Trust Yourself: An Analysis/Theory of Orpheus, Nightmare, and Villain Charm
It's been a bit since my last analysis post and this is a topic I don't know that I've seen anyone talk about! That I think about a normal amount! So today we're going to talk about Orpheus and his plurality, in the context of IDV's timeline - specifically focusing on the management of the manor games and the detective's return to the manor - in which I'd like to pose the questions:
- When did Nightmare/Villain Charm come into existence? Can they even be said to be the same?
- Who actually ran the manor games?
- What is Villain Charm's goal in the present day?
TO BE CLEAR: this is not an analysis on DID (mis)representation in IDV. This is specifically analysis and theorycrafting on what the narrative is trying to tell us - the canon of what is happening, not whether it's accurate to real life plurality. As such, I will be touching on some things that IDV does that aren't accurate, and this is not to agree with its portrayal of these things.
Now! Onto the analysis. Buckle up, detectives, it's gonna be a long one.
Let's start with clearing up our naming. For ease of understanding, throughout this analysis I'm going to be referring to Orpheus, Nightmare, and Villain Charm as separately defined characters (and I'll get into why I'm separating Nightmare and Villain Charm later, trust me it'll be less confusing this way even if there's overlap between all three). So, from here on out:
Orpheus will refer to the "main" identity, the system host, the guy we generally understand as the 1.0 protagonist and everything that entails - from kid to medical researcher to novelist to detective.
Nightmare will refer to the character we see throughout Time of Reunion - the hunter stalking Darkwoods, mixing the drugs in his trailer, etc. The guy with the bird mask.
Villain Charm will refer to the other side of the 10-years-later amnesiac detective. The alter that guides his path through the manor.
With that out of the way, let's get into what the prologue and Time of Reunion led us to assume about these three and how we've carried those assumptions into Ashes of Memory.
The Detective's Narrative
The beginning of the game introduces us to Orpheus the Detective, the man who lost his memories 10 years ago after a fire at Oletus Manor. He returns to the manor due to a commission letter penned by the mysterious James Reichenbach, asking him to locate the man's missing daughter who was last seen near the manor. During this time, we also meet Villain Charm - as Orpheus puts it, "another soul" that had "awakened" in his body.
To spare you all a full summary of this part of the game, as I'm going to assume anyone reading this has played through or watched it, I'll skip ahead a bit and circle back to its details later. In short, the initial narrative Orpheus gives us for Villain Charm is that he's a separate person from himself - he even likens his existence to witchcraft - and one that isn't to be trusted, even if he accepts guidance from him sometimes.
Then there's Nightmare. After Orpheus consumes the drug Hydra to begin reassembling his lost memories, he constructs a....very elaborately incorrect narrative, which we'll dig partially into (though I won't do a full deep dive on it because that strays into other topics entirely and isn't what this analysis is for).
He concludes he was a repeat subject of the experiments who had his memories wiped between games with the rest. However, due to developing a collection of alters (including Villain Charm, shifting from his previous narrative) as a result of the repeated trauma, his alters were able to retain some memories and help him to fake his own death to escape the games. He then hid in the manor's hidden rooms to survive, until people he later determines were his wife and daughter arrived at the manor. Hoping to save them, he follows them to their game in Darkwoods. It's a bit unclear from here on exactly what he thinks happened to either his "wife" or his "daughter" (which I think is intentional but not too relevant here specifically), but he knows there is a hunter after the group - Nightmare. Nightmare ends up hunting him as well, until Orpheus opens a valve that unleashes the memory-wiping drug, Dionysus (formerly called Mnemosyne, the name changed for unknown reasons) into the air. He falls unconscious and loses his memories amidst fire taking over the forest.
So, to Orpheus, he is a victim of the games while Nightmare is the games' mastermind and therefore not himself. Villain Charm, meanwhile, is just one of the many alters who ostensibly came to be during his participation in the games and is the only one still around.
Pushed Assumptions
Now, all of that was just what the game tells us that Orpheus himself believes about who he is and what's going on. It isn't counting what we learn from the various videos and pieces of text we get outside of the prologue and ToR (and even details present in the game at that time) which tell a bit of a different story.
