Video Game / The Lacerator

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The Lacerator is a Retraux Comedy Survival Horror developed by Games From The Abyss (mostly helmed by Fernando Tittz) and published by DreadXP for Steam in 2025. It follows the misadventures of a legendary adult film star known as Max: The Man Who Loves Sex, whose most recent film shoot led him and his crew - his mate Stacy and cameraman Rodriguez - to getting abducted and finding themselves in a hideout of the titular Stock Slasher known as The Lacerator. This lair houses plenty of failed ghoul-like experiments, deadly traps and paths with unclear destination, and it is up for Max to save himself and his crew (possibly) by getting out of this hellhole, any way he can, preferably but not neccersarly in one piece.

The "any way he can" and "preferably but not necessarily in one piece" are not for show. The game employs Story Branching with few ways he can begin plotting escape from The Lacerator's lair, giving him few distinct paths - described as "flows" - leading him into different places. Max also has to be mindful (or not) of his body, as various deadly traps as well as the titular antagonist are able to deprive a body part out of our pornstar "hero", and contrary of expectations of other horror games that usually had characters die violently soon after losing their limb, Max has to carry on with survival without his lost part^note Each of the flows have 1-2 unique Lacerations Max can be subject to. Both of these features supports the mission statement of this game being designed for multiple playthroughs, boasting whopping 9 endings depending on which of the flows Max survives through, either completely on one piece or with any of the unique Lacerations.

Introducing the tropes who love sex:

• 1-Dimensional Thinking: Ending I inverts this, with Max jumping out of that van to the side of the road, right onto a pole, when it would've been barely safer to jump opposite where the van was driving.
• Achievement Mockery: In addition to special death cutscenes that have their own achievements tied to them, there are also achievements for trying out few lockbox codes that are obviously incorrect, including 69^note "I love this number! But it's wrong.", 420^note "The Lacerator is not into smoking I guess", 666^note "Either The Lacerator isn't a satanist, or he doens't like Heavy Metal" and even a code only a "nerd" would try like 451.
• An Arm and a Leg: Max can lose an arm during Flow 1, while he can lose a leg during Flow 2.
• The Artifact: The End-Game Results Screen has the "Lacerator Defeated" stat which while it did make sense to be featured in the demo version as it was possible to complete the demo evading The Lacerator instead of defeating, in the final game each of the final confrontation with The Lacerator is a mandatory boss fight, so this stat will always say yes except for Ending G, as the Final Boss fight in that ending was hallucinatory.
• Artificial Limbs: Max doesn't have to go through an entire ordeal with a missing body part. Whenever Max is able to find a high value "food" item like a chewed gum or a box of Pussytos snacks and provide these to The Man In The Wall, he would be rewarded with a prosthetic that provided him with a fancier offensive ability, including a grenade launcher in place of a missing arm, a chainsaw to do roundhouse kicks with, a mouth machine gun and even a drill that Max can hump the enemies with.
• Antagonist Title: The title refers to the Stock Slasher that kidnapped our top porn star and his crew.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: Agreeing to escape with The Man In The Wall - revealed to be Buck - at the Last-Second Ending Choice of Flow 2 has Max fight a giant Lacerator in a middle of a surreal realm. The fight climaxes with Max pulling off plenty of outright supernatural moves - including a transformation into a Devil Gene demon....only to cut to Max punching a wall in reality.
• Badass Transplant: Max with Lacerations plus Artificial Limbs he can get for Chewing Gum equals one sexy killing machine.
• BFG: There's a sawed-off grenade launcher available as a replacement for the missing arm. Due to circumstances, Max only has 7 shots of it for the entire run.
• Bond One-Liner: Max does have a line for each unique way he gets to dispatch the Final Boss, as well as for the Bob Gates fought as a mid-boss during Flow 3.
  Max, right as he's about to kill Bob Gates There's no way to burn me, cuz I'm hot to the Max.
• Bullet Seed: The Motormouth, an Artificial Tongue to treat the Tongue laceration available in Flow 2 that lets Max spit out bullets.
• Chainsaw Good: When his leg is missing, provided he's able to provide a High Value Food to the Man In The Wall, he's able to replace his missing leg with a Sawkondo, which he does a multi-hit roundhouse kicks with.
• Critical Existence Failure: Downplayed, but few of the lacerations certainly affect Max's performance^note Max's Arm and Guts lacerations do slow down Max's movement and melee attack speed, something which is not restored after replacing the limb much more than his current health level.
• Company Cross-References: Within Flow 3, inside the hideout of the traffickers, Max can find the wanted poster of Exit, the Villain Protagonist from Pigface also published by DreadXP. Max could not resist getting puzzled by that character's nickname.
• Content Warnings: The game does have one as the game loads, just as around tongue-in-cheek as a lot of things in the game.
