Problem Sleuth - TV Tropes

> Knock a stiff one back and get to sleuthing.

Problem Sleuth is the third webcomic under the MS Paint Adventures banner, written by Andrew Hussie, and was arguably the one which first brought Hussie and his work into the limelight. Written and presented in the style of an ersatz text/point-and-click adventure game, it details the antics of three especially hardboiled detectives—Problem Sleuth, Ace Dick, and Pickle Inspector—in their attempts to get out of their offices, all the while working to aid the turmoil-stricken kingdoms of the Weasels, Clowns, Hogs, and Elves and to foil the dastardly plots of Mobster Kingpin.

While initially presented as a take on the Film Noir genre, its strength is in how it parodies numerous point-and-click adventures, JRPG mechanics, video game tropes, and its ever-increasingly complicated story, which still eventually ties up all loose ends neatly. Much like its successor Homestuck, it also demonstrates a very steady level of Art Evolution up until the end, evolving from relatively-crude static panels to increasingly-complex panels depicting Super Move Portrait Attacks, Summon Magic, and Wave Motion Guns galore.

Warning: High chance of spoilers. Proceed with caution.

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> Pose as a team, because tropes just got real:

• Action Girl: Despite their less-than-intimidating monikers, both Hysterical Dame and Nervous Broad can hold their own in a scrap. Madame Murel is another example of the Dark Action Girl variety.
• Affectionate Parody: The menu options, magical factions, multi-stage boss battles, miscellaneous health and magic meters, weird puzzle shit, and constant exploration are a a nod to JRPGs and Adventure Games.
• All Just a Dream: Subverted. The "imaginary universe" that at first seems like a shared dream world is a tangible location that can be accessed several different ways.
• All There in the Manual: The author's commentary in the published edition often explains (jokingly) a few plot points not otherwise apparent, including a few Aborted Arcs.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: One of PI's duplicates decides to fly away and ascend to godhood. He becomes Godhead Pickle Inspector and only responds to the command "Fondly regard creation".
• Amateur Sleuth: All three protagonists, allegedly: they never actually do any sleuthing.
• Anachronism Stew: Despite being "vaguely Prohibition-era", characters will play board games invented in the 50s, paint ethnically-diverse murals of the 90s, and use computers to search GameFAQs. Also, they have wormholes to other dimensions that run on power from wall-sockets.
• And the Adventure Continues: The second to last page of the webcomic states "There's a problem. And you'll be damned if you aren't gonna be the fellas to sleuth it."
• Arc Words: Shit just got real. Shit is real.
• Art Shift: For one page, the narrative continues through a delightfully charming Kate Beaton style comic.
• Ass Kicking Pose: After arming themselves with powerful candy guns, PS, AD, and PI pose as a team because SHIT JUST GOT REAL.
• Behind the Black: A giant mural celebrating ethnic diversity is unexpectedly revealed to be on the fourth wall of Problem Sleuth's office, possibly symbolic of the comic's audience.
• Big, Stupid Doodoo-Head:
• Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: The FIVE ALARM HOT SAUCE, which is a concoction brewed by combining chipotle peppers with various monster horns.

  It has a funny taste. You can't put your finger on it, but if you had to describe it you would say it has the flavor of INTENSE PAIN.

• Body Horror: DMK, whose body is a gigantic, floating, plant-like head covering a mass of vines, claws, wings, and thorns.
• Bond One-Liner: "You drop your cold blooded line which you spent the last few minutes thinking up."

  Hate to cut and run...

• Born Lucky: Mobster Kingpin. "As luck would have it, your VIM gauge maxes out." Later, it's revealed that he was cheating.
• Bottomless Bladder: Lampshaded/subverted: "You remember you're pissed off at Ace Dick, and in addition to which, you haven't been able to pee once in the 13 and a half hours you've been locked in your office."
• Brick Joke: Almost every Brick Joke is also a Chekhov's Gun, but one example that fits better here is Ace Dick walking the UGLY DOG.
• Bullet Dodging: Each hero's "Auto-Parry" does it differently: Problem Sleuth on purpose via Unnecessary Combat Roll, Pickle Inspector accidentally via distraction, and Ace Dick auto-parries by...taking the shot directly in his gut.
• "Burly Detective" Syndrome: Parodied by having nearly every relevant humans identified by a description as part of the comic's Film Noir setting. The boys get names like "Pickle Inspector" and "Churlish Toff", girls are referred to as "Nervous Broad" and "Hysterical Dame", even the main villain is just known as "Mobster Kingpin" in the narration. The only main character exempt from this is Madame Murel.
• Call-Back: Many Call Backs develop into Running Gags, making it difficult to distinguish between the two. The story is manifest out of building previous one-off gags into stable pillars of the game world. From the FAQ:

  For instance, the seemingly idiotic and highly ignorable command "Build fort out of desk" lead not only to a short-term humorous payoff, but to an entire imaginary universe paradigm, and in a way, a whole gaming system which appeared to exist from the beginning, but only became manifest through the command.

