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    Louis Everett

    Part 1 · St Jeoire

    Louis opens the game unable to sleep: thirty, married, with his own business, and still the same dream every night. In the morning Anne asks whether he has taken his pills; he hasn’t, and he can’t remember where he left them or the code to the safe they’re in. He finds the code written backwards in his diary, 1974, and reads it in the bathroom mirror.

    Félicienne rings to remind him of his appointment with Mr Belleville, a customer whose file he was meant to have ready. Louis gives Anne a lift to the village, where she tells him she has something important to say that evening. At the shop Belleville offers him an urgent, not entirely legal job that will take the whole weekend, and Louis, who badly needs the money, agrees to hear him out.

    Part 2 · Paris

    He wakes in room 315 of the Hôtel des Lilas in Paris with no idea how he got there, or what Belleville’s errand was. He recovers his wallet, his coffee and his pills, then spends the best part of two hours being sent between ticket desks 3, 6 and 8 to buy a ticket home, finally claiming a disability he doesn’t have.

    On the train he chats to a young woman who says she knows Anne. When the ticket inspector comes, Louis can’t find his ticket and hides in the train’s toilet, where he blacks out again.

    Part 3 · Back in St Jeoire

    He comes round in his best friend Jean’s bathroom. Jean pours him wine and tells him Anne has probably just left him for a while. At home the power is off and Anne is gone; his shop has been ransacked; the Vanderbrughe neighbours accuse him of beating her and set the dog on him.

    Louis collects evidence: photographs of the burglary, strange graffiti on the mailbox and the globe, and a recording of a noise on his phone line. He takes it all to the police station. When he plays the recording, the officers turn on each other and on themselves.

    Part 4 · San Lazzaro

    He wakes in the park of the San Lazzaro institute, an asylum in Sicily, where the staff insist he is ill. He trades favours with the patients and burns down the gardeners’ hut for Parx in exchange for a way out, but Parx betrays him. His cell turns up covered in writing he doesn’t remember putting there, and he is locked in a padded cell.

    Escaping through a well beneath the grounds, he finds a cult performing a sacrifice in a cave. The victim looks like Anne, the master of ceremonies is the asylum’s doctor, and one of the robed figures who spots him is Jean. Louis runs, and wakes up at home.

    Part 5 · Anne’s trail

    The police call him to the Love Woods, where a woman’s body has been found. At the funeral Belleville, Félicienne and Jean all console him. Louis realises the body isn’t Anne: she had dyed her hair before she left, and the dead woman’s is a different colour.

    Anne’s clues lead him to his late mother’s apartment in Paris, to Gisèle the caretaker who knew Anne as a child, to the EXIT, a partner-swapping club in Pigalle, and to Christine. He breaks into Saint Arman’s apartment and Belleville’s garage, finds his childhood friend Alex hanged in his flat, and opens Anne’s safe-deposit box.

    In the cave beneath the EXIT, Saint Arman tells him Anne was working against Belleville. Belleville arrives with Félicienne and sets the cave on fire, and Félicienne is shot dead. Saint Arman hands Louis a painting, and Louis performs the ritual from Anne’s Bible in his mother’s living room as armed men break down the door.

    Astrid ferries him to the Isle of the Dead from Böcklin’s painting. In an amphitheatre of statues he relives moments with Alex, Christine, Jean, the doctor and Saint Arman, this time choosing differently, and each memory gives him something he needs.

    Beneath the isle he finds Anne and Belleville by a lava lake. Anne throws herself at Belleville, a shot goes off in the struggle, and Belleville falls into the lava. Anne has been hit. Before she dies, Anne gives Louis her pendant and makes him promise to set them both free.

    Louis wakes naked in a cryogenic tube on the Damocles, an orbital medical station. Two doctors tell him that St Jeoire was FADE, a simulation he lived in during a long sleep in space, that Belleville was the program he wrote to stop himself waking, and that Anne did not survive. Louis doesn’t believe a word. The game ends with him swearing to find the door: “I HAVE TO WAKE UP!!!”

    Description

    Fade has no character list, so this description is the archive’s own, written from the game’s scripts.

    Louis Everett · 30, married

    An antiques dealer in St Jeoire, a village of four hundred people. Louis is happily married to Anne, short of money, and plagued by headaches, sleepless nights and the same dream every night. He takes pills every morning and forgets more than he should.

    Trivia

    • Louis is the only main character the end credits don’t list.
    • He is almost never seen: Fade is played from his point of view. The pictures here are the photographs Anne leaves him, showing him as a child.
    • The code to his safe is 1974, written backwards in his diary.
    • The whole game takes its name from the simulation he is trapped in, FADE.

    Artwork

    Every scene of the game that shows Louis Everett, as shipped, with the game’s own name for each picture.

    Part 5 · Anne’s trail

    Louis Everett, Anne’s photograph: two children and the Isle of the Dead
    Anne’s photograph: two children and the Isle of the Dead PART5 PHOTO 2
    Louis Everett, Anne’s photograph: his mother’s apartment
    Anne’s photograph: his mother’s apartment PART5 PHOTO3