The game is set in the Cursed Apple, an alternate 1930s New York City where strange and supernatural phenomena have become commonplace. The players are fighting for one of two powerful entities known as Patrons, the Hidden King or the Archmother, who will grant their desires in exchange for destroying the other.

Gameplay combines traditional MOBA elements like abilities, lanes, and minions (known here as Troopers) with more fast-paced Third-Person Shooter elements and special movement techniques like Air-Dashing and sliding that are tied to a Stamina resource. The primary MOBA rewards of Experience Points and Gold are combined into a single resource, Souls, which grant extra stats and ability points when certain total amounts have been collected, but can also be spent on items.

The game is currently a friend-invitation-only open alpha which opened at some point over the summer of 2024 and hasn't yet been formally announced outside of its Steam store page that launched on August 23 of the same year, which only describes it as "a multiplayer game in early development".

Complete the ritual, and you shall find all the tropes you seek:

• Absurdly High Level Cap: The maximum level required to max out every ability and receive every stat boosts is 35, which requires nearly fifty thousand souls to reach. The vast majority of games will end before even a winning team's carry hero can reach this point; consequently, you'd need to decide which ability you want to max and which ability you're fine keeping at the second rank.
• Action Bomb: The Street Brawl-exclusive item Unstable Concoction allows the user to turn themselves into a timebomb. After its timer runs out, the user explodes like a balloon and deals massive damage to everything within its area of effect.
• Aggressive Play Incentive: Various mechanics exist to promote risktaking:
  • The Souls obtained from Troopers are split in two: half of it is dropped into an orb that will automatically be picked up by being near it, and the other half is in a floating bubble that can be melee attacked to secure it earlier than shooting. This prevents players from defeating troopers under the protection of their Guardian while keeping up with their opponents in souls: if you want to keep pace in item economy, you must venture towards your enemy.
  • All weapons face some degree of damage falloff that reduces most attacks to Scratch Damage at long ranges. Even the resident Long Range Fighters like Vindicta and Grey Talon will want to at least consider moving near their foes if they need to deal barely enough damage to close out a kill.
  • There are multiple points of interest at mid: two bridges featuring buffs, one soul jar that can be carried to a target location to get extra souls, and one midboss that can be slain for an extra-potent buff. Hunkering down in one's base and fortifying against enemy attacks will lose the potential advantage of having those buffs.
• All Myths Are True: Deadlock takes place in a setting where every classical fantasy and legend is true all at the same time. America has had multiple generations of vampires running a secret society, horned fire-controlling demons (known as Ixians) live on another realm separate from Earth, the djinn are a powerful political faction bartering for the territory of Wyoming, there really is a sea monster lurking at the bottom of The Bermuda Triangle, and the shopkeeper talks about The Krampus and jolly present-bearing home invaders like they're a genuine concern around the holidays.
• Alternate History: The point of divergence seems to be the Maelstrom, a magical event that brings the supernatural to the mortal world, which occurred at the end of 19th century and revealed supernatural to the world at large. Several decades forward and we have a mix of the occult elements, early-mid 20th century culture and various Magitek contraptions.
• Alternate Techline: The hideout features what is clearly supposed to be a magic 1930's version of a 2020's era gaming PC. It has a typewriter keyboard, ouija board as a mouse, a vintage television for a monitor, and a radio device for wireless connection. The PC tower (some kind of miniature stone masonry building) glows from the magic candles inside it rather than from RGB lighting, paper scrolls substitute for CPU chips, and at the very back is a spinning pentagram to represent a cooling fan.
• Animate Inanimate Object: The Soul Urn is actually a pretty chatty fellow and will drop a chatter or two as it's being carried from one end of the map to another. It also has little frog-like legs to propel itself to safety once it's dropped long enough.
• Anti-Air: Knockdown summons an anvil over a target victim that will stun them after a brief animation plays. It has a magnified effect if the target is airborne, which makes it very useful for bringing flying snipers like Vindicta or Grey Talon into reach for close-range attackers.
• Anti-Escape Mechanism:
  • Shooting an opponent who is taking a bounce pad or riding a zipline will deal significant damage and knock them to the ground, which makes these high-mobility map options a lot riskier to use in combat.
  • Majestic Leap has a built-in cooldown where getting damaged temporarily prevents you from leaping away from the encounter.
  • Various items such as Slowing Hex, Mystic Slow, Slowing Bullets, Lightning Scroll, and Crushing Fists inflict slows, stuns, or prevent usage of movement abilities.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Various to the shop mechanics:
    • The item shop is much more streamlined than in other MOBAs. All items are organized into three categories and four price tiers, making it easy to quickly understand what you can afford and which items you want to look at. Their names are also descriptive and straightforward so newer players have an easier time keeping track of what does what (rather than the "fantasy artifact" name-schemes that the original Defense of the Ancients grandfathered in).
    • Items that will have no effect at all will gray out and become unpurchaseable. So for example, Graves (who cannot headshot) cannot buy headshot-boosting items, Yamato (who does not have any multiple-charge abilities) cannot buy charge-boosting items, and Mirage (whose ultimate is a non-damaging teleport) cannot buy Lightning Scroll which only triggers if the user deals damage from their ultimate. This prevents accidental purchases of stuff that would be a waste of money.
