Characters from The Boogie Man
Beware of Spoilers from The Crooked Man and The Sandman (2014).Introduced in this game
Keith Baring
The protagonist of The Boogie Man.
Keith is a tough and serious detective, with his mind often set on his job and nothing else. Due to his focused way of tackling his work and criminals, he has been harassed and vilified by the media.
His boss sent him onto the castle tour as a means of vacation.
- Amicable Exes: Becomes this with Helena in the Precious Box ending. Subverted, however, when he kills her.
- Anger Born of Worry: If David and Keith are able to save Sophie in time, Keith slaps her and scolds her for running off to find Helena on her own. Him yelling at her for worrying her father triggers a memory of his own son for doing something that worried him.
- Bloody Tears: Cries them in The Boogie's Fine Tonight, when confronted with the man who killed his wife.
- Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: With his wife, Helena. He’s the stoic, sullen boy to Helena’s soft, gentle girl.
- Character Development: In Come Rain, Come Shine, he realizes that he is broken from not working through the grief of losing his son and vows to seek therapy and not let his emotions remain bottled up.
- Cowboy Cop/Rabid Cop: The media has portrayed him as a mixture of these, more intent on catching criminals and refusing to think of the civilians and community that he is actually supposed to protect.
- Cutting the Electronic Leash: Inverted, when Keith tries to find out about the investigation's progress from his subordinate and Dick tells him to not bother and just enjoy his vacation. Keith also has a terrible habit of not answering phone calls. Justified, when he reveals that he was informed of his son's death from a phone call he answered. He's terrified that the next phone call he answers will give him news about a family member's death again.
- Deadpan Snarker: His main way of interacting with other people.
- Driven to Suicide: Two of the Bad Endings involve him shooting himself out of despair for failing to protect his family.
- Happily Married: To Helena, until she drops the news of wanting a divorce.
- Hidden Depths: Helena says Keith is actually pretty funny. Hard to believe! In the best endings and even in The Hanged Man, we get to see some of his humor.
- Murder-Suicide: Precious Box has him kill Helena before committing suicide.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Upon realizing during The Boogie's Fine Tonight that he accidentally caused his wife's death.
- My Greatest Failure: He feels this way about his son dying in a car accident.
- No Social Skills: He's very blunt and straight-to-the-point.
- Parents as People: His stoic attitude stems from still not having come to terms with his son's death yet.
- Photographic Memory: Keith has a very precise mind for details.
- Only Sane Man: He's the only one that doesn't fly into a panic. Though he admits that he's aware of the fact that if he were to panic, the others on the tour would feel worse and make things more difficult.
- Sanity Slippage: Shows signs of this throughout the game. It's worst in the bad endings.
- Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: The manly man towards David.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Delivers one to the Boogie Man in the finale.
- The Stoic: Keith rarely speaks above a monotone.
- There Are No Therapists: Averted, they exist, but Keith doesn't seek help. He does, in the Happy Ending.
- Unable to Cry: He didn't even cry when his son died. Averted in the worst and best ending.
- Unreliable Narrator: It's hinted that his view of things in the castle might not be what the others see. He can hear a phone ringing, while David can't. In the Happy Ending, the mothers also mention not having seen some of the red writing that Keith did.
- White Shirt of Death: Keith drops the jacket and his white shirt gets stained with blood later.
- Workaholic: His devotion to his job, to avoid having to think of his son's death, has led to tension between him and his wife.
Helena Baring
Keith's loving wife.
Helena suffered badly when her son died and that, along with Keith's workhalic tendencies, has severely strained their relationship. She wanted to wait until after the tour, but decided to tell him about thinking of getting a divorce during the tour, because she felt like she couldn't take it much longer.
- Amicable Exes: Becomes this with Keith in the Precious Box ending. Averted when he kills her…
- Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: With her husband, Keith. She’s the gentle, kind girl to Keith’s broody, sullen boy.
- Decoy Damsel: She spent the majority of the game running around. She admits that she did it to distract the Boogie Man from Keith as much as possible, to keep her husband safe.
- Driven to Suicide: In the Happy Dream ending, she jumps out of David and Shirley’s window because she can’t live without Keith.
- I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Her considering divorce was for Keith's sake because she knew that he couldn't accept their son's death, since he was too busy taking care of her the whole time.
- It's All My Fault: She feels responsible over Keith's inability to deal with Tod's death since she knows he's too busy supporting her emotionally.
