The Game (Warning: all spoilers unmarked)
Miki Takamura
Miki Takamura
The protagonist of the game. Due to certain circumstances, she has moved into her deceased aunt's house. On her very first night there, she encounters a monster that seems intent on following her around and does her best to hide from it. Now she hides from the monster every night, though the days don't go by uneventfully either.
- Action Survivor: She manages to successfully escape and hide from the monster night after night.
- Adaptational Angst Upgrade: Not that Miki wasn't angst-ridden (and for good reason) in the original game, but in the remake she is more openly distraught, often breaking down crying, privately fretting about things, experiencing angry outbursts and mood-swings. Her mounting paranoia is a lot more pronounced too; near the end she even starts accusing Shinji of calling her crazy behind her back, not unlike her late aunt.
- Break the Cutie: The entire game revolves around her slowly breaking, with mommy dearest only making it worse.
- Cannot Tell Fiction from Reality: Comes across as this, if the monster is just a hallucination.
- Cassandra Truth: Nobody believes Miki when she claims that the monster is not just a delusion, and she could be telling the truth.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: In the bad ending, Miki's body is found covered in blood and gouged wounds. It's suspected to be a suicide, though it's left rather ambiguous and Shinji, who found the body, says it looked more like a monster attacked her. Whether or not it was the monster that killed her or an extreme case of self-harm, it's a nasty way to go.
- Driven to Suicide: It's implied to be how she dies in the Bad Ending, given that just before the monster (which is heavily indicated to be a delusion) gets her on that night, Miki is talking about how guilty she feels about her aunt's death. The police in the remake outright suspect suicide, though it remains unconfirmed either way.
- Generation Xerox: According to her family, Miki has an uncanny resemblance to her aunt. There's also the fact that the game reveals that Miki is becoming mentally ill to the point of delusions, just like her aunt did after suffering a miscarriage and killed herself. In the Bad Ending, Miki is also implied to have committed suicide.
- Get Out!: If Miki insists the monster is not a delusion, she screams this at Shinji after he still doesn't believe her.
- Girls Love Stuffed Animals: This is actually an important plot point. It's revealed that Yuriko had offered to make her a stuffed animal, as she was already making lots of toys for her unborn baby, who was ultimately stillborn. Even though Miki was in high school, she insisted she would love to have a stuffed animal from her aunt, though in the event of her aunt's tragic death, she had forgotten this happy memory. In the good ending, Miki finds a teddy bear with her name embroidered on the foot, causing her to remember that day. As a result, she's able to remember that she and her aunt did love each other and is able to start letting go of the guilt she feels over Saeki's death.
- Gory Discretion Shot: Whenever Miki is caught by the monster, she dies a bloody death, but this is never shown.
- Implied Love Interest: She might return Shinji's feelings but it's not made explicit.
- I Reject Your Reality: Miki has to choose this by claiming the monster is real, despite all the evidence that says otherwise, if the player wants the Good Ending.
- Kill the Cutie: Happens in the Bad Ending.
- My Greatest Failure: She blames herself for letting her aunt die because she didn't do anything to help, which is especially pronounced in the Bad Ending.
- Nice Girl: Is this for the most part, when the monster isn't scaring her out of her mind.
- No Medication for Me: Averted, she always makes sure to take her pills. They are anti-depressants.
- Pink Means Feminine: She wears a pink-ish dress, but rejects a pink dress in the dressing room for being too gaudy.
- Ship Tease: With Shinji. One might think that they have feelings for each other. Miki appreciates his company and
Word of God has confirmed Shinji does indeed have a crush on her. - Strong Family Resemblance: Miki stated that she was often told that she looks like her dead aunt.
- Tears of Fear: Often in the presence of the monster.
- Thinks Like a Romance Novel: Averted, despite having written some.
- Through the Eyes of Madness: The entire game is played only from Miki's perspective, so if she truly is insane, this is the case. Not only is Miki at least a little insane, it runs in the family, meaning for all we know the monster might really be a hallucination after all.
- Troubled Fetal Position: She assumes this pose a number of times throughout the remake when she feels overwhelmed (the updated graphics allow for this).
- Unreliable Narrator: The game leaves everything open to interpretation, including if anything was real or just a hallucination of Miki's, which may have been caused by her schizophrenia. And this includes the Good Ending, where Miki insists on the monster being real.
- Violation of Common Sense: The player must have Miki insist that the monster haunting her every night is real, despite the game having revealed by then that Miki may be suffering from delusions to get the Good Ending. Although the other option seems much more viable to be the correct answer, given the revelations.
Shinji Miura
Shinji Miura
The neighbor. Shinji's been living next to Miki's aunt for years and has known Miki for about as long as well. He starts to drop in and check on Miki every day and shows concern for her, even when she begins to talk about a monster being in the house.
- Adaptational Angst Upgrade: In the original bad ending, we don't know how he reacted to finding Miki dead. In the remake, we learn that he is ridden with guilt and starts seeing the guilt-monster as well.
- Adaptational Nice Guy: Downplayed, as he was always a nice guy, but the remake explains some of his more forceful moments in the original game. In the original game, he entered Miki's house when she wasn't answering to discover her unconcious. In the remake, he went to ask her out for dinner and found her in the well after she screamed his name.
- Anger Born of Worry: Near the end of the game, he shouts at Miki to get her to calm down and shouts her name to get her attention.
- Agent Scully: Shinji doesn't believe that there is a real monster in the house and suggests that it might be a projection of Miki's because of the guilt she feels over her aunt's death. Since Miki is revealed to be schizophrenic in the Good Ending, he could very well be right.
