Video Game / Escape from Butcher Bay

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Escape from Butcher Bay is the first of two games set in The Chronicles of Riddick universe. It is a prequel to the events of Pitch Black. Riddick must escape from the infamous Butcher Bay prison, a feat no-one has ever accomplished.

The facility, constructed on a barren planet, contains three increasingly secure holding areas, and a subterranean mining operation. A captured Riddick is brought to the prison by none other than bounty hunter William J. Johns.

Whilst Johns meets with the warden Hoxie to discuss the matter of payment, Riddick quickly gets to grips with his surroundings and starts a riot. In the confusion, he escapes into the sewer system below the prison. There, after fighting his way through mutants, he meets Pope Joe and a woman named Shirah, eventually gaining his trademarked "shined" eyes. Over the course of the game, Riddick must overcome each increasing security level of the prison before making his escape.

Created by Swedish developer Starbreeze Studios and co-developed by Vin Diesel's own game studio Tigon Studios, the game is a notable aversion of The Problem with Licensed Games, being praised for its story, gameplay, and visuals, and gathering overwhelmingly positive reviews.

A second game based on the Riddick movies was released in 2009, Assault on Dark Athena. It was essentially a Mission-Pack Sequel to the first game, and included an Updated Re-release of Escape from Butcher Bay with improved graphics and some gameplay tweaks.

Escape From Butcher Bay contains examples of:

• Ten-Second Flashlight: When Riddick falls into the Pit and grabs the shotgun of the guard he used as a cushion, the shotgun's flashlight will only be able to last for 6 minutes (even if not used), as it got damaged in the fall.
• Adaptational Personality Change: Riddick is a lot more stoic and cold here, compared to his movie counterpart.
• Admiring the Abomination: After Riddick bombs the elevator a couple of guards are escorting him in, it crashes into a deep, subterranean part of the planetoid inhabited by large and extremely vicious creatures. Both guards only have the torches mounted on their weapons to see with, while Riddick can, of course, see everything with his eye shine. When one of the guards is effortlessly grabbed and ripped limb from limb by one of the monsters, Riddick simply murmurs "beautiful..." in an awestruck manner.
• Air Vent Escape: As expected from a Stealth-Based Game, you'll climb through a lot of vents, although you sometimes have to acquire a vent key first. In a few cases, someone even helpfully left directions in there.
• The Alcatraz: Butcher Bay is a triple-max security prison facility built on a barren desert planet. The point of this place is that you don't leave. Its highest security level is especially bad; the prisoners are kept in cryogenic sleep inside vats (prolonged contact to which seems to have damaging effects on one's psyche and/or mental abilities), and are only awakened for exercise five minutes per day. Riddick finds an exploitable flaw in the system and gets out.
• And I Must Scream: Triple Max, where the inmates are kept in cryo sleep and only let out for two minutes a day, with a system to automatically sedate prisoners when their time is up, which has left at least two prisoners insane. Riddick describes it as "Sleep without rest."
• Armor Is Useless:
  • Though many guards wear armor, it doesn't make them any tougher than the unarmored ones.
  • Averted for Riddick in the Pigsville segment, as he takes less damage if you replace the guard outfit with proper armor.
• Artistic License – Military: The guards called out "Grenade!" instead of "Fire in the hole!" when using a grenade. "Grenade!" is only called out for incoming grenades.
• Attack Its Weak Point: The enemy mech at the end of the mainframe is unaffected by a frontal attack, but vulnerable when hit on the panel on its back.
• Auto-Doc: NanoMED Plus stations which will inject a user with nanomachines to repair injuries nearly instantly. They only contain enough to restore four blocks of health.
  "NanoMED Plus: We treat you right when the world treats you rough."
• Back-Alley Doctor: Pope Joe, an inmate who lives in the sewers, will stitch up Riddick's arm once he retrieves a radio.
• Back Stab: Sneaking up on an enemy offers the option to kill them, with the choice between a fast and noisy kill, or a slow and silent one.
• Bag of Spilling: You often lose any NanoMED cartridges you have in your inventory when transitioning between levels. You will also lose your entire inventory upon being transitioned to Double Max and Triple Max, as Riddick gets arrested and has everything taken away from him.
