Riddle School is a Newgrounds flash game series created by JonBro following a boy named Phil Eggtree trying to escape numerous grades of school, and later on, a number of environments.
Tropes featured include:[]
- Air Vent Passageway: Very early on in RS5, Phil sips through an air vent to escape his cell.
- Aliens Speaking English: Viz and Diz.
- All Just a Dream: RS5 reveals RS2 through RS4 to have been this.
- Artifact Title: Past RS4, the series has very little to do with school.
- Blind Without'Em: Mr. Soggy in RS3. You have to knock his glasses off with the rubber band hidden in the vent.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Diz in Riddle School 4.
- Enter Solution Here: In Riddle Transfer, you have to enter the codes on Phil and his friends' keypads to set them free. The codes are:
- Phil: 78255. You can see it by clicking on your TV screen.
- Phred: 51702. Phred's clue is a piece of paper with the word "Snoz". The letters are actually numbers, bunched up together.
- Zack: 12345. The clue he gives you sounds complicated, but it's actually a set of consecutive numbers. It was written on the side of his door.
- Smiley: 51333. The agent who locked her up was mumbling it to himself out loud.
- Final Exam Boss: The dream chair in RS5 is this in a sense, revisiting the beginnings of the previous three games with different goals: namely, instead of escaping each room you have to kill your friends.
- Four-Temperament Ensemble: Phil is choleric, Smiley is sanguine, Zack is melancholic, and Phred is phlegmatic.
- Freeze Ray: This is Viz's ultimate plan: to freeze the planets by harnessing Zack's coldness. Fortunately, it backfires on him thanks to Phil's intervention.
- The Guards Must Be Crazy: Apparently par for the course where Zone 5.1 (Transfer) is concerned. Not only do they make very little effort to conceal the codes to open the prison cells from the prisoners (see Enter Solution Here above), but every guard in the facility apparently gets the day off at the same time.
- To be fair, having the prisoner know the code to his or her cell door is slightly less of an issue when they can't see or reach the dialpad.
- The staff in the schools Phil has gone to aren't much different. In RS2, Phil enters the principal's office, takes the key to the front door, and bolts... all directly in front of the principal, who just stands there the whole time. In RS3, the principal is too busy playing video games to notice as Phil swipes the key.
- High School: The setting of RS3.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Viz's defeat in a nutshell.
- Junior High: The setting of RS2.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In RS5, shortly before the final series of puzzles in the game (and by extension the entire series), Viz says "Prepare yourself... for the Grand Finale."
- Similarly, during the introductory cutscene to Riddle Transfer, Phil makes a comment about a "new beginning".
- Mythology Gag: The combination to Richy's locker in RS3 is "BLOBBLES". It's actually 53788078. Read it upside-down. Blobbles is the name of the protagonist of some early Flash animations JonBro made.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: If Phil hadn't escaped school early on the day he had way back in RS1, the entire series's overarching plot would've been nullified.
- Painting the Fourth Wall: The aliens have colored speech bubbles that match their skin color.
- The Pollyanna: Smiley to a T.
- Shout-Out: Too many to list, to other popular users, games, and animations on Newgrounds.
- Space Whale Aesop: Stay in school.
- Stock Ness Monster: One of the five animal residents of Zone 5.1 (Transfer) is Messie, the Mock Mess Monster.
- Stuffed Into a Locker: Richy in RS3. It's not at all clear how he actually got in there in the first place; maybe he did it to himself by accident.
- Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: Smiley has a mouth as her characteristic. As a style choice, JonBro made all the children bald and gave all the adults hair. Since Smiley didn't have the usual TSC of hair, he tried giving her a mouth instead. It didn't work: The special features section in Riddle School 5 lists "Smiley is a guy" as the biggest misconception about the series.
- Come Riddle Transfer, Smiley did indeed get hair.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Viz. Technically, he was trying to eradicate evil. He was just a little misguided about where he could find it.
- Wham Game: Riddle School 4, when Phil Eggtree 'died'. Made originally as an April Fool's joke to convince others there will be no more Riddle School games, but years later made a few more, with RS5 tying in the significance of the other four games, including #4