So, following the release of Time of Reunion and its associated material, what were we as players supposed to assume about the narrative?
Well, given that Nightmare's name in-game is "Orpheus", I think it's more than safe to say that the game tells us Orpheus and Nightmare are two sides of a coin, at minimum sharing a body. Given that we see both Villain Charm and Nightmare's handwriting are more or less the same, I'd say it's also pretty strongly pushed that Villain Charm IS Nightmare 10 years after the "final game" - that is, Orpheus's alter who was running the games and who has retained his memories of doing so where Orpheus hasn't.
That actually leads me to the next point - that we're told in a few ways that Nightmare was the game-runner. For one, his backstory trailer shows him making the drugs which serve as the games' main mechanism; his voiceover also points to him knowing the purpose of these experiments. This is all further supported by the ending of ToR, which shows the bird mask fall from Orpheus's hand as he falls unconscious from the drug.
Then there's the live action video which showcases in no uncertain terms that Orpheus and Nightmare are of one body. It also introduces us to the idea that Orpheus has, through Nightmare, written himself a narrative in which he is both the hero and the villain.
So, Orpheus was partially correct in his conclusions but also way off base. Yes, this "Nightmare" was running the games while he himself was an ignorant victim. Yes, the other soul sharing his body that we call Villain Charm is a sinister being we can't trust. But, he didn't escape the games by faking his own death because he remained a part of them the entire time, seeing as his body was in use by their ringleader - the same ringleader that still resides within him. That all makes sense, right? Time of Reunion wouldn't just lie to us repeatedly about basically everything, right? .......Right?
I mean, let's just take a look at Ashes of Memory.
Since 1.0 more or less told us that we have Nightmare and Villain Charm as the same being, running the games, we bring that assumption with us to 2.0. Thus, when we see Orpheus peacocking onto the scene of AoM, it becomes our assumption that it's Nightmare we're looking at. After all, this guy is clearly pushing everyone's buttons to get reactions out of them, and is repeatedly guiding the cast to where he wants them to be in the games. He very very evidently knows a lot about what's going on. Very clearly, this is the guy running the games, and we know from 1.0 that the guy running the games is Nightmare who is also Villain Charm. Case closed.
But....do we know that, for sure, 100%?
Villain Charm: What We Actually Know & Conflicting Theories
Let's start from the beginning, without the assumptions. And not, you know, looking at things we saw when Orpheus was drugged out of his mind. What confirmed pieces of information do we know about Villain Charm, without any doubt or inference on our parts?
We know he and Orpheus share a body. We know that there are times that Orpheus blacks out, and Villain Charm starts fronting. We know that when Orpheus comes to after this, he's covered in small injuries and his neighbors seem uncomfortable at the sight of him. We know that this hasn't been the case for all 10 years of his amnesia, as he mentioned that it started happening after he turned to alcohol and has increased in frequency even as Orpheus has sobered up. Despite all of this, we know that Orpheus asks Villain Charm for help multiple times in uncovering the manor's mysteries.
And...that's....it. That's basically all the 100% confirmed information about this guy. The rest is inference, or comes to us after Orpheus has taken drugs that we know alters his mental state and makes his perspective more untrustworthy than it already is, or is just...pushed, in small and large ways, by things like Da Capo and the live action video and Villain Charm's skin description ("Rogues move like rogues do and they act like them also. It's time to get rid of the weak guy!")
With that in mind, how can we be sure he is what we think he is?
Let's interrogate Orpheus's own theory in the prologue (before ToR), that Villain Charm is "another soul." Not himself, but some supernatural being possessing him. Surprisingly, there's actually some evidence we have supporting this.
