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The Protagonist/"Milk-chan"
The heroine of both games. She is an ordinary Russian girl, except living with a debilitating mental illness that warps her perception of everything around her.
- Absurd Phobia: The girl is apparently afraid of the letter O and all of a sudden we see how she visualizes it, as a sort of black hole. Naturally, she meets someone that (from her perspective) is only able to say that letter.
- Beat Them at Their Own Game: When confronted with somebody that can only say "O", after the player character talks to her, the girl concentrates and puts aside her phobia of that letter: she says "O" back at them, to which they finally go away and leave her alone. You also get an achievement for it, to show how difficult it was for her to do that.
- Cloud Cuckoolander: The girl, Played for Drama. She has some very odd mental processes, a strange phobia of the letter "O", sees people as weird creatures, is apparently a recluse... and that's just the beginning.
- Freudian Excuse: Non-villainous example; while never explicitly stated, it's implied that her mental illness stems from, or was exacerbated by, her being mistreated by everyone in her life, from her Abusive Parents, to her classmates and teachers, and even an online "friend" of hers who cyberbullied her.
- Gameplay Protagonist, Story Protagonist: The main character is an unnamed girl who goes about her days struggling with her mental illness and abusive mother, and the inner narration is from her point of view, but you play as one of the voices in her head, who is a separate character that makes all the decisions for her.
- Medium Awareness: Played with - either she knows she's a character in a visual novel, or she enjoys pretending to be one in order to face the difficulties of the outside world. Though she still seems to be aware of some elements of the interface. In the sequel, the girl states that last time pretending to be a visual novel protagonist helped her, so this time she's trying to be a point-and-click adventure protagonist.
- Mood-Swinger: As a part of the girl's condition, she's prone to shifting between happiness, sadness, anger and anxiety within a few sentences. It's also mentioned that she went to abrupt meltdowns before.
- Obsessively Organized: In the first game, the girl freezes when her inner voice makes her notice that she was stepping on asphalt with one foot and on grass with the other, and she tries to "undo" the fifty-one steps she took that way. In the second game, the haphazardly-placed items in her room are purposefully left that way by her because she doesn't feel comfortable about them being moved around.
- Older Than They Look: While she looks and acts like a teenager,
Nikita Kryukov said to consider her to be 24. - Sleep Deprivation: Towards the end of the game, the girl talks about how she experienced insomnia for an entire week and began to experience hallucinations due to sleep deprivation. She eventually collapsed of exhaustion, but the hallucinations never went away.
- Through the Eyes of Madness: We're seeing most things in the girl's view in both games. However since she sees other perfectly normal-looking people as monsters and everything around her being red, goes out of her way to repress details of her traumas and can't hold a proper conversation, what actually happened is up to interpretation.
- Trauma Button: The girl says at one point that she hates milk, and it's heavily implied she's deathly allergic to it. There's also implications that her dad tried to kill her with that, and she drinks it because of OCD, often to disastrous results.
- Unreliable Narrator: The girl's worldview is so warped that her words cannot be taken at face value.
The Voice
One of the voices in the protagonist's head and the player character.
- Deadpan Snarker: The voice has several options in which it snarks at the protagonist or mocks her thought processes.
- Gameplay Protagonist, Story Protagonist: The main character is an unnamed girl who goes about her days struggling with her mental illness and abusive mother, and the inner narration is from her point of view, but you play as one of the voices in her head, who is a separate character that makes all the decisions for her.
- Hello, [Insert Name Here]: After starting the game proper, the player is asked to input their name. It only comes up if the player is nasty to the girl, since she suddenly quits and says that [name] wasn't useful to her. It's all but stated that the name you input is actually the name of the medicine she's taking, and the player character is a personification of its effects.
The Mother
The protagonist's mother.
- Abusive Parents: Downplayed for the girl's mom. It's suggested when the girl says her mother will "throw her out of the window" if she doesn't buy the milk. The sequel however, implies that she still possibly cared for her to some extent, shown when she injected her daughter with an epipen that the latter interprets as a "poison claw" when she was suffering from milk allergy, indicating that she was more burnt out than anything, but she still harshly forces her daughter to scream out loud and repeatedly that she will never drink milk again.
- Ambiguously Evil: While it's indicated that she is abusive, exactly how much she loves her daughter is left to interpretation. In the second game, she injects her daughter with a "poison claw" (actually an epipen) after she drank milk which she is deathly allergic to, and showed no consideration for her daughter's pain, only forcing her to scream and swear that she will never drink milk again. And this is after she made her daughter buy the milk under threat of Destination Defenestration. It's never made clear if she saved her daughter's life because she loves her daughter on some level and expresses it in an unhealthy manner, or if she only did so because she wants her daughter to do stuff for her like getting her milk. Or if it even happened the way the daughter says it did.
- Black Eyes of Evil: How the girl's mother looks like when she comes home to her at the end. Her sudden appearance can be disturbing. The sequel clarifies they are meant to be empty eye sockets.
- Parental Neglect: According to the girl, her mother would regularly not be in the house, leaving her with her equally terrible father.
The Father
The protagonist's deceased father.
- Abusive Parents: The exact details are unknown, but based on the way the girl herself described it, her dad was completely fed up with dealing with her at one point, so he got her out of school and attempted to kill her by forcing her to drink milk before he committed suicide.
- Driven to Suicide: According to his daughter, he jumped out a window and smashed himself on the ground for some unexplained reason.
- Offing the Offspring: The protagonist recounts one day where he tried to make her drink milk, which she is deathly allergic to, and kill her after one argument too many.
- Posthumous Character: He jumped out the window and killed himself before the story starts.
Treska
A strange boy the protagonist interacts with in the default ending of Milk Outside.
