characters
the victim
In the town of august, a 21-year-old
cellist who recently received a scholarship at julliard,
dorota shaw, was killed on Monday,
October 9th, around 9:00 PM while her parents were out at the
movies.
She was found strangled in her bed, naked. No signs of sexual
activity. She also had a gold coin in her mouth.
She has red hair.
spoilers
We learn from oscar that
dorota shaw was an only child,
collected thimbles, and helped out with the girl scouts with
her mom.
She's implied to be a lesbian, which she struggles with
considering her relationship with
oscar.
ellis suggests an alternate sexual
activity: oscar watching her from
the closet while she touches herself.
She has a beautiful accent.
ending credits spoilers
Cello is her hobby, but her real dream is to make a time
machine. She knows it's possible, and she wants to go back
and fix some mistakes. Make better choices.
sam
Sam is the main character of the game. Or, sort of. You start the
game with a man telling you that you're going to a town called
august and you're going to use your
shapeshifting powers. When you arrive,
chief dupont mistakes you for someone
else. He seems to be in on it, but he's not in on it. Still,
you're the main character, and if you die, the game is over.
chief dupont
chief dupont was in the station all
night, and there are tv monitors to prove it.
chief dupont is the police inspector
in charge of solving the murder of
dorota shaw. One of the game mechanics
is that you can go to him and he will summarize all of the
information you've gotten and put it together. It's not always the
whole story, but it's good for knowing what the game thinks you're
supposed to know based on what you've heard/seen. Because he's
part of the game like this, and he has an airtight alibi, he's not
a suspect.
spoilers
violet (who calls him by his first
name, Claude) implicates
chief dupont in helping
violet dispose of a body of a
homeless man named Mr. Hedges.
We hate him.
He's homophobic.
He's a cop and more than willing to do whatever he wants just
because of it.
bronwyn castle
bronwyn was logged in to a phone
service called Tarotasm. She's paid by the minute, and there are
voice recordings all night.
bronwyn castle is the leader of the
tarot readers who are staying in
violet gallacher's guesthouse. She's
maternal. According to lexie, she's an
Aquarius and her favorite color is green. She owns a tarot deck
called Mercury, which is special because it doesn't just give the
answers to questions, but asks the questions themselves. She's
also part of the story, with an airtight alibi, and there's a
section where bronwyn can even get
arrested so you have to deal with That before you can progress
narratively and there's a few bits of dialogue that are obviously
generalized enough that they're used at the end of Every murder,
and bronwyn appears by name, we
suspect that she is unkillable.
Spoilers
bronwyn discovered travelers (time
travelers) existed when she, inspired by Aldous Huxley's the
Doors of Perception, took a bunch of mescaline. People had
rainbow outlines and she could watch them walk around. But,
sometimes, people would just pop in. A new rainbow outline. And
then they'd join with another and... disappear. Melt into the
person.
She frequently uses nicknames for
lexie and
rayne. She calls
rayne "Ray" which isn't any shorter
but it's cute regardless.
She owns the Mercury tarot deck, a deck where it only answers
its own questions.
In the group readings, she drew the Ten of Swords.
violet gallacher
violet has no alibi. She can't
remember what happened the night before.
violet is our favorite character and
we love her. She runs the guesthouse where most of the characters
are staying. Her background includes cults, alcoholism, and alien
abductions. She has beautiful red hair (plot-relevant), a frigid
exterior with a butter-soft interior, and macabre sense of humor,
and we love her.
spoilers
She's in a relationship with
zak Weston, the town photographer. She
is very jealous, and when she's the killer it's a lot of focus
on their love life.
She takes clozapine to try and stop her "delusional episodes" of
being abducted by aliens. But she's perfect and telling the
truth always, so they're very real.
She's been abducted five times. She describes each time starting
with a dripping sound, then a metallic taste, and then she's
gone. Her head is thrust through the walls, which are made of
vines "dripping with pain," and when she turns her heads she
sees other girls just like her. Red-heads. Their heads are stuck
out like trophies, and sometimes they're rearranged. Pulled back
out into the void and then put back into the vines in a
different position. She's been a decoration for aliens.
She disposed of the body of Mr. Hedges, a homeless man who
stayed at the guesthouse recently.
