History Characters / NightInTheWoods

* TraumaCongaLine: [[spoiler:His wife died of cancer]], THEN he lost his house, THEN he had to move into a tiny apartment with his daughter, THEN his subsequent emotional breakdown prevented him from running his hardware store. And somewhere in the middle of all that, his daughter was accosted by a sexual predator, but [[UltimateJobSecurity Mr. Santello couldn't fire the guy]] because he's their best repairman.

* TraumaCongaLine: [[spoiler:His wife died of cancer]], THEN he lost his house, THEN he had to move into a tiny apartment with his daughter, THEN his subsequent emotional breakdown prevented him from running his hardware store.

* LoserProtagonist: She's a self-admitted womanchild, [[{{NEET}} has no job or prospects for one]], and doesn't have much to do once she gets back home beyond hanging out with her friends and going to parties. The cult showing up is the first thing happening to her that Mae has any sort of conflict with. But since Mae was TheOneWhoMadeItOut, this means that coming back home has earned her some animosity from a few other town members, including her parents.

* StickyFingers: She shoplifts, among other petty crimes, compulsively.

A 20-year-old college dropout cat who recently moved back into her hometown of Possum Springs who realizes something dangerous is going on in the woods.

[[folder:The Void]]

* AmbiguousSituation: The only people who encounter it are not the most reliable narrators. The cult is a group of people in Possum Springs who [[IveComeTooFar are trying to convince themselves that what they're doing is helping the town, and are in too deep to stop now]]. And Mae is already suffering from some pretty rough mental states when she encounters it. All of this sparks a lot of ambiguity if the Black Goat is even real, let alone if it's as malevolent as the cult makes it out to be.

** [[MaybeMagicMaybeMundane Whether or not there even is a Black Goat is up for debate]]. Regardless of the answer, one only needs to look around to see that the sacrifices aren't working. Possum Springs is still a DyingTown, and all the sacrifices have resulted in is the deaths of thirty-nine innocent people. (Well, maybe not entirely "innocent," but as far as we know, none of them did anything bad enough to deserve death at the hands of an EldritchAbomination.)

** Whether or not there even is a Black Goat is up for debate. Regardless of the answer, one only needs to look around to see that the sacrifices aren't working. Possum Springs is still a DyingTown, and all the sacrifices have resulted in is the deaths of thirty-nine innocent people. (Well, maybe not entirely "innocent," but as far as we know, none of them did anything bad enough to deserve death at the hands of an EldritchAbomination.)
** To add insult to injury, the game's ending gives some indicators that things ''might'' be starting to get better for Possum Springs (things like Mae's Dad planning on unionizing the Ham Panther workers for example) after the cave-in Eide caused. Suggesting that things are looking up for the town yet the cult doesn't live long enough to see it. And even if they had survived, one must wonder how [[MyGodWhatHaveIDone they'd react to Possum Springs improving without their sacrifices.]]

* KilledOffscreen: If the cave-in doesn't kill them, then them being trapped in a cave deep in the earth with no way out ''will'' kill them. Just much slower.

** During the final confrontation with Mae's group, they decide to just let Mae's group leave without a fuss. They know none of the kids can identify any of the cult members, and they know the kids would definitely be missed if they suddenly went missing ''now'', not just because of their connections to the town, but because [[NiceJobFixingItVillain one of their own members shooting at Mae got the police involved]]. The only one of the cult members to object to this is Eide, who just wants compensation for getting shot in the shoulder by Gregg. [[spoiler: Eide's refusal to stick to this trope and listen to the rest of the cult is what ends up dooming all of them.]]

!!God? (AKA The Astral Cat)

In the trifecta of possible Gods, it is "Present but Uncaring"

* BreakThemByTalking: Drops this existential bombshell on Mae:
--> Little creature. I am telling you something. There is a hole in the center of everything. And it is always growing. Between the stars I am seeing it. It is coming. And you are not escaping. And the universe is forgetting you. And the universe is being forgotten. And there is nothing to remember it. Not even the things beyond. And now there is only the hole.

* AGodIAmNot: The first thing it makes clear is that it is not God, and that it has witnessed the entire span of time and space and found nothing like a God. Mae continues calling it God anyway, because she has no other name for it.