    • When accessing the shop, there's a build browsing function that lets you download and use build maps right then and there instead of having to alt-tab from the game just to check your item guide. It also lets you make builds of your own to narrow selections and trim the fat for a given character, rather than browsing the full page every time. Finally, each character has a default recommended build that outlines obvious item synergies (like the Death from Above reliant Lash being recommended Majestic Leap). This makes planning and buying equipment a lot more manageable, in spite of the shop's massive selection.
    • You can directly buy items that need to be "crafted" from lower-tier items, and the game will immediately buy (when needed) and combine for you.
    • There's a Soul vent at the base, close to the shop, that will periodically spew 10 Souls into the air that you can pop and get. Just fifty souls away from an item you want to buy? Pop a few Soul bubbles and you're good to buy and go, instead of having to run out of your base and find some Souls.
  • Important information is more easily available: enemy heroes' current souls values and items is openly shown, the minimap shows the current status of neutral camps and powerups, you can see sources of damage you took recently (allowing you to buy defensive items accordingly).
  • The aesthetics for area-of-effect attacks like explosions and shockwaves have very clear borders so it's always obvious where is safe and where is dangerous.
  • Like with Dota 2, the game features a pause function for if someone needs a brief timeout.
  • Unlike many other MOBAs, the map is rotationally symmetric (short of the randomly-generated bridge buffs and very mild level geometry differences), and all players are assigned evenly across all lanes. This makes it so that the player experience doesn't vary wildly across different lanes, unlike Dota 2 or League of Legends where significant map asymmetry and uneven team distribution makes it so that skill at fighting in one lane won't always translate to fighting in a different one. Furthermore, in the uncommon case that a player would prefer to play in a different lane from the one they were assigned, they can request to swap lanes with a teammate and (if the request is approved) the game will treat it as if they were always in their current lanes.
  • While most of Yamato's voicelines are Japanese, her pings/callouts are in (stilted) English so teammates who don't speak Japanese can still understand what she's saying.
  • Objectives are invulnerable if no enemies are within its attack range and if they haven't been damaged by a trooper in a while; they gain backdoor protection in the form of heavy health regen, preventing enemies from easily backdooring your objectives. They are also immune to enemies that are too far away, preventing them from attacking at oppressive ranges and angles.
  • In Street Brawl sometimes one of the three items offered to you is an upgrade to one you already have — ie., the effect of the lower-tier item is already rolled into the higher-tier item. If this happens, picking the upgrade will give you an extra item with it to ensure you don't fall behind due to having too few items.
  • Also in Street Brawl, rerolling your selection will ensure that the new items selected for you will match the tiers and enhancement status of the old items. This makes it so that you're never given the Sadistic Choice of having to choose between an on-paper better item that synergizes worse with your character's build, vs. rerolling for the chance to get a synergistic item with worse stats.
• Anti-Regeneration: The Healbane item inflicts a regen-reducing status effect to its victims.
• Anti-Magic: Lots of items exist just to prevent magical effects:
  • Dispel Magic will purge any negative effects on the user.
  • Counterspell allows the user to block one spell using a parry.
  • Spellbreaker heavily reduces big hits of spirit damage.
  • Silencer, Silence Wave, Spirit Sap, and Cursed Relic reduce their victim's magic abilities or block them outright.
  • Nullification Burst will remove the enemy's self-buffs.
• Anvil on Head: The Knockdown item's active ability summons a comically oversized anvil to drop on the target enemy's head, stunning them for a couple seconds.
• April Fools: An update on April 1st, 2026 made it so that the Uniqueness Rule was lifted, enabling players to create full teams of nothing except one hero, like whole teams of McGinnises or six Sevens.
• The Artifact: A few character designs are holdovers from the game's origins as "Neon Prime," which had similar gameplay in a sci-fi setting. Bebop appears to be a robot made out of scrap metal, while in the lore he is intended to be a Golem made from trash. Similarly, Yamato's oddly elongated head and purple skin are a holdover from her Neon Prime backstory, in which she was an alien cosplaying a samurai, whereas in the current game, she is actually Japanese. As the game is currently in-development and models are subject to change, it's possible these outdated designs will eventually be redone to fit the Urban Fantasy setting.
• Artificial Stupidity: The player-controlled AI in bot matches is less than stellar. It doesn't bother with tactics like farming neutral enemies, attacking the midboss, or taking bridge buffs. It rarely, if ever, takes advantage of even basic movement techniques like dashing, sliding, jumping, or character-specific ones like Kelvin's ice path. It's also highly prone to charging in even when it's on low health. About the only thing it can do effectively compared to entry-level players is parry heavy melee attacks.
• Artistic License – Economics: In one conversation between Abrams and Krill, the latter asks for 50 bucks. Abrams is initially dumbfounded that Krill is concerned about a middling amount of money in the face of altering the world forever after the Patron is summoned, but comes around to understanding when Krill clarifies that it's because he's in debt to Wraith. The joke is supposed to be that Wraith is very strict about her debtors making payments on time even with mild sums of cash, but 50 US dollars in the 1930's would be equivalent to nearly $1,000 at the time of the game's open beta due to inflation; it's a lot more reasonable to get on Abrams' ass for not giving back that level of cash.