• Call a Hit Point a "Smeerp": There's no end to them. Vitality Carats. Gumption Wafers. Pep Gold.
• Calling Your Attacks: SEPULCHRITUUUUUUUUUUDE!
• Calvinball:
  • General game mechanics adhere to Rule of Funny and Rule of Cool, and nothing else.
  • The game PI plays against Death. It is an enormous mesh of Sudoku, chess, Tetris, Sorry!, a Western, and Dungeons & Dragons.
• Canon Immigrant:
  • Ace Dick ends up falling backwards in canon into Jailbreak, revealing answers brought up to questions in a different game.
  • Ace Dick also visits the swamp from Bard Quest.
• The Cassandra: The Infinite Summation Honeybee Professor might be annoying, but it turns out his advice would've actually been pretty useful.
• Character Alignment:
• Chekhov's Armory: Anything, no matter how meaningless or insignificant, can turn into something crucial or valuable later on in the story.
• Chekhov's Gun: Many, including just about every named battle command, but the one with the longest time to fire and biggest effect would have to be Problem Sleuth's CANDY CORN, which is finally sacrified to land the finishing blow to DMK.
• Chekhov's Skill: PI and the Labyrinthine Sudocube Comprehsensile.
• Chess with Death: Happens quite a few times, even without anything at stake, and never once with chess. At least not the traditional version of it.

  You desperately bargain with Death, challenging him to any game you can think of for the fair damsel's life. Clue, Connect Four, Uno, Battleship, Sudoku, well ok not Sudoku, but how about Snakes And Ladders, that's fun, or what about Hungry Hungry Hippos god you LOVE Hungry Hungry Hippos .''

• Chew Bubblegum:
  • Ace Dick joins the battle against Mobster Kingpin by jumping through the pool portal:

    You're here for two things: to fucking ruin someone's shit, and to play a friendly game of make-believe.

    AND YOU'RE ALL OUT OF IMAGINATION.

  • Also, in an extra:

    You're here for two things: to rain unspeakable devastation down on the forces of evil, and to flail your limbs about in a playful manner.

    AND YOU HAVE NO ROOM IN YOUR FORT TO FLAIL ABOUT WHATSOEVER.

• Chicken Walker:
  • Candy mecha is a sentient example. In fact, even after the head is detached so that it can fly off to fight the villain, the legs still are used for various purposes.
  • Problem Sleuth mounts the legs of the first beast the party slew and walks around in it.
• Closed Circle: The entirety of Problem Sleuth. It turns out to be a BIG (imaginary) circle.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: "Sensing his impending demise, DMK grows a few extra health meters."
• Concealing Canvas: Frequently subverted and otherwise played with.
• Continuity Nod: Over 1000 strips later, we rejoin the sunglasses that were stolen from the Starsky bust. Although the plot relevance makes this technically a Call-Back, it has the largest "time since last mention":"relevance to plot" ratio in the game.
• Cool Airship: Mobster Kingpin's ship, the CHICAGO OVERCOAT, black thorn of the imaginary skies.
• Creation Myth: With equal parts absurd myth and hard science.
• Critical Hit: By many names: BRUTAL AFFRONT, SAVAGE UPBRAID.
• Cut and Paste Comic: Lampshaded in some of the "pose as a team" commands; "You copy and paste your previous poses into a new file and animate the background rapidly."
• Cutting the Knot: After having a solved puzzle reset, Fiesta Ace Dick uses this to solve it a second time.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Five separate times Problem Sleuth tried to call forth the "righteous fires of charisma" of Sepulchritude, and every time he was stopped. After it is finally used, he turns grey and beaten and, greatly weakened, falls into BHMK's Event Horizon.
• Death by Origin Story: Your losses cause you to feel an all-consuming sense of vengeance. You feel like every superhero origin cliche is swirling around you at once!
• Death Is Cheap/Death Is Not Permanent: You get 3 imaginary lives and, if your physical body dies, you can challenge Death to the game of your choice in the afterlife or just sneak out while he's not looking.
• Delicious Distraction: Battle Technique: Torso Flail.
• Department of Redundancy Department: If your IMAGINATION was a face you would punch it. In the face.
• Designated Distaff Counterpart Fight: Hysterical Dame + Nervous Broad vs. Madame Murel.
• Deus ex Machina: DEUS EX SEWING MACHINA
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?:
  • No, Fluthlu.
  • Defeating DMK, a demonic entity who is vastly more powerful than Fluthulu, certainly counts as well.
• Dissimile: "The candy mecha's legs scramble around like a chicken whose head decapitated itself and flew into the sky to fight a demonic mob boss."
• Distaff Counterpart: Played straight in two instances and downplayed in another: Each of the three detectives eventually had spirit quests, where they were psychically linked with female counterparts of themselves. They later meet the counterparts. As described on the site:

  PS, AD and PI each have a lady counterpart, in accordance with deep seated mythology that dictates that any man secretly wishes to have sex with a female version of himself (re: Alvin and the Chipmunks, Mickey/Minnie, etc.) HD is PS's counterpart, NB is PI's, while AD is his own counterpart because he has a very poor imagination. So that's one duplicate AD, the one with the wig/helmet.

