.
- The final boss theme that plays while fighting the Nuclear Throne sounds exactly like an acoustic Spaghetti Western version of "The Justice Ray" from the Thunder Force series.note
- A loading screen tip for the Jungle area is "Welcome To The Jungle".
- When playing as Robot, one of its unique loading screen tips is "I'm afraid I can't let you do that".
- Skill Scores and Perks: Mutations are the game's equivalent of perks, earned by leveling up by gaining rads (the game's version of XP). Most characters get a pool of fournote randomly-selected mutations. These mutations include abilities like doing damage every time you're hit, gaining more health from medkits and upgrading the effects of certain weapons. At max level, or Level Ultra, each character gets a choice of twonote character-specific "Ultra Mutations", each one designed to benefit a different playstyle.
- Solemn Ending Theme: "Kings and Queens of Wasteland", a lyrical track lamenting the tragic lives of the mutants.Kings and Queens of Wasteland we were
And already forgotten the reasons to fight
From the day we were born it was bloodshed forever
We've seen enough comrades go dead in the night - Speedrun Reward: Plant's B-Skin is unlocked by reaching the Nuclear Throne in less than 10 minutes.
- Spider Tank:
- Tank enemies from the frozen city level are lumbering robotic creatures that wander the snowdrifts upon stilted legs, carrying a powerful chaingun they can target you with.
- The Nuclear Throne itself is a gigantic throne-shaped robot that walks on four crablike legs.
- Spread Shot: Several instances of these, usable by both the players and the enemy.
- Standard FPS Guns: Out of the ordinary for a non-FPS game, but not for a game about guns. Each weapon belongs to a different category, and as such uses the same ammunition as its ilk. In addition, each ammo type has a special mutation that benefits it.
- Bullets: The most basic of weaponry, starting with the regular Revolver, and subsequent guns firing more and more bullets at a time, leading up to the Minigun or the Hyper Rifle, which shoots five bullets at once, and has autofire. Its special mutation is the Recycle Gland, which gives you a chance of recovering any bullet that hits a target. (The Pop weapons fire shotgun-like pellets despite using bullet ammo; they aren't affected by Recycle Gland, but they are affected by the Shell's special mutation, seen below.)
- Shells: Shotguns of all shapes and sizes, which vary between firing either regular pellets, which hit in a spread, flame pellets that ignite on contact, or slugs, which are single heavy shots with enough force to kill giant scorpions in one hit. These shots have less range than other weapons, but bounce off walls and deal more damage up close, making them useful for closed spaces or crowd control. The Shotgun Shoulders mutation increases the range and speed at which they bounce off of walls.
- Bolts: Crossbows, obviously. These weapons come in either traditional bolts, which fire straight with perfect accuracy and pierce through small enemies killing them instantly, splinters, which fire in a spray similar to the shotgun, and seekers, which deal lower damage but home in on enemies. Also includes the Toxic Bow, whose bolts release poison gas on impact, and the Disc Launcher, which fires bouncing buzzsaws of friendly fire death. The Bolt Marrow mutation gives bolts slight homing capabilities.
- Explosives: Grenade Launchers of various types, with an obligatory Sticky Bomb variant, a mini grenade variant whose weapons fire multiple grenades at once, and one that also releases poison gas on detonation. The only weapon class capable of destroying terrain by itself. Curiously, Flamethrowers and Flare Guns use this ammo type too, as well as the Jackhammer, despite being a melee weapon. Its special mutation is the Boiling Veins, which makes the player immune to fire and explosions when at or under 4 HP.
- Energy: Laser weapons which fire single piercing beams, plasma weapons which fire balls of energy which eventually explode, an orbital strike Ion Cannon, and lightning weapons that home in on objects. Similarly to the Explosives above, the Energy Screwdriver, Energy Sword, and Energy Hammer are all melee weapons which use Energy ammo. The Laser Brain mutation increases the strength and duration of all energy attacks.
- Story Breadcrumbs: There's a plot and characters have pasts, but making sense of it all requires reading the loading screen tips and translating Trashtalk and Finnish, then making inferences.
- Summon Magic: Rebel's special attack summons a bandit to fight on her side, for the cost of 1 HP for the first on stage, and 2 HP for all additional bandits while at least one is on stage. Upgrading her ability increases their fire rate.
- Surprise Car Crash: On a looped run, IDPD vans will sporadically spawn in out of nowhere (heralded by an extremely loud and aggressive beeping version of the normal IDPD siren which is your cue to duck out of the way) and barrel across the screen in a straight line, killing anything (including you) that it runs over and then spilling out its cargo of a bunch of IDPD officers.
- Theme Music Power-Up: The fight against Throne II is topped off by a resurgence of the main theme to the game, usually heard on the character selection menu, heralding either triumph on your part, or a hint of where you're going in the next few seconds depending on your skill level.
- There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Some of the weapons you can pick up are ridiculously excessive in how much projectiles they fire and how much damage they do, though this isn't really a bad thing. For example, the Super Crossbow (a crossbow that fires five bolts at once) is great for taking out both a tanky enemy and anything unfortunate enough to be around it.
- Throwing Your Sword Always Works: Chicken's ability lets her throw her weapons — even if she only has one of them. This, of course, includes her starting weapon.
- Time Police: The I.D.P.D. are from a timeline where the Apocalypse never happened, and will try and stop you as you get close to the Throne. If you manage to loop a third time, all the I.D.P.D. troops are turned into mutated freaks, which goes to show they do it to protect their own timeline.
