Not to be confused with Enemies
The End is Nigh features many characters despite the end of the world. You can find surprisingly talkative skeletons and references to other games by the same creator, along with other creatures.
Ash[ | ]
Main character of the game.
Ash is a black blob with a missing right eye.
He has somewhat survived the first end of the world and has since been living in a damaged building in The End, playing video games on his console.
Ash is lonely, awkward, and, let's be fair here, an almost completely insane mass of tumory flesh. He seemingly used to be a human before the apocalypse, as the Nevermore Ending suggests.
Some of the NPC dialogues and Ash's ability to play video games on his console imply that his limbs aren't missing entirely, but are heavily deformed.
Ash's in-game sprite
"Realistic" Ash on the title screen
The Friend[ | ]
Parts of human corpses and a bomb core from the Machine, assembled by Ash into something that resembles an actual human being in order to escape the loneliness.
Assembling the Friend is the goal of the first part of the game. Ash must find the head in SS Exodus, the body in Golgotha, and the "heart" in The Machine, then place all three objects onto a hook in his house. After that's done, the Friend Cutscene can be played by interacting with the fully assembled Friend.
According to Ash, him and his Friend had a great time together after Ash made him, but after waking up the next day, Ash finds that the Friend is missing, and the world has gotten even worse.
By the time Ash finds the Friend in Ruin, the "heart" grows into a large brightly glowing orb with its own gravitational pull. The overheating bomb core eventually explodes in the Acceptance Ending. Alternatively, Ash can jump into the orb, leading to the Nevermore Ending if he has collected enough tumors.
Friend's head
Friend's body
Friend's "heart"
Ash after placing the last Friend piece on the hook
NPCs[ | ]
NPCs are various characters Ash can interact with in the game, by talking to them. When a conversation with an NPC is initiated, a dialogue box will appear above it and the player will be able to go through NPC's text.
There are different kinds of NPCs, visually, but almost all of them serve the same purpose, providing context about the world and occasionally delivering tutorial information.
Stevens are the exception and are the only NPCs talking to whom is necessary for the full completion of the game.
Dialogues of each NPC are listed on the pages of areas in which they appear.
Trivia[ | ]
- According to Edmund, Ash lost his right eye due to "negligence".
- Steven is both the main character of Time Fcuk and a boss from The Binding of Isaac, and also has a cameo in Aether. All 3 games are made by Edmund McMillen, the co-creator of The End is Nigh. As Edmund states, Steven is the glue holding his games together and represents the passage of time.
- In The End is Nigh, Steven appears in many forms. In the first half of the game he appears as four large blobs, then in Blight he shows up as a regular-sized NPC, and finally he can be seen in the Nevermore Ending in his humanoid form.
- Isaac - an NPC seen in Anguish both appears as the main character in The Binding of Isaac, and also has a cameo in Aether.
- A poster of The Binding of Isaac can be seen in Ash's room in the intro cutscene. This implies that The Binding of Isaac exists as a video game in the world of The End is Nigh and explains the appearance of Isaac as an NPC in Anguish as Ash hallucinating a familiar character.
- Gish - an NPC seen in Blight is both a boss from The Binding of Isaac, and the main character of the game Gish, which is also made by Edmund McMillen.
- Guppy - an NPC seen in Ruin was Edmund McMillen's cat, and it also appears in The Binding of Isaac.
- The Aether monster - another NPC seen in Ruin is one of the 2 main characters from Aether.
- Different NPC types tend to provide different kinds of information. Ascender blobs (white) and ghosts tend to very vaguely predict Ash's future, descender blobs (black) provide some context on Mother's importance in the world of The End is Nigh, and skeletons most commonly serve as tutorial NPCs, reminding Ash and the player what they can and cannot do. These rules are loose and there are exceptions to those.
- It is not entirely clear how real many of the NPCs are, and how many of them are figments of Ash's imagination. Due to Ash being moderately insane, relying on his perception of the world is problematic. That being said, the game isn't too concerned with such details.
See also[ | ]
- Levels - the page from which individual area pages can be accessed. Area pages contain more details regarding NPCs which appear in those places.
- Cinematics - a list of animated cutscenes, in Ash can be seen talking and interacting with the Friend.
- The Future - a set of challenge areas accessed with the help of Stevens. Dialogues and additional information about Stevens are available on that page.