• Batman Gambit: Riddick's first objective in Double Max is to deliberately get himself arrested, as he knows that Abbott will want to have a meeting with him. This would allow Riddick to steal his keycard and start escaping the prison.
• Big Bad: Hoxie, the Warden of Butcher Bay. Everything and everyone in Butcher answers to him, and he's the final threat Riddick has to overcome before escaping the prison.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Rust, who rules the biggest gang in Single Max and does a lot of favors for Abbott in exchange for being allowed to do whatever, gets talked up by a lot of prisoners as being very dangerous, which creates the impression that he'll be the main threat in Single Max, especially since he eventually sends out thugs to beat up Riddick. However, when he personally confronts Riddick in an attempt to take away our hero's newly-acquired shiv, it ends with Riddick putting him into a hold, seemingly about to slit his throat, and he only comes out unharmed thanks to Abbott's intervention. Riddick then immediately storms his prison block and kills him, with the rest of Single Max being devoted to the actual prison escape.
• Big Red Button: These are on everything that you need to interact with.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Riddick is a hardened criminal who only cares about himself, but he's never shown to do any bad things to those who don't deserve it. His allies are also self-interested — Johns wants to send him to a prison that will pay better, and the friendly prisoners either want to improve their life in prison or get out of it. By contrast, the guards are sadists who abuse their power regularly, most of the prisoners he fights are genuinely evil, and Hoxie doesn't care about his prison being a total hellhole.
• Blinded by the Light: Since Riddick becomes highly light-sensitive once he gets the Eyeshine, having it on will cause you to get dazzled by any bright light. A gunfight in the dark will be often complicated by your own muzzle flashes and the guards shining flashlights at you.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: The original Russian version translated the term "Rooster" literally, which seems to indicate the leader of a prison gang who serves Abbott. The problem is that, in Russian prison culture, the term "Petukh" (which literally means "Rooster") is used for a Pariah Prisoner who is forced to perform the most humiliating jobs in prison and, in older days, was also treated as a Sex Slave. No self-respecting prisoner would allow themselves to be called a petukh, not even by the prison's head of security, because doing so means that you'll be permanently treated as a petukh afterwards. The translation done for the Assault on Dark Athena remaster, for comparison, translated the term as "Pakhan", used for a prisoner with high level of influence over criminal activities inside the prison, and is thus a title that prisoners would like to be called by
• Border Patrol: Trying to run into the desert in the very first level will result in Riddick blowing up on a mine.
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: Riddick attempts to steal Abbott's eyes at the end of the Single Max segment, in order to get past a locked door. Unfortunately, he gets interrupted by Hoxie and Johns at the very last moment.
• Bottomless Magazines: The taser you can get in Double Max requires reloading after each shot, but otherwise has infinite reserve ammo.
• Brick Joke: Riddick goes into Pigsville (the guards' living quarters) through an entry point in the shower room. Later in the game you can overhear two guards complaining that the showers are closed because of this.
• Bullying a Dragon:
  • Rust tries to push Riddick around, sending thugs to beat him up, even though he knows of his reputation. He doesn't stop even after their first confrontation ended with Riddick effortlessly putting Rust into a hold and threatening him with a shiv.
  • After Riddick kills Bam or gets caught with drugs, Abbott takes him to an interrogation room with the notion that he and his men are going to beat him to death in revenge for an attempted escape from Single Max that ended with Riddick killing numerous guards and almost tearing out Abbott's eyes. He's very wrong, but you can't say Riddick didn't warn him.
  Riddick: You don't know what you're fucking with.
• Chromosome Casting: The only female character in the game is an unseen woman who speaks to Riddick telepathically.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Abbott, the captain of the guard, is the only guard to wear a red uniform.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: In the HD remaster of the game, counter-attacks don't work on melee combat bosses (i.e. Rust, the fight club opponents, and Abbott), although you can still interrupt their attacks with regular attacks as long as your timing is good.
• Cool Shades:
  • Abbott never takes off his sunglasses.