For one, he doesn't behave exactly like a normal alter could be expected to - he specifically wakes up when Orpheus is unconscious, including through alcohol or drugs. Orpheus calls him to communicate by taking a small amount of the drug intended to induce a comatose state, and Villain Charm is able to awaken and be mobile enough to carve his response into Orpheus's skin. More strange than that is the ways that he manifests when Orpheus is initially testing the drugs in the basement. When Orpheus gets stuck in the loop of smelling Dionysus, forgetting that he did that, and then doing it again, Villain Charm snaps him out of it by leaving an ink message on his arm. We don't see him write it - we only see Orpheus's hand falter reaching for the bottle as if out of his control, and then he looks down to see writing on his skin: "if you forget this, you got it."
Now, that being said, I don't personally subscribe to this possession theory, and I'll explain why in a bit. But, I think it's worth mentioning because there's not actually anything that directly and clearly refutes it. In this theory, Villain Charm is a supernatural entity - possibly connected to Yidhra, given her very strongly implied connections to the main plot - that is controlling Orpheus's body for...some reason. I'll be honest none of these theories are very good at explaining the "why" of what Orpheus/Nightmare/Villain Charm does but that's been true of any theory about why the games happened. There's just too much about that we don't know.
What evidence do we have against possession theory? Well, from a meta point, we don't have high hopes that IDV is....great when it comes to a realistic portrayal of DID. Given, you know, Jack the Ripper. So, if Villain Charm fronts when Orpheus becomes genuinely unconscious, then you know, I think I could believe that's just how the devs think DID works and so isn't a very strong point in favor of this theory. As for the more magical elements, they occur after Orpheus has, as mentioned previously, inhaled the fumes of mind-altering drugs.
We literally cannot trust anything that he sees or experiences from that point (possibly even from when he first enters the manor, if the drugs were in the air somehow). I mean, just look at the photo of "Reichenbach's daughter" - after he has experience with the drugs, he starts to see her as Little Girl.
Maybe Villain Charm wrote on his skin with a pen while briefly fronting - or maybe he didn't write at all, and what we saw was just Orpheus's hallucination, possibly brought on by Villain Charm in some strange way. Not to get too into it because it's a separate deal, but there's also the slightly more out there Dreamlands theory or otherwise the-manor-is-magic-somehow theory - the idea, basically, that the space itself is supernatural in some way, or that by entering the manor, Orpheus has been transported to a version of the manor that exists somewhere like the Dreamlands - in which case, not only is what we see even less trustworthy but maybe Villain Charm now has capabilities he didn't before as just an alter, because the space operates under different rules.
Do I think any of that is exactly how it happened? Couldn't tell you! It's all just to say that there's multiple ways of explaining what we saw without Villain Charm being an expressly supernatural entity. I personally think it's more likely that Villain Charm is a genuine alter, given the "trust yourself" mantra repeated by the narrative and because Orpheus's heated denial that Villain Charm is "himself" just makes sense with how wrong he is about everything else and the fact that he currently has no actual clue who he is beyond the past 10 years. Then, well, there's a bit of admitted confirmation bias in the fact that this version of things supports my other main belief that inspired the making of this post: who, truly, was running the manor games during and before Ashes of Memory.
Sifting through Ashes (& Birthday Letters) (& that Untranslated Set of Pages from an Offline Package) for the Answer to Everyone's Favorite Question, "Who's That Death Game Host?"
As I discussed in the previous sections, the dominant assumption I see when it comes to Ashes of Memory is that the "Orpheus" we see over the course of the story is in fact Nightmare, who is fronting in order to manipulate the game to go in his desired direction. But, what we're trying to do here is to look past our assumptions and put together what we know from facts - so what evidence do we have that would tell us Nightmare is running the games?
On a very basic level, there's the fact that Orpheus has a different personality than the guy we see throughout AoM. He's calculating, yes, but more serious and reserved. Melly's 2024 birthday letter touches on this - explaining that the "Orpheus" she knew years ago was near the opposite of the one she sees now, whose personality seems almost borrowed from one of the others she knew back then (I'm going to call him Sam Bourbon. I know it's not confirmed, but most of the evidence points toward that and if you disagree, then it doesn't have much bearing on this theory anyway, so just look past it I guess). Sam in this letter is described as "flamboyant" and of a "caustic wit", compared to the introverted Orpheus. And before anyone mentions it, yes I know she says the opposite thing in the Affection System dialogue - that Mr. Bourbon is the reserved and serious one of the contradictory pair. Given that both of these opposing tidbits are sourced from Melly, I'll just ask which one you think she was more likely to be lying in: her private diary, or a conversation with a near-stranger that we know for a fact she's keeping things from already.
