Video Game / The Forever Winter

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The Forever Winter is a Tactical Survival Horror Shooter and the debut game of Fun Dog Studios.

The year is 20XX. Earth is in ruins, and its bones are steadily being picked clean by three once-mighty armies as they struggle for dominance in unceasing conflict — following orders they no longer understand in a futile attempt to win a war that began an unknown number of decades ago. But that isn't your fight. You are a scavenger, affectionately known as a "Scav", attempting to eke out a living amidst the crumbling remains of the macro-city known as Lost Angels.

You must brave the lethal battlefields of this shattered megalopolis in the hunt for water, the most crucial resource for keeping your ramshackle community alive, as you scrounge for better gear and complete odd jobs for rewards. But keep your head on a swivel, pick and choose your targets with caution, and avoid attracting the attention of the clashing superpowers, lest you end up dead, or worse.

The game released on Steam in Early Access on 24 September 2024.

On 26 September 2025, in a Milestone Celebration video for the game's first year in Early Access, Fun Dog revealed that Dark Horse Comics would be helping them create the graphic novel the game was originally envisioned as.

Trailers: Cinematic Trailer, Gameplay Reveal, Gameplay Overview.

The Forever Winter provides examples of:

• Absurdly Long Stairway: The Stairway Gate is a colossal staircase leading from the main portion of Lost Angels to the city's defensive wall. While the lower portion appears to have been completely obliterated by the fighting such that even the Night Shift won't rebuild it.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Bunco, the Scav general trader, will absolutely gouge you on prices if you try to sell any of your loot to him. It's telling that the trader for any faction that hates your guts will still offer you a more fair price than Bunco will. However, if you're just starting out and your water level is too low for any other traders to be available, then Bunco is your only option until you can get your water level higher. The price of his goods are pretty bad too; at max Scav trust level his prices are only slightly better than that of a faction trader that hates you.
• After the End: The Earth has been wrecked beyond recovery by the three superpowers going to war with each other. The landscape has become a scorched battlefield where war is waged constantly by armies commanded by AI whilst the bombed out ruins of cities are constantly being rebuilt in warped and twisted ways by malfunctioning repair machines. To complicate matters, Earth's orbit has been enshrouded by orbital debris so thick they've rendered spaceflight and long-range communications impossible. The situation is so bad that the deepest, most destitute bowels of the ruined cities, where water has become a precious but scarce commodity, are the safest places for civilians and scavengers living out in the wasteland.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • Toothy, prominently featured in the cinematic trailer, is a Euruskan medical mech controlled by a Virtual Intelligence. While many still serve Euruska, several have gone rogue, and are now feared predators on the battlefield, hunting down unsuspecting humans in order to stuff them into bodybags and turn them into biofuel. Currently, only Toothies that are still loyal to Euruska can be encountered in-game, either as random spawns or as guards for Euruskan commanders.
  • It's also suggested that some of the Virtual Intelligences controlling the superpowers' remaining military forces have gone rogue and are directing the conflict to their own ends, or have simply gone insane and are no longer following any sort of logical plan.
• Alliance Meter: You can take jobs for either of the superpowers in return for increasing benefits, but doing so will change the balance of power — whoever you helped will start gaining the advantage, and start pulling out heavier weapons, making it more dangerous for you to operate there. Factions also react in real time to your actions, so killing a faction's soldiers will dampen your relationship with them. Benefits of having a good working relationship with the a faction include reduced prices from their merchants and new entry points on each map - with the exception of the Mech Trench, every map has at least one entry point that requires a good relationship with one of the factions to use. Additionally, a good relationship with a faction will cause their mooks to take longer to recognize you as a threat, making it easier to avoid fighting with them.
• All There in the Manual: While the game is set in an Ambiguous Time Period, the store page confirms that the Forever War started forty years prior to the main timeline of the game.
• Ambiguous Situation: The cows being fultoned out of various maps have enormous amounts of ambiguity to them - what do they eat, how are they still alive in this dark future, are they actually cows, and where are they headed?
• And I Must Scream:
  • The fate of Eurasian Cyborgs — Disposable Vagrants, refugees and the like are rounded up, then their bodies are torn away and replaced with metal. Their minds, however, remain fully aware of everything that is happening to them as they are used as disposable Cannon Fodder and deployed towards enemy positions in air-dropped waves, unable to control their own bodies. No wonder a task for dispatching a certain number of them is named "Mercy Killing".
  • Toothy's victims are kept artificially alive by the rogue robot's jury-rigged medical suite as it steadily consumes them for fuel, eventually regaining consciousness and remaining in horrific pain until they expire.
• Anti-Frustration Feature:
  • There's a special surplus ammunition type that can be obtained for free from the Scav weapons merchant, ensuring that, even if you have several bad runs or worse, lose everything due to Water Death, you always have a full gun on hand.
  • Your crosshair will turn into a skull if you are capable of performing a Back Stab on an enemy.
  • Hunter Killers will not spawn in a work in progress map, since said maps might have glitches that could give the HKs unfair advantages. Additionally, they won't spawn in the Scrapyard Nexus or Underground Cemetary, as these are the two smallest maps in-game and have special circumstances that are challenging enough with being chased by an HK.^note The former only has a single timed extraction point, meaning Hunter Killers would be able to corner you while you're waiting for the timer to expire. The latter, meanwhile, is incredibly claustrophobic and is always patrolled by a Grabber.
  • If you end up starting a mission during the Night Shift or in the incredibly dark Underground Cemetery, the game has the decency to place a rig light near your entry point so you won’t be left wandering blind.
