Damned (2014) - TV Tropes
- ️Fri May 31 2024
Damned is an asymmetrical multiplayer horror game developed by the Brazilian 9head Game Studios which released on Steam Greenlight in 2013, with its official full release coming on October 6 of the following year. During a session, four players are thrust into an isolated location and must open up an exit to escape, all while being stalked by the fifth player who controls a monster bent on killing them.
Sounds a bit familiar, doesn't it? Besides beating DBD to the punch by a couple of years, Damned makes things a bit different for both parties. The killer isn't physically manifested into the map at first, behaving more like a haunting; they need to "trap" various setpieces strewn around the environment which will activate when a survivor draws near to them, and once enough have gone off, the monster can enter the material world and start attacking their victims. Meanwhile, the survivors had to find keys, crowbars, and flashlight batteries strewn around the map in order to unlock doors, solve puzzles, and stave off the monster and their powers. Being a fairly humble game, only four monster types were made available across the game's lifespan — the Lurker (a demonic skinless entity), the Phantom (a skeletal ghost), "Mary" (a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl), and the Fallen (an angelic statue); meanwhile, the survivor options have different identities but are all functionally identical without any perks or skills to unlock.
Nine years later, Damned 2 was announced.
These games provide examples of the following tropes:
- Abandoned Hospital: Four of the available stages — Black Lake Asylum, Hund Hills Asylum, Serenity Asylum, and Tygerberg Hospital
- Abandoned Warehouse: The aptly named Warehouse is shown to be one, and there's also a factory.
- Asymmetric Multiplayer: One of the earliest examples of the survival horror version of this type of gameplay.
- Blackout Basement: This game is dark, making the flashlights necessary to get around the environments... which in turn can attract the monster's attention.
- Deliberately Monochrome: The monster can only see the world in shades of blue at first. Once survivors have tripped enough traps for them to manifest, their vision changes to yellow.
- Disposable Decoy Doppelgänger: The Fallen's main power is that it can leave copies of itself around the map which alert it to survivors' presence, although survivors can drive them off with their flashlight.
- Hell Hotel: Three of the available stages — Bodom Hotel, Bright Hotel, and Rose Crimson Hotel.
- Helping Hands: One of the traps a monster can set is a group of ghostly hands reaching out from the floor or walls.
- Invisible to Normals: The monster cannot be seen by survivors... until it's ready to attack, at least. Interestingly, this is also inverted, as the monster cannot see the humans, but they can see evidence of their presence besides being tipped off by their traps.
- Intangibility: While still in spirit form, the monster can just pass through doors that survivors need to interact with.
- Living Statue: The Fallen is a murderous statue of an angel
- Lock and Key Puzzle: The bulk of the gameplay for the survivors is getting access to more of the map by locating keys.
- Mighty Glacier: Mary is slow as molasses during normal play, but she is able to see survivors at all times, can teleport around the map, and once she has stalked close to them for long enough, she can enter Frenzy mode, rushing towards her victims like an Olympic sprinter.
- One-Hit KO: Monsters only need to swipe at someone once in order to take them out of the game.
- Poltergeist: Until they can appear in the flesh, the monsters largely behave like this, causing objects to move and scare the survivors.
- Randomly Generated Levels: The available stages all have a set theme, but their exact layouts and contents change between sessions.
- Sanity Meter: To keep survivors from just running around with their flashlights off (and thereby being "invisible" to the monster), remaining in the dark or alone for too long will cause your character to start freaking out.