Nathaniel Blake

Nathaniel Blake is the player's character (PC) in Darkness Falls (2018-2019), the fifth game ever set in the Elsaverse. As a non-player character (NPC), Blake appears in several other titles as a side character. He is an experienced detective who works for the Sangrive Police Department and doesn't have any powers, although he is one of the detectives in charge of investigating cases involving people with powers, along with his partner Michelle Won. Blake was married to a woman named Samantha, who died in strange circumstances shortly before they got divorced; they had a daughter named Brenda who is also a police officer. Now Blake has a long-lasting yet secret sexual affair with Internal Affairs' investigator Lara and also has casual sex with several women on a regular basis.

Character Overview
Nathaniel Blake is an experienced and hardened detective who works for the Sangrive Police Department. He is quite good at his job, having solved 372 out of 402 cases in his career upon Michelle Won's arrival: he is observant and intuitive, and has a vivid imagination, but prefers to take an analytic approach to the cases before jumping to conclusions. For this reason, the assistant pathologist, Jannike, calls him "Ice Man". Although according to the Captain, Blake is a bit stubborn, he cares for the people and that's one of the reasons why he connects well with his new partner, Michelle Won, who shares that trait. His relationship with her, although always respectful, can be slightly altered by players in Darkness Falls, as they can choose Blake to behave as an antagonistic partner or as a supportive one.

Won comes as a replacement for Blake's last partner, Frank Smith, who was forced to retire due to his drug addiction; Blake, who had been covering up his partner for months while trying to help him, was also investigated by Internal Affairs but ended up being cleared. His secret relationship with IA's investigator, Lara, might have had something to do with this clearance. As their respective jobs make this relationship a forbidden one, they limit themselves to a casual sex affair, despite their obvious feelings for each other. They have known each other for years, as Lara has always been in charge of investigating him, but this professional relationship only became a private one after the death of Blake's former wife, Samantha.

Due to his job, Nathaniel Blake wasn't there enough for his wife, who ended up cheating on him; when he discovered it, they divorced almost immediately. As their daughter, Brenda, was already an adult woman, Samantha had to find a job. And, working as a receptionist in a shared office building, she died in a weird accident after the owner of the company next door tried to pull off an insurance scam by setting a bomb. Blake found her body, and two years later he still feels responsible for her death; this tragic event makes him especially sensitive around bombings, something that everyone in the Police Department is perfectly aware of, and has also hurt his relationship with her daughter, which seems almost non-existent despite her being a police officer too. Miranda, who seems to know Blake since he helped her after the accident that put her in a coma, advises him to talk about Samantha's death with someone he cares for, and he eventually confesses this burden to Won.

During his first weeks of work with Won, Blake has to face an unexpected series of cases with no logical explanation. Eventually, the detectives learn that some people in Sangrive seem to have unnatural powers, and they end up confronting a serial killer who is able to throw knives around and get them back from a distance. Following Won's intuition, Blake wears a vest that protects him from a potentially mortal wound when the killer throws a knife into his chest. The murderer is then subdued by a group of three women with powers, Alexis, Amanda Reid, and Anastasia Bertradino, who have been covertly following and helping the detectives for some weeks, as they wanted them to stop Charles Reyes. Accepting these women's requests, Won and Blake decide not to mention them in their reports to protect their privacy; however, Blake is surprised when Lara visits him some days later to ask him to change his official report, as the murderer's unnatural powers shouldn't be known by the general public. Blake reluctantly agrees to do as she says, after Lara assures him that Won's career won't be affected by this and promises to tell him more about powers.

From that moment on, Blake and Won are assigned every case that could involve a person with powers, under the premise of preventing those powers' existence to get out. Blake is intrigued by Lara's role in all of this and tries to get some info about her superiors out of her, to no avail. He also has his doubts about what these mysterious puppet masters are willing to do, which leads the detectives to carefully ponder their options when they catch another girl with powers. Due to this mistrust, when Lara introduces him to Theresa, a woman who has the ability to detect lies, and asks him if he knows other people with powers, Blake lies and denies it; much to Blake's surprise, Theresa covers his lie, raising even more questions about Lara's role.

Blake is considered an attractive man by many straight women, like Jannike (players can choose to have sex with her in the game Darkness Falls), but also by the department's admin, a shy girl named Eve who is infatuated with him, and even Alexis and Won, as both of them make some comments on the matter. Although Blake draws the line on partners and former partners like Detective Karen Thorntree, he takes this chance to flirt with them and has several casual sex partners besides Lara. The chief editor of the Sangrive Times, Hanne, is one of them; following Lara's suggestion, he uses this relationship to leak the info about a vigilante that is starting to act in Sangrive, in an attempt to prepare the ground to spread alternative theories in the hopes that powers won't become public knowledge. Blake and Won end up discovering that the vigilante is a woman named Beth Lagrange, who has an unnatural fighting skill; fortunately for them, and with the help of the journalist Hanne tasked with the case, Beth agrees to stop acting as a vigilante and the newspaper spreads the false info about her death.

Miscellaneous

 * Nathaniel Blake is a total cliché character, with his hardened attitude, his large trenchcoat, his cap, and his slightly short tie. This raised some mild criticism after the first release of Darkness Falls; however, this characterization worked as intended, as the game was supposed to be a tribute to classic movies and TV shows about criminal investigations.


 * Blake's outfit was included by Tora Productions as an easter egg in Life Changes for Keeley, one of their games set in another fictional universe, the Keeleyverse. In that game, the main protagonist, Keeley, wore Blake's clothes in a role-playing scene with her lover, Claryce.