  • Quests that require you to obtain parts from non-human boss enemies (mechs, tanks, Ultra-Hind helicopters) never specify that you kill the enemy in question, just that you retrieve parts from them. As non-human enemies often have colossal amounts of health (for reference, an Europan Pyro has 8,200 hit points while an Europan Merkava Tank has 37,500 hp, and the Corpse Tank variant has 187,500 hp), this allows players to loot the remains of a foe killed fighting other tough enemies for quest completion rather than expend ruinous amounts of ammunition trying to kill one tough enemy. Additionally, most loot collection quests will count items you already have, so if you find the loot without having the associated quest, you can pick it up and store it for later.
  • Since traversing the tunnels between maps can expend many resources better saved for missions, these tunnels are very generous with how many containers you can find, allowing you to restock on your way to your destination.
  • While you can only store a maximum of ninety nine days of water, the game rewards you very generously if you collect extra water - firstly, you'll get 1250XP for every extra day of water you get until you hit maximum experience for a character, after which you will receive twenty five thousand credits per day of extra water.
  • Fast Traveling to the first three maps beyond Tunnel A (Scorched Enclave, Ashen Mesa, and Tunnel B) only requires expending water, allowing players to save Fast Travel Drones for more dangerous (and more rewarding) maps. This was later expanded to encompass all Tunnel maps, meaning you only need to spend drones if you really need the loot (and perhaps want to avoid expending most of your supplies before reaching the map in question).
  • Several tiered Innards projects require codices to build the final upgrades to these rooms, most of which require using the Railgun or the AT-43 MASS to down the boss carrying said codex. The two exceptions to this are Personal Quarters and Bar, with the former needing a Toothy codex and the latter a Rat King codex^note Toothy can be instantly killed if it loses a fight with a Europan Medium Mech, while the Rat Ling is not invincible and will go down after being attacked enough. Both of these upgrades also have direct impacts on regular gameplay^note your Personal Quarters provides a health buff that regenerates in the time between deaths, while the Bar is needed to access the MASS in the first place, so the relative ease in acquiring these codices ensures you don't miss out on some crucial advantages when raiding.
  • Building and upgrading the Bar requires various types of alcohol, which are normally found in alcohol vaults that spawn in the later five maps (Frozen Swamp, Stairway Gate, Babel, Underground Cemetary, and Downtown Lost Angels). Alcohol can also be found in either provision crates or in loot bags from dead soldiers, though, making the grind for the MASS easier.
• Art Evolution: The Euruskan Commander at launch was just a tougher version of the Euruskan Rider. The May 2025 update, In Honor of V-Day, gave him a unique model - a heavily armored but helmetless soldier equipped with a colossal combat shield.
• The Artifact: When the Tunnels were first introduced, it was possible to find water barrels in them. As this clashed heavily with the lore that the main reason your Scavs had to go to the surface was to collect water was because there was none in the Innards, these were removed from the large object spawn pool on the Tunnels when the Fast Travel Blues update dropped. If you find a treasure room, though, you'll notice that all of them had spots where dozens of water barrels are stacked, even though the three barrels that would spawn by them will no longer appear.
• Assist Character: Any unused squad slots can be filled with an NPC merc recruit. Their combat effectiveness is nowhere near that of a human player (they're much closer to a Half-Life Barney rather than a Left 4 Dead or PAYDAY 2 bot), but they are an extra gun on the battlefield and can be ordered to defend locations. You also don't lose them if they die in a mission, only if you fail to extract, so you can use them as expendable distractions if needed.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: While this is shown to be a regular tactic of Eurasian Cyborgs due to their implants and programming, in Early Access all enemies will heedlessly throw themselves at you in an effort to kill players either through massed gunfire or with their bare hands. This applies even if you've already killed scores of them - after all, you will run out of ammo before they do.
• Attack Drones: Deployed in significant numbers by both Europa and Eurasia. They hover above the battlefield raking enemy units with machine-gun fire, the primary difference between them being their appearance (Europa's are simple and utilitarian, Eurasia's are insect-like). They're especially appetizing targets, as they are highly likely to drop drone parts, which sell for a high price among merchants.
• Back Stab: While difficult to pull off, a melee attack from behind will instantly and silently kill low-rank enemy soldiers (cyborgs are exempt from this). This is extremely useful if you need to get through a lightly guarded area quietly.
• Bandit Clan:
  • The Water Thieves fulfill this role, if only because other criminal ventures have no room in this setting. They mainly show up in the Frozen Swamp, but should your base reach Water Death, they're more than happy to sneak in and rob you of what little water remains. Additionally, killing enough of them in the field ''Will’’ provoke them into invading your base as retaliation.
  • The Scavengers in general. Starvation and warfare have forced them into a life of thievery and killing to survive, but some scavs choose to take it to the next level, taking on sabotage and assassination contracts for a bigger paycheck. Anyone they 'save' is press-ganged into work. And they all live far away from normal civilization, deep within the abandoned bowels of a sprawling sewage/transportation system, trying to stay away from the madness above while still depending on the war for supplies.
• BFG: There's the heavy rifle category which includes the 36M AntiTank rifle that uses 20 x 105mm rounds and the heavy machine guns which has Painless, a .50 cal machine guns. Only certain characters can use these oversized guns, but the firepower they bring is usually worth it.
• Bio Punk: The aesthetic and one of the main distinguishing features of Euruska, which has developed biotech far in advance of either of the other factions — this includes disturbingly fleshy "orga-mechs" and the rogue medical mech "Toothy" that fuels itself by capturing still-living humans to use as biofuel - something it may have been capable of before it went rogue.
• Boss Subtitles: Following In Honor of V-Day, the newly-reskinned Euruskan Commander receives a special cutscene where he arrives with a squad of Euruskan Soldiers and pounds a cyborg corpse against his shield as a challenge.
