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Main Characters
Ash
Ash/ Dr. David Nash
The Leader
A man with a mysterious connection with the entity responsible for the Blight and the eternal Winter, which continuously torments him as a malevolent Inner Voice.
- Badass Bookworm: Before the end of the world, he was a particle physicist. Now, he's a warrior-leader and a damned good one at that.
- The Leader: He's the leader of the Refuge and by the end of the game will have assembled a sizable crew of followers. The game notes his leadership skills must be quite high, given how he's able to keep the group running smoothly despite how strong-willed and harsh many of the people he recruits are.
- Resurrective Immortality: As long as there are Flames of Hope burning back in his crypt, he'll resurrect there after death. If he runs out of Flames of Hope, however, everything he's built will be erased and he'll be sent back in time to re-live the Cycle of Torment all over again.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Dr. Nash was the scientist present when the Inner Voice came into our world through a breach in the space-time continuum created as part of the research project he was working on. Nash was distracted by the intrigue of encountering an other-dimensional presence and failed to shut the system down before it invaded our world; he also later made a Deal with the Devil with the Inner Voice to resurrect his family.
- Warrior Therapist: Besides battling monsters and carving out a path through the harsh Winter terrain, Ash also acts as a therapist towards his followers and helps them overcome their dark pasts and achieve catharsis.
Alice
Alice
The Daughter
Ash's 12-year old daughter. Providing her with food and warmth is the primary driving force behind Ash's actions in creating and maintaining the Refuge. As she's too young to perform any meaningful labor or combat, she mainly stays behind in the Refuge and observes the actions and behaviors of the other survivors.
- Children Are Innocent: She seems remarkably upbeat, all things considered, and seems to be the only character who hasn't become jaded and harsh due to the end of the world. This is because she's a hallucination of Ash's mind, the real Alice is an evil Blight zombie.
- Dead All Along: Alice is a hallucination in Ash's mind, which accounts for why none of the other Refuge survivors ever mention her. The real Alice is a Blight zombie hanging out in the crypt where Ash always resurrects.
Followers
Jin
Jin
The Undertaker
- My Greatest Failure: He failed to burn the bodies of some of his family members who died. The bodies then came back to life as Blighted and killed the rest of his family.
- The Stoic: He's noted to be one of your team's most emotionally stable members.
- Token Good Teammate: Jin's the only member of your team who isn't a murderer of some sort, and is one of your team's least abrasive members. That said, most of them are Sympathetic Murderers and Alice notes that Jin has his moments of frustration and tension as well.
Vic
Vic
The Looter
- Accidental Murder: She caught her lover Stella hugging a man who was also stealing supplies from them. In a rage she shoved Stella to the ground and shot the man through the heart. Stella hit her head on a rock and died, and to her horror Vic realized the man was Stella's brother.
- Book Dumb: During one of her therapy sessions she confesses to being illiterate.
- Hair-Trigger Temper: Her Fatal Flaw, which led her to killing her lover and her lover's brother.
- The Lad-ette: She's violent, foul-mouthed, and tempermental.
- Glass Cannon: She has high melee and ranged skills, but below-average health and self-healing.
- Sir Swears-a-Lot: Her character bio mentions she swears like a sailor, and many other characters note that she swears way more than anyone else in the game.
Gani
Gani
The Ritualist
- Came Back Wrong: After her husband was killed by a horde of Blighted, she used a magic ritual to bring him back to life. However, he came back as a soulless monster and she had to kill him. She's now trying to figure out if the ritual can be done with better results.
- I Did What I Had to Do: She and her sickly husband Isaac were taken in by a group of survivors. After a while, she overheard the other members of her group planning to abandon them because Isaac was a burden to the group. So she slit all their throats while they slept so she and Isaac would be able to retain the group's shelter and supplies. For most of the Refuge survivors, this would be their Dark Secret, but for Gani it's just a case of But for Me, It Was Tuesday.
- Jack of All Stats: She has the most down-the-middle average stats of all the characters in the game.
- Lady Land: Is mentioned as coming from a female-only tribe, which she left in order to be with her husband Isaac.
- The Leader: Alice notes that Gani keeps the camp running smoothly when Ash isn't there, and wonders which of them is the better leader.
Rhys
Rhys
The Investigator
- Badass Bookworm: The world's last living scientist ( not counting Ash), he also has above-average health and is decent with a sword.
