Outland (video game)

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Ikaruga, eat your heart out.

Outland is an adventure platformer game, published by Ubisoft.

An unnamed man experiences bizarre dreams every night, and no medicine can rid him of them. Exhausted and compelled to find answers, he visits a shaman who tells him a tale of what is occurring. Thirty millennia ago, two divine sisters, one of light and one of shadow, created the world, and both of them wished to destroy it afterwards. A hero rose up and, using his own soul, bound them both to the earth. The man is the Reincarnation of that hero, and the fact that he's back means the sisters will rise again too. Therefore The End of the World as We Know It is at hand, and it's up to this new hero to rise up and begin Saving the World.

Tropes used in Outland (video game) include:


  • Bad Moon Rising: The sisters merge to form one.
  • Bullet Hell: The bullet patterns are just as extravagant as a 2D flying game would be.
  • Charged Attack: Of the elbow charge variety. Strangely enough, it does little to no more damage than basic sword swings but stuns and knocks back most enemies hit by it, including the shielded non-giant warrior enemies even if you hit them from the front.
    • An additional charge skill allows you to absorb all energy in the vicinity, regardless of color and unleash a destructive screen-filling shockwave.
  • Collection Sidequest: Of the usual "hidden item" variety. Most of the time you just get some concept art out of it, although you do ultimately get the ability to stick to walls longer, reveal all large money pots in the game and double the strenght of your melee attack if you get enough of them.
  • Dark Is Evil: Sister Moon.
  • The End of the World as We Know It
  • Everything Trying to Kill You: Spiders, flowers, bugs, you name it: if it's Color-Coded for Your Convenience and not inanimate, chances are it's going to either eat you or shoot a lot of bullets at you and then eat you.
  • Demonic Spiders: Surprisingly enough, the literal giant ones (as well as the extra-large variety) aren't that bad since the former are more or less the first enemy you come across and latter aren't that much different from the normal variety besides their size and ability to take more hits. The smaller ones are far more annoying, since they either shoot arching streams of projectiles at your general direction or leap at you, and you can't tell kind they are until they attack.
  • Final Boss Preview: Seen in a flashback to the previous hero's final battle.
  • God Is Evil: Subverted in the end where they see the world crafted by time and men, decide that it is not theirs to destroy, and leave.
  • Going Native: The opening depicts The Hero leaving the big city to find a cure for in visions.
  • Kamehame Hadoken: The Beam. No real surprise there.
  • Light Is Not Good: Sister Sun.
  • Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: At least 2 types of warrior enemies carry one. Especially annoying with the Giant Mook variety, since you can only jump over them to hit them from the back right after they attack: try jumping too early and you'll hit their head or their mace or try getting too close before jumping and you'll hit their prone mace.
  • Mayincatec: The aesthetics ooze this, from the random artwork on the walls to the intricate carvings to the humanoid enemies' armor and even to the bosses. Look no further than the Winged Serpent, another name for Quetzalcoatl.
  • Metroidvania
  • Orange-Blue Contrast: Just look at the box art or any screenshot, it's a relentless barrage of orange and teal. Because the gameplay asks for two contrasting colors, and black and white were already taken by Ikaruga, it is somewhat understandable.
  • Red Oni, Blue Oni: Sister Moon and Sister Sun, respectively.
  • Reincarnation
  • Reverse Polarity
  • Shockwave Stomp: Very similliar to the Mario variety (well, besides using feet instead of his ass), complete with a momentum-halting front flip before the actual execution. The actual shockwave doesn't really have that much range, but the kick and the stomp count as seperate hits.
  • Silent Protagonist
  • Stationary Boss: The Sisters, who make up for it by having the battle take place in a void with moving platforms, requiring you to destroy the ends of the beams that rotate around them and change polarity at preset intervals to make them vulnerable and naturally spamming you with projectiles while you're busy doing both.
  • A Taste of Power: A flashback to The Hero who fought the sisters. He's not that much stronger beyond the playable version at that point of the game besides having twice as many hearts and being able to change polarity right away.
  • X Meets Y: Limbo meets Ikaruga.
  • Yin-Yang Bomb