She has a nine-year-old goddaughter named
sophia.
She reads erotic romance novels.
She likes the radio as it cuts through the "unbearable silence"
in her house.
She keeps a diary.
She ran in with a bad group of cultists who left her with a
monkey branded onto her back. After the incident, she began to
drink heavily, to the point of neuropathy in her fingers. She's
six months sober
She spray-painted "whore" on
ellis Munro's car in the parking lot
of the August radio station.
Her parents were physically abusive. She's an only child, and
once in a wedding someone else was the flower girl, so she
played the page boy. She thinks her parents would've preferred
her better because they'd always wanted a son.
rayne
rayne's alibi is that he was praying
in his room.
rayne is a tarot reader who arrived in
August with bronwyn. He's awkward and
stuffy. lexie describes him as a
"walking esoteric library," who can conjure up numbers and do
astrological calculations.
Spoilers
rayne is his stage name. He was born
Lawrence Petrovsky, and he was charged with murder in Hong Kong.
He was seen holding a girl, Victoria Cheng, by the ankle before
she fell to her death (off a building named "Flight").
bronwyn and
lexie
corroborate, however, that
rayne had been trying to save her,
but he wasn't strong enough to hold on.
Besides Hong Kong, he was also involved in their latest attempts
to stop travelers in Birmingham, Alabama. A man named Yuri
slaughtered three South African girls within hours of each
other.
You can kiss him if you catch the killer.
He's the only other person, besides
violet, who uses the French
pronunciation for "dupont"
He believes in nothing, but he also believes anything is
possible.
zak weston refers to
rayne meeting him the night before to
discuss something about dorota shaw.
So far, we don't know what that is. (Because we've never gotten
the ending where he's the killer.)
rayne went down to the radio station
to offer his services as a tarot reader for the local radio
show, Po and Munro. He is turned down over the course of the
game, mostly because ellis is turned
off by the way that he read her death in his tarot reading.
His foundation is orange and we constantly have to point it out.
In the group readings, he drew the Knight of Wands.
lexie taylor
lexie's alibi is that she was in her
room with bronwyn.
The little sister of the tarot reading group,
lexie owns a ouija board, with which
she communes with the dead. She's sweet, sassy, and a bit of a
flirt; she gets a crush on Sam immediately. She always seems
sincere, but is willing to do dirtier things.
spoilers
According to the tarot readers, as explained by
lexie, the spirit world is very far
away from our world, physically, which means it must take time
for information to travel between them and us. So they can tell
us things that happen in the future because, in the spirit
world, they've already happened.
She can be ruthless.
She's a fan of Ariana Grande.
She considers bronwyn a big sister
and loves her unequivocally.
bronwyn reassures
lexie that she's immortal to quell
her anxieties.
In a very uncomfortable scene with
zak, it's implied that she's very
comfortable with her body, but our only proof is when sam is
playing as lexie. It may not be
reflective of her actual behaviors.
In the group readings, she drew the Five of Swords.
oscar wainright
oscar's alibi was that he was playing
football all night, with dozens of witnesses.
oscar, the son of the vicar, was
dorota shaw's boyfriend. They'd been
seeing each other for about three and a half months, but they
"cared for each other." He appears supportive of
dorota shaw's endeavors, but he still
has doubts and is pretty quick to bounce back.*
spoilers
In exchange for removing all of the points on his driver's
license, oscar is tasked by
chief dupont to rummage in
bronwyn's room.
oscar's happy to bounce back quickly
after the death of dorota. He offers
to go out for coffee with
bronwyn on their second meeting.
He leaves partway through the story, tired of being questioned.
He plays football, but we don't know how well.
He was on board when
dorota shaw suggested a new game:
for him to hide in the closet and watch as she touched herself.
He also kept the dirty pictures
dorota shaw sent him straight to his
phone.
zak weston
zak's alibi is that he was in the
photography studio.
zak's the town photographer. He
photographed dorota shaw for the paper
when she got her scholarship, but that's not the only time they've
met. He has books about serial killers and the only drinks in his
photography studio is a skull of vodka. He apparently had a wife,
but now he doesn't and he lives in his studio.
spoilers
zak also does boudoir photography,
which is tasteful nudity to imply sexuality, but isn't overtly
so. dorota shaw had pictures taken
with him for ellis munro.