- Dogged Nice Guy: He has an obvious crush on Miki and goes out of his way to help her with things that he really doesn't have to help her with - like carrying her luggage when he has an injured arm. He's the only one to show any support when Miki begins to talk about seeing a monster in the house, despite not believing in the monster himself.
- It's All My Fault: In the bad ending, Shinji starts blaming himself for Miki's death, believing he should've done more to help her. Then the monster appears behind him.
- My Greatest Failure: In the Bad Ending of the 2019 remake, he blames herself for not noticing Miki's decaying mental state in time. To the point where he starts seeing the monster too.
- Only Sane Man: Shinji is the only one to care for Miki's well-being and tries to calm her down when talking about the monster, often offering rational explanations. It could be a literal example, as the other characters all suffer from mental issues.
- Ship Tease: With Miki. One might think that they have feelings for each other. Miki appreciates his company and Word of God has confirmed Shinji does indeed have a crush on her.
- Stalker with a Crush: Downplayed, since he never does anything actually creepy toward Miki. He does have a tendency to barge into her house uninvited when she doesn't immediately answer the door, but he is most likely doing this out of concern for Miki's safety, especially considering Aunt Saeki's suicide.
Aunt Saeki
Yuriko Saeki
Miki's deceased aunt. Her house has been left abandoned ever since her death, leaving only a layer of dust and a handful of messages for Miki to discover.
- Big Sister Worship: According to her diary entries, she mentions how grateful she is to her older sister for taking care of her after their parents died.
- Cool Aunt: Miki was closer to Saeki than to her own mother.
- Despair Event Horizon: Her grief over her miscarriage, and lack of any emotional support in the aftermath, eventually drove her to suicide.
- Driven to Suicide: She hung herself after her whole family basically abandoned her.
- Nice Girl: She was an incredibly kind person to everyone, even to her horrible sister. When she got pregnant, she started making stuffed animals for the baby, with the intent to give them away to the neighborhood children if her own child didn't want them. And she even offered to make one for Miki, although she was already in her teens.
- Posthumous Character: Saeki has been dead for three years by the start of the game. Her backstory is revealed little by little in the notes that Miki finds scattered all over the house.
- Sanity Slippage: After the miscarriage and her husband leaving her, Saeki became depressed and paranoid, to the point of hearing voices.
- Sibling Yin-Yang: Saeki was a kind, loving and very patient woman. Her sister is a selfish Jerkass, whose only forms of interaction seem to include being rude and judgemental. Nonetheless, Saeki loved her.
- Tragic Stillbirth: Her baby being stillborn was the catalyst for her mental breakdown and many of the subsequent events of the game.
- Walking Spoiler: Beyond her name and the fact that she's dead, you can't say much more.
Miki's Mother
Minako Takamura
Miki's mother. She calls Miki at the house to see how things are going but becomes increasingly frustrated and impatient when Miki keeps insisting that there's a monster in the house that's chasing her.- Abusive Parents: She is absolutely nasty to her daughter. She sent her daughter to live in her deceased sister's house because it's the perfect house for "crazies like her", refuses to let Miki come home when she starts getting scared by the monster, and she tells Miki to go hang herself when Miki tells her about the monster chasing her in the Good Ending.
- Adaptational Nice Guy: Downplayed in the remake. She is still an insensitive, rude jerkass, but she comes off as slightly more reasonable; rather than constantly going on hateful rants, she's mostly just blunt and dismissive.
- Hate Sink: Not only is she horribly abusive towards her daughter and sister, and basically responsible for the events of the game, but since the monster is not actually evil and may not even be real, this makes her the closest thing the game has to a villain.
- Hypocrite: Suffers from conversion disorder, but relentlessly mocks her daughter and sister who are also sufferers from mental illness.
- Jerkass: Part of her attitude could be attributed to suffering from mental health issues that run in the family, but this woman is just plain mean to people. She barely manages to hold a decent conversation and quickly resorts to rude comments or blaming people.
- Kick the Dog: She laughed at her sister when she had a miscarriage. She also made Miki live in Saeki's house because she wanted nothing to do with her 'crazy' daughter suffering from depression and, in the Good Ending, tells Miki that she should kill herself like Saeki did.
- No Sympathy: None for her sister. And even less for her own daughter.
- Pet the Dog: As horrible as she can be, she does make an effort to call Miki and even asks her if she's feeling okay on one occasion due to Miki sounding upset.
- Promoted to Parent: She had to look after Saeki after their parents died, but she couldn't cope for very long and Saeki was eventually placed into foster care.
The Monster
The Monster
The antagonist of the game, who haunts the house and chases Miki. Her design differs between versions- the original version was fleshy and visceral, while the remake turns her into a shadow being.
- Adaptational Attractiveness: Downplayed; while not attractive, per se, the monster looks far less hideous in the remake, as rather than a bloody, half-rotted skeleton, she resembles a blurry humanoid figure with a broken neck.
- Big Bad: As the entity that stalks Miki every night, she is the antagonist of the game. Played with in that the ending implies that she is either Not Evil, Just Misunderstood or a delusion.
- The Blank: In the remake, her head distinctly lacks a face.
- Imaginary Enemy: Implied to be just a hallucination of Miki's, but this is never conclusively stated.
- Living Shadow: In the remake, she resembles a shadow but with glitchy effects.
- Love Redeems: In the Good Ending, her reconciliation with Miki helps her spirit leave the house.
- Nightmare Face: In the original game, her face resembles a human face without skin. In the remake, she simply lacks a face.
- Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: One possibility is that she is the spirit of Yuriko who just wants to reconcile with her niece and is unintentionally killing her.
- Stalker without a Crush: The monster relentlessly stalks Miki every night.
- Tragic Monster: It is implied that she is the spirit of Yuriko, and that she doesn't realize that her touch would kill Miki and only wants to reconcile with her niece.