  ''Warning: This game is a work of fiction, any similarities to reality is purely coincidental. It also contains flashing lights, scenes of violence, gore ...and tank controls.
• Coup de Grâce Cutscene: Shall he succed at finally defeating him, Max does an unique sequence of kicking The Lacerator's ass per flow, and each of the Artificial Limbs used to deliver a killing blow have their own Finishing Move.
• Cowardly Lion: Max does berate Rodriguez as a coward ever since becoming captured, and he does gain courage during the course of Flow 1, to the point of even assisting Max in the Final Boss fight by dropping the chair onto The Lacerator, and the Epilogue of that path has Rodriguez purse career as a wrestler.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Max is easily the most foul-mouthed Survival Horror protagonist since Ethan Winters.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: Pun related to the protagonist's name aside, The Coup de Grâce Cutscene for the hallucinatory fight with The Lacerator in one of possible Flow 2 endings has Max be able to do a Blade Lock against a giant axe, shoot lightning, kick out a flame, turn into a Demon of Sex with its own variety of powers among things. Then again, this particular fight is happening inside Max's drugged up mind.
• Determinator: A missing body part or two does not stop Max from trying to escape and eventually take on The Lacerator, and shall he survive Flow 3 with the Guts laceration, Max would boast that "Even with his guts out of his body, he had the guts to keep moving". There's also this tidbit during Flow 2.
  Max started mentalizing escaping as a sexy task to keep motivated.
• Down the Drain: The first half of Flow 3 is especially Sewer themed, and it even houses a sewer monster named Petunia.
• Explosive Barrels: Some of the rooms happen to contain red explosive barrels that Max take advantage of by shooting at them to take out multiple ghouls, while being mindful to not stand too close to the explosives.
• Eyes Out of Sight: Stacy has her eyes completely covered by the bangs on her model. This also applies to all of the women featured in the trailer for Max To The Max.
• Fan Disservice: If Max would let Stacy be abducted and killed by The Lacerator, the latter would spend the remainder of the run hunting down Max in Stacy's bikini, as if the sight of Stacy's butchered remains wasn't enough.
• Freeze-Frame Ending: The Epilogues display text overlaid on the freeze frame, with the particular standout being Ending H, which freeze frames on exact point Max impacts with a pole.
• Grammar Correction Gag: The game's Game Over screen has a message that reads "You Are Die" before correcting itself to "You Are Dead".
• Groin Attack: Max himself can suffer getting his Johnson cut off during Flow 1. This even changes his nickname to be written in past tense.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: Max can encounter legless Ghouls that are rigged with explosives, also recognizable by their beeping of their bombs.
• He Knows About Timed Hits: Played for Laughs with an Apocalyptic Log found in the starting area of the game written by a "Lazy Husband", who couldn't wrap his head around the act of using bandages, described by his wife as Opening the Inventory, Selecting the Bandage and Clicking on the Use option.
• Injured Player Character Stage: A defining feature of this game, both various traps and The Lacerator himself are able to cripple Max by brutally chopping off a body part of his, which can include an arm, leg, tongue and even the groin, some of which come with their own effects (e.g. a missing leg would force Max to crawl and be unable to reach areas that would require him to jump, and a missing arm would impede his ability to aim and open doors that need both hands to operate). The possible lacerations are dependent on the Flow.
• Inertial Impalement: In Ending H Max manages to pull this off on The Lacerator with a foot up his groin.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: This gets Played for Laughs during the drug-fueled trip during Flow 2, where Max at one point has progress blocked by a feather in middle of the corridor. Max has to find and use an Office Fan nearby to blow it off.
• Inventory Management Puzzle: Max has to contend with limited inventory space of only 6 slots (at first), and this is a Survival Horror game with no equivalent of an magical item box, so chances are whenever he'd be overloaded and he has a key item to pick up, he'd likely have to dispose a healing item. Max can at least find backpacks that increase his carrying capacity for an extra slot each.
• I Was Quite a Looker: At one point during the Drug-induced hallucination in Flow 2 Max can see the photos of Buck, Max's frequent blonde co-star who was just around as a hunk as Max is. That man is now a grotesque Man In The Wall, whose current appearance stems likely through how The Lacerator managed to drug him.
• I Was Young and Needed the Money: A note during the bad memory during Flow 2's drug-induced nightmare states that Max was brought onto the porn industry by Buck due to former's financial situation, something Buck later grew to regret.
• "Jaws" First-Person Perspective: In Flow 3 some of the times Max wades through the sewers would have him get chased by the resident sewer monster Petunia, at which point the game would assume this perspective.