• Break Out the Museum Piece: The various weapons and tanks used by both factions are still recognizable models from the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty First centuries such as the M16, meaning that depending on when the Forever War started, all of them. Could be well over a century past their initial service dates. Europa, at least, has the excuse of having lost the tech race and needing to rely on older equipment used en-mass to keep up with the Technologically Advanced Foe that is the Eurasia-Euruskan Alliance.
• Continuing Is Painful:
  • Downplayed if you die on a map and are unable to retrieve your gear - while some weapon mods will require additional raids to recover, you can buy most of the other items for decent prices at the Innards, though dying repeatedly and failing to collect your gear is a very good way to deplete your cash reserves.
  • Played Straight if you fail to repel a Water Thief Raid - you will lose everything except your experience levels and anything you hid in the Secret Storage Vault, which will cripple you for at least a few days.
• Cool Plane: The bombers utilized by Eurasia. Humongous, flying wing aircraft resembling stealth bombers like the B-2 but twisted in shape and having the equally twisted payload of Eurasian cyborgs which they drop off on the battlefield in low-flying, sometimes almost as if levitating, bombing runs.
• Crapsack World: World War III has consumed the planet in nuclear hellfire, leaving a burned husk — and it's still not finished. The nuclear exchange has wrecked any semblance of central control, leaving the three factions' forces leaderless, under local command, or directed by Virtual Intelligences that may be following their own sinister agenda. The civilian population lives under grinding poverty and constant surveillance, when they're not being pressed into service on the front lines, and those independent from the super-states, such as the Scavs, are left living on a knife edge.
• Cyborg: The majority of Eurasia's units are cybernetically modified to varying degrees of quality and care, although they do deploy some purely-mechanical units such as their advanced drones or the towering "Mother Courage" scavenger units.
• Dangerous Orbital Debris: Kessler Syndrome is well and truly in effect after the warring super-states chucked nukes at each others' satellite weapons and communication systems, preventing any spacecraft from ever escaping Earth. Spacesuits are now highly prized among Europan flamethrower units for their heat resistance.
• David vs. Goliath: Any fight between a Scav and enemy forces beyond infantry will devolve into this - you're just a normal human facing all kinds of technological, biological, and cybernetic horrors. While many foes can be defeated via an enormous amount of ammunition, it's far easier to trick enemies into killing each other and looting their corpses.
• Defog of War: You can hack a trio of walkers on each map to gain real-time data about enemy operations for the next six hours. Doing so, however, will usually cause Eurasian Opal mechs to spawn and investigate the hacking.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Acquiring a Codex requires defeating one of the game's various boss entities, most of whom either have colossal amounts of health or are outright invincible to anything other than railgun shots. Taking one of them down will not only require massive expenditures of ammunition, it will also tank your reputation with whoever said boss belongs to. Finally, even if you take down a boss and brought a drill to open the codex container, looting it will trigger a response from Hunter Killers, several of whom are boss variants. The reward for extracting with a codex? An amazing 60,000 Experience Points, while the codex itself can be sold for 640,625 CR and an instant maximization in your relationship with all three of the big powers.
• Disaster Scavengers: The game's draw is that you play as one, a nobody scavenging for the resources necessary to keep your little community alive amid a colossal war. Being a mere scavenger, you have to pick and choose your battles carefully, because you stand no chance against the full might of any of the three warring factions.
• Early-Bird Cameo: The Rat King can first be seen on the Shrine to the Mech God that players can build in the Innards, as it is the titular Mech God.
• Easy Level Trick: Farming up enough money to get the higher-level Innards upgrades can take days or even months of grinding missions to get the millions of credits needed to pay for said upgrades... unless you focus on collecting water. Once you hit the cap for water, you start getting experience points for every day of water brought back, and once you hit the current experience cap for a character, the extra water is converted into credits at a rate of twenty five thousand credits per barrel. This allows you to focus on just extracting with water barrels for large amounts of cash. It gets even easier if you have the fortune to get the lift start for Tunnel A on a given day, as the first room past the lift will have three barrels of water in it, giving you a seventy five thousand credit payout for essentially zero effort.
• Elite Mooks: Each of the factions has some variant of "heavy infantry" more dangerous than their basic soldiers. For Europa, it's the GRINN and EOD squads, while Euruska has Armoured Infantry and Eurasia has the Brawlers.
• Exact Words: The Bring Her In mission requires you to rescue an EXO Pilot from the wreck of her machine. It doesn't specify how her EXO was disabled in the first place, so a very well armed player can destroy the mech themselves and then drag her out kicking and screaming.
• Extraction Shooter: It's unusual for the genre in that the game is purely Player Versus Environment rather than Player Versus Player. The focus is on scavengers surviving in a hostile battlefield in a war between three murderous, insanely powerful military factions, rather than the scavengers themselves fighting each other over loot.
• Fake Longevity: Building the large Innards upgrades (the Shooting Range, Personal Quarters, and Bar) require colossal expenditure of resources, usually including several million credits, and five each of both concrete power and mixers, plus at least 10 canisters of construction foam. All three of the latter resources are Rare Random Drops that can take days find in significant quantities, while the average mission awards, on average, 20,000 credits, meaning it will take a long time to grind up to afford these upgrades.
• Finishing Move:
  • If caught at low health by a Grabber, the Scav is grabbed, thrown to the ground twice, and finally decapitated.
  • Eurasian Drones will hoist a Scav into the air and sting them until they expire.
  • Should a Europa Medium Mech defeat a Euruska Medium Mech, the former will shove the latter to break its guard, then pull the Euruskan Mech's head off. On the flip side, should a Euruskan Medium Mech overwhelm its Europan counterpart, the losing machine will be knocked to the ground and have its cockpit smashed in with the Euruskan Mech's rifle.