- What Does She See in Him?: Several of the others wonder why she and Keith are together, considering how different they are and his repeated refusal to spend time together on the tour.
Dick Anderson
Keith's superior officer. Gives him a month off from work and tickets for the castle tour.
- Bald of Authority: He's bald and a high-ranked officer in the police department.
- Happily Married: He's married and seems to be a very loving father to his kids, judging by how he mentions them.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Takes a pretty calm approach to getting Keith to take a break from work. He's also open-minded when Sophie implicitly mentioned her experience in Fairy Land from The Sandman (2014).
- Scary Black Man: Not that apparent with his sprite, but the in-game bio (which can be seen after completing the game) mentions he's physically intimidating. Subverted in that he's actually very nice to Keith and the other officers, as well as other characters in the game.
Eric Simpson
One of Keith's coworkers. Ambitious, but not very organized.
- Early-Bird Cameo: Turns out he's the detective who investigated David's cases during the events in The Crooked Man, namely when David almost accidentally killed his mother and when David found Duke's hanged corpse. He also interrogated David's two friends, Paul and Marion. This provides Keith information about David's troubled past without David telling him too much about it. Eric also recalls that David's colorblind in one of the endings.
Lance Kamal
A photographer working for a travel magazine, taking the tour as part of his job.
- Everyone Has Standards: Insists that he's not like the sleazeballs who work for gossip rags, and refuses to take pictures of people. In reality, it's less about having standards and more about losing his former job as a journalist for going too far in the past.
- Jerkass: Upon recognizing Keith, he immediately tells him that he's going to be watching him during their trip and sell information about him to his fellow paparazzi. He also makes sleazy comments about Helena, and considered flirting with her just to provoke Keith into making a scene so he'd have some juicier stuff to sell.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He's willing to help everyone survive, even though he keeps butting heads with Keith.
- You Monster!: Or rather, “you bastard”, but he says this to the Boogie Man when he forces Keith into a Sadistic Choice between saving either Richard or Sophie.
Stevie Small (spoilers)
The group's tour guide for their vacation.
- I Have a Family: He says this to Brendon to get him to spare him. Brendon just uses it as leverage.
- Madness Mantra: Brendon forces him to repeat "Turn on the lights..." while keeping him trapped in a dark room, intending to play a trick on Keith.
- Sacrificial Lamb: He is the first named character that Brendon kills, and shows that he is serious about his Deadly Game.
Brendon Dumont (spoilers)
The current owner of Livingstone Castle, who inherited it from his parents. Hopes to turn it into a vacation hotspot.
In truth, he is the antagonist of the game. Disguised as the Boogie Man, he decides to play an entertaining game with Keith: he kidnaps the rest of the tour group and will kill them one by one, until Keith is either the only one left or has managed to thwart all of the Boogie Man's traps.
- Bad Boss: He murders his nine servants and mutilates their corpses, even hanging one of them by their entrails, just to scare Keith.
- Bad People Abuse Animals: At one point, he beheaded a dog and presented its head in a box to Keith and David, purely as a sick joke.
- Big Bad: He is the one who traps the tour group in the castle and challenges Keith to rescue them from his grasp.
- Break Them by Talking: His favorite tactic to use. The Boogie Man loves to talk and often talks about the thing that hits one's nerves the most and sends them into a frenzy.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: He not only says he's challenging Keith to a game where he is 'the player', he also presents him with a 'tutorial mission' and refers to himself as the 'final boss'.
- Card-Carrying Villain: He outright refers to himself as 'the bad guy' during the scene with Lance, and his motivation is to make himself a monster feared by the public.
- Dead Guy on Display: His modus operandi; he loves to display the corpses of his victims, often theatrically, and leave them in the most open and easiest way for Keith to find them.
- Dramatic Unmask:
- Come Rain, Come Shine reveals him to be none other than Brendon, the owner of the castle that was 'killed' at the beginning of the Boogie Man's little game.
- In The Boogie's Fine Tonight, he takes the mask off and turns out to be Keith himself. Though this is indicated to be Keith's insanity screwing with him.
- Expressive Mask: His paper-bag mask changes with his emotions.
- Faking the Dead: He supposedly died in the beginning, but really just used a mannequin to make it look like he died.
- Fame Through Infamy: His goal is to use his planned massacre of the inhabitants and tourists in Livingstone Castle to become a feared killer throughout the world.