• Ascended Glitch: Heavy melee cancels. Players discovered that using an active item will cancel the heavy melee lunge animation, which could be used to retain its momentum. Rather than fix this bug, Valve opted to only remove the speed gain; heavy melee cancels are still good for faking out enemies into parrying when they think they are about to be hit.
• Auto-Revive: The buff granted from killing the midboss allows its users to respawn on the spot if they get killed.
• Back Stab: The self-explanatory Backstabber item will cause debuffs to victims if they're attacked from behind.
• Baleful Polymorph:
  • If the game's anti-cheat picks up a hit, it will offer the opposing team one of two options: banning the cheater immediately, or transforming them into a giant frog for the entire match. A polymorphed cheater cannot do anything except hop around uselessly and be cannon fodder for the opponents to mow down, and they will still be banned once the match ends.
  • The Magnificent Sinclair's third ability turns enemies into rabbits, making them helpless and take more damage for a few seconds.
• Big Applesauce: The world of Deadlock was changed forever during an event called The Maelstorm, where magic revealed itself to the world. During this, Astral Gates (extraplanar portals) appeared across the world, and at least one of them manifested right in New York City's Central Park, which transformed Dynamo. Fifty years later, two extraplanar deities known as the Patrons have decided to use New York as a battleground to wage war against each other, to ultimately culminate in being summoned to Earth.
• The Big Rotten Apple: NYC's underworld has a massive presence in the Ritual that forms the game's matches, and the character roster as a whole. Between local crimelords (like Wraith) and enforcers (like Mo & Krill), those fighting against local criminal gangs (like Ivy), and incoming Ruthless Foreign Gangsters (like Yamato), with an assortment of unaffiliated criminals sprinkled on top (like Seven and Paradox), all in one place vying for control, the Cursed Apple isn't having a good day. To make things worse, while the law's presence in the Ritual isn't especially corrupt, both official law enforcement (like Haze) and the local vigilantes (like Warden and Grey Talon) are pretty brutal themselves.
• Bland-Name Product: The Old Gods, New Blood update placed some "Crown Dansk" butter cookies on the voting table. The name and packaging of the cookie tin are a reference to the Royal Dansk brand of butter cookies. As is the inevitable fate of these cookie tins, it got turned into a sewing kit after character voting ended.
• Bottomless Magazines:
  • Sliding while shooting makes it so that the user's gun no longer consumes ammo.
  • The Legendary item Infinite Rounds, as the name implies, will grant the user infinite bullets for their gun, eliminating the need to reload.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Many of the lines pertaining to selecting or unselecting a character from the roster will have the characters seeming aware of the roster system and will comment on the player’s decision.
• Cast from Hit Points: Blood Tribute will slowly drain the user's health while active, in return granting various buffs.
• Casting Gag: One of the Drifter's pre-fight conversations with Lash sees the vampiric murderer called a "murder hobo", a common prejorative for tabletop RPG players who mindlessly kill others. The Drifter's VA, Matthew Mercer, is a Dungeons & Dragons veteran and a long-time dungeon master for Critical Role.
• Chain Lightning: The item Tesla Bullets (and its upgrade Capacitor) causes bullets to have a chance of releasing a bolt of lightning that jumps between multiple enemies. Seven's third ability also grants this effect to his own gun.
• Chess with Death: In older versions of the public beta, the Cheat Death item depicted a poker game with the Grim Reaper. As the item's name implies, the player's point of view is holding a poker hand with five aces. The current version simply depicts the illegal poker hand, so the trope is merely implied.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • The lanes have colors and alliterative names: York (Yellow), Greenwich (Green)^note  formerly Orchard (Orange), and Broadway (Blue).^note  Previous versions of the game featured four lanes, with fourth one being Park (Purple)
  • While playing, allied troopers are green-colored, while enemy ones are red. Soul orbs "belonging" to you/enemy are cyan/orange. In replays, teams are instead yellow/blue (for Hidden King and Archmother).
  • The three types of upgrades (bullet, vitality, and spirit) are color-coded with orange, green, and purple respectively. Also, the costlier upgrades in each category have darker background colors.
• Comeback Mechanic: 
  • The Soul Jar's delivery destination changes if one team is significantly behind on total souls, from the opposite side of the middle of the map, to the opposite side a short walk outside that team's base. Moving the goal point makes it easier for the lower net-worth team to secure the income for themselves, and harder for the higher soul total team to snowball their money advantage.
  • In Street Brawl, if one team is one round away from losing the entire match, their objective changes from defending their Guardian to defending their Walker. The Walker has more health than the Guardian and the winning team needs to run a longer distance before they can start attacking the Walker, so it'd take a serious difference in skill for the losing team to not turn it around there.