  • Riddick eventually gets his signature welding goggles alongside the Eyeshine, which are used to toggle between normal vision and night vision.
• Counter-Attack: In melee combat, injured enemies can have their attacks countered, instantly killing them. Gun-wielding enemies, meanwhile, can be provoked into Pistol-Whipping, allowing you to kill them with a well-timed melee attack that makes Riddick kill them with their own gun.
• Covers Always Lie: Those cool knives Riddick's holding on the cover? You never get anything so nice (the best bladed weapon you can get your hands on is a scalpel.) And forget about Dual Wielding.
• Cryo-Prison: In Butcher Bay prison, the most dangerous and escape-prone convicts are kept in cryogenic suspension for the duration of their sentences and let out only a few minutes each day for exercise in a sealed room. Which is all that Riddick needed in order to escape.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: Right before the second fight with Abbott, Riddick gives off a Super-Scream that kills all the Mooks and throws Abbott through a steel door. Riddick never gets the ability to perform such a scream in gameplay.
• Daydream Surprise: The opening level of Escape From Butcher Bay, serving as a tutorial, where Riddick imagines himself starting the escape right from the landing pad, only to be woken up and find out that he's still en-route to the planet. A player familiar with Pitch Black will know that the whole thing is a dream because the first thing Riddick does is breaking Johns' neck, even though he's still alive in the movie.
• Deadly Environment Prison: The prison is located on a desert planet, ensuring that escapees wouldn't really have anywhere to go.
• Death by Irony: By dressing Hoxie as a prisoner, Riddick gets him shot by the guards that were supposed to protect him. For extra irony, they were deceived into thinking that it was a hostage situation.
• Decoy Getaway: Riddick's successful escape from Triple Max has him dress Hoxie into his own prison clothes and putting on a guard uniform, then deceiving the real guards into thinking that he took Hoxie hostage, which leads to them killing their own boss. Meanwhile, Riddick takes advantage of the distraction and escapes on Hoxie's ship along with Johns.
• Developer's Foresight: An inmate in Double Max will sell you a taser. If you shoot him with your new weapon afterwards, he'll comment on it.
• Dirty Cop: Abbott, who allows Rust to act unhindered by law and have an entire prison block to himself, in exchange for doing things that guards won't or can't do.
• Disguised Hostage Gambit: Riddick ultimately manages to escape Butcher Bay by dressing Hoxie in his own prison clothes, with an assault rifle tied to the man's hand, then putting on a guard uniform himself. It works flawlessly, with Hoxie getting shot by his own guards.
• The Dragon: Abbott, the captain of the guard, runs the day to day operations in Butcher Bay to keep the prisoners in line. In true Dragon form, Riddick disposes of him long before facing off with the Big Bad.
• Dreadlock Warrior: Abbott, who is the prison's head of security and the toughest guard you'll fight, wears his hair in cornrows.
• Dressing as the Enemy:
  • In the Guard Quarters section at the end of Act I, Riddick can disguise himself as a guard and walk among them, quoting the "wolf in sheep's clothing" tale.
  • Riddick's escape from Triple Max ends with him discarding his prison clothes (which he puts on Hoxie, thus getting him shot by his own guards), then putting on a guard uniform.
• Dual Boss: At the end of the section where you pilot a Riot Guard Powered Armor, you fight a pair of "Flamingo" combat droids. Also, the Final Boss of the game are a pair of custom guard robots known as Hoxie's Personal Guard.
• Dude, Where's My Reward?: Johns feels like Hoxie isn't paying him enough for the capture of Riddick, to the point that he repeatedly tries to kidnap Riddick in order to put him into another prison that will pay a better price.
• Elite Mooks: Riot Guards are clad in Powered Armor, which gives them two machine guns, an invulnerability to Back Stabs and melee attack (and the taser, in the Assault on Dark Athena remaster), and greatly increased health. The only way to kill them is to use explosives or a gun of your own.
• Enemy Chatter: The guards in Butcher Bay can sometimes be overheard talking about how bad they think their job is, demonstrating that they're not all just sadistic bullies.