• Foreshadowing: The full cinematic trailer's final shot of the Big Badass Battle Sequence between the three factions before returning to the Scav team shows a mixture of human corpses and several vaguely arthropod-shaped forms, one of which is later seen scurrying away after noticing the team descending into the ruins of Lost Angels. These are "mites" used by Toothy mechs, and it's implied the one seen in the rubble was a scout for the rogue Toothy that attacks the team at the end of the trailer.
• Forever War: World War III might have only started forty years ago, but it's devolved into this by the time of the game. It's deliberately left ambiguous if anyone alive remembers a time before the conflict, but in the present day it's a fact of life.
• Fragile Speedster: Cyborg Scramblers are quite fragile, especially for a potentially Hunter-Killer tier enemy type, but they are insanely fast, capable of easily outrunning even Scav Girl. A pack of them can easily swarm you and maul you to death if you don't have enough firepower to mow them all down or end up having to reload in the middle of fighting them off.
• Gaia's Lament: World War III has utterly ruined the environment - most fauna aside from dogs and cows appear to have gone extinct, you can only find growing plants in the Frozen Swamp (most of which are grass, as the trees have lost their leaves and grown gnarled masses of roots), and it's implied the surface water has become toxic, since getting into deep pools in the Frozen Swamp will hurt you even if you aren't fully submerged.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: The game goes a long way to emphasize how valuable water is.
  • Your water level is considered a direct indication of how well the Innards are doing, and it shows - even without investing money in getting welfare upgrades, a higher water level results in the Innards becoming more populous. At just a few days worth of water, the number of non-merchant characters in the Innards can be counted on one hand. At twenty-five or more days of water, though, not only will the Innards be relatively packed with people, but reprogrammed drones will fly around the area to keep track of things that don't concern the Scavs.
  • The Water system is probably the most lore intensive part of the game, with the devs releasing two lore videos that accompanied major updates to the system, providing the in-universe context behind both the 2.0 update (the Scavs built robots to help collect additional water, but their programming is bad enough that they can be easily followed, hence the turrets to fight off water thieves) and the 3.0 update (the reason that water was changed from a timer to a currency was that the Scavs decided that only those who contribute to the survival of the Innards get to drink, with freeloaders being executed).
• Grenade Launcher: There are no rocket launchers in this game, instead grenade launchers are the explosive weapon of choice. And among them is a sawn-off M79
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: Missions make it clear that most of the ground-level forces of the three superpowers are just as tired of fighting as everyone else and aren't necessarily evil. But with their chain of command reduced to artificial intelligences that no longer have any oversight, there's no way for them to negotiate a peace. Additionally, as most of those fighting have only known endless conflict, the only way they can see the fighting end is with their victory. Further emphasized once you've built and fully upgraded the bar, as Scavs, Euruskans, and Europeans will all mingle in peace despite nominally being at war with one another. The only reason Eurasians aren't joining them is that their cybernetics allow their commanders to track them, making it impossible to safely visit the bar.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: The Euruskan Toothy mech is an infamous invincible unit known for using enemy combatants as bio fuel. However, the not so invincible Medium Mech of the Europans can inflict this fate with its bare hands.
• Hero of Another Story: While the game mainly focuses on the Eurasian and Euruskan invasion of Lost Angels, the lore does state that fighting continues to rage all over the planet, with Europa staging its own invasion of Eurasian territory elsewhere.
• Hide Your Children: Players never see any children in the game, even in the Innards, but Flavor Text for missions confirms that children are present, and not immune to the horrors of the ongoing conflict - you can be asked to retrieve a child's toy so that their parents can use it as a Memento MacGuffin, or be asked by said parents to avenge the death of their child.
• Hopeless War: World War III turned most of the planet into a nuclear wasteland, but the fighting has continued for forty years. It appears that Europa is about to lose its homeland to the invading empires of Eurasia and Euruska, but regardless of who wins, there's little left to fight for. Most plant life has gone extinct, and the reconstruction drones have gone insane from lack of maintenance, creating surreal and unlivable ruins instead of new homes. Every day, thousands of soldiers slaughter each other using mad science abominations, and every night, they're forced to retreat from any gains they've made. And their main motivation isn't patriotism, but because the soulless AIs directing the war will starve their own troops if they disobey, with the implication that once the war finally ends, the 'victorious' side will just cut off all communications and leave their troops to die. Many of the veterans on all three sides have half-surrendered to the despair of it all, and some secretly collaborate with enemy platoons in neutral zones (such as The Innards, the players' shithole of a secret base) in order to ensure their platoons will survive while everyone else eradicates each other. You play as a scavenger, a nobody whose only remaining hope is to steal enough supplies from the spoils of war to keep their loved ones alive until the war finally ends. They will not survive to see the end of this conflict, and they know this.
  Scavenger: Remember: we're already dead.
• Hub Level: The Innards, a ramshackle underground community that's clinging onto life only through the player's deliveries of precious water. Here, you can purchase and customize equipment, accept quests, and hire mercenaries. The higher your water level, the more lively it becomes - at first, only one or two people will be inside, but as you get more water, additional Scavs move in until not only is the area well populated, repurposed drones can be seen flying around.
• Human Resources:
  • The "Night Shift" that moves into the battlefields after the fighting dies down to conduct repairs and salvage materials is said to happily harvest the organs of the living and the dead alike at it comes across them.
  • In the Mech Trenches map you can encounter the Europan Grinder system. Going down there reveals that Europa is recycling everything, including piles of human bodies, for food and new equipment.
• I'm a Humanitarian: One prominent feature of the Mech Trenches map is the semi-abandoned infirmary and the "recycler" underneath it with a massive pile of corpses being processed into emergency rations. Europa can ask you to fix it in one mission and it's not clear if the corpses in there are from the enemy or their own. Fast Travel Blues allows players to indulge in this as well - the crafting recipe for foods tins uses smuggled organs, implied to be from Eurasia Cyborgs.