• Don't Fear the Reaper: Death is actually a pretty nice guy with a love for games.
• Epic Fail: Past Future Pickle Inspector's ultimate attack against the Midnight Crew in this bonus strip.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: All the boys wanted was to escape their offices and get on with their sleuthing. To do so, they had to journey through fantastic worlds a hundred times over, die a few times, solve a perplexing number of preposterous puzzles, subject themselves to reality-warping shenanigans of a profound nature, and engage in an entirely-too-long, highly-difficult, insanely-complex fight against a demonic mobster. But, in the end, they get their reward. The world is real.
• Enter Solution Here: Parodied. PS has previously seen a code written on a piece of paper (and the readers know it). But since it wasn't technically needed yet, the author forces the player to undergo several more rooms of weird puzzle shit before he can re-read the note.

  You vaguely recall seeing somewhere the sequence of symbols, STAR - HEART - HORSESHOE. However, you can't quite remember the symbols STAR - HEART - HORSESHOE. You will need the piece of paper with STAR - HEART - HORSESHOE written on it if you wish to remember the sequence STAR - HEART - HORSESHOE.

• Escaped from Hell: Parodied, where upon dying, characters are sent to the Afterlife (where they play various board games with Death), which they can simply open the door to and return to the land of the living, no "Fighting your way out" required (although Bumblebee Prof. gets sent to a different afterlife that doesn't seem escapable, and a more traditional Fire and Brimstone Hell is shown at some point). Later on, the door gets blocked, preventing any further escapes.
• Exposition Fairy: The Infinite Summation Honeybee Professor appears and offers long winded pro-tips whenever one of the characters attempts to break reality by shoving a portal through itself.
• Fantastic Angst: A prolific businessman who runs a prosperous town with a wife and son, Ace Dick and his family are caught in a drive-by shooting. While AD manages to protect his son, his wife dies, and he and his son turn to vigilantism before going west to the open frontier in a covered wagon, leading to AD's son drowning in a river. Anguished, lost, and out of supplies, Ace Dick takes his own life. This all happens in an intense game of Life played with Death casually to pass the time.
• Fantastic Drug: Candy liquor. Not alcohol made with sugar or flavored to taste like candy, mind — actual confections melted down and brewed like hooch. It's way more potent than regular alcohol, maxing out the drinker's Imagination stat immediately. In the imaginary world, this is represented by the drinker gaining godlike power and a rainbow aura.
• Fight Woosh: Going outside with a window unplugged makes the world become metaphorical for a moment. And then a Beast appears!
• Film Noir: The series started out as a pastiche of this before things got considerably more zany.
• Final Boss: The battle with Demonhead Mobster Kingpin spans over half the comic and parodies several boss battle tropes.
• Foreshadowing: Mixed with Call-Back due to the strip's improvisational nature.
• Freudian Trio: The three detectives act as this.
  • Id: Ace Dick (brash, gluttonous and violent)
  • Ego: Problem Sleuth (charismatic jack-of-all-trades)
  • Superego: Pickle Inspector (highly intelligent and good at puzzles)
• Friendly Sniper: PI becomes one, which is vital to taking down MK.
• Gamebooks: Parodied. Some pages offer a choice between two commands. The first one leads to a very obvious Game Over, while the second one advances the story.
• Gaslighting: Doing this to the audience is a Running Gag introduced three pages in. Problem Sleuth is commanded to grab the gun sitting on his desk, but there is only a key, and there never was a gun. When he is commanded to pick up the key, he picks up the gun. All weapons in Problem Sleuth end up being keys or other tools that are replaced with weapons between pages.
• The Gods Must Be Lazy: GPI will only respond to the command "Fondly regard creation". He actually does do two things, but those things are create the universe via Stable Time Loop with the help of the temporally-replicating Pickle Inspectors and sewing the universe back together when it is torn apart. Never once does he directly help the protagonists, except for perhaps in this instance.
• Good Bad Bugs: In-universe example. Every real weapon has a tendency to not be a weapon, and the Game Faqs walkthrough consulted by Problem Sleuth confirms that its some sort or weird glitch in the game.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: You call for a diplomatic laying down of arms.
• Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: You suddenly remember the universe is upside-down!
• Grid Puzzle: Wizard's Sudoku is a Calvinball game that combines Sudoku with improbable stuff like jousting and chess. PI plays it with Death as one of the challenges to be beaten to achieve freedom.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: AD attempts this with BATTLE TECHNIQUE -> LV. 2 TORSO FLAIL, but fails at even providing a Delicious Distraction like with the original Torso Flail.
• Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: Inverted; the main three male detectives start with guns, and the two female alter egos get melee weapons. Played straight with Mobster Kingpin's iron knuckles and when Nervous Broad gets her hands on the paint stripper.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: "The window loses it's extra-dimensional portal properties, and severs you mid-way through. You are dead."
• Hand Cannon: The Sniper's Sextant controls a giant cannon. Not a strict example, but a roundabout literal one.
• Happy Dance: Frequently. THIS one is REALLY impressive.
• Hardboiled Detective: The titular hero and his friends.
• Hard Gay: Hunk Rump, and, by extension, most of the gay porn magazines featured.