So, "Orpheus" is using Sam's personality. Maybe whenever Nightmare came into being, he was modeled off Sam - a medical researcher capable of manipulation and casual cruelty to do what he believes needs to be done.
Personality aside, what else supports Nightmare being the game-runner? Well, there's everything we mentioned from ToR, for one. Nightmare's backstory trailer basically says it outright, and Da Capo strongly implies an inner conflict between Orpheus and Nightmare that would support the idea that Nightmare is acting against Orpheus's will. Then there's the Memory Pages.
The Memory Pages, a set of untranslated notes and diary entries contained in the Netherwalker's Offer offline package back in 2020 (for those unaware), are a bit of a controversial source given the, well, lack of an official translation. There's a fan translation on the id5 wiki, though, that's been pretty well accepted through the years to my knowledge.
They don't tell us much concretely about Nightmare - but I'd say they give points both to support and refute this viewing of things. I'll get into the contradictory pieces in a moment, but the main piece supporting Nightmare as the participant in AoM comes from the Memory Pages' inclusion of Alice's diaries during the game. She seems aware of the fact that "Orpheus" is her childhood friend, or at least strongly suspects it, and at one point says that he seems to have forgotten her.
This is a large part of the prevailing narrative that Nightmare is behind the games. After all, if he doesn't remember Alice, then he would have no qualms using her like an experimental subject like everyone else - and it makes more sense for the alter made to run the games to have forgotten her than for the person who once would have done anything for her.
But are the Memory Pages canon and unretconned? Perhaps. The first letter included in them went on to be Orpheus's first birthday letter in 2023 with no notable alterations. However, it's worth nothing that the dates on Alice's diary entries are at odds with the game's timeline. The game tells us that the "final game" which Alice, Norton, Melly, and Orpheus participated in took place July 15th, yet Alice's diaries in the Memory Pages span from the 12th to the 16th - one day after the scheduled game. Now, we could assume that maybe the game lasted more than one day, and we already imagined Alice took her diary with her to the game given what we see in the 2.0 tutorial cutscenes. Except, the 16th entry doesn't really seems like it was written during or even after the game. Cryptic as her writing is here, she seems to still be actively investigating, stating, "No progress has been made, yet there are more and more things beginning to trouble me..."
In short, I'd take evidence from the Memory Pages with a grain of salt. There's some things in them which are objectively canon, and other things that are either contradictory to canon or otherwise unclear. Still worth mentioning, but not worthy of being taken as hard fact.
Back to the theorizing, I'd like to look at one of our previous assumptions again. If we operate under the theory that Nightmare is running the games, would this also place Orpheus as an unaware and unwilling participant? Let's start with the matter of "Orpheus's" memory. Does the "Orpheus" we see throughout Ashes of Memory know who Alice is? Well, nothing can be said for certain, and there's evidence in both directions, but I'd personally say...yes, he does.
Looking at Ashes of Memory itself, there's a few things of note. We more or less know that during her time with the man who adopted her, Vilhelm Lamb/Lord Melbourne, she went by Eury Lamb - or Ollie Lamb, as she said in her application to the Spectrum newspaper in her 2025 birthday letter (I figure one of the two is just a translation error of the other). And the code letter given to her near the end of Ashes of Memory is "LAMB." So, at minimum, "Orpheus" knows Alice's alias.
From there, we can make a reasonable extrapolation that he knows she's Alice Deross too; Alice's 2025 birthday letter has an individual we can at least assume with some confidence is Orpheus interacting with her while she's with Lamb - including helping her escape from him. So, if Orpheus knows about Eury/Ollie Lamb, and cared enough to try to free her during that time, it would stand to reason that he at least knew back then that Eury/Ollie Lamb was Alice Deross. During the time of the game, as well, he had a breakfast set out for her that included things he would know that she liked, if he knew anything of her personally.