• Implacable Man:
  • Hunter-Killers are only deployed when GPS-tracked equipment falls into a Scav's hands, and they live up to their name - once on the map, they will hunt you down until they kill you. Notably, they're the only enemy for whom invoking a Mêlée à Trois is a temporary solution - while they can be distracted by a more dangerous enemy, if they kill said foe, they'll resume their pursuit of you. If the Hunter-Killer dies in the fight, another is deployed to take its place. The only way to survive against the Hunter-Killers is to exfiltrate from the map.
  • Euruskan Grabbers are extremely aggressive foes that generally go to whatever lengths they can to chase you. The only way to escape them is to find a place they are physically incapable of fitting into, and even then it takes them a while to lose aggro. And just to make things worse for players, they have a Hunter-Killer variant. They're also one of the few enemies in the game that are nigh-unkillable - while they do have a set health limit, it's so high that it would be practically impossible for players to kill it, even if they goaded boss enemies into fighting it.
  • The Euruskan Orgamechs. They have the build of the Doom Slayer, and are just as badass. It's invincible, and it will relentlessly pursue you with The Slow Walk until you extract from the map. If it gets close enough to you, it will charge at you and One-Hit Kill you.
• Insurmountable Waist-High Fence: Applied to both players and enemies - certain barriers that aren't significantly larger or smaller than climbable objects cannot be scaled. At the same time, certain tunnels are small enough to prevent Mother Courage from chasing you, despite said machine being able to crouch low enough to crawl through them.
• Inventory Management Puzzle: All items have weight, and each rig can only carry a certain amount of weight. Additionally, destroyed weapons and large objects need special slots to be carried in. This may lead to a Sadistic Choice; the large object spot can be used to bring back extremely valuable items... or it can hold the water necessary to keep the Innards running, or the special equipment your scav needs to survive. You can upgrade a rig with reinforced containers, which increase the loot normal containers can hold and allow large-item containers to act as impromptu armor.
• Item Crafting: With the proper upgrades to your Stash, you can craft a variety of different equipment from items you scavenge in the field.
  • At launch, the only recipe available was the 0.545 Cryo Ammo, which gives guns that take 0.545 ammo the power to slow or stun enemies when shot.
  • The Nosebleed update added the heavy weapons using the "Special Projects" tab, with the initial recipe being the railgun.
  • "In Honor of V-Day'' added in the option to craft grenades (initially coming in Frag, Cluster, and Scrambler varieties), as well as the ability to repair destroyed weapons for usage in later missions.
  • "Rats in the Walls" added in options for crafting drones used for either construction, fast travel, or recovering lost gear, as well as crafting components needed to build the drones.
  • Fast Travel Blues massively overhauled the crafting system by making it possible to craft every piece of ammunition in the game, as well as medical supplies, rig gear, and other useful items as part of an overhaul to the game's economy.
• It's Probably Nothing: Played with. Enemies that hear something suspicious will investigate, but how much so depends on their relative threat level and yours. Infantry, for example, will try to hunt you down once they hear you, but vehicles will usually ignore you.
• King Mook: Assassination target bosses are typically versions of regular units with a unique appearance, a lot more health and armor, and better weaponry. For example, Pyro and Tormentor are Europan EOD troops with unique headgear, grenade launchers instead of machine guns, and are able to soak several dozen rounds of assault rifle fire rather than about a full mag for a regular EOD trooper.
• Let's You and Him Fight: Exploiting the existing conflict is key to survival, so naturally players are encouraged to get the factions fighting each other to make their lives easier. Overlaps with Summon Bigger Fish if you see that one of the parties is much stronger than the other - for example, dealing with Eurasian cyborgs or drones by luring an Europan EXO toward them. This is especially encouraged with bosses, where the optimal strategy is to trick other enemies into whittling them down, only directly engaging them to give the nudge needed for the kill.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: Europa. Despite being a totalitarian nightmare of a society - freely engaging in mass Conscription, police-state policies, and having a brutal Might Makes Right mindset - they have not sunk to the horrific lows of the Eurasian Cyborgs, and are explicitly fighting a defensive war against Eurasia's aggression. Notably, while the Europan and Euruskan quest givers thank you for your help, the Eurasian quest giver tells you that you performed above expectations for an inferior lifeform.
• Little Hero, Big War: Played with. The player isn't simply a cog in the war machine, they're completely apart from it — a scavenger whose lot in life is to scurry ratlike across the battlefield, scouring it for anything of value and hoping not to attract unwanted attention. There's nothing you can do to change the Forever War, and you're too busy trying to keep your failing settlement alive to think about much else.
• MacGyvering: As shown in their crafting recipes, Scav grenades are assembled from fuses, compression chambers, gunpowder, and ball bearings, but are good enough to be functionally identical to those looted for the enemy corpses, with the game treating them as the same item.
• Machine Worship: Scavs have taken to worshipping a rogue Europan Medium Mech called the Rat King, with a shrine dedicated to it being one of the welfare upgrades to the Innards. Actually encountering the Rat King will reveal why this is the case - it's the only boss in the game (and only enemy at all) that isn't hostile to the player, and will help them kill enemies. Additionally, it's more likely to spawn after praying at its shrine in the Innards, blurring the line slightly as to whether it is merely a rogue machine, a citizen of the Innards with a secret identity, or even a case of Divine Intervention.
• Magnetic Weapons: A railgun can be earned through the Bunco quest line. The railgun is a turret weapon designed for destroying mechs and before being assembled on the field, its parts must be carried by 3 people.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The Rat King is treated as a god by the Scavs, and while this could just be a coping mechanism for the absolute hellhole that is life, praying at its shrine in the Innards does make it more likely to spawn. Additionally, while it can be "killed", it won't collapse upon losing all health, simply ceasing its movement instead.