- Body Horror: His right arm appears infected with Blight; in his character portrait, the right side of his face is Blighted as well.
- Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Looking almost exactly like Willem Dafoe, and is very much the sort of character Dafoe often plays.
- Demonic Possession: In the course of his research, Rhys has figured out a way to merge his mind with that of the Blighted. However, this causes him to adopt the Blighted's mindset when he does so. He may or may not have mauled someone to death (though he reasons it might simply be a memory of the Blighted that he's recalling), and he definitely burned down the last research outpost, causing the death of the world's last scientists, while under the effects of the Blight.
- Insufferable Genius: Some of the other survivors mention how they find his intellectualism to be grating.
- Unique Enemy: He's the only human opponent in the game you fight, when he attacks you after being corrupted by the Blight when you first meet him. He's not intended to be a difficult fight, either, only having a fraction of his health and going down after only a few hits.
Ryme
Ryme
The Sneak
- Long-Range Fighter: She has a high ranged combat skill, an average melee combat skill, and the lowest health out of all the game's survivors.
- Offing the Offspring: Ryme had the misfortune of being pregnant when the apocalypse happened. After her baby was born, she cared for him as best as she could, but ended up smothering him to stop him from crying because the noise was about to alert Blight monsters to their location. She's blamed herself for this ever since.
- Shrinking Violet: She's quiet and shy, in contrast to most of your other followers who tend to be quite strident and opinionated.
Ezra
Ezra
The Alchemist
- Grumpy Old Man: He's quite curmudgeony and seems to be the oldest survivor in the game.
- Meet the New Boss: He was a member of a gang whose leader would force the lowest ranking members to drink random concoctions of chemicals, which would often turn out to be fatal. He killed the leader and took over, but found the gang had gotten so used to cruel leadership that they saw his attempts at a more reasonable leadership style as weakness and were ready to revolt. So, he ended up becoming as bad a leader as the former guy, killing dozens of children to test his concoctions.
- Support Party Member: Ezra's melee skill is the lowest in the game, and his ranged skill is only average, so he's probably the least helpful member to bring along on combat expeditions. Instead he's best used brewing potions back at base.
Issa
Issa
The Sniper
- Functional Addict: She confesses to being a drug addict, with her biggest regret being that she hit her young protege when she found her using some of her stash, causing her protege to accuse her of being no different from her stepfather and run away.
- Long-Range Fighter: She has the highest ranged combat skill out of all the survivors, but low melee combat skill.
- Rape as Backstory: She was repeatedly raped by her stepfather as a child. Upon growing up, she seduced and then murdered him, and has made a career out of doing so to other men she considers to be bad.
- Serial Killer: She seduces men she considers to be "bad", then kills them with a needle through the ear post-coitus. She states they were all Asshole Victims, and the game never contradicts her, but we do have to take her word for it.
Tua
Tua
The Warrior
- Close-Range Combatant: He has the highest melee skill and the lowest ranged skill of all the survivors in the game. He also has the highest health of all the survivors in the game.
- Defector from Decadence: He used to be part of an Eclipse Cult, but left due to not being able to live with the human sacrifice in good conscience.
- The Engineer: He mentions having served in this role when he was in the Eclipse Cult, and Alice notes that he's always building and maintaining things. He's also one of 3 survivors with the Construction skill.
- Heel–Face Turn: He used to be responsible for capturing human sacrifices for the Eclipse Cult, having been convinced by the cult's leader that the victims deserved their fate, but had an attack of conscience and left the cult.
The Eclipse
The Inner Voice
The Inner Voice
- Big Bad: He's the evil force behind the Eclipse, the Blight, and the eternal Winter.
- For the Evulz: Seems to have no discernable motive for his actions other than the fact he likes making humans suffer.
- Lemony Narrator: He'll constantly taunt and mock you throughout the game as he observes your every action.
- Jerkass Genie: When Dr. Nash implores him to bring his family back to life, he brings them back as monstrous and evil Blight zombies (albeit more humanoid and self-aware than the usual Blighted creatures).
- Would Hurt a Child: At one point he fondly recalls how several school buses full of children screamed and died when he ended the world.
- The Unfought: He either has no physical form, or his physical form is the gravitation rift at the center of the Eclipse. In either case you never fight him directly.