• Establishing Character Moment: Rust's first appearance has him visit Riddick's cell as he receives a shiv, claiming that no transaction can happen without his approval. He then tries to take away Riddick's shiv, only to be effortlessly counter-attacked and put into a hold. Afterwards, he gets rescued by Abbott coming to the cell and demanding that Rust is let go, who then decides to release his anger by breaking the fingers of the prisoner who armed Riddick. This establishes Rust as a Jerkass and a Big Bad Wannabe who likes to torment those weaker than him, but falls apart quickly when dealing with an actual tough guy, instead having to rely on his connection with Abbott in such a situation.
• Expy: The mechanical armored Riotguards are very clearly modeled after Hans Grosse.
• Extremely Short Timespan: Riddick escapes each level of the prison within a few hours. The game does leave it ambiguous how much time passes between each transfer to a new level, but it's probably no more than a day.
• Eye Scream: In the beginning of Butcher Bay, there is a locked cell in which two inmates known as the Torture Twins are... entertaining a guest. If you listen long enough, you can hear him screaming "NO, NOT THE EYES!"
• Fake Difficulty: As good as the game is, the enemy AI has not aged well, which makes the stealth sections even harder than they're supposed to be, since the guards can easily spot you without even directly seeing you, or just by exposing yourself, even if they cannot see you.
• Fight Clubbing: A fight club is being run in Double Max with the approval of the guards. You can bring any melee weapon you want, and the fight lasts until one of the fighters is killed. It's a good way to earn money, and winning all the fights will allow you to meet Abbott.
• Finishing Move: In the Assault on Dark Athena remaster, a melee fight will often end with a finishing animation, such as breaking the enemy's arm and killing him, grabbing his gun and shooting him in the head, etc.
• Finishing Stomp: Incapacitating an enemy with the taser will give you the option to stomp on him for an instant kill.
• First Rule of the Yard: Within a day of arriving in the Single-Max level of Butcher Bay, Riddick has openly challenged, then hunted down and killed Rust, heretofore the toughest inmate and leader of the Aquila Gang. This earns him the enmity of Abbott, the chief guard and The Man Behind the Man to Rust, and directly leads to a Prison Riot because of the resulting Evil Power Vacuum.
• Framing Device: The original game opened with Riddick during his years on the ice planet he was hiding on at the start of The Chronicles of Riddick (2004). The Furyan woman in his visions tells him to remember his past, and what happened in Butcher Bay. Then the rest of the game begins, which is actually one long flashback. At the end Riddick awakens and is told of his destiny, and sees visions of the Necromongers. The framing story was dropped in the 2009 remake to better connect it to Assault on Dark Athena, its immediate successor in the chronology.
• The Future Is Noir: Being a Hellhole Prison, the lighting in Butcher Bay tends to be spotty, making it rather easy for Riddick to sneak around, especially after he gains the ability to see in darkness
• Gang Initiation Fight: Riddick has to use the prison variant of fighting to gain respect.
• Gas Mask Mooks: The Maximum-Security Light Guards in Butcher Bay wear gas masks as part of their uniforms.
• Gorn: The games are, uh, pretty graphic.
• Great Escape: As the title tells you, the whole game is about escaping Butcher Bay.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: The tutorial, which is Riddick's dream, has the prison guards make Johns wait for them alone and guard multiple prisoners, while Johns himself fails to cuff any of them. This leads to Riddick breaking his neck and immediately starting his prison escape. However, once Riddick wakes up to actually land on the planet for real, the trope is averted as he's immediately cuffed, taken in, and escorted by two guards, with no other prisoners vying for their attention.
• Guide Dang It!: Finding all of the cigarette packs and bounty cards in the two games.
• Gun Struggle: This is a Finishing Move used by Riddick on a guard with a shotgun or assault rifle, ending with him pulling the trigger with their own hand (as the assault rifles are capable of shocking anybody outside of the database who tries to use them)
• Hand Stomp: One of the first things you see in Double Max is a guard stomping on the hands of a prisoner hanging from a ledge, causing him to fall to his death.
• Handwraps of Awesome: Riddick wears handwraps in this game, presumably to protect his hands while punching and climbing.