He's "in a relationship" with
violet. It's complicated. He says
they're in a relationship, supposedly, but also
zak denies it when sam and
chief dupont ask him about it.
If you go to his studio as lexie,
zak will attempt to drug you to take
explicit photos, maybe more. He pours
lexie a large glass of vodka, none
for himself, and doesn't mind when
lexie
insinuates she's younger than 21. If you drink from the glass,
you're drugged. If you're drugged, you "revert to your natural
form" and "no one wants to say that." If you stay to take
lexie's top off for
zak, then you'll revert and you have to
choose between changing into
violet or
zak. We changed into
violet, to which he left, and
thought we were a scary freak for an hour.
When he takes pictures, he can "step into them." Like holograms.
That's part of why he likes to take dirty pictures.
He's stalked ellis.
ellis munro aka munro
ellis's alibi is that she was on the
radio.
ellis Munro is one half of "Po and
Munro," the august local radio show.
she's been in august for two years,
and john pope ("Po") refers to her as
august's sweetheart. She has red hair,
but it may be dyed (plot-relevant). She had a stalker named Dennis
who chief dupont failed to prevent
from kidnapping her, but john was able to
save her instead.
spoilers
She's been in a romantic relationship with John for their entire
working relationship, when
john approached her putting her makeup
on and forcing himself on her.
She was in a relationship with
dorota shaw, someone she views as a
friend. They were in a friends with benefits situation, but
dorota shaw stopped being
comfortable with men touching her after she started her
relationship with ellis. It was
ellis' idea for
dorota shaw to make
oscar watch from afar as a sexual
activity.
Two characters say that they imagined
ellis to be blonde for some reason.
We recently had the realization that that could mean that
ellis dyes/dyed her hair, which would
be hard for anyone else to know because she's mostly on the
radio.
When you first try to show up at
ellis's as
bronwyn, she shouts that she
doesn't know you and forces you to leave. You have to "leave"
from a black screen, the only time in the game we've seen that.
She was working with zak to get
john's amethyst pendant to sell. When
pressed about it, ellis says that she
was going to use that money to help pay for
dorota shaw's living expenses so she
could play the cello full time and not have to worry. There is
no one to corroborate.
She knows that dorota shaw had the
wedding dress in her closet because it was her mother's, and she
wanted to get married someday.
If you try to hit on ellis and try to
proposition sex as oscar, she'll say,
"Sure, i'll let you put it in me... imagining
dorota shaw's... cold, lifeless dead
body... that way at least someone will be thinking of her." And
then kicks him out. Intense.
Something is OFF about this girl.
She "charmed the local electrical store" into donating free
radios so she could give them to people, including
violet's guesthouse.
Not in game, but she features in the sequel to this game.
john pope aka po
john's alibi is that he, along with
ellis, was on the radio the whole
time.
john is the other half of "Po and Munro",
providing dramatics and instigating dialogue. He's a happily
married man who cares a lot about
ellis. He is a local historian and owns
a pouch of gold coins. He's been doing radio for longer than
ellis and considers it his civic duty
to continue broadcasting despite the recent murder and the threat
to ellis's life.
spoilers
He came onto ellis on her very first
day at the radio station while she was doing her makeup, despite
being a married man. They've been in a romantic relationship for
the entire two years they've been doing the show. He's made
promises to leave his wife for ellis,
but he hasn't yet.
He tells you about the history of town of
august, explaining why he has an
amethyst pending and pouch of gold coins lying around.
He gets uncomfortably close to the camera during a lot of his
scenes.
His pupils are very dilated despite the very bright light.
agent x
We call him "The Man."
In the beginning of the game, you're standing in a room with a
white light and a deer head trophy on the wall. He explains the
"delete" mechanic of the gameplay and provides you with the meta
story and provides you with two rules.
- Don't get caught
- Never, ever change into a child
spoilers
When the game ends, if you caught the killer, you are augmented
from Agent 3.13 to 3.14.
If you are caught, you are deprecated (killed).
He tells you that your powers will run out if you transform too
many times. We have not reached this limit, if it really exists.
He tells you not to confirm the existence of travelers. They're
"not ready."