* UncertainDoom: Thanks to Eide [{RevengeBeforeReason insisting on getting vengeance on Mae and the other kids]], the only elevator between the mine and Possum Springs ends up broken, with the cultists trapped at the bottom of the mine shaft. There's no other apparent way out, either. Considering they're trapped at the bottom of a mine shaft with no light, no food, no water, and no way to call for help, their chances of survival are not very high. However, the game ends without confirming whether the cult members died or not.

** They have a strict set of rules on who can get kidnapped as a sacrifice to the Black Goat and who can't. They only kill people who won't be missed. Of course, "won't be missed" is according to them, so it's still both pragmatic and villainous.
** During the final confrontation with Mae's group, they decide to just let the kids leave. This is because, according to their own rules, the kids would be missed if they were sacrificed. And even if they attacked without the sacrifice part, their friends and family would no doubt come looking for answers. Eide objects because he was shot in the shoulder by Gregg with a crossbow, but the leader of the group promptly dismisses that as self-defense since Eide attacked first. With everything that's happened between the two groups, the Cult decides to call the whole thing a wash and lets the kids leave.

* PoliceAreUseless: {{Downplayed}}. She doesn't believe a single word out of Mae's mouth about the "ghost" or any other weird events, but she does nonetheless look into it. She doesn't find anything, but she tries.

* TheFriendNobodyLikes: Neither Gregg nor Mae actually like him.
* {{Jerkass}}: Rude, unpleasant, and slimy. Some cut dialogue with Lori M. reveals he still hits on high schoolers, as well.

* DidntThinkThisThrough: Even putting aside that they were desperate and if the Goat is real in the first place, The Black Goat is a God associated with ''bringing sadistic suffering to all thse who encounter it and making things fall into darkness and rot'', why the cult decided it was their best shot to appease it with sacrifices in the first place is baffling. If the absence of sacrifices did indeed cause its influence to be cut off from the town, it seems it was actively ''doing the opposite, and causing Possum Springs to die faster.''

* AmbiguousDisorder:
** As the game goes on it becomes more and more apparent something has happened that has messed with her mental state. [[spoiler:Bea suggests she possibly has depression or anxiety after a traumatic event in her childhood; said event matches up with a textbook description of dissociation. The near-end of the game seems to imply she has psychosis. The endgame also implies that her dissociative experiences might be caused by the Black Goat making contact with her mind, but it's also ambiguous if the Black Goat is even real. In any case, there's definitely something inherently wrong in Mae's head.]]
** Her impulsive shoplifting could also imply she's a kleptomaniac; especially when after stealing a belt buckle from the Hot Topic expy, Mae says she'll probably never wear it. She stole the belt buckle because she wanted to steal something, and that was it.

* AmbiguousDisorder: Gregg mentions that he has "really up up days and really down down days", and exhibits some poor impulse control and self-destructive habits when "up" high enough. Bea explicitly says Gregg's probably bipolar.

** Even their jobs contrast: The family-owned, aged Ol' Pickaxe versus the new, flashy Snack Falcon. Gregg can slack off and even steal or destroy his employers' property with no consequences; Bae has to work herself to exhaustion and [[spoiler: can't fire an employee who wants to (or might even have) assaulted her because he's good at his job.]]

* RedEyesTakeWarning: She calls them "nightmare eyes" and reckons they wouldn't be out of place in a slasher movie. It is implied they didn't help her reputation after the "killer" incident.

* SlapstickKnowsNoGender: Is constantly getting electrocuted, and can get into knife fights with Gregg that wound her knuckles.

* {{Jerkass}}: Though she leans more to SugarAndIcePersonality by the mid-game. She treats Mae like dirt several times throughout the game, and can say some pretty terrible things to her former friend if you pick the right choices. After she says she'll bring Mae home after finding the arm on the ground, she drops her off blocks away from her home after Mae merely mentions her parents. [[spoiler:However, this can be easily justified by her being angrily stunned that Mae doesn't even remember that Bea's mother died while they were in high school.]]
* JerkWithAHeartOfGold: She can be blunt and sarcastic, but she's genuinely trying to do the right thing. Early in the game, she drives Mae home one night so she'll be safe, even though her dislike of Mae is evident. She takes care of her father [[spoiler:who is still in the midst of a breakdown after his wife's death]], works hard to keep the Ol' Pickaxe afloat for her father, and hosts a community play on Halloween.