• Hated by All:
  • Abbott is hated by all the inmates and even the other prison guards for being a sadistic Jerkass who abuses his power whenever he feels.
  • Rust is also quite hated by everyone for the same reason as Abbott, to the point where the inmates actually root for Riddick to kill him.
• Hate Sink: Abbott, Hoxie, and Rust.
• Healing Shiv: In the two games, the NanoMED stations refill your health by jabbing you in the neck with various sharp objects. The upgrade stations go the extra mile and jab you in the chest with even more needles.
• Heart Container: There are a few souped-up, one-time use NanoMED stations that give you an extra block of health.
• Hellhole Prison: The game takes place in the Butcher Bay triple max security prison, housing the most notorious criminals in the galaxy. It's divided into three levels, each one more hellish than the previous: the first level is pretty much a "normal" prison (although madness-inducingly horrible and violent), the second is a series of tunnels infested by murderous alien bugs where the prisoners must mine for precious ores under terrible conditions, and in the last (saved only for the very worst of the worst) the prisoners are simply kept frozen in cryostasis for the rest of their lives (except for a two minutes long exercise period per day in an extremely well secured area).
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Unlike the other guards, Abbott never wears a helmet with his armor.
• Iconic Attribute Adoption Moment: Riddick doesn't start the game with his signature welding goggles. After getting his arm stitched up by Pope Joe, however, he suddenly acquires the Eyeshine, which prompts him to grab the goggles from Joe in order to protect his eyes from light.
• Idiot Ball: All the assault rifles carried by the prison guards have DNA protection, meaning that if any inmate (Riddick included) tries to grab hold of one, they get electrocuted to death. Unfortunately, they forgot to add DNA protection to the pistols and shotguns, which partly leads to their downfall.
• I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: They just had to name the prison "Butcher Bay" to make its nature abundantly clear.
• Improvised Weapon: With only a few exceptions, most melee weapons are improvised, such as scrap metal molded into knuckledusters, screwdrivers and shivs used as knives, or a piece of rebar wielded as a club.
• "Instant Death" Radius: If you get too close to a Riot Guard, they'll kill you instantly.
• Justified Tutorial: The first level is Riddick dreaming about escaping prison right from the landing pad, with many situations being set up for the sole purpose of teaching you how to do something.
• Laser Sight: All of the guns have a laser sight that acts as your crosshair. It exists purely for the player's benefit, as enemies won't ever notice the dot.
• Lawman Gone Bad: Haley, encountered in Single Max, used to work as a guard at Butcher Bay before getting thrown into the very same prison he used to guard. Once Rust is killed, he'll tell Riddick some information from his days as a guard — the existence and location of the DNA repository used by assault rifles, and the fact that one can get into the guard quarters from the Pit.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: After Riddick gets captured in Double Max and his prisoner transport container crashes (due to the bomb he planted exploding), thus releasing the straps holding him, the two guards inside the container decide to split up — one goes outside to scout, the other stays inside to watch Riddick. The one watching Riddick quickly gets killed by the man he's supposed to watch, while the scout gets his head torn off by a bug and devoured.
• Kill the Lights: If you have a gun, you can use to shoot out most light sources, allowing you to sneak better. Since Riddick gets his signature Innate Night Vision pretty early into the game, the darkness will hinder the guards, but won't cause any problems to you.
• Meaningful Echo: Riddick tells Johns about how "Statistically speaking, [space shuttle] landings are the most dangerous." as their shuttle begins to enter the atmosphere. At the end cutscene of the the game, Riddick (who is now piloting the shuttle) he comes close to repeating the same line, but instead says "Statistically speaking, takeoffs are the most dangerous."
• Mini-Mecha: The Heavy Guards, which are basically walking tanks with a gattling gun and missile launchers. Riddick commandeers one at the end of the game.
• More Dakka: The above Heavy Guards with their gatling guns. Near the end of the game Riddick picks up a detached gatling gun with four thousand round ammo pool. This is the one gun in the game that doesn't get a laser sight (added in the Dark Athena version), and it doesn't need one; with the extremely high rate of fire and how wide the spray is, it will hit anything vaguely in the middle of the screen.