  Sweet Jesus, that buttock. You could ricochet a quarter off that buttock and kill a man where he stands.

• Healing Boss: One of the many tropes uses it increasingly. Absurd JRPG boss fight is a regenerating health bar that compelled the three private investigators to find more and more ridiculous ways to hurt a mob boss turned One-Winged Angel.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Sepulchritude was presented as one, but Sleuth survives it.
  • The Collider of the Pickle Inspectors, where two Pickle Inspectors sacrifice their lives to inflict massive damage on Demonhead Mobster Kingpin's second form.
• High-Altitude Battle: The final battle against DMK takes place in the airspace between the Imaginary City Streets and the Four Kingdoms.
• Hufflepuff House: The Clowns. While we learn quite a bit about the Elves (introducing us to the concept of Elemental items), the Weasels (recurring allies), and the pigs (Dick's Quest), the Clowns just show up when needed and otherwise give out Pie Fillings. We do know they were important to Mobster Kingpin's quest, but all of that was offscreen.
• Humongous Mecha: Made out of candy.
• I Fell for Hours:
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Mobster Kingpin ends up falling onto the Ham Needle from a really large distance.
• Interactive Comic: The Trope Codifier, as it pretty much refined the technique of MS Paint Adventures as a whole.
• Interdimensional Travel Device: There are two ways to travel between the real world and the world of imagination: Either by climbing through a window, or entering a fort and imagining really hard (booze helps with the latter).
• Interface Screw: The whole keys/gun thing mentioned above in Gas Lighting. Each of the three main characters and their female counterparts have a similar problematic weapon. It's supposedly a bug in the game that gets exploited for laughs and frustration. See also You Can't Get Ye Flask below.
• It Makes Sense in Context:
  • "Appoint Pickle Inspector as chosen savior of the weasels."
  • "You cannot descend into the sky because the universe is not upside-down!!!"
  • "It's DMK's third and final face. He is more fearsome than ever, with THREE HEALTH METERS, and a deadly BLACK HOLE VERSION OF HIS NON-IMAGINARY SELF pulsing on top of his HAT."
• Kevlard: Ace Dick's variation on the Auto-Parry technique involves taking the attack in the gut. Zombie Ace Dick extends this to taking attacks in his rotting body as a whole.
• Kitsch Collection: Fancy Santas.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: Your motto is "let no inventory go uncluttered".
• Lack of Imagination: Played for Laughs with Ace Dick, who has an extremely low Creativity stat, which is a minor problem that comes up occasionally. When he gets his 11th-Hour Superpower transformation, he ends up looking exactly the same because of his low Creativity
• Lampshade Hanging: "You feel it is incredibly important that events in this adventure maintain strict adherence to the laws of physics, because it would just be so stupid if there were any inconsistencies."
• Last Breath Bullet: Zombie Hired Muscle heroically saves Problem Sleuth from the last of the Cultural Rainbow mob.
• Limit Break: Charm Break, Comb Rave, Schema Form, Ostentation Drive, Murder Flux, Parliament Uproar. Some characters share a common limit break bar.
• Literal Metaphor: The Lazy Susan of Endowment seems like just another fake game mechanic used to initiate the previously mentioned Comb Rave, but turns out there is a physical manifestation of it in the world. Mobster Kingpin exploits this by replacing one of its receptacles with the one that he uses, allowing his boss form to use his own super move.
• Locked Door: Almost all of them, except, ironically, Death's door.
• Locked in a Room: Problem Sleuth and Ace Dick start out bitterly hating each other and both locked in their respective offices and the game ends when they finally escape.
• Magikarp Power: Ace Dick has a special attack called the Truffle Shuffle, which has absolutely no effect and usually ends with him being killed. However, if he combines his Truffle Shuffle with one or more additional Ace Dicks, it can turn into an incredibly devastating attack.
• Marathon Boss: The battle with DMK lasts for about half the duration of Problem Sleuth.
• Medium Awareness: Problem Sleuth is fully aware that he's in a video game. Whenever he's too lazy to put up with the webcomic's weird puzzle shit, he takes advantage of this knowledge by printing out cheat codes, re-loading save states, and looking up walkthroughs from Game Faqs.