The Memory Pages offer a tidbit here as well. In a diary talking about the cultivation of the plant we now know to be Delphi, the writer mentions that "there isn't much time left. She's already suffered enough."
Now, it's technically not clear that Orpheus wrote this. But I'd say context handily points toward it, considering it's talking about test subjects and Delphi and the fact that the rest of the Pages were basically entirely focused on Orpheus and Alice. The writer could be Nightmare, but then the specific mention of "she" in a caring manner would imply that Nightmare still has knowledge and affection for Alice, which would be at odds with the idea that Orpheus lost himself to Nightmare while running the games.
The most damning evidence that Orpheus is at least aware of, and likely even participating in, the running of the games is the Affection System dialogue. As he speaks to Alice, he lets go of the manipulative persona and is, dare I say, openly affectionate with her. Repeatedly. Near constantly, at the final affection level. I mean, just, look.
"Precious", "I admire the agility of your mind", basically imploring her to consider her own safety....
Like???????
He starts talking about wanting to spend time with her just talking about mundane things???? He'd be delighted to??????? He cares for her so much I want to cry.
And that's before even getting into his "story" he tells her, about the person seeking revenge for the attack on the manor when they were children. The early parts of the story all seem like his typical appropriation of her backstory - the child of the Derosses who survived the attack, and was then sent to a mental hospital that he later escaped from. He then leads into talking about what I assume is something like what he did between then and AoM, with taking back the manor and all that (assuming it isn't. all lies. because this is Orpheus we're talking about). The climax of the story, though, is where it gets really interesting, because the protagonist stops being him and starts being Alice.
He mentions the protagonist's "close friend" who was indirectly the cause of the attack, allowing the bandits to gain possession of the piccolo that opened the gates. We know that close friend was Orpheus himself, and his parents the forest rangers that betrayed the Deross family. In this story, he's basically asking Alice whether she blames him for it all.
Which, from the exchange that followed, it seems that Alice never even considered blaming him. And that fact stuns Orpheus into silence, until he comes to a thoughtful smile.
All of that to say that who we talk to in the Affection System is, in my mind at least, 100% Orpheus. Not Nightmare, not even Villain Charm - Orpheus. And given his other conversation topics, about the things he's researched for his stories and even just the fact that despite him clearly knowing who she is, he refuses to tell her his own identity, really makes me think he's aware of the games and what they're for. He even likens his current reality to that of the "noble thief" archetype in stories, the hero unable to remove his mask.
So at minimum, if I'm at all correct, Orpheus knows about the games and helps to run them - it isn't all Nightmare. But then, if Orpheus knows, the justification for it being Nightmare at all becomes significantly weaker. He remembers Alice. He's a willing participant in the running of the games. The only thing that's really left is his differing personality, which can be just as easily explained by him acting - putting on Sam's persona to guide things where he wants them. He even mentions in his 2025 birthday letter that he was planning to revert to his "original identity" - implying he's put more than one mask on in all these endeavors.
So, this is my thesis here: at the time of Ashes of Memory, and for all the games that happened before then, the person running the games was never Nightmare at all, but Orpheus alone.
Then What the Heck Is Up with Nightmare?
Now that we're moving away from analysis and into full-blown theory, I won't bury the lede: I don't think Nightmare exists. Hear me out on this.
While I acknowledge it is in no way confirmed, I'm going to be running with my theory that Orpheus ran the games, without Nightmare, because there's largely no reason for Nightmare to exist as an alter at the time if I've analyzed things correctly. Yes, Orpheus went through horrible trauma that could have easily caused him to develop DID - I'm not arguing that logic. Rather, I'm arguing that the current proposed narrative purpose for Nightmare is to bear the cruelty of running the games in order to protect Orpheus's mind, and since I've concluded that Orpheus is at minimum fully aware of the games, this purpose is moot.
So what's with the bird-masked hunter? We see him in ToR, associated out-of-game material, and in the 2.0 tutorial cutscenes. Or, to put it another way, we see him solely through the lens of people who have been drugged.