- Freudian Excuse: Near the end of the game, Keith and David can come across different rooms in a basement hallway. In one of the rooms is a stack of papers filled with rewritten Bible verses, and a diary entry where the writer mentions that they hate their life in the basement, as they are not allowed to do anything else but study the Bible and listen to their parents. Going by a locked room with shelves of movie tapes and movie posters all over the walls, it can be inferred that the writer of the diary entry was Brendon.
- Humans Are the Real Monsters: Unlike The Crooked Man and The Sandman, whose antagonists are a dead man's spirit and a fairyland creature, respectively; this game's antagonist is a normal human — and easily the most vile in the series thus far.
- Lack of Empathy: He really doesn't care about the people he's killing.
- Large Ham: Very theatrical in his speech. Or not, given how he talks to Sophie — it is indicated that his voice is actually monotone, and Keith just imagines it as hammy.
- Manipulative Bastard: He knows every character's personal Berserk Button to push, and will often use this to taunt them and break them down — for instance, he brings up David almost killing his mother.
- Nightmare Fetishist: Doesn't seem particularly bothered by Livingstone's tragic history, nor does he see anything wrong with trying to turn it into a tourist destination. Also, he has a fondness for Death Traps and literal bloody murder.
- Off with His Head!: How the Boogie Man offs him. Subverted, as he is the Boogie Man.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When he talks to Sophie, his voice is quite monotone, indicating that this might be how he really talks and the hammy theatrics are just a projection of Keith's.
- Pungeon Master: He makes a few puns throughout the course of the story. For instance:
- The first obtainable VHS video made by him says 'this tunes you on'.
- At one point, he makes David believe that Shirley's body was hacked apart and stuffed in a box. When Keith opens the box, he sees the decapitated head of a dog and a note saying to David, 'Don't worry, this isn't your bitch' (bitch as in female dog).
- Sackhead Slasher: He wears on his head a paper bag with a painted-on face, and is somewhat of a tribute to B-movie slasher villains.
- Sacrificial Lamb: Subverted. The Boogie Man seemingly kills Brendon to show Keith that he's serious about their little game, but the corpse was a fake used by Brendon himself.
- Soft-Spoken Sadist: Keith imagines his voice as hammy, but when we see him outside of Keith's perspective, he's instead very soft and quiet when talking about cruelly killing people.
- Spree Killer: In one night, he brutally murders his nine servants and a dog, then kills Stevie Small and puts the tourists in death traps; whether he succeeds in killing them depends on the player’s actions.
- Walking Spoiler: The Boogie Man actually being Brendon is a major reveal.
The Boogie Man (spoilers)
The supposed antagonist of the game, a creature who stalks children in their closet to kidnap them. In truth, he is unrelated to the main incident, as the Boogie Man seen is a fake.
- Early-Bird Cameo: The Boogie Man appears for a brief stint in The Sandman. Subverted, since the antagonist is not the real Boogie Man. Sophie reveals that the real Boogie Man's hands were ice-cold, while the fake one has warm hands, like a human's.
- Walking Spoiler: A major reveal is that he is a different person than the Boogie Man terrorizing the tourists.
Tod Baring (spoilers)
Keith and Helena’s deceased son. He was killed in a car accident prior to the main story.
- Death of a Child: He was five years old when he died.
- Like Father, Like Son: He had dark hair like his dad and he wanted to become a police officer when he got older.
- Posthumous Character: The game is set after his death. The best ending is Keith coming to terms with his son’s death.
- Walking Spoiler: His involvement in the story explains a lot about Keith’s character and the reason why his marriage with Helena is waning.
Introduced in prior games
David Hoover
The protagonist of The Crooked Man.
David seems to have gotten married to his fiancée, Shirley, after the events of The Sandman (2014), and the two are currently vacationing together. He originally intended to have his friends, Paul and Marion, join them on the tour, but because Paul became sick, he instead invited the Grundlers to come along.
- Berserk Button: Insulting his mother's death or mentioning his father's parenting. The Boogie Man and Keith purposefully trigger David at certain points. While the Boogie Man did it just to rile him up, Keith did it to verbally slap some sense into David and prevent him from doing something stupid.
- Big Brother Instinct: He feels like a responsible, older sibling to Sophie.
- Distressed Dude: Keith needs to rescue him twice from the Boogie Man's traps and prevents his death during cutscenes.
- Heroic BSoD: Falls into a brief one when the Boogie Man leaves behind a box and heavily implies that he chopped Shirley up and left her head inside it.
- Mistaken for Romance: Sophie’s father initially believed that David was Sophie’s boyfriend. This misunderstanding is cleared up, though.