• Meaningful Name: Every playable character has a descriptive name - Scav Girl is the only girl in the group, Mask Head wears a mask, Gunhead is a robot with a gun where their head should be, and so on.
• Mêlée à Trois: The overarching conflict has Europa on one side while Eurasia and Euruska are on the other, with the former acting as frontline fighters against Europa while the latter protect supply lines. Scavs like the player aren't affiliated with any of the nations and will be attacked by anyone else if they are deemed a threat to the operations. You're encouraged to exploit this by allowing enemy forces to kill one another (potentially by luring one group of enemies toward another faction) so that you can finish off the survivors and scavenge the remains, or get past an otherwise impassable bulwark. Additionally, several smaller factions can be found on certain maps ^note Cultists in the Underground Cemetery and the Water Thieves in the Frozen Swamp who are hostile to everyone.
• Mini-Mecha: The Europan EXOs, roughly the size of a small tank, and operated by a single pilot. These are distinct from Mechs, towering war machines the size of buildings and bristling with armaments. The "Babel" update introduces the Euruskan Kotleta, a boss enemy with a jetpack and a powerful Kool-Aid Man charge attack, with a rounded shape similar to the mechs from Sakura Wars.
• Money Sink: Upgrades to the Innards cost colossal amounts of money (usually several million credits at higher levels), making them the main way of burning through cash once you've gotten into a groove, especially if you are able to consistently collect codexes, which sell for six hundred fifty thousand credits a piece)
• Nice Day, Deadly Night: Downplayed in that the Forever War makes every hour dangerous, but daytime will see the deployment of drones, mechs, and vehicles, which carry extremely valuable loot. Nighttime, meanwhile, sees Eurasia deploy their Mother Courage units, which are massive, invincible, and have guaranteed One-Hit Kill attacks, and that isn't getting into the other things lurking out there as part of the Night Shift. Additionally, Europa usually flees the field during the Night Shift, meaning you can't rely on enemies trying to kill each other to sneak past them.
• Nightmare Fetishist: The presence of a stylized image of a Mother Courage in your personal quarters indicates that someone finds her attractive.
• Not So Invincible After All: Several boss enemies (The Orgamech, Grabber, Mother Courage, and Toothie) were virtually unkillable, such that the only way to survive against them was to run. Then the Nosebleed update dropped and introduced the railgun, which has enough firepower to stun said enemies, knocking them out of the fight completely.
• Not Worth Killing: Enemies will gauge a scav's threat level before deciding how to respond, which leans into the stealth-focus of the game. Soldiers will try to hunt you down once they've determined that you're in the area, but vehicles, EXOs, and Mechs will ignore you unless you prove a persistent threat.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The melee-oriented Cyborgs behave rather like zombies, but aren't truly undead — they are poor unfortunates submitted to Unwilling Roboticization and used as cannon fodder for Eurasia, forced into obedience by their remote-controlled implants.
• Perspective Flip: The game has been referred to by both the devs and content creators as a mech game where you're one of the non-mech characters. This becomes especially apparent when observing the battlefield - tank turrets rammed into the ground by mechs serve the same purpose as skulls on spikes, discarded mech weapons can be used as platforms or cover by soldiers, and the strange metallic pillars that can occasionally be found on maps are actually spikes designed to stop mechs from being airdropped onto the battlefield.
• Piñata Enemy: Drones. While they are just as deadly as everything else in the game, they can easily be cut down by a squad of soldiers from an opposing faction or another drone - in fact, they often engage in firefights with each other in the Mech Trench that ends with several wrecks on the ground. Said wrecks contain drone parts, which can be sold for over three thousand credits a piece. The In Honor of V-Day further increased the wrecks' value by adding components for grenades to their loot pools. Also doubles as Metal Slime, as drone wrecks and their associated loot despawn much faster than other loot piles.
• Play Every Day: The water mechanic in the first Early Access release encouraged this. In brief: you gain water through gameplay, your base constantly uses water, and your progress is wiped (with the exception of character XP) if the water runs out. The problem is that your base keeps on using water when you're offline, requiring the player to keep topping it up. However, 55 days' worth of water (or 100, with upgrades) can be banked, meaning some time can be taken in between playing. The water mechanic was removed, but water can be used to access different zones and entry points, and you can still log in every day to claim water using the water bots upgrade. Additionally, starting with "Rats in the Walls", you need to traverse tunnels to reach the maps, and the layout of these tunnels (including treasure rooms containing exceedingly valuable loot) changes daily.
• Poor Communication Kills: The sheer level and duration of the conflict between the three superpowers has effectively obliterated long range communication and the chain of command. Armies are only aware of nearby forces at best, and most soldiers don't have any idea if their homes exist anymore. Gameplay wise, this also explains why a faction will keep attacking you even if you consistently aid them - there's no way to disseminate information regarding friendly scavs, and it's likely that those in charge don't care.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Assuming any of the factions somehow finds a way to win World War III, the only spoils they will be able to claim is a dead planet (and, at best, an equally long and painful restoration process).
• Rare Random Drop:
  • Large Lockboxes (not to be confused with Gacha Boxes) are some of the most lucrative items that can be found on a map - while they need a large-item storage spot to hold, each can be sold for over fifteen thousand credits. This is a higher payout than basic missions, making them a consistent way of increasing your funds, especially once you've gotten a large backlog of water.
  • Gacha boxes are sparse, but contain a random assortment of goods, equipment, and weapons, which sometimes exceeds the value of a Large Lockbox. However, they have spawn points scattered across every map yet their spawn rate is low, meaning a scav will typically find Large Lockboxes more often than Gacha Boxes.
  • Some items will be worth tens of thousands of credits, but don't require a large inventory slot. They usually spawn in storage boxes at very low rates.
  • IFF Tags are used to repair weapons acquired on the field, with different weapons requiring different levels and amounts of tags. Level 3 IFF Tags spawn very infrequently, and are worth a fortune if you grab them.
