The list of Survivors expanded to the point they were split off into separate pages.
Tropes related to the survivors in general
- Action Survivor: They have no chance against any of the killers in a straight fight, but they can hinder, harass, distract, or delay them in a number of ways. Their goal is not to kill the killer but to keep out of his/her reach long enough to escape.
- Adaptational Wimp: No matter how physically strong a survivor was before being taken, they will never be able to physically take down a killer and go down in two hits. And no, it's not that their attempts at fighting back are ineffective, it's that they're all but completely incapable of physically raising a hand against the Killers, with only a tiny handful of perk-related moves (e.g. Decisive Strike) that even come close to inconveniencing their pursuers in any way. Even survivors who have canonically beaten people to a pulp like David and Yui, or established pop-culture action heroes like Ash, Bill, Ripley, Alan, Jill, Ada, Leon, Carlos, and Chris can easily get taken down by the likes of someone like Trickster or Legion. Justified because The Entity making it impossible for anyone to fight back is a quick way to drain hope from the survivors.
- And I Must Scream: Their current fate is to go through a "Groundhog Day" Loop of being chased by the killers and either escape or to be slaughtered or have part of their soul eaten, for as long as the Entity pleases.
- Badass Boast: Some of the survivor's teachable perks include quotes along these lines.That's not enough to beat me. Not even close. - Lucky Break
I'm gonna hit you with everything I've got. Then I'll do it again. - Any Means Necessary
I've dealt with psychopaths in suits. You're just uglier and worse dressed. - Smash Hit - Blood Knight: Bill, Feng Min, and David King aren't scared of the realm and are ready for a challenge. Bill is adjusted to violence due to his time in Vietnam, and David King is combative and lives for it.
- Controllable Helplessness: A carried survivor can struggle; a hooked survivor has a slight chance to jump off the hook; a downed survivor can crawl. Any of those things might be enough to escape otherwise certain death, but the odds are... unfavorable.
- Conservation of Ninjutsu: Brutally enforced despite the illogical nature of the trials, where the Survivors are utterly helpless to fight back and escape their pursuers despite massively outnumbering them and potentially having highly experienced fighters among their ranks.
- Cosmic Plaything: In the lore from the official website, the survivors are brought back to life if they are killed and are forced to try to escape again over and over.
Even if the survivors manage to leave, they end up back at the beginning at the campfire, forced to escape again. There's no escaping the Entity and its killers, not even through death. - Dead to Begin With:
- The inclusion of Bill might be hinting that all the survivors died on their own before the Entity somehow ensnared them and forced them to spend their afterlives playing its sadistic game. The further addition of David Tapp and Amanda Young, both dead in their home franchise, seems to confirm it outright. However, many of the original survivors are stated to have simply "Gone Missing," and several killers (such as The Cannibal and The Clown) are taken while they're alive, suggesting that death is not a prerequisite to being pulled into the Entity's realm and both survivors and killers are selected at random.
- More recent characters, such as Adam, Élodie, and Yun-Jin are taken right when they’re about to die, with the implication that they would have died for real if The Entity didn’t intervene. Whether they actually died and are stuck in purgatory (in the case for Adam and Élodie, since Yun-Jin probably would’ve survived if only Ji-Woon was taken) or The Entity’s intervention guaranteed their survival is left ambiguous. Even more confusing is that it also includes Leon, Jill, Ada, Chris, Sheva, Claire and Rebecca into the fray despite none of them having canonically died in their home series making it a Zig-Zagged trope.
- Determinator: None of the survivors are willing to surrender to their situation and will do what it takes to survive and escape.
- Don't Go in the Woods: Dwight, Meg, Claudette, Jake, and Kate were abducted while they were in a forest. If Kate Denson's backstory is believed, these survivors may have stumbled into a sigil or a site where the Entity promptly abducted them and tortured them with its games after they accidentally caught its attention.
- Dragged Off to Hell: Kate Denson's backstory suggests that this is how the survivors were taken by the Entity to its realm, while Haddie was dragged into the Realm by tendrils.
- Final Girl:
- With her unique perks unlocked, Meg will have an edge becoming the Final Girl — being a faster and more stealthy runner means that all things being equal, Meg will give players who favor avoidance a slight edge over the other characters.
- Laurie's Sole Survivor perk decreases the ranges of the killer's aura reading ability for every survivor that has died, making it harder to find her the more people die.
- Bill's Left Behind perk allows him to aura-read the hatch once it spawns, enabling potential tense escapes if the other Survivors end up dead too soon.