We know that Siren's Song is the drug that causes people to hallucinate the characters' hunter forms. We've had this proven by Margaretha seeing Smiley Face and Soul Weaver in Closing Night while under its influence. Alice also saw Bloody Queen in Kreiburg Racecourse and Fool's Gold in Darkwoods, though we don't know when she was drugged to cause that to happen - there were more than enough opportunities, to be honest. We can easily assume that every participant of the "final game" was drugged by Siren's Song, thus Alice seeing Orpheus as Nightmare would be entirely reasonable.
Then there's Time of Reunion, wherein every scene that has Nightmare in it is when Orpheus is - you guessed it - heavily drugged. The entire "final game" sequence was just the scrambled memory reconstruction of Orpheus taking Hydra. None of it is 1:1 for what really happened, and since Orpheus was in denial of his own role in the games, he created an image of the Hunter stalking him - the villain behind it all, separate from himself, trying to kill him. Just as he created the image of the Little Girl superimposed onto Alice, because he remembered feeling protective over her. And if the image of this Nightmare happened to be the same as Alice's hallucination in the tutorial, then that's just narrative consistency and not wanting to make another model, really. Not to mention the fact that the bird mask could very easily be a real thing he wore, likely to keep out the fumes of Siren's Song in the air - or something like that, anyway.
Narratively, I think Nightmare is a construction made of the hallucinations of those under the influence of Siren's Song and Orpheus's own rejection of the reality that he was the one running the games - NOT Orpheus's alter.
But then, going back to our assumptions from earlier, where does that leave Villain Charm?
Back to the Manor: The Origin & Purpose of Villain Charm
This is the last section I swear.
We're deep into theorizing now, so I'm once again going to be running with my conclusions from earlier: that Villain Charm is an alter and not a possessing entity, that Orpheus was the one running the games, and that Nightmare was never an alter of his.
So, Nightmare's not an alter, but Villain Charm is. Why?
10 years ago, Orpheus lost his memories at the end of the "final game" due to the drug Dionysus. An unspecified number of years later, he started having blackouts that he initially attributed to alcohol, but which persisted after he sobered up. He determined that another soul had awoken within him - Villain Charm. Villain Charm, who seems to know about Oletus Manor and the contents of Orpheus's missing memories.
While Orpheus's research during the games may have indicated that memories lost through Dionysus would never return (at least according to the Memory Pages), he had no data on the long-term effects of the drug to work from.
It was 10 years without Dionysus. It wouldn't be much at all to say that his memories could have started returning to him, in bits and pieces. Only, it was too much - too much trauma, too much cruelty at his own hands - so his mind sought to protect itself from the memories. It's my belief that Villain Charm was born to carry these returning memories during the 10-year period before Orpheus returned to the manor.
Then what is Villain Charm trying to do now? He tells Orpheus to trust himself - meaning, trust in Villain Charm as an extension of himself. He guides him to uncover the manor's mysteries.
This is the point at which I have to admit I can only vaguely theorize. There just is genuinely not enough information about why the games happened in the first place to be able to solidly explain the motivations of an alter that remembers running them.
If Orpheus is right about not being able to trust Villain Charm, then he could want to start the games up again (maybe with more sinister intentions than Orpheus had the first time, if IDV is yet again going for the evil alter trope).
It's worth noting that when Orpheus finds a page from a participant's diary in the prologue, he finds an entry dated several days ago - implying that even though he hasn't been at Oletus, the games have continued.
While, as mentioned, we can't take anything he sees as hard fact, this was still prior to him entering the basement and actively taking Siren's Song. It's certainly possible for it to be real. Meaning, something is still happening at Oletus Manor. Games are still being run, by a different ringleader.
Maybe Villain Charm wants to investigate this, find out who's taken over their game.
Or maybe, the alter that was made to carry Orpheus's memories of the past - his traumas and his joys - is trying to lead Orpheus home, to find what he's lost. To continue his mission from so long ago, to seek out and protect the one he cares about most. Maybe he's guiding Orpheus into the underworld to find his Eurydice once more.