- True Final Boss: The I.D.P.D. Captain, only reached by looping at least once and reaching the I.D.P.D. Headquarters. Once you beat her, your run ends.
- Underground Monkey: There's the common desert Bandit, the Jungle Bandit, and the Snow Bandit. Assassins also have variant in a Jungle Assassins.
- Cursed Crystal Caves enemies are recolored variations of normal Crystal Caves enemies, only with additional abnormal abilities.
- Ungrateful Bastard: The cocoons in the crystal caves contain trapped enemies that you can free by shooting. They'll still try to murder you on sight, of course.
- Unintentionally Unwinnable: The Crown of Guns prevents ammo drops from spawning in exchange for greatly increasing the number of weapon drops. Unfortunately, if one has chosen the wrong sets of mutations and weapons to bring, one can end up in an unwinnable scenario against against pre-loop Throne II, as there are no chests in the Campfire stage, weapons might not be dropped by the I.D.P.D. officers you face at the start of the level, and the exploding orbs fired by the Throne won't drop ammunition at all due to the Crown's side effect. All the player can hope to do at that point is reset the game or deliberately get killed.
- Universal Ammunition: Despite the huge arsenal of weapons to use in-game, there are only 5 ammunition types. This leads to completely different weapons somehow sharing the same ammo pool, such as the Auto Crossbow and Disc Gun both using bolt ammunition.
- Unspecified Apocalypse: We don't know how the nuclear apocalypse happened, all that we know is that it just did.
- Useless Useful Spell:
- Downplayed with Eyes' Telekinesis ability, which doesn't really do anything except slightly pull enemies closer, attract pickups and chests from a greater distance, and slightly move bullets away. This still has certain uses and gets stronger with Throne Butt and/or his Ultra mutations.
- Chicken's special ability is to throw her active weapon. Thrown weapons deal heavy damage (increasing as she levels up) and knockback, but past a certain point just firing/swinging the weapon in question is more worthwhile unless it's out of ammo. On top of that, without Determination (an Ultra mutation) weapons she throws don't even return to her, so you're essentially throwing away one of your two weapons for upfront damage and have to go pick it up yourself if you want to retrieve it. It's largely used as a ranged method of conserving ammo early on, a niche desperation move, or for tossing excess weapons into exit portals as backup.
- Robot's active gives it ammo or health... at the cost of eating its currently held weapon. Doing this in the middle of combat is not very practical, to say the least, and compared to most active powers it's best used as an out-of-combat means of recycling weapons it isn't using.
- Rebel's special ability allows her to summon minions that automatically shoot at enemies...in exchange for some of her health. Without mutations that provide extra health and healing, and preferably a melee weapon for self-defense, it's not really worth willingly damaging yourself just for backup in a game where everything already kills you in a few hits, and the supposed counterbalance that she automatically regains health from entering portals doesn't fully outweigh this. (It can be used early on after the level is cleared just to get extra rads that minions drop, however.)
- Horror's radiation beam can become this if you rely on an Ultra Weapon – a strong weapon that has the added cost of rads per each shot. It's also not very useful early on while you still want your mutations and rads are limited.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: A minor example. In Y.V.'s Crib, there's Y.V.'s cousin Yung Cuz who appears to be playing a game on his giant golden TV. Although you can't interact with him (save for Y.V. himself, whom Cuz cheers when he blares his airhorn), you can damage the TV. Destroy it, and he'll cry nonstop until you leave the level. This doesn't affect the gameplay as a whole, though. However, if you go there as Cuz and destroy the TV while Y.V. is playing on it, he'll begin attacking you.
- Violation of Common Sense:
- The basic screwdriver is mostly a Joke Item, so you probably wouldn't want to equip it, much less take it all the way to the Scrapyard. Too bad, since that's what you need to do to enter Y.V.'s Mansion.
- In order to get Chicken's black sword, you need to leave her sword behind at 1-1, something most players wouldn't purposely do otherwise.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: The IDPD wants to protect their own timeline from the apocalypse or any outside influence. This includes assassinating potential threats, which includes you. They spawn whenever you're going for a crown and in the palace, and they start to chase you regularly in the loops. They also succeed in murdering the other playable characters, or different instances of them.
- Wham Line: One of the verses from the credits song provides more context for an oft-seen loading screen tip, making the course of the game suddenly seem much sadder.It's not fair, it's not right, there's no reason to fight
- Wham Shot: The first thing you see after initiating a loop is a campsite with the other playable characters dead, with the IDPD immediately spawning in. Assuming you survive Throne II, this sets you up for being chased by the IDPD for the rest of your run.
- A Winner Is You: After beating both the Final Boss and the True Final Boss, your character makes a short, completely untranslated speech and the game cuts to credits.
- With This Herring: Nearly character starts with a dinky little revolver that is better off being exchanged for a new weapon ASAP.
- Wrench Whack: A pipe wrench is one of the first melee weapons you can get, doing acceptable damage with a relatively quick swing speed and average range for the first couple of areas.
- You Nuke 'Em: The Nuke Launcher, a powerful late-game weapon that fires devastating cursor-guided nukes. Its power comes at the price of consuming 3 explosive ammo and being somewhat slow. Like with all explosive weapons, be careful not to blow yourself up.
- Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Upon beating the Nuclear Throne for the first time, a cutscene plays after the credits showing the I.D.P.D. Captain watching your character's progress on a monitor, showing that things are far from over.
- Zerg Rush: Almost all of the enemies in The Labs will make a mad rush for you. Included in the swarms of Freaks or exploding enemies and enemies that will tank the damage.