• Neck Snap: Unarmed stealth kills consist of Riddick grabbing the enemy's neck and snapping it, instantly killing them. Making a silent stealth kill with a club will also result in Riddick snapping the enemy's neck, using the weapon for leverage.
• Non-Action Big Bad: Hoxie, the Warden of Butcher Bay, never actually fights Riddick personally and spends the entire game residing in the corporate offices of the prison. Even when Riddick faces off with him at the end, Hoxie attempts to flee and let his robotic guards deal with Riddick.
• No-Gear Level: The majority of Double Max has you sneaking through heavily guarded areas without any firearms. You are able to purchase a stungun about 3/4ths of the way through, but it's not suited for straight combat, and useless against Powered Armor (it does stun them though - but not in the remake).
• No OSHA Compliance: The cell blocks in Double Max hang over a huge pit, but there are no railing to protect prisoners or guards from falling, and you even see a few prisoners falling to their death. It's yet another indicator of Butcher Bay being a Hellhole Prison.
• Notice This: Interactable items tend to have a white illumination to make them obvious.
• Not the Fall That Kills You…: In Escape from Butcher Bay Riddick survives a massive fall by grabbing a guard with him and holding him in front of him, which resulted in the guard hitting the ground first and taking the impact, leaving our favourite anti-hero unscathed. Badass as this may be, it landed him in a dark, underground subterranean level of the prison filled with nasty aliens with a dwindling flashlight and not much ammo. Bonus points for actually mentioning this trope, word for word.
• The Old Convict: Riddick encounters an old prisoner in the Single Max section, who among other things asks Riddick what his first kill was like ("that's between me and him" being Riddick's answer), and offers Riddick a reward if he gets rid of a troublesome inmate. In a Shout-Out to The Shawshank Redemption, he's named "Red".
• One Bullet Clips: Averted. The game keeps track of how many magazines you have, instead of the individual bullets. Reloading a weapon therefore sacrifices any bullets that were remaining in the original mag. This was taken out in the Updated Re-release included with Assault on Dark Athena, where this trope is played straight.
• Organized Crime Sidequest: In both the Single Max and Double Max levels, certain well-connected inmates offer Riddick the chance to assassinate rival contacts or even entire gangs. While these one-off missions have no relevance to Riddick's goal of breaking out - or the overarching sci-fi plot of the franchise, for that matter - they're a useful source of cash and smokes.
• Penal Colony: Butcher Bay is built on a desert planet that doesn't otherwise seem to be used for anything.
• Pistol-Whipping:
  • The pistol, shotgun, and rifle can be used to strike enemies. The damage is low, but these attacks don't force you to stand in place like melee weapons do.
  • Guards will try to strike you with their guns if you get too close. This will quickly turn out to be a bad idea, as it allows you to kill them with their own guns.
• Police Brutality:
  • The prison guards don't think much of beating up or killing prisoners for minor steps out of the line.
  • Gun turrets in Double Max will kill anybody who violates the prison's rules, even though there's no reason to, given that Single Max has turrets that incapacitate prisoners in a single shot.
  • After Riddick deliberately gets himself detained in Double Max, Abbott decides to beat Riddick to death in revenge for his escape from Single Max where he started a prison riot and almost killed Abbott. This backfires, as Riddick was counting on meeting Abbott, and thus kills him for a keycard.
• Powered Armor: The Riot Guards. Riddick steals one of them in the expanded game and goes on a rampage in a weapons testing lab in the Butcher Bay facility.
• Power Fist: Knuckledusters act as a permanent upgrade, increasing any damage done with punches.
• Prison Changes People: Enforced. The eponymous prison is separated into three security levels, the third being a Cryo-Prison where the most troublesome inmates are stored. Long-term exposure to cryostorage seems to have a degenerative effect on the minds of inmates, likely exacerbated by the fact that they're only allowed a minute of daily exercise with limited stimuli; as a result, the few inmates Riddick speaks to in this level are barely coherent. Charlie Green, a man who was considered reformed enough to be released back into Single Max is a broken, disconnected husk of his former self who can only mutter things about birds and occasionally keel over.