• Mighty Glacier: Pickle Inspector's "Tootsie Roll Frankenstein" transformation. Twice as strong as an actual glacier, but twice as slow, too!
• Mind Screw: It can become increasingly difficult to tell where (and when) everybody is. Summed up in this line: "You're not totally sure, but you think this means there are now three Ace Dicks running around."
• Morph Weapon: All weapons exhibit object duality — they double as an innocuous object that randomly switches from one form to another whether or not the user wants them to. For example, Pickle Inspector's Machine gun doubles as a hairpin, a tube of lipstick doubles as a chainsaw, and Mobster Kingpin's brass knuckles double as the Megaton Key.
• Mundane Made Awesome: So very, very much.
  • Highlighted in the Clip Show Tribute, which takes all the frames of the entire comic and sets them to orchestral music.
  • Best example: DING.
• Mythology Gag: Running gags from other games, such as:
• Nameless Narrative: Many of the characters are only referred to by their titles. The only exceptions to this are Madame Murel, The Midnight Crew and possibly Death.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: DMK and BHMK never would have formed as they did if not for Fiesta Ace Dick's actions.
• Nice Mean And In Between: Pickle Inspector is the nice of the bunch, being a generally polite and affable fellow. The brutish Ace Dick lacks manners and falls into being the meanest one. Problem Sleuth is a smooth talker who is capable of convincing people with his charisma, but isn't particularly polite, so he's the in-between.
• No Fourth Wall: On a couple of occasions the characters look up an FAQ for the game on GameFAQs and input cheat codes to bypass certain parts of the "game".
  • At one point in the game, Ace Dick beats someone to death with a stat meter.
  • When DMK's final form starts generating additional life bars, Problem Sleuth starts physically attacking the life bars.
• Non Standard Game Over:
• Ominous Latin Chanting: "Fast-paced organ music and a haunting vocal chorus accompanies your epic struggle."
• One-Winged Angel: It's MK's hideous ultimate form, DEMONHEAD MOBSTER KINGPIN.
• Ontological Mystery: When you boil down the plot, the characters are trapped in their office building^note  and need to learn how to use their environment^note  in order to escape.
• Opposite-Sex Clone: Subverted. Ace Dick had too little imagination for a Distaff Counterpart, and instead just became a clone of himself with a blonde wig/Prussian Picklehaube.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: A quick change in headgear makes all the difference.
• The Pen Is Mightier: The Tectrix of the Arbitor has item confusion with the legendary TECTRIXCALIBUR.
• Physical God: Pickle Inspector ascends to godhood at one point. One of many Pickle Inspectors.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Problem Sleuth, Ace Dick, and Pickle Inspector are all supposedly detectives, though the story really has next to nothing that involves solving crimes and what not.
• Plot Coupon: Anything can be a Plot Coupon...even your own skull.
• Portal Cut: What happens if a window loses power while something is in it.
• Portal Network: What would at first appear to be what is outside Problem Sleuth's window.
• Porn Stash: Gay porn stash. Problem Sleuth seems to have a tendency to be keeping Hunk Rump magazine somewhere nearby.
• Pot Hole: "Death throws down his hat in disappointment. He really must remember to invest in stronger security measures for the afterlife."
• Power Gives You Wings: Problem Sleuth gains a pair of wings upon using Sepulchritude.
• Power Levels: Understandable in the sense that this IS an RPG.
• Power Trio: Early on before the cast expands, the three detectives act as this.
• Pretty Little Headshots: Dramatic variant.
• Private Eye Monologue: Parodied in several places, including the epilogue.

  This is what being a hard boiled problem sleuth is all about. It's about being a strong, silent type, oozing with confidence, charisma, and other fine qualities such as not being trapped in your own office. It's about having a working phone. A real desk. Not one, but two steak dinners. And some hysterical broad on the line, yackin' about some fella she's got troubles with. It's always the same thing with dames. You comfort yourself in your sublime fantasy by now and then saying things into the phone such as, "Now calm down a second, toots..." and "Hey, take it easy, sweetheart. I can barely understand a word you're sayin'..."