  • For the Tunnels, there's Construction Foam, Cement Powder, and Cement Mixture -
• Recruitment by Rescue:
  • The only way to obtain the EXO Pilot mercenary is by completing a mission to rescue one after their machine is destroyed.
  • Some rescue missions have flavor text where the quest giver plans to put them to work in exchange for a more comfortable life than 'imprisoned slaves'.
• Robbing the Dead: Heavily encouraged - the vast majority of your finds from the average mission come from items scavenged off of enemies, as while weapon mods, medical supplies, and ammo can be taken from storage crates found all over the map, soldiers carry items that have no use besides being sold off.
• Robot Buddy: One of the recruitable characters is a Scav Mule, a small flying robot that possesses no combat abilities, but can carry large amounts of loot. In Early Access, it had numerous bugs, but this was mitigated by the option to simply order it to stay in one place, allowing players to place the drone in a secure location and use it as a loot bank until they're ready to exit the field.
• Robot Girl:
  • Disturbingly, Mother Courage units are stylized to look like attractive, shapely women as they go about harvesting the remains of Eurasian cyborgs. They are completely invulnerable and will tear you in half if they catch you.
  • The hulking Eurasian Heavy Brawlers have a head that resembles a Japanese high school girl. It appears to be some sort of robot head or even a stylized helmet akin to the monster helmet that the Tormentor wears.
• Ruins of the Modern Age: The necro city of Lost Angels is suggested to be an After the End Los Angeles, but the sheer amount of devastation has made the area unrecognizable. Word of God indicates that the cities have been constantly rebuilt by gigantic 3D printer machines, resulting in the architecture blurring over after thousands of repairs.
• Run or Die: Once a Hunter-Killer is on the map, it's time for a Scav to bail - Hunter-Killers are programmed to zero-in on the player specifically, such that while they can be distracted by other, more dangerous foes, it's just that, a distraction. Once the other foe is dead, they resume hunting the player. If the Hunter-Killer is killed, another will take its place. Hunter-Killers are some of the toughest foes in the game, so while it's possible to kill them, you are expected to run out of ammo before they run out of reinforcements.
• Scavenged Punk: Scav equipment and technology is assembled from whatever they could loot off the battlefield and looks very ramshackle, even when compared to Europa. The Bar, in particular, has several pieces of furniture (including a crude toilet) that were obviously built using scrap metal.
• Scavenger World: Anyone who isn't a member of the three factions has been reduced to scavenging the battlefields for everything needed to survive from food to medicine. Often, beating out the "Night Shift" for the best spoils requires raiding active battlefields, which makes it important to know when to fight and when to run.
• Scenery Gorn: Good grief. Pretty much every landscape shown in the game is a grim, blasted battlefield dotted with ruins, trenches, burnt-out war machines and piles of corpses. Probably the most famous example of this in-game is a tank that uses human corpses as either camouflage or an intimidation tactic.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: The game encourages you to avoid fights unless absolutely necessary, which can mean running away if the battle turns away from your favor.
• Sentry Gun: Your Scav can get 20mm turrets that deploy and fire on enemies.
• Shop Fodder: Many of the items you can collect from a battlefield serve no purpose other than being sold to merchants.^*Some of these items are needed to complete missions, but they'll be lootable even if the mission is not selected Examples include tool sets, repair kits, and PDAs. Perhaps the most lucrative of these is large lockboxes, each of which can be sold for over fifteen thousand credits. The catch is that they are a large item, so your starting rig will only be able to carry one of them.
• Shout-Out:
  • The setting is a miserable, dystopian future fought over by three totalitarian super-states in a grinding Forever War — even their names, Europa, Eurasia and Euruska, are not far removed from Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia.
  • The contact NPC, Aramaki, seems to be a shoutout to influential Scifi writer Yoshio Aramaki, whose Imaginary Battle series is definitive of the Forever War trope.
  • Eurasian Cyborgs are rather similar in appearance to Terminators, and the developers have cited the opening Robot War scene of Terminator 2: Judgment Day as a significant inspiration for the game.
  • The cows being airlifted out of the city of Lost Angels is taken from Apocalypse Now, where a similar scene was done with a water buffalo.
  • Much of the imagery for both sets and battles is themed after The Second Renaissance from The Animatrix.
  • Enemy units behave much more like Real-Time Strategy units rather than third-person shooter soldiers. The developers have cited their love of classic RTS games, such as Command & Conquer, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, and KKND. Simpler RTS style A.I. also fits with practical considerations given how many units appear on a map actively fighting each other constantly.
  • As in the later Metal Gear games, all factions use ID-locked weapons, which is why any weapons you collect on the field are labeled as "destroyed". And just like in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, you can cheat the system using modified IFF-chips.
  • One of the Old Man's lines mentions carrying the fire.
• Socialization Bonus: Starting with Update 0.4, Nosebleed, Scavs can craft heavy weapons that can be used to take down tougher enemies with minimal risk to themselves, the first such example being a railgun. The catch is that said weapons must be assembled in the field, and only one component can be carried per player, meaning you need at least three people to deploy said weapon.
• Starter Equipment: All Scavs start out with the Surplus Rifle and the Surplus Shotgun, as well as a basic rig.
• Stealth-Based Game: You are not expected to beat most opponents in a straight fight. Maps contain multiple corridors and hiding spots that allow you to evade foes, while limited ammunition and extremely durable enemies makes it so that every encounter must be considered in advance before engaging.
• Stereotype Flip: Generally speaking, fiction that features Western powers fighting Eastern ones has the former being on the cutting edge while the latter often relies on We Have Reserves. Here, however, Europa is the one on the backfoot technologically and dependent on conscripts to fill out its ranks, while Euruska and Eurasia are the ones with the cutting-edge weapons.