• Conveniently Empty Building: Even though the game takes place inside of and around the densely-packed downtown district within the most populous city in all of the United States, there aren't any civilian non-combat participants to be caught in the crossfire of the frantic firefight gameplay. It's implied by some New York Oracle headlines that the locals are all hiding indoors at the moment and waiting for the events surrounding the ritual to pass.
• Cooldown Manipulation:
  • Compress Cooldown, Superior Cooldown, and Transcendent Cooldown can be purchased from the shop to reduce the cooldowns of the user; respectively doing so to a selected ability, all abilities, and all abilities as well as all items.
  • Certain abilities in the game are "chargable", indicated by a horizontal white charge meter over the ability in question — this means that they can be used multiple times in quick succession if enough charge is built. Extra Charge and Rapid Recharge will let those abilities store more of those charge and allows users to use those ability charges even more frequently, and the Omnicharge Signet from Street Brawl allows players to alter any of their abilities into a chargable one.
  • Echo Shard allows the user to instantly cooldown one non-ultimate ability on the spot. Refresher does the same, but for all of the user's abilities and their ultimate at the same time, with a longer cooldown.
• Counter-Attack: One of the universal mechanics of the game is the parry button. It only triggers if you get hit by a melee attack while its animation plays, but if this happens the attacker gets stunned and is ripe to be obliterated for it.
• Critical Hit: The item Lucky Shot grants each bullet a chance to deal massively increased damage.
  The Shopkeeper: They say a little luck never hurts anyone, but in this case it's gonna do some serious damage amirite?
• Damage Typing: Damage falls into two categories: weapon damage (and its subtypes bullet and melee damage) and spirit damage. Enemies that have specialized heavily into one can be countered by picking the appropriate items that protect against it.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Earlier versions of the public beta made the Troopers color-coded during normal gameplay: allies have green candle heads while enemies have red ones. The Old Gods, New Blood update changed it so that the color is dependant on which side you're on; the Hidden King always has orange Troopers while the Archmother always has turquoise-blue ones. Playing on the Archmother's side has little issue, but long-time Deadlock fans on the Hidden King's side might get confused in the heat of battle, equating "warm colors = enemy" and shooting their own side's minions.
• Death Cry Echo: When a hero is killed, they let out an echoing death cry heard by all players in the match.
• Death or Glory Attack: Melee attacks are high risk, high reward, especially if the player builds around them in the late game. Meleeing someone can carve massive chunks out of their health bar and trigger some nasty item effects, like a heal-on-hit or building up a stun effect. But if that melee is parried, the attacker is given a lengthy stun, which is a death sentence for anyone close enough to actually hit a melee attack. All of this applies even moreso so for heavy melee attacks: they deal about double damage compared to a light melee and will often have double the effect with items, but there's a notable sound cue that makes it very easy to react and parry if a would-be victim is paying attention.
• Deckbuilding Game: Street Brawl has shades of this; it's a best-of-five-rounds gamemode where between rounds, all players are given a random selection from the ingame shop. As the game goes on, each player's "decks" (inventories) is stacked with more "cards" (item upgrades) and the occasional exotic Purposely Overpowered one, the challenge being to contend with RNG in order to get the items that synergize with each other and the player's chosen character. About the only thing missing is that the items aren't explicitly said to be cards, and even then, their UI appearance of pictograms over descriptive text strongly resembles collectible trading cards.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Each round of Deadlock is oriented around the Ritual, a war between two extraplanar deities in which they send six mortals each to duke it out. The game only ends when the mortals destroy one of those deities' avatars.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Some items and techniques have a high skill floor, but pay out handsomely when used appropriately.
  • Counterspell makes your next parry attempt fully block any and all enemy abilities if you time it properly. You can dodge nasty AOE hits like Rem's ultimate or Apollo's ultimate, but you can also time it perfectly to block things like Vindicta's sniper shots if you time it properly.
  • Cursed Relic quite literally turns off one enemy, interrupting their channeled abilities, silencing them, disarming them, and preventing item usage for good measure. This is probably the single worst debuff in the entire game, but the item has a short casting range that makes it very tricky to use in the heat of battle, and just carrying it debuffs your damage slightly, so you have to make the sacrifice count.
  • Crippling Headshot applies healing reduction and shreds their bullet and spirit resist by 16% for 12 seconds. Slap this on any gun carry and they can positively cripple any opponent, opening them up for further pain... but you still have to land a headshot, which is very tricky unless you're going after someone solo.
• Different States of America: In this universe, the United States had their 50th state earlier than ours, with Puerto Rico and South Ixia being the 51st and 52nd states respectively. Meanwhile, there are talks about selling a part of Wyoming to the Djinn so they can form their own nation.
• Diminishing Returns for Balance: Purchasing items will also give bonuses to the user's weapon damage, maximum HP, or spirit power, depending on if the item is a weapon, vitality, or spirit item, and on how much the item costs. Getting the higher-tier bonuses will get more and more expensive and there's a big jump in effectiveness at investing 4800 souls in a category, so it's most cost-effective to invest at least 4800 souls in all three item types instead of relying entirely one one of them.