• Pun: Fondly regard creation/crustacean/crenellation/donation.
  • Succumb to unfathomable bloodlust/bratwurst.
  • It has a HAIRPIN trigger.
  • It could be that these are the one thousand angels which are said to dance on the head of a pin...Or the head of a KINGPIN.
  • You attempt to woo your fan by turning it on.
  • The Infinite Summation Honeybee Professor peppers his speech with bee-related puns ("Avoid 1:1 duplications which will lead to unwelcome 100% matter accretions, and you'll keep hiving a honey of a time!") until he gets muted.

    Very well, bee that way!

    Asshole!

  • Then Honeybee Professor gets right back at it once he gets unmuted.

    Once we have completed building your Impetus Comb, and all of its Jocose Honey has ripened and is sweet as can bee, that is when the fun beegins!!!

  • And then there's this.
• Pungeon Master: Honeybee Professor makes a bee pun during every opportunity he gets. It's a good thing you get the option to mute him.
• Puppet Gun: Pickle Inspector aims the CLOCK TOWER SNIPER CANNON via the SNIPER RIFLE.
• Purely Aesthetic Era: Problem Sleuth is supposed to be set in The Roaring '20s, but you wouldn't know that if they didn't mention bootlegging and Prohibition. At one point PS looks up a solution to a puzzle on GameFAQs.
• Purple Is the New Black: Any antagonist worth their salt is shrouded with black when they use their powers. Black Hole Mobster Kingpin and higher forms are depicted as black but shoot out purple, and the Midnight Crew's shadow powers are stated to be black but are depicted as a mix of black and purple.
• Randomized Damage Attack: The Catenative Doomsday Dice Cascader is a machine that uses a process of dice-rolling to determine the damage it deals. First, a central dice is rolled to decide how many of the six others will be rolled to determine the actual damage. All the selected dice are then rolled, and each result is multiplied by the previous total to determine the sides of the next die (for instance, if the centra die rolls a six and the second one a two, all further dice have twelve sides; if the third rolls a seven then all further dice will have ninety-six sides, and so on). This can end with a final with a monstrous number of sides, which is then rolled to determine how much damage is dealt to the target. The Cascader is used in a non-canon strip against the Midnight Crew, ending with a final die with over fifty trillion sides. It rolls a one.
• "Reason You Suck" Speech: Parodied; Sleuth gives Kingpin a "Scathing" letter letting him know how much the tyrant's been infuriating the heroes, but it's little more than a short note full of grade school taunts. It's still enough to make him reel from the burn.
• Reality-Breaking Paradox: All the damn time. Mainly by ramming a window portal through itself.
• Recap Episode: Two of them (the first one by Death, the second one by the Devil), and a third one on the wiki.
• Red Herring: Several items are presented to the reader as possible scopes for the SNIPER RIFLE before Pickle Inspector finally gets one.

  The Swain makes a valiant play for his eyepiece, which in no way shape or form could ever be used in conjunction with a sniper rifle, and possibly could serve as one of numerous red herrings to this effect.