- Heroic Willpower: Their determination to survive in spite of the situation is what keeps them safe and alive.
- Know When to Fold 'Em:
- David King, Bill, Ash, Alan, Detective Tapp, Jonah, Steve, Ripley, and the Resident Evil survivors all have experience in combat and are known to hold their own in a fight, but even they have to run and hide because the Killer is just that much stronger and better armed.
- While Laurie, Jane, Ripley, and Elodie (and by extension, any survivor who has the appropriate perks from them) have ways to directly hurt the killer, they are still useless in a one-on-one fight because the Entity refuses to let them directly kill the killer.
- Even guest characters who have fought off creatures with god-like power singlehandedly like Ash, Alan and Cheryl are still just as capable of going down in two hits like everyone else. Namely, because they lack any access to weapons and the Entity's influence is much stronger than anything they have ever faced.
- Last Ditch Move: A downed survivor can still attempt to escape with their life by crawling out through the exit gates, or an opened hatch if they are the last one alive in the trial, the former of which is usually easier to pull off due to an invisible wall near the exits that Killers cannot move beyond.
- Made of Iron: Any survivor can be hacked, stabbed, run through with a chainsaw and impaled on a hook, and still be able to keep running. Amusingly, a survivor who is downed/dying and gets hooked will somehow heal back up to merely injured status if taken off.
- Multinational Team: While most of the survivors are American, other nationalities represented are Canadian (Claudette and Jeff), Swedish (Nea), Argentinian (Ace), Chinese (Feng), English (David), Jamaican (Adam), Latin American (Jane and Jonah), Japanese (Yui and Yoichi), Lebanese (Zarina), German (Felix), Malagasy (Élodie), Korean (Yun-Jin), Indian (Haddie), Italian (Vittorio), and Brazilian (Renato and Thalita). When including alternate character models of licensed survivors, we also get South American (Carlos) and African (Sheva).
- Oh, Crap!: A survivor's reaction when a killer finds them hiding in a locker. Their reaction is seen best from the first-person view of the killer.
- Palette Swap: Several survivors have been given alternate costumes that allow them to essentially cosplay as characters from other franchises (such as Attack on Titan), but the most significant examples are some of the licensed survivors, who have DLC costumes that let them change into different characters from their home franchise, complete with different accompanying character portraits and voices:
- Leon Kennedy can be changed to two other men from the Resident Evil franchise, Chris Redfield and Carlos Oliveira.
- Similarly, Jill Valentine can turn into two other Resident Evil women, Claire Redfield and Sheva Alomar.
- Steve Harrington from Stranger Things can become Jonathan Byers.
- Silent Hill's Cheryl Mason is the most dramatic example, as she can be switched to four other characters from the franchise: Lisa Garland, Cybil Bennett, James Sunderland, and Maria. She also has Alessa Gillespie as an alternate costume.
- Ellen Ripley can turn into Ripley 8, her genetic clone from Alien: Resurrection.
- Alan Wake can be changed into Rose Marigold or Saga Anderson, the co-protagonist of Alan Wake 2.
- Prisoner's Dilemma: Some of the survivors were abducted while they were alive, while others are on the edge of death, meaning that if they do find a way to escape, they have to make a choice between who lives and who dies.
- Right Man in the Wrong Place: Each of the survivors bring unique abilities (perks) that make it more likely that they will survive the Entity's realm, though those skills didn't prevent the Entity from abducting them in the first place.
- You Don't Look Like You: Played straight with most of the Guest Fighter survivors, especially those adapted from live-action films instead of videogames or comics, who look nothing like their original counterparts, as Behaviour couldn't secure the rights to their actors' likeness. The only ones to avert this are Ash Williams, as Bruce Campbell agreed to lend his face and voice to the character as part of the collaboration, the Stranger Things survivors, whose respective actors allowed their likeness but did not voice their characters, and Alan Wake, based on his live-action actor and physical model Ilkka Villi. Laurie Strode toes this line somewhat, as while she's clearly not modeled after Jamie Lee Curtis, she was made to resemble her comic book incarnation. Ripley as well, while not directly resembling Sigourney Weaver, does manage to still look like her in a general sense that's closer than most of the the others. The Silent Hill and Resident Evil characters naturally avert this as animated videogame characters with no physical actors to replicatenote . Also averted by Nicolas Cage as, obviously, he's playing himself rather than any of his previous characters.