• Do Not Run with a Gun: Played With; shooting will make your character run slower, and dashing temporarily prevents shooting. However, those are the only times shooting hampers movement or vice versa; jumping, dash-jumping, being airborne, and sliding are unaffected by shooting (sliding actually enhances shooting via an unlimited magazine while doing so). A number of items are also intended to encourage moving while shooting, like Kinetic Dash empowering the user's gun after dash-jumping, Burst Fire granting movement speed upon shooting someone, and Fleetfoot temporarily removing the movement penalty while shooting.
• Double Jump: Players can jump a second time in the air at the cost of a bar of Stamina.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: In the earliest versions, characters had a short sentence describing their abilities (for example, "Charges into close combat" for Abrams), which has since been replaced with three "tags" consisting of one or two (or, rarely, three) words each ("Tank, Brawler, Bull-Headed"), which accomplishes a similar goal in a more memorable format.
• Escort Mission: The Soul Urn can be carried from one side of the map to the other for a large amount of Souls. Whoever carries the Urn cannot use any abilities or attack, so they'll have to rely on protection from teammates and their own mobility to avoid being gunned down immediately. (They can put the urn down to fight back, but that still lets the opponent to shoot first and will result in having to pick up the urn again later.)
• Exponential Potential: The items in this game go significantly deeper than the average MOBA, in both depths of their effects and in that some actively grant new abilities, from stuns and emergency defensive buffs to entirely new movement options. This makes build variety vastly greater than most would expect, giving options for each character to cover up their expected weaknesses, specialize in their strengths to overbearing extents and pull completely unexpected tricks on the other team. On one hand, it can be very difficult for a player to figure out what to do with this. On the other, this goes for the enemy too.
• Expressive Health Bar: The Character Portraits at the top of the screen on the HUD will look bruised and beaten if the character is on critical health. Inversely, if the character is on a big kill streak, their portrait gains a glowing aura and their expression shifts to a happier or more confident one.
• Expy: Pocket is clearly based on Puck from Dota 2, another Valve MOBA. Both have similar names, a non-binary gender identity, and a pair of abilities which consist of Travel to Projectile and briefly hiding in another world to exploit being Locked Out of the Fight.
• Eye Motifs: Eyes are everywhere in the game, especially in places that pertain to the supernatural. The game's icon is an eye, there are eye shapes in the window frames of the Playable Menu, the green ball in the training area has a fracture in the shape of an eye, and most of the spirit item icons have an eye symbol on them.
• Fantastic Comedy: Headlines from the New York Oracle tend to fall into this. They have a similar vibe to stories of the Florida Man or tabloid headlines with a supernatural twist, such as a interview with a relationship expert on whether love potions have ruined dating, or a news story about a sewer spirit leaving the subway out of order.
  Newscaster: The New Jersey Devil continues his reign of mediocre stand-up performances, as the cryptid's latest set receives more jeers than cheers!
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: We have a living gargoyle vigilante running alongside a duo of Molemen and monkey underworld (both literally and figuratively) enforcers, a Magitek genius engineer alongside a ghost sniper as well as a bodyguard blessed by the Djinn and a secret agent working for the Soviet Empire ruled by the ghost of Catherine the Great.
• Fantastic Noir: It is set in alternate, more mystic version of New York in the middle of the 20th century, with all the characters that fit in that type of story, from law enforcers of varying degrees of legality to criminals of different scales of notoriety.
• Fantastic Racism: Part of the lore of the Deadlock universe is that there was a Great Offscreen War between Earth and another plane, Ixia. While explicit racism isn't a big staple of anything, short of the apparent war crimes that happened in the Ixian war, some level of casual speciesism does appear now and then, like Kelvin asking Infernus about his home plane even though the man spent his whole life on Earth, in a way that's really coded to sound like assuming every black person has been to Africa.
  Grey Talon: I've... never worked with a golem before.
  Bebop: I'm not sure why you'd think it'd be any different from working with a person.
  Grey Talon: Now I feel like an asshole.
• Full Health Bonus: Certain items such as Hollow Point grant their effects only if the user is above a certain level of health.
• Ghostly Animals: Scattered around New York, you'll see some ghostly pigeons with an ectoplasmic green translucency to them.
• Glass Cannon: The self-explanatory Glass Cannon upgrade massively boosts damage, but also reduces the user's maximum HP.
• Gratuitous Japanese: Yamato rarely bothers to speak English, so her backstory, while complete, is written exclusively in her native tongue.
• Holiday Mode:
  • During Halloween, jack-o'-lanterns replace some of the randomly-occuring props scattered around the map.
  • During Christmas, the game gets a snowy makeover. The hideout is redecorated to look like it's winter outside, and a snowball fight sidequest unlocks within the matches.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: The Ricochet item upgrades the user's bullets so that each shot bounces off of opponents to also hit another target in the vicinity. Any target, including those the user couldn't even see from where they stood, let alone target.
  Shopkeeper: You are gonna be shootin' things that you never even knew existed!
• Jerkass: The full character description for Lash: "Jacob Lash is an asshole."