* {{Acrofatic}}: Mentions how out-of-shape she is on occasion, but can still pull off impressive triple jumps and balance on power lines.
* AgentMulder: She is the most willing to believe in the supernatural, despite not being religious. Whenever she would encounter anything spooky or mysterious, she's usually the one who will conclude or assume it's a ghost or something else paranormal.

** As the game goes on it becomes more and more apparent something has happened that has messed with her mental state. [[spoiler:Bea suggests she possibly has depression or anxiety after a traumatic event in her childhood; said event matches up with a textbook description of dissociation. The near-end of the game seems to imply she has psychosis.]] The endgame also implies that [[spoiler:her dissociative experiences might be caused by the Black Goat making contact with her mind]].
** Her impulsive shoplifting could also imply she's a kleptomaniac; especially when after stealing a belt buckle from the Hot Topic expy, she says she'll probably never wear it.

* BigEater: She comments that she has to stop eating everything that she sees. She has several scenes of dining on prodigious quantities of pizza, tacos, doughnuts, and the like. Unfortunately, she also has a sensitive stomach and has trouble keeping it all down.
* BootsOfToughness: Hard to tell with the art style but a line of dialogue says she's wearing boots when she threatens to kick down a locked door.

* CannotSpitItOut: For the majority of the game, she can't bring herself to tell her parents or friends exactly why she dropped out of college. Bea will ask her three times if they spend a lot of time together, with Mae not fully answering once. She only tells the friend she hung out with the most why she left after getting hurt [[spoiler:running away from the cult members]].

* TheDitz: She has her rare moments of cleverness, like the gall joke she tells to Bea and when she corrects Gregg on the pronunciation of "carpe diem." However, while Gregg is probably 'The Ditz' of the group, Mae is a very close second. For example, she doesn't know that whales are mammals, what the word "entrepreneur" means, and she egregiously writes "*You're* parents forgot you" in a journal entry. There are many more errors she makes in the game (some are listed in other tropes,) and her first college assignment work was posted by WordOfGod, which reveals terrible writing abilities: [[https://mobile.twitter.com/bombsfall/status/1232854262524383232 She attended Durkillesburg]], but it is very likely a state college with a high acceptance rate. Also, she would have turned 21 years old by her fourth semester, which means she probably had to go to community college at 18 to scrape by on grades. Mae's mother says she had trouble with math growing up. Also, Mr. Chazokov calls her his "best worst student" to which she replies, "Yeah. Hated school."

* AffectionateNickname: Angus calls him "bug".
* AmbiguousDisorder: Mentions having "really up up days and really down down days" and exhibits some poor impulse control and self-destructive habits when particularly "up". Bea explicitly says he's probably bipolar.

* BowAndSwordInAccord: [[spoiler:Has a crossbow and knives on him seemingly at all times.]]

** Surprisingly polite to Mae and the gang. They don't even hold the fact Gregg shot one of them against him, since it was a rational reaction to Eide's behavior. The only time anyone but Eide directly threatens the gang with immediate death is when Gregg pulls back out his crossbow.

* HumanSacrifice: Erm... or rather ''anthropomorphic animal'' sacrifice, but this is their main purpose. They believe that if they sacrifice people to the Black Goat, then it will bring prosperity back to the town. They only sacrifice drifters or "degenerates" of society, people who won't be missed. It doesn't really seem that effective, if it works at all; even after all the people they've sacrificed the town is still in a decline, with no signs of it improving substantially.
* {{Hypocrite}}: For all their high talk about the welfare of the town, the cultists themselves are all well-off and have never mined or done hard labor in their lives. Bea calls them out on this immediately and is disgusted by their attempt to evade the question.
* IDidWhatIHadToDo: How they justify their actions. None of them takes any pleasure in what they have to do to keep Possum Springs alive, but they clearly aren't going to stop.

