The game was translated from German into English by Azn Chipmunk
, who also translated Desert Nightmare. The translation can be downloaded here.
Schuld provides examples of:
- 20 Minutes into the Future: Technology hasn't advanced much beyond the invention of virtual reality.
- Absurd Phobia: Aaron has the fear of becoming fat to the point of refusing food in a world where food is scarce. His fear is later realized after being forced to eat Maria's corpse.
- All Just a Dream: The places Aaron goes to over the course of his journey are all false visions inflicted on him. In actuality, this whole time he's been held prisoner in a space station on the moon.
- Alternative Calendar: A newspaper has the date 17.15.9999.
- An Arm and a Leg: Early on, Aaron meets a young girl whose arm has been destroyed by "rot". Other people suffer a similar affliction. And then his own arm gets cut off in order to give it to someone who lost all their limbs.
- And then it's revealed Aaron is sentenced for the crime of cutting Williams's legs, as punishment for murdering Maria.
- Asshole Victim: Most of the cast can die, and a majority of them are major assholes, some even downright monsters.
- Big Bad: Judge Williams is behind the rot, war, and other horrors afflicting the world, which is a simulation created to torment Aaron for breaking his legs in retaliation for killing Maria.
- Bittersweet Ending: Vergil destroys the moon prison and its captives escape from the digital world they were tortured at. However, he lost his life on the process and Aaron throws away his chance of freedom to get payback on Williams once and for all.
- Benevolent A.I.: Vergil, the artificial intelligence in charge of the moon prison.
- Can't Get Away with Nuthin': Williams thinks he is above the law when he kills Maria due to him being the head of the moon prison, but he's certainly not impervious to an irate mourning lover that cuts his legs and later comes back with revenge.
- Crapsack World: Aaron is trapped in a post-apocalyptic world where there's constant war, a virus called "the Rot" is decomposing people's limbs and money has no value anymore. The real world is no better, with a moon prison that tortures its inmates by trapping them in a digital world, with their suffering being broadcasted to people on Earth for fun. And the heavy implication that Maria is a sex slave.
- Cruel Mercy: After Williams murders Maria, Aaron tries to kill him, before deciding that cutting his legs is a more fitting punishment. This causes Williams to lock him in the moon prison.
- Dead All Along: Maria was murdered by Williams some time before the start of the game, due to cheating on him with Aaron.
- A Deadly Affair: Williams kills Maria for cheating him with Aaron.
- Driven to Suicide: Aaron and Vergil come across the aforementioned man who has lost all his limbs to the Rot smoking a cigarette. Vergil explains that smoking accelerates the Rot.
- Evil Cripple: Judge Williams lost the use of his legs after Aaron mutilated them, which is his motivation for revenge.
- Eye Scream: Rot can decay even the eyes; late in the first chapter Aaron meets a child who's been blinded from the disease. He gives one of his own to her, but it grows back when he's transported to the next world.
- "Everyone Dies" Ending: By the end of the game, every named character is dead or has been for a long time.
- Foreshadowing: There's a lot of focus on mutilation and lost limbs, to the point Aaron is forced to lose his body parts during his journey. This is a hint of how Aaron cut Williams's legs in the past.
- Force Feeding: At one point, Aaron is forced to eat Maria's corpse. This is when Vergil realizes Williams has gone too far and releases him from the moon prison.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Vergil detonates the moon prison so that its prisoners could escape. Since he's an A.I, this is at the cost of his life.
- Meatgrinder Surgery: After talking with the man with no limbs, Aaron is captured and strapped to a surgery table. One of his arms is amputated by a doctor using a wooden saw, but it grows back when he's transported to the next world.
- Mind Rape: Most of what Aaron experiences over the course of the game isn't really happening; he's being trapped by Williams in a digital world to be tortured for eternity.
- Mind Prison: There is such a prison, as it disposes of people by putting them in cryostasis and projecting their minds into a virtual world.
- Moral Myopia: Williams swears revenge on Aaron for cutting his legs and tampers with the digital world he's trapped in so he would suffer more. Conveniently ignoring that Aaron mutilated him as payback for murdering the love of his life.
- Noble Top Enforcer: Vergil is reluctantly allowing the inmates to be tortured because he genuinely believes they can be rehabilitated, unlike Williams who only wishes to make Aaron suffer.
- No Kill like Overkill: After killing the warlord who ordered Maria's death, Aaron continues to shoot the warlord presumably until he runs out of bullets.
- One-Word Title: The word being "fault" in German.
- Rain of Something Unusual: Aaron comes across an area where money is raining. There's even a canal where money is flowing like a river.
- Reset Button: Things that happen in one chapter don't all carry over to the next one. There's a reason for this.
- Revenge Before Reason:
- Williams is in charge of overseeing Aaron's sentence, until he starts tampering with the digital world in order to make him suffer more. This is what convinces Vergil to turn against him and free Aaron.
- Aaron decides to take his revenge against Williams at the end, even though the space station is going to self-destruct in a few minutes and if he takes his revenge there's no chance of getting out alive.
- Revenge by Proxy: The reason Maria keeps popping up in the visions Aaron is given is because Williams wants to torture him further by having to see Maria suffer.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: After Maria is killed, Aaron immediately grabs a gun, heads to the warlord who ordered her death, and fights and kills him.
- Robotic Reveal: Vergil turns out to be an AI used to run the cruel rehabilitation program Aaron is a part of.
- Seven Deadly Sins: At the beginning of the game, Aaron has in his possession a book with empty pages except for the last page which has the Latin words for the seven deadly sins. The places Aaron goes to each center around one of the sins.
- Sex Slave: It's heavily implied Maria is a "comfort woman", but poses as Williams's wife to avoid scandal. That's why he's unconcerned after he kills her, stating to Aaron that she was disposable.
- Tongue Trauma: In the second world, Aaron meets a woman who looks like a woman he once knew, and she never speaks to him. He's told it's because her tongue's been cut out.
- Tragic Dream: Aaron meets a little girl whose eyes have decayed away, and she expresses a wish that she could have seen the ocean one last time. He tries to grant her wish, giving her one of his own eyes and taking her to the beach, but the ocean has by now become awash with corpses, and looks just as bad as everything else.
- Unexplained Recovery: No matter how many times Aaron loses his limbs, he's shown okay when he's transported to another world. This is a clue about how the world is not real.
- Villain in a White Suit: Downplayed with Vergil, who dresses in a clean white suit and is stated to be very beautiful. He is a Well-Intentioned Extremist AI that tortures Aaron and other prisoners on the moon in order to rehabilitate them but does not enjoy his job and has misgivings about it.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Vergil goes along with the prisoners being mentally tortured because he genuinely believes they can be rehabilitated. However once he sees Williams tampering with Aaron's trail and realizes the prisoners were never meant to get better in the first place, that he decides to destroy the moon prison once and for all.
- Wham Episode: The final chapter "Truth" lives up to its name by revealing that everything Aaron experienced thus far was a machine-induced dream as part of his rehabilitation in a prison on the moon. The program is run and tampered with by Judge Williams who wishes to get revenge on Aaron for taking away the use of his legs as retaliation for killing Maria.