• Kung-Fu Wizard:
  • Melee attacks and parrying are universal mechanics across Deadlock's magically-infused character roster. Any character could be turned into a spell-slinging brawler with the right build, but special note goes to Abrams, a demon with a life-leeching magic tome and a massive physical stature that makes his melee strikes among the hardest in the game, and Drifter, a Blood Magic-using vampire whose power is in his deformed claw-hands.
  • Various magic items from the shop enhance the user's melee attacks, but special note goes to Spirit Strike, Spirit Snatch, and Runed Gauntlets, which encourage the interplay of magic use and punching by making melee victims more vulnerable to magic or enhancing the user's magic following successful melee strikes.
• Leaked Experience: During the first 10 minutes, if more than one hero per team stands on the lane, any souls earned from creeps by one are duplicated for the rest. This allows everyone to get full rewards without worrying about "stealing from carry".
• Le Parkour: Crouch sliding, wall jumping, and ledge grabbing are all universal movement tools that players can use to navigate the complicated streets and skyline in New York.
• Line-of-Sight Name: Ivy was named after the plant covering her.
• Luck-Based Mission: Street Brawl's items are randomly selected and have a chance to appear as upgraded versions at random. Your ability to build a good character in this gamemode is confined to whatever the game allows you to choose, and some options you'll be offered obviously have little synergy with certain characters — a close-range melee brawler like Abrams is unlikely to get as much value from the floaty Seraphim Wings than a Death from Above flier like Lash would.
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic: Each buy phase in Street Brawl will let you reroll three of your randomly-presented items before you pick them, in case the choices presented aren't what your character needs. Joining the game from the random character option will grant extra rerolls.
• Mage Marksman: Nearly everyone in the playable cast wields powerful magic and a firearm.
• Magic Carpet: A Tier 4 Spirit item lets you summon a magic carpet to fly around, allowing to get away from danger or reach the enemy quickly.
• Magitek: The supernatural has become so commonplace in the world of the game that it has completely seeped into the technological development of the world. This is best shown in the hub where, despite the setting being obstensibly based on the early 20th century, there is a fully functional computer made from an old-fasioned television set, a typewriter, a mouse operated by a Ouija board, and a tower that seems to be powered by souls (complete with spinning pentagram where a fan would be).
• Money Is Experience Points: Nearly all forms of character upgrades stem from the game's currency, Souls. Boons and Ability Points are gained mostly from level-ups, which are gained when reaching certain Soul totals — once you have Souls, investing them in items at the shop will directly give you more weapon damage, max health, or spirit power depending on what category of item you buy (in addition to the unique effects of the purchased item itself).
• Money Multiplier: Several items allow you to directly increase your soul income: Cultist Sacrifice lets you instantly kill a creep for more souls than usual, Trophy Collector grants a permanent soul trickle every time you get a kill or assist, and Golden Goose Egg can be hatched to grant a burst of soul that increases the longer you hold on to it. They are ideally bought as soon as possible so as to maximize the amount of souls earned.
• Multiple Life Bars: In addition to normal health, some items grant barriers.^note  Those barriers used to be specific to a type of damage, but such a split was removed during testing. These absorb damage before health, but always expire after a certain period of time, and are always applied conditionally: either from an active item/ability or in reaction to a trigger (like taking a big chunk of damage of a certain type). Big barriers can be more effective in the early game, when resistances are not as effective on lower healthbars, or for squishier characters that cannot compete health-wise, or are lacking healing options.
• Mundane Fantastic: The world of Deadlock is a world where the magical and fantastic is just a normal fact of life. By the various billboards and buildings around the map, it's the kind of world where someone could put on winged shoes and ride an ethereal zipline as public transportation to book an extra-planar vacation, do groceries, and sort their resurrection affairs as a basic day's worth of errands.
• The Necrocracy: The Soviet Empire is ruled by the ghost of Catherine The Great who very much wants to stop being a ghost, which is unreleased hero Raven's goal.
• Newspaper Backstory: The New York Oracle newsstands will constantly deliver headlines that may or may not be relevant to the plot (whether individual characters or the Ritual as a whole), and generally flesh out the setting and give life to this magically-affected version of the world.
• Ninja Looting:
  • Souls float away in the form of a Soul Orbs, and they must be shot to collect the Weird Currency. Enemies can shoot the orbs from their own team's dead Troopers to prevent the other team from gaining Souls, while getting some more for themselves.
  • The Mid-Boss drops a crystal that must be broken with melee attacks to collect its buffs. Wielding one of those buffs augments various stats of the team, and each one collected provides a near-instant revive for any character on the team (this consumes the buff, and the respawned character loses both the bonuses and the ability to quickly respawn). Said attack does not have to come from the team who actually killed the boss.
• Non-Indicative Name: Infernus runs a bar called Jezebel's. Jezebel's is owned by someone named Hank, not Jezebel. Viscous questions this, to which Infernus replies that It's a Long Story.
• Not So Similar: Discussed in an interaction between Vyper and Calico. When Vyper tells Calico that they are birds of a feather since they are hardened criminals who kill people for money, Calico coolly rebuffs her, pointing out that she kills people for money, while Vyper kills people for gains as small and simple as "a pack of cigarettes and a hot meal".