• Summon Bigger Fish: If all else fails, you can try luring extremely tough enemies into other foes to get an opening to find more loot or get out of the map. This is always the case if you provoke a Mother Courage into attacking Europan troops, as the former is completely invincible and only tanks can resist them due to the former not having animations to attack vehicles in Early Access.
• Swamps Are Evil: The Frozen Swamp, while lacking snow or ice, is just as devastated and nerve-wracking as every other map. Hazards include roving drones, toxic pools, twisted mass of tree roots, and a central Injection Rig that Europa has turned into a fortress. Worse still, the map is the home base of the Water Thieves, and killing enough of them will lead them to siege your base.
• Take That!: The Early Access release date trailer is full of these toward the entire AAA gaming industry, with the devs directly calling out studios for their focus on the bottom line over making enjoyable games. Among other issues, the requirement that games be always online, predatory microtransactions, and the high price of games at release are mocked. Tellingly, said trailer is named Declaration of War, which refers to both the beginning of player involvement in the Forever War and the team challenging the ideas that dominate the modern gaming industry.
• Tank Goodness: Modern tanks like the Merkava and T-90 are used by Europa and Euruska respectively. Meanwhile, absolutely gigantic battleship-esque Europan Titan landships adorn several maps, some of which are dilapidated wrecks that can be entered and contain lots of loot but hide hordes of enemy forces.
• Token Non-Human: Gunhead is the only playable character who isn't a normal human - they are instead a robot with a gun where their head should be.
• Tunnel Network: The Innards are connected to the rest of Lost Angels via a series of tunnels that run under the city. While initially only seen in the loading cutscenes for missions, "Rats in the Walls" made them fully explorable and initially requires players to do so, only allowing you to fast travel to maps if you have previously found their connecting tunnels and have both spare water and transportation drones. Additionally, the tunnels have their layouts altered every day when the Night Shift rebuilds the city. Though tunnels have plenty of hazards, they also carry great rewards - in addition to having several containers filled with
• Underground City:
  • The Innards are located underneath the rubble of the city of Lost Angels, with what can be seen implying the accessible area used to be part of a subway network. The loading screens show just how deep they are, with Scavs having to climb huge towers to reach the surface.
  • One of the maps, Underground Cemetery, is set in a different part of the Lost Angels' underground, which as the name suggests has been converted into a makeshift graveyard.
• Uniformity Exception: Initially, Eurasia was the only faction to lack Exo units or equivalents, with Europa having their Exos and Euruska having Orgamechs. This was finally subverted in the May 2025 update, In Honor of V-Day, which introduced Eurasia's equivalent unit, the Opal.
• Urban Warfare: While initially downplayed in the first Early Access builds due to those maps focusing on either the outskirts of Lost Angels or in dedicated military installations (albeit ones that are nestled deep within urban areas), this trope finally enters the game in the March 2025 update, The Descent to Averno is Easy, which added the Stairway Gate, a colossal stairway leading to the city's defensive wall. A former plaza acts as a duel area for mechs while infantry scuttle around trying to either break into the Europan fortress at the top of the stairs or hold said fortress against hordes of cyborgs backed up by Euruskan soldiers, and two of the decaying skyscrapers the stairway is sandwiched between act as entry/exit points for the map. This was expanded on with the release of the next map, Babel, which is set in a trio of interconnected skyscrapers where enemies exchange gunfire within the remains of rooms that once housed civilians. The trope was fully embraced with the release of Downtown Lost Angels, where enemies fight for control of abandoned office buildings and housing blocks, with Eurasia having converted a gas station into a refueling point for helicopters.
• Video Game Caring Potential:
  • The game provides "donation stations" in the Innards, where more experienced players can provide items that they have upgraded from or have a surplus of to new players.
  • The welfare upgrades to the Innards in the Early Access release serve no gameplay purpose and exist to make life easier for everyone else living there (like adding a dog kennel, a decorative tree, or a shrine to pray at).
• Warfare Regression: Downplayed, as while the mass nuclear launch effectively removed satellites and extremely long-ranged artillery weapons from the playing field, Humongous Mecha and Mini-Mecha are common sights on the battlefield. It's highly likely you'll see one trudging through trenches straight out of World War I.
• War Is Hell: Yes - the demolished cities that are constantly rebuilt each night, the various walking warcrimes each faction throws at each other, and the destitute Innards that stand as the only safe haven from the conflict, the game pulls no punches in showing war as an absolute nightmare for everyone involved.
• We Have Reserves: Both main belligerents have their own variation on this trope:
  • Europa maintains a plentiful supply of poorly equipped conscripts, who are either forced into service or volunteer for combat given that their "civilian" life is even worse.
  • Eurasia has smaller numbers of "proper" infantry, but assaults Europan positions with massive waves of Cyborgs, programmed with a single-minded desire to kill while their human mind remains intact and impotent.
• World War III: The conflict between the Western nations and South America under Europa, and the East, Africa and Asia under the Eurasian-Euruskan alliance is responsible for the sorry state of the world the game is set in. Amazingly, the fighting is still ongoing, having devolved into a Forever War managed by Artificial Intelligence. Every map is a battle between Europa and one of the other factions, involving forces ranging from infantry to Humongous Mecha.
• You Are a Credit to Your Race: The Eurasian Questgiver will frequently give the scavs missions that he expects them to fail. If you succeed, he'll be dumbstruck, and praise the otherwise "inferior forms of life" for completing labors that his forces struggle to accomplish.
• You Bastard!: The lore video for Water 3.0, which finally removed the water countdown that most players hated (and which the developers really wanted to keep), has several Gunheads and Water Robots throwing some of the inhabitants of the Innards to their deaths while discussing the new water system, clearly emphasizing the in-universe reason for the timer and the cost of getting rid of it.