- Parental Abandonment: David's father left his wife and son years ago.
- Previous Player-Character Cameo: He was the protagonist of The Crooked Man and had a cameo role in The Sandman (2014), and in this game, he has the largest role of the minor characters.
- Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: Can die in a gas chamber if the player doesn't realize how to avoid the toxic puddles and inhales too much of the gas.
Shirley Webber
David's wife.
Shirley is the opposite of her husband and is a very level-headed, independent woman that can and prefers to do things on her own. She was knocked out by the Boogie Man and left for David to find, before the Boogie Man got him, too. She becomes the de facto leader of the others.
- Crucified Hero Shot: She is tied to a cross in the castle's chapel.
- My Greatest Failure: In Happy Dream, she reveals to Helena how she was actually quite close to David's mother. But because Shirley had her own abandonment issues, she broke up with David and regrets not only that, but also that she only returned after his mother had already died.
- Opposites Attract: She's willing to state her mind, while David is a people pleaser.
- Parental Abandonment: The Boogie Man reveals that Shirley was abandoned by her parents. In Japanese, she's referred to as a 'coin-lock baby', a phenomenon of parents leaving their babies in coin locks.
Sophie Grundler
The protagonist of The Sandman (2014).
Sophie has become much more outspoken after the events of The Sandman and is trying to make the best of her relationship with her father now. The two were invited by David to join them on the castle tour, after his friends couldn't make it.
- A-Cup Angst: Keith invokes it on her in an ending, teasing her that she shouldn't fill up her head with fairy fantasies, but rather her chest because 'they look so pathetic that [he] can't even look at them'.
- Brutal Honesty: Says exactly what is on her mind, clearly having learned from her prior experiences not to bottle up her feelings.
- Cassandra Truth: She knows about fairies and their existence, compared to the others. She even mentions having met the Boogie Man once before, except it was the real one and not the fake in this one.
- The First Cut Is the Deepest: She used to have a crush on David, but gave up. In a cutscene, she tells Helena that she feels like she cannot fall in love anymore. It's hinted at that the pink jewel she made in The Sandman contained her love. Since the Sandman still has it, he might return it to her when she's older.
- Previous Player-Character Cameo: She was the protagonist of The Sandman (2014) and is briefly playable.
- Sadistic Choice: The Grundlers' first trap. Sophie and Richard are suspended over a hole, filled with sharp spikes at the bottom by rope — choosing to pull one rope will have the other dropped, meaning one of them has to die. Both get saved.
- Stepford Smiler: In The Sandman (2014), she was very passive and chose to never voice how she actually feels about things in her life and bottled everything up. After those events, though, she chose to speak up, toning this trope down a lot.
- Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: Can die from being attacked by dogs if the player finishes that sequence with 30 HP or less.
Richard Grundler
Sophie's father.
He's trying to better his relationship with his daughter after the events of The Sandman (2014) and is more open about how much she means to him. He came along for the tour, after David invited Sophie and him.
- Bound and Gagged: Done to him by the others, if Sophie dies.
- Boyfriend-Blocking Dad: The game's bio states that he initially thought David was Sophie's boyfriend and got angry that he was dating his daughter. The misunderstanding was cleared and he's obviously okay with their friendship.
- Papa Wolf: When Sophie goes missing, he's determined to venture the castle alone to find her. Gets worse if she dies.
- Sadistic Choice: The Grundlers' first trap. Sophie and Richard are suspended over a hole, filled with sharp spikes at the bottom by rope — choosing to pull one rope will have the other dropped, meaning one of them has to die. Both get saved.
- Smart Ball: Richard reveals in Come Rain, Come Shine that he had a suspicion that Brendon was the Boogie Man. When Sophie went missing, Keith calmed Richard down by saying that the Boogie Man would have widely proclaimed and presented her, had he caught or killed her. Those words made Richard realize that perhaps Brendon's supposed death was nothing but a fake. He didn't mention it, though, because he thought his amateur opinion may be stupid.
- Take Me Instead: During the above choice, Richard begs Keith to drop him, so Sophie can live.
- When You Coming Home, Dad?: He was mostly absent in The Sandman because of his work.
- Workaholic: Richard was one in The Sandman (2014), though he also did it because he felt like Sophie didn't want him around. With him being on this vacation, he's obviously trying to work on this.
- You Monster!: Says this to the Boogie Man upon learning that he kidnapped his daughter.