* MaybeMagicMaybeMundane: Were the disasters and economic decline of Possum Springs due to insufficient worship of Black Goat, or were they merely coincidences? Are the cultists really appeasing an eldritch abomination with sacrifices, or are they worshiping an imaginary being in a futile effort to save their town?

** During the final confrontation with Mae's group, they decide to just let the kids leave. This is because, according to their own rules, the kids would be missed if they were sacrificed. And even if they attacked without the sacrifice part, their friends and family would no doubt come looking for answers. With everything that's happened between them, the Cult decides to call the whole thing a wash and let them leave.

* AmbiguousSituation: The only people who encounter it are not the most reliable narrators.

* DevilButNoGod: Possibly. While the Black Goat is confirmed to exist, several people believe in God around Possum Springs. God never directly makes an action within the plot, though the Janitor that shows up multiple times throughout the game seems to be supernatural in nature (possibly being the real God), and Mae meets an entity in one of her dreams that she believes may be God, so this may be subverted.

* EldritchAbomination:
** Played straight, but also subverted. While it functions like one, it interacts much more with people than most Eldritch Abominations do, bringing prosperity to the town in exchange for sacrifices.
** The cultists describe it as black like the space between stars. When Mae encounters Black Goat in her hallucination, it appears as a darkness out in the cosmos that speaks gibberish.
** All this assumes, of course, that it's even real and not Mae having an [[HeroicBSOD incredibly bad episode]] provoked by discovering the cult.

* BatterUp: Her WeaponOfChoice is a baseball bat. [[spoiler:This may be because, as a kid, she hospitalized another kid with a softball bat after suffering a mental breakdown.]]

* AddedAlliterativeAppeal: She's an alligator astronomer named Adina Astra

[[folder:Casey Hartley]]

* BitchInSheepsClothing: [[spoiler:Implied, though the source is less believable than usual. Though he is only remembered by the gang as being a friendly, normal guy, the cult says that he would never amount to anything except a "mile long list of kids without a father" and that he was making meth with his cousin, which is believed to set him on a path to being a criminal. Given how the cult explicitly uses heavily biased rationale to choose victims, the veracity of this claim is questionable.]]
* DeadAllAlong: [[spoiler:He was one of the sacrifices thrown into the mine by the Cult of the Black Goat. Beforehand, it was just assumed he'd gone missing or skipped town. Nope; he's gone.]]
* {{Foil}}: In a sort of way, one to Mae. Both were cats who never stood out around town until a certain point (Casey's disappearance, [[spoiler:the Killer incident]] and both managed to leave town. He, however, never returned to Possum Springs like Mae, [[spoiler:and his personal run-in with the cult ended with him dead in contrast to Mae and company indirectly killing them through a cave in.]]
* TheGenericGuy: Aside from being on good terms with the rest of the gang and managing to escape the town, he is mentioned as being as normal as anyone else. [[spoiler:Eventually played for drama and horror; His complete averageness and inability to stand out made him a perfect candidate for the cult's sacrificial ritual]].
** As the story progresses, you learn more about his character. He was the band's original drummer and a very close friend of Gregg. His social network profile describes himself as [[LowerClassLout "country trash proud"]] and was a skater. During the last train hangout with Lori, Mae confirms that he was also a smoker. [[spoiler:According to a cultist: he had a cousin who was a meth cook and died in a lab explosion, he aided his cousin in the meth production which the cultists believed justified his sacrifice because he was on his way to becoming a criminal.]]
* PosthumousCharacter: The gang thinks he caught a train out of town before the events of the game. [[spoiler:The truth is he was sacrificed by a cult in town]].
* SatelliteCharacter: [[spoiler:Deconstructed, because he didn't have any relations outside of his parents and friends, the cultists saw him as a perfect sacrifice for their god.]]
* SmallRoleBigImpact: It's him disappearing that makes it finally hit Mae that everything she knows is changing, [[spoiler:and his death is what finalizes how the cult chooses their sacrifices.]]
* WalkingSpoiler: [[spoiler:It's hard to talk about him without mentioning what the cult is.]]

* KnifeNut: Always carries a knife (sometimes two) and has knife fights with Mae.

* NiceHat: Her karakul which some fans confuse for a fez.