• Prisoner's Work: Double Max includes a mine, which is staffed by prisoners. This job is rather dangerous due to the fact that the caverns also house man-eating giant bugs.
• Prison Riot: Single Max erupts into a riot shortly after Riddick kills Rust, starting off with his gang getting rowdy in the wake of their leader's death. The guards respond to this by ordering every prisoner to stay in their cell and killing anybody who doesn't comply with the order.
• Punch-Clock Villain: The guards mostly seem resigned to their work and as much a part of the system as the inmates. When Riddick infiltrates Pigsville and the Butcher Bay mines, you can catch a lot of them going on about mundane things, grief that Hoxie and Abbot tare letting the prison go to hell, and complain they haven't had a shower yet because an inmate broke in there.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking:
  • In both of his boss fights, Abbott has noticeably more health than any other human enemy in the game. He's still fairly easy to bring down both times, though.
  • Rust makes a decent Wake-Up Call Boss, having boss-level health, a unique moveset, and being better at countering after blocks than regular enemies.
• Rapid DNA Test: The guards' assault rifles zap you if your genes aren't in the system.
• Regenerating Health: Your health bar is divided into blocks, and as long as one block of health isn't completely depleted, you can regenerate it by standing still for a few seconds. Restoring a block instead requires using NanoMED Plus station.
• Saved by Canon: Johns has to survive this game so that he can get killed in Pitch Black. One of the first signs that Riddick's first escape attempt is All Just a Dream is that he snaps Johns' neck right at the start.
• Scenic-Tour Level: The opening of the game after the tutorial with you are being led into the prison, but can look around on your own. The developers said it was their tribute to Half-Life 1.
• Schizophrenic Difficulty: The middle section of the game is easily the most difficult. The first 1/3rd has a relatively merciful learning curve, and the last 3rd is a short action section followed by an extended sequence where you're given an incredibly powerful mech to mow down guards with.
• Second Hour Superpower: Riddick's Eyeshine treatment. More of an awakening, really.
• Sentry Gun: The Double Max stage of the Butcher Bay prison is guarded by red sentry guns wherever Riddick goes. Killing foes requires getting targets in specific secluded places.
• Shoot the Dog: During the riot putdown, the player comes across a mortally wounded prisoner whom they have the option of Mercy Killing.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: The shotgun mainly sticks out due to the fact that it's not DNA-encoded, unlike the assault rifles, but is a lot better in direct combat than a pistol.
• Shout-Out: There are four unseen prisoners with the names Keenan, Carey, Chancellor, and Jones, the surnames of the members of tool.
• Sinister Shiv: Most of the knife-type weapons you encounter are various shivs. At the very start of the game, Riddick even decides to acquire himself a shiv the moment after he's thrown into his cell.
• Slashed Throat: Silent stealth kills and Counter-Attacks with knives will result in Riddick slashing the enemy's throat, instantly killing them.
• Stalked by the Bell: Once you get into the Pit, you only have 6 minutes before the shotgun's damaged flashlight will finally break, and you have to find Pope Joe and his radio in this time. Once it gives out, you'll be forced to rely on flares found in Joe's hideout, which are a lot less convenient to use.
• Starts Stealthily, Ends Loudly: Prior to the mainframe, Riddick needs to sneak around and hide in dark areas - if at least long enough to take out one guard from behind. These stealth sections tend to result in an action sequence rather quickly.
• Stealth-Based Mission: The game frequently pits you against superior numbers of armed guards while you don't have any guns, thus forcing you to sneak in order to avoid getting shredded. Double Max particularly sticks out once you go into the restricted areas, as all of the guards wield assault rifles (which you can't use due to DNA encoding), your weapons at the start are all melee, and you don't get the taser until quite a while.
• Super-Scream: When Abbott tries to beat up Riddick in Double Max, Riddick responds with an angered scream. It kills all the regular guards and knocks Abbott through a steel door, evening the odds.
• Taser Tag Weakness: The taser that you get in Double Max is ludicrously powerful, able to stun riot guards (otherwise invulnerable because you don't have firearms), and also able to paralyze regular guards in a single shot to any part of the body, leaving them vulnerable. The 2009 remake downplays this, however, as riot guards are now invulnerable to the taser.