• Not the Intended Use:
  • The Counterspell item allows you to block the next "spell effect" by activating your parry just before it hits. On paper, this lets you tank things like Seven's stun or Bebop's hook with good timing, but you can also use it to duck through certain unique spells.
  • In general, the itemization mechanics allow you to push certain character abilities way beyond what they should normally allow. This can result in some very funky but functional builds that completely go against a character's supposed playstyle. Some notable examples include...
    • Building Paige to focus on gun damage, taking advantage of the fact that her weapon fires giant projectiles that can pierce opponents. Stack High Velocity Rounds, Split Shot, Burst Fire and Glass Cannon, and suddenly Paige is throwing out damage with the best of them.
    • Throwing on numerous gun, movespeed and tank items on Bebop turns him into a highly mobile initiator, as opposed to the combo focused mage he usually plays as. While this neuters his ult, it makes his basic laser attack incredibly threatening and causes him to shred opponents, due to it having a very high rate-of-fire.
    • Current latest upgrade of Bebop's sticky bombs, which applies bonus movement speed when used, assists an alternate initiation: instead of sticking the enemy with the bomb(s), a Bebop with movement items can stick the bombs to himself and then rapidly engage the enemy who has no way to remove the explosives.
    • You could build Viscous as a tanky, healing support character with some emphasis on cooldown reduction for his useful knockup punch... or you could build nothing but spirit damage and take advantage of the incredible spirit scaling on Splatter. Suddenly, Viscous is no longer a support, but a burst-damage mage capable of deleting squishy targets from the game.
    • Warden usually builds all three types of items equally, with some emphasis put on spirit or health items to help his survivability. You can also build nothing but spirit, allowing his ultimate Last Stand to go from "useful teamfight tool" to "make Warden invincible button" as it heals based off of the damage done to enemies. At x1.3 spirit scaling, it has a really great investment ratio, allowing for Warden to heal back his HP incredibly quickly while ripping into his opponents. This also has the side effect of making his Alchemical Flask (already a good ability with decent scaling) hurt even more.
    • Haze is meant to be a gun-focused ambush Hero, but her Sleep Dagger is a strong single-target disable with absurdly high Spirit scaling on its damage. Stacking Tankbuster, Echo Shard, Mystic Reverb, and a ton of Spirit Power lets her be an invisible nuisance who runs around knocking giant chunks of health off of isolated foes with no way for them to retaliate.
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • Kelvin's ultimate forms an invincible dome around him, preventing anyone in its radius from shooting out, and stopping everyone outside from shooting in. In the 09-12-2024 alpha update, the ability was changed to freeze objectives like towers and the Mid-Boss solid, keeping them from attacking or being attacked. While this mechanic brings in some unique tactical applications, it also prevents Kelvin from securing objectives completely risk-free.
  • The Soul sharing mechanic that works in the first 10 minutes could once be abused by a fast enough hero to get a share from creeps at two lanes at once, by being present on the lane when the creep wave there was killed. 09-17 patch put an end to it by restricting the number of creeps (per each wave) that each hero can earn souls from to 4.
  • After a patch, anyone carrying the urn has a fixed movement speed that can't be changed to prevent speed buffs and debuffs factoring into the difficulty of delivering the urn and especially Ivy using her ultimate to carry the urn holder. They can still be stopped by other debuffs like stun and hex though.
  • Rem's inclusion also came with a slight map overhaul, adding small tunnels that only he can currently crawl into consistently.^note  Calico can also use them, but only in her Ava form To curb on hit-and-run tactics, tunnels are blocked if you've taken damage for 3 seconds, like with ziplines, so that Rem players can't escape scot-free.
• One Degree of Separation: Downplayed, but still present; everyone is at least a little familiar with everyone, even if it's often only in a "knows a guy who knows them" way. Drifter references some incident in Oklahoma when talking to Grey Talon, which Vyper knows about because she was jailed once in OKC, Infernus recognizes Vyper as the person who replaced him in the Mendoza syndicate after he left it, Lady Geist visits the bar Infernus handles, Geist's son Johann is the doctor working on Bebop's creator Miss Shelly, and so on.
• One-Hit Polykill: The Haunting Shot legendary item causes the user's bullets to be able to penetrate through multiple targets at once.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. Johann is the name of Lady Geist's late husband, as well as her grandson named in his honor.
• Our Demons Are Different: Ixians are a feature of the setting and are demons in all but name. They originate from another realm called Ixia, have fire powers, and are humanoid with alternate skin colors like faded blue or ebony black. Abrams and Infernus are two examples of such, with the former having a fairly typical demonic appearance (horned, muscled, red-eyed with black sclerae, tail) and the latter departing from that look quite a bit. Short of these visual similarities however, they're just another type of person, rather than the antagonistic tempters and corrupters usually associated with demons.
• Our Genies Are Different: The Djinn are a political faction that are trying to build a new independant nation out of the American state of Wyoming. They rest in containers when inactive because they're incapable of holding their corporeal form for more than 48 minutes at a time (rather than being trapped inside).