• Reveal Shot: Technically a Closeup on Head, at least by name.
• Role-Playing Game 'Verse: All of the detectives and the Mobster Kingpin have (weirdly named) stats and hitpoints—towards the end more and more bizarre bonus powers also appear.
  • Imagination: Magic, intelligence, and bonus to power in Imaginary areas.
  • Pulchritude: Evasion and Diplomacy/Charisma.
  • Vim: Strength and Health.
  • Each also has a expendable item that temporarily boosts it much in the manner of potions. Imagination is boosted by alcohol, Pulchritude is boosted by candy, and Vim is boosted by hotsauce. Early in the game, Vim is boosted by coffee, so really any hot drink will do.
• Rube Goldberg Device: A puzzle so particularly difficult that it's solved by loading a save state from a point after the puzzle is solved. It is later revealed that a time traveling Pickle Inspector did it.
• Running Gag: Items switching back and forth between weapons and completely unrelated objects (e.g., a revolver becoming keys or a chainsaw becoming lipstick), responding to characters attempting to ride something like a mechanical bull (at times something about to explode) with "Wow, what a fucking waste of time!" and weasels "flipping the fuck out".
  • Business cards loaded with Double Entendre. Subverted with Glass Blowers, Inc.
  • Ace Dick punches X in the snout to establish superiority. Xhearst is particularly enamored by your rowdy, no-nonsense brand of ruffianism.
  • Ace Dick's astonishing lack of imagination to the point where all of his alter egos are just him.
  • And of course: "Quickly retrieve arms from [X]." "You've already got arms, [another word for idiot]!"
  • "Throw hat down in disgust."
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: "Complain that the MASS of the OBSERVABLE UNIVERSE is only thought to be 3x10^52kg.
  DMMK, at 100x10^100kg, weighs about thirty trillion trillion trillion trillion times MORE than the MASS of the OBSERVABLE UNIVERSE."
  • Reply from Andrew Hussie:
  • The universe is becoming a rather crowded place.''
• Self-Disposing Villain: While DMK is dispatched by the heroes during an extensive Boss Battle, Mobster Kinpin himself doesn't get defeated by the sleuths. Instead, he gets accidentally pushed through his gravity corset by the moon, ejected from his black hole, and falls to his death, where he is gruesomely impaled on the Ham Needle.
• Serial Escalation: How utterly ridiculous can the game mechanics get? How ridiculously powerful can the cast's attacks get? Answer: very.
• Serious Business: Any and all forms of anything but chess with Death. Such as Sudoku.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Newly-introduced names take on more and more of this further as the game gets along.
• Shout-Out:
  • Problem Sleuth's door is initially blocked by a bust of Starsky from the Starsky & Hutch remake, supplied by Busts-R-Us. There are also busts of Hutch and Duggy in Ace Dick's office. The busts of various Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson and Snoop Dogg characters becomes a running gag throughout the comic, usually getting destroyed.
  • Get ye flask.
  • During the planning scene between the four kingdoms, a separate link references Ctrl+Alt+Del. GAME FUCKING OVER May also qualify as a Take That!.
  • You're here for two things: to fucking ruin someone's shit, and to play a friendly game of make-believe. AND YOU'RE ALL OUT OF IMAGINATION.
  • After Problem Sleuth summons Henry Clay during the tower battles, it takes the form of a charming homage to comics done by Kate Beaton like Hark! A Vagrant.
  • Death plays Wizard's Sudoku with Pickle Inspector so that the latter can return to life.
  • Summon Moe.
  • One of the scythe's forms is Dinosaur Comics' T-Rex, after Ryan North's praise of MSPA.
  • Another form the scythe takes is the head of Manny Calavera from Grim Fandango.
  • The Space Whale and "This all seems highly, highly improbable." in a reference to similar gags from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
  • LV. 4 HOOPTECH—DMMK KATAMARI BALL
  • You got the CHRONOSCOPE!! ARGH LAME PARODY DUMB
  • During his Game of Life, Ace Dick takes up the role of The Punisher, while his son becomes Bathearst to avenge their city of crime.
  • Ace Dick and Bathearst head out West in the board game Life, shifting into an unnamed parody of The Oregon Trail.
  • Mobster Kingpin's airship is helmed by Problem Sleuth's bust of Snoop Dogg's character from the movie Soul Plane. It becomes a Running Gag throughout the rest of the comic, to the point that the bust ends up being used to defeat Mobster Kingpin as the finishing blow. A Silent Film version of the movie is also watched by Hysterical Dame and Nervous Broad in the comic's epilogue.
  • When the Dapper Gentlemen are beating up Fiesta Mobster Kingpin, the narration launches into "A British Tar" from H.M.S. Pinafore.
  • A Brick Joke
• Single Tear: Death sheds a tear of black liquid sorrow on two occasions: a tear of awe when PI solves a puzzle, and a tear of mourning when he loses his scythe.
• Sinister Scythe: Death's scythe, which Problem Sleuth borrows for a while. It transforms into (among others) a rocket launcher, an F-16 fighter jet, a T-Rex, and an atomic bomb.
• Sniper Rifle: The SNIPER'S SEXTANT.
• Soft Reset: When prompted, selecting the command to press the shoulder buttons, start, and select will take you to the title screen. Then you have to start the entire comic all over again.
• Solve the Soup Cans: More and more weird puzzle shit as the story progresses. The Moonlight Sonata piano from Resident Evil makes a cameo.
• Space Whale: Harpooned.
• Start Screen:
• Stat Meters: Not merely an abstraction.
• Stick-Figure Comic: Most of the cast can be described as "peg people with noodle limbs", with only a few characters (such as Mobster Kingpin) breaking this rule.
• Strongly Worded Letter: Problem Sleuth sends one to Mobster Kingpin.
• Super Move Portrait Attack:
  • Sleuth Diplomacy is structured like one of these, with a quick-moving background and a zoomed-in pose.