• Last-Second Ending Choice:
  • One of the routes, Flow 2, has The Man in Wall - revealed by that route to be Buck - snatch the car keys just as Max was about to reach them to soon present with a choice of either escaping with Stacy and Rodriguez using a car or escaping through Buck. Each of the choices present their own way the Final Boss fight plays out, with Buck's choice involving a drug-induced hallucinatory encounter.
  • Two out of three Flows also have two endings related to each of the suffered lacerations, and it's possible to have both of the available lacerations in a run. In that case, an ending related to an Artificial Limb used to deliver a killing blow to The Lacerator is prioritized.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: Flow 1 happens to be the case of a Whose Life or Limb Decision, as by default the flow involves Rodriguez surviving and escaping alongside Max. There's an alternate version of Flow 1 that has Stacy survive instead of Rodriguez, for which Max would have to lose his limb trying to obtain the Revolver and immediately Shoot Out the Lock and beeline towards the elevator.
• Living a Double Life: As inferred by the sideburns he spots both in his model and his movie posters in his villa in Flow 1, The Lacerator is Mark, an accomplished movie star with a varied filmography who also has a wife (Crystal) and a son (Kevin). His way of keeping the secret involves sending his family to a vacation every time he gets a new "role", to the point Crystal suspects him of infidelity.
• Low Clearance: A variation: the Final Boss fight of Flow 3 has Max battle The Lacerator on top of a moving van, and Max has to periodically avoid billboards by jumping. And The Lacerator can do these sick flips as well whenever he's not in a middle of an attack or pain animation.
• Malevolent Masked Men: There's The Lacerator himself with his love for dismembering victims, and there are also the human (resources) traffickers clad in balaclavas.
• Mercy Invincibility: Max gains few seconds of invincibility each time he takes damage, complete with the blinking effect.
• Menu Time Lockout: Be grateful this trope is in effect, as the game doesn't have an in-game reload button, making inventory menu the sole means to reload the weapon.
• Multiple Endings: The game prides itself with 9 endings, with each of the 3 flows having an ending for surviving in one piece as well as surviving with each of the possible lacerations, with Flow 2 also having a secondary ending through the Last-Second Ending Choice.
• Notice This: Obtainable items are denoted with a glow of light. The same kind of glow can be also present in few areas that aren't items able to be picked up, catching Max off guard each time.
• Non-Standard Game Over: There are few ways to die that is accompained by its own special animation as well as an Achievement, like falling onto Spikes of Doom, getting killed by hot steam, dropping onto a deep pool of slimy water and Ludicrous Gibs after suffering an explosive damage.
• One Bullet Clips: Averted, using a spare clip completely replaces the weapon's magazine, with unused rounds being discarded. Max does not have an idea how to reload weapons any other way.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Downplayed. While the lacerations certainly affect Max in a variety of ways, Max himself doesn't need to worry about bleeding out.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": At one point in Flow 3 Max can encounter a lockbox locked with a 10-digit code. The code is all 1s.
• Permanently Missable Content: Few lacerations can lock Max out of some optional areas. Losing an arm would make him unable to use doors that require two hands to open, and losing a leg would make him lose access to areas he would've reached by jumping. In Flow 1, Max can make up for this with Breakable Walls with either the Obliterator or the Penetrator.
• Pivotal Boss: The Final Battle In The Center Of Mind in Flow 2's ending with escaping with Buck turns The Lacerator into this. Max would have to shoot out the cysts in the area in order to make The Lacerator vulnerable to gunfire.
• Porn Stache: It is The Eighties, a pornstar like Max would not be complete without it. Buck, a fellow pornstar used to have this too.
• Press X to Not Die: Applies mostly to the final fight with The Lacerator on top of a van in Flow 3. Whenever the van is about to pass by a billboard at the height of the two combatants, there would be a prompt to make Max jump over it.
• Psychological Horror: While most of the game plays out like a Slasher Movie, at one point in Flow 2 Max gets a hallucinogenic drug injected up his ass, putting him in a nightmare that has him visit locations based on his past memories that later get a rusty, Silent Hill-esque makeover. Said memories involve Buck, Max's once frequent co-star who - while he did introduce Max to the porn industry - he himself wanted out of the industry in favor of pursuing his bigger life ambitions.
  Max loves sex, not bad memories.
• Recurring Boss: The Lacterator is encountered few times during the playthrough, and damaging him enough before the designated Final Boss fight has him leave - with a static covering the screen to aid his escape - to come back later. The Lacerator also leaves the pre-final boss fight as soon as he scores a Laceration on Max, expecting the porn star to bleed out of his injury.
• Repeat Cut: Flow 1's default/lacerationless Coup de Grâce Cutscene has Max chop The Lacerator's head off with his own axe around eleven times.
• Rewarding Vandalism: Breakable crates and vases usually tend to contain some goodies in them.