• Piano Drop: Exclusive to Street Brawl is the Mystical Piano item. Similar to Knockdown, what it does is summon a magic piano over a targeted area, then drop it down onto the heads of anyone in the area.
• Player Nudge: Your character will occasionally remark on certain contextual situations to remind the player about good habits. If you're isolated by yourself, have unspent ability points, carrying souls that could be invested into an item, or see unsecured souls, your character will talk about it so that you're aware and can fix the issue.
• Perfect Reload Command: The Active Reload item adds in a colored region of the reload progress meter. Pressing the reload button while the meter is in that region will instantly reload, but pressing it any other time will fail to do so. You know you've done it correctly if you hear an M1 Garand clip ejection ping.
• Playable Menu: A large update on August 18, 2025 changed the top menu to a Hub Level called the Hideout where most of the game's options can be accessed, friends can be invited to chat and play around, training dummies can be practiced on, a spectral cat similar to the one Calico transforms into can be played with, and more.
• Playing with Fire: Residents of the supernatural plane of Ixia, such as Infernus and Grey Talon's step-daughter, are said to have fire-manipulating abilities.
• Pre-Battle Banter: In lieu of your patron whispering something to you as you zip into battle on the first few seconds, if there is someone on the line with you, there's a chance you'll have a brief chat with them.
• Purposely Overpowered: Street Brawl features various legendary-tier items exclusive to the mode that aren't available anywhere else. And perhaps for good reason, because those item's effects — stuff like becoming gnat-sized or gathering a steady income of permanent upgrades — are fun overpowered tools that would be nigh impossible to balance in the main gamemode's economy without making them either Awesome, yet Impractical or removing the fun of using them.
• Quick Melee: Heroes can perform melee attacks, which can be charged up. Killing Troopers with a melee attack instantly collects their Soul Orb, preventing the enemies from denying it. Melee damage is substantial when used on other heroes, but enemy heroes can punish it by parrying.
• Rewarding Vandalism: Breaking crates and golden statues (that spawn a few minutes into the game and respawn some time after bring broken) may give you extra Souls or minor permanent upgrades that stack up.
• Short-Range Shotgun:
  • The various shotguns fire multiple pellets in a spread, and as such are most effective at close range where they are all likely to land on the enemy. Appropriately, characters whose primary weapons are shotguns (e.g. Abrams, Shiv, Pocket) are all various flavors of close range brawlers who usually want to get right next to an enemy.
  • Inverted with the Split Shot item, which turns all gunshots into a five-way Spread Shot. Connecting more than one bullet onto an enemy won't increase damage against them — but it will deal extra damage if the bullets hit multiple enemies with one volley, encouraging players to stay away so they can catch as many opponents in that spread of bullets.
• Shrink Ray: The self-explanatory Shrink Ray item; choose an ally or yourself, whoever is targeted becomes tiny, agile, but no less powerful.
• Spread Shot: The Split Shot item duplicates the user's bullets to split into five evenly spaced trajectories.
• Sizeshifter: The Colossus item allows its user to suddenly grow in size. This grants additional resistance to damage.
• Stealth Pun: Ivy's Tether ability lets her link to a chosen hero, making her reminiscent of an IV bag.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Heavy punches can be trivially parried if there's little else going on, because they have a noticeable sound cue and a reactable delay. A player who is punching and expecting to be parried can counter this by redirecting their punch away before it connects, wasting their opponent's parry. But if the opponent is expecting that the player is going to expect their parry, they can simply continuously shoot them instead of wasting time on a parry that isn't going to protect from anything, which is of course countered by not redirecting the punch...
• Theremin: To underscore the haunted 1930's New York setting, the theremin is prominent in the title theme, owing to its associations with supernatural film of the 20th century.
• Total Eclipse of the Plot: The Ritual that forms the game's match takes place during a solar eclipse, with background material establishing one such celestial event brought magic to the world in the first place.
  New York Oracle Newscaster: Once, an eclipse changed the world. Who knows what today's celestial event will bring?
• Unnecessary Combat Roll: The Dash movement technique gives a quick burst of speed to avoid attacks, and can be chained into a jump or a slide for extra momentum. The character's Stamina puts a limit on how many times this can be used.
• Unstable Equilibrium: There are two items in the game that cause this: Trophy Collector and Glass Cannon. The former gives permanent passive soul income whenever the user gets a kill or assist, while the latter gives the user more fire rate if they score a kill. Players that can repeatedly activate either item can rapidly snowball out of control and win the entire game with that unstoppable momentum. On the other hand, players who can't will have burned a ton of souls on these extremely expensive upgrades that could have went to something with better value.
• Video Game Sliding: Characters can slide down slopes (even ones like stairs where it wouldn't make sense) or on flat ground if they have enough momentum. A character's primary weapon does not use ammo while sliding. Vyper specializes in sliding as long as possible to get the most out of her high rate of fire but low ammo SMG.
• Wall Jump: Done by attempting a Double Jump while right next to a wall and inputting a direction away from the wall. It lets you get extra height and quickly change direction in the air without consuming any Stamina.
• Worldbuilding: Many bits and pieces of in-universe information are given through news headlines on radios scattered across the map.