  • The introductions of the Gambit Schema make them sort of like Epic Move Portrait Attacks.
• "Super Sentai" Stance: ...because SHIT JUST GOT REAL.
• Stairway to Heaven: DMK: LADDER TO HELL
• Stout Strength: Ace Dick and his various forms, as well as Mobster Kingpin.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: A command suggested switching hats with an enemy to disguise Problem Sleuth, but to no avail. Later, Mobster Kingpin does this successfully.
• Summon Magic:
  • You do not have enough ELF TEARS to summon the WEASEL KING!
  • SUMMON HENRY CLAY
  • You call forth the blistering white hot fury that is MOE.
  • You unsummon MOE. MOE will be of absolutely no use to you in this battle whatsoever.
  • MK: SUMMON WILFORD BRIMLEY
• Swiss-Army Tears: Elf tears.
• Thememobile: The whore-mobile.
• Theme Table: Each detective has a certain body type (which in turn are each associated with a type of food, a truck carrying that food, and a district of the city that is named after the makers of that food, a gentleman with some sort of optical accessory, and a room in the Sleazy Brothel in the sky), an office, something keeping them from escaping their office, a different kind of window/portal to the World of Imagination, a stat in which they excel, a standard weapon/key, a candy weapon, a type of candy armor, a Super Mode based on both a classic movie monster and type of candy, a Distaff Counterpart (each of which have their own weapon/other object, two of which get a weapon/object used in painting and a undergarment that warps their physical properties, and one of which is just a clone of one of the detectives wearing a wig), an ultimate move, and a non-human race they go on a quest for (each of which terrorizes another of the races somehow, and each of which has some kind of emissary and a champion that represents a Fantasy Character Class). Mobster Kingpin gets in on most of this as well.
• Time Travel: Pickle Inspector, to downright incredible levels.
• Transformation Sequence:
• The Treachery of Images: The window on Problem Sleuth's front door quickly turns out to just be a piece of paper taped to it. Inverted with Ace Dick, when the piece of paper taped to his door turns out to be an actual window. Then we get Pickle Inspector punching through his window, thinking it's paper... which turns out to have no glass at all, just a hole with some floating letters connected to an elf's elevator shaft.
• Turns Red:
  • Ace Dick does this literally when he becomes Fiesta Ace Dick in the Transformation Sequence linked immediately above.
  • When the final boss is down to his last Health Aegis, he gains an extra health bar (for a total of three bars), instantaneous regeneration, and more aggressive attacks. When he's brought down to his final health bar, he spawns an excessive number of health bars, to the dismay of the MSPA readers.
• Unstoppable Rage: "The [Weasel] Emissary flips the fuck out!"
• Unusual Euphemism: All of Problem Sleuth's gun attacks are named for negotiation techniques-the longer and more complicated, the more powerful.
• Useless Useful Spell: BELLY OF THE WHALE!!! Ace Dick's Operandi is basically an instant-KO move, swallowing the enemy whole...the only problem is that, whenever it's used, it's either completely ineffective or simply extorted and turned against him. The only time it DID work was when he used it to swallow himself.
• Victory Pose: Victory dance!
• Visual Pun: The typewriter/tommygun used near the end of the comic. Another nickname for the tommygun is the Chicago Typewriter.
• Villain Protagonist: Mobster Kingpin takes user commands just like the three detectives.
• Wave-Motion Gun: The most recent instance.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Mobster Kingpin is completely invulnerable to all harm...until his Emotions or Blood Sugar are raised.
• Weak Spot: DMK's NETHER-REGIONAL VULNERABULB blooms, briefly exposing his WEAK SPOT.
• Webcomic Print Collection: The entire comic has been compiled into 5 volumes at Topatoco.com, with commentary and a foreword by Ryan North as well as several notes from the author. Sadly, they've all gone out of print.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The (Zombie) Hired Muscle stops appearing after his death, not even in the afterlife like many of the other deceased characters, though the character Higgs Bonehead bears a resemblance to him, and the gentlemen encounter a mustachioed new gentleman who looks a lot like the HM at the end.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The epilogue shows what the characters of the Imaginary Realm are up to. Meanwhile, Team Sleuth is finally free to roam the Real City Streets and do some sleuthing.
• Wicked Weasel: Weasels comprise one of the Four Kingdoms. Pickle Inspector is their chosen saviour, and they are quite susceptible to flipping the fuck out.
• A Winner Is You: When the Labrynthine Sudocube Comprehensile is finally solved once and for all, it appears in Death's hands saying, "You're a winner!"
• World of Chaos: The world accessed through desk forts and window portals.
• World's Strongest Man: Ace Dick. Fiesta Ace Dick is stronger than that.
• Written Sound Effect: Thud.
• You Can't Get Ye Flask:
  • Averted, since the command parser is a person. You DO get ye flask!
  • Sometimes, the game refuses to acknowledge the existence of the pumpkin you're trying to get.

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> Continue searching for tropes.

> Look over collection of business cards.
> Give 'em your two spondulicks.
> Relay frivolous knowledge.
> Examine NOTE OF CONCISION.

> Decipher plot using enigma machine.
> Attempt to remedy story-induced headaches.
> Ogle the refrigerator open.

Next.

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3 detectives

365 days

1621 pages

1915 images

142 megabytes

45,000 words

0 sacred urns toppled

0 mystic ruins desecrated

0 hallowed tombs defiled

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Start Over | Go Back^*

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