• Sadistic Choice: The game begins right away with one, as Max finds a lockpick that lasts only for a single use, having to decide whose cell of his crew-mates he has to unlock to progress and who soon gets first abducted by The Lacerator. Curiously, while the route through Rodriguez's cell has The Lacerator abduct Stacy and butcher her unless Max gets rather fast about shooting out the padlock, Flow 2 - accessed through Stacy's cell - has the potential for both Stacy and Rodriguez surviving, even if both of them would go out with a missing arm themselves.
• Shmuck Bait: The first obtainable weapons - either a Knife or Revolver - are put in booby trapped places. There is a way to gather either of them without danger, with the knife is as simple as letting the saw-blades pass and then turning them off, while for the revolver Max would have to find a hatchet in order to cut down the wire operating the trap.
• Shout-Out: This game is quite a love letter for horror media of various mediums and beyond.
  • Should Max get his cock chopped off, he's able to replace it with a drill. He can also get to skullfuck The Lacerator with it as a Finishing Move.
  • Coupled with a bit of Take That!, in Flow 1 within Mark's house Max can interact with a potted plant - as in a Herb as depicted in early Resident Evil games - which makes him ask "why the f*ck would he pick up a plant".
  • One of the endings for Flow 1 where Max blows The Lacerator to smithereens with a grenade launcher, complete with a freeze frame of the latter's torso-less body is influenced by the similar ending of Blood Debts.
  • The achievement for getting the Sawkondo is called "Groovy".
  • In the middle of Flow 2 where Max gets drugged, the entire sequence takes a bit after Silent Hill, and there's even a Checkpoint that flashes a close-up of Max staring at a red-ish reflective surface, reminiscent of the save screen from Silent Hill 2.
  • The Coup de Grâce Cutscene for the imaginary fight with Giant Lacerator in one of ways Flow 2 can end has Max make a Blade Lock against a GIANT axe, turn himself into a purple devil form and summon Buck in a matter akin to a Wicked Weave attack.
• Show Within a Show: There are two clips viewable in-game, each providing a clue towards a code.
  • After getting onto The Lacerator's house in Flow 1, Max can get a film reel of Uncautious Whisper, an old-timey film featuring some intense smooching action as well as a number of slaps. A number of these slaps makes up the last digit of the mandatory code.
  • Much later in Flow 1, there is a VHS Tape containing a trailer for a canceled film Max To The Max, with Max on his quest to score with ten women in one continuous shot.^note Max reportedly ran out of energy after the seventh one. The projected release date provides the code for an optional lockbox nearby.
• Stock Slasher: The Lacerator fits this bill with that white mask, his impressive physique and a bladed weapon he loves to dismember victims with. He does twist a bit of formula by being more talkative - either through notes he leaves or during some of the final fights - as well as through the fact he's a fellow actor who happens to moonlight as a serial butcher.
• Sudden Downer Ending: Ending H, the default laceration-less ending for Flow 3 is a darkly humorous take on this, with Max foolishly jumping off the van to the side of the road only to die instantly hitting a pole.
• Take That!: The Yellow Paint trend gets mocked within Flow 3 with huge amount of yellow ink pointing to a key.... hanging around literally next to the door its used for.
• Take That, Audience!: In the room of The Lacerator's son in Flow 1 Max can find a console styled after the Atari 2600. Examining it, Max is quick to call its owner a loser.
• This Is a Drill: After suffering a Groin Laceration, for a high value food item Max is able to get a prosthetic drill, which replaces his default melee attack with aggressive multi-hit humping.
• Quick Melee: The shoot button also has Max do a punch, kick or use a melee Artificial Limb even if he's not currently equipped with a melee weapon provided he's not currently aiming his weapon.
• We Used to Be Friends: As the drug trip during Flow 2 is coming to an end, Max not only laments Buck going on a different life path from him, but also seemingly cutting contact for over 3 years now. Downplayed by the fact that Buck does support Max in his quest to escape, even if Buck became barely recognizable himself.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: Each of the endings provide with their own text describing what later happened to Max and whoever survived alongside him. Ending I straight up says that Everyone died, including Stacy, Rodriguez, Mark and Max.
• White Mask of Doom: Adding to his Stock Slasher nature, The Lacerator is never seen without one except for the posters of movies he starred in as Mark.
• The Unfought: In Flow 3, as Max explores the office of the leader of the human traffickers known only as The Tiger and is about to make some use out of the golden toilet, Max overhears footsteps and takes cover from the aforementioned gang leader showing up to avoid confrontation with him. Chances are The Tiger ends up getting butchered by The Lacerator anyway.
• Unique Enemy: The late part of Flow 3 has Max go against the gun-totting members of a body part harvesting cartel.
• Use Your Head: The armless ghouls encountered will still attack Max with their headbutts.