• Tempting Fate: Abbott tells Riddick that nobody has ever escaped from Butcher Bay. So, for the rest of the game, Riddick strives to be the first one to escape. Naturally, given that the game is a prequel to the movies, he does escape.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: After escaping Single Max, Riddick ends up in a sewer, where the game becomes a survival horror shooter, as you dodge mutants with a small amount of ammo and no cover, as almost every wall has a door for them to come out of, leading to the best solution to be running like hell.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: The Butcher Bay guards' assault rifles are DNA-encoded, so trying to pick them up will only sent a jolt of electricity through Riddick's body. A prisoner in the first level learns this the hard way when it fries him. Eventually subverted when Riddick sneaks into the Mainframe room and registers himself, allowing him to pick up and use guns. However, the guards are smart enough to delete Riddick's DNA entry after he's captured at the end of Act I, and he won't be able to use the guard rifles for the rest of the game. Pistols and shotguns are not DNA-encoded, but are only found in maintenance or administrative areas that prisoners are not expected to be able to access. Riddick does eventually find an old prototype assault rifle that pre-dates the DNA-encoding technology down in the mines, but it has a much smaller clip size, is much less accurate, and has a higher rate of fire, making it more of a shotgun in assault rifle form.
• Updated Re-release: This game got two.
  • The "Developer's Cut", released on PC six months after the Xbox version, adds a mech combat section in the middle of Double Max, a few more cigarette packs, and a developer's commentary mode unlocked upon completion. It also takes advantage of the machine's higher power, with higher resolutions and more advanced shaders.
  • The version of Butcher Bay that's included as part of Assault On Dark Athena has improved HD graphics and the extra content of the first PC version, as well as a number of subtle but meaningful changes to gameplay. The most obvious difference is significant tweaking to the melee combat to emphasize counter-attacks. One Bullet Clips have also been added, as (this was in the original PC "Developer's Cut", but not in the Xbox version). The final boss fight has also been somewhat improved. A comprehensive list of the changes is available here.
• Use Their Own Weapon Against Them: A Counter-Attack made against an enemy with a gun will result in Riddick grabbing their gun and shooting them with it. With assault rifles, in particular, he actually uses the guard's own finger to do so, as the rifle would otherwise shock him for not being present in the database.
• Variable Mix: Music shifts based on whether or not there is combat. Punching air seems to be enough to activate music when guards are nearby (e.g. in the infirmary) while the guards remain passive.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Escape From Butcher Bay allows you to kill many of the inmates you encounter. You can systematically empty the entire Single Max prison wing one person at a time, and your only punishment will be a temporary incapacitation each time. You can even contrive circumstances to kill a fair number of inmates in Double Max (such as disabling the lights in the diner and then making your way back there to go on a killing spree in the dark), which normally makes this extraordinarily difficult due to being chock-full of wall-mounted gun turrets and almost every area being highly visible.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Just try harming the inmate in Triple Max however, or any of the other ones in Double Max.
• Wardens Are Evil: Downplayed with Warden Hoxie, who does run one hell of a Hellhole Prison, but because he's a Non-Action Big Bad, he spends the entire game sitting in his office while Abbott, the head of the guards, actually brutalizes the prisoners. All things considered, he's rather restrained considering Riddick keeps killing dozens of his men and even provoked a Prison Riot.
• With This Herring: Since Riddick is in prison, he starts out with literally nothing.
• You Kill It, You Bought It: Once Riddick kills Rust, Abbott immediately offers him to take up Rust's place as the rooster — a prisoner who gains special privileges from the guards in exchange for occasionally doing special favors. Riddick isn't the sort of man to cooperate with the authorities and is more interested in leaving the prison, though, so he declines the position, which greatly offends Abbott, but makes the other prisoners respect him.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: On three seperate occasions it looks like Riddick's just about to make his getaway, only for the first getaway to be revealed as All Just a Dream, and the other two being foiled at the last second by Johns as Riddick's brought back and sent to a more restrictive area of the prison.