The one useful thing about a creative writing degree, the Novelist carries a typewriter that can perform multiple tasks. For starters, at the beginning of the game, you can tell the host what kind of room you want, and a random room on the map will be overwritten in favor of that, automatically giving you a home base. In general, this role incorporates a smooth mix of deception and pulling strings behind the curtains I really appreciate, between being able to put players out of your way or into your favor by writing them into stories against their will and putting fake events into someone's results. And if that's Still not enough perks for you, you can get plenty more faster than anyone thanks to having an extra bond point to use towards NPCs. Any one of these on their own would make for a top-tier role, but I'm astonished that with this, you'd be able to use any of them in one night and every night (besides the room one, obviously). Between Alan making it all the way to Night 8 and Dodo probably being able to make it just as long if not longer if not for his dropping out, Despair truly created a monster by creating a faction just as busted as Crimson Eye without the handicap of the added suspicion.

The Crimbo Researcher can make one-use devices that can replicate the abilities of Anomalies, effectively allowing them to take use of them without removing them from their cells. Busted, needless to say. You can also do this with a player with an Anomaly role, albeit at the risk of looking suspicious, but it's a worthy enough tradeoff. Almost getting weary, finding different ways to say "this Crimson Eye role is obviously among the best in the game at the cost of looking shady as fuck at any given moment".

The CEBM can put a creature of their own design on the map, complete with a special powerset, and upon freeing it from their cell, it will do whatever you say. While the spans of what the monster can potentially do are too vast to really rank, it's essentially a player-controlled NPC with no restrictions that can be revived (albeit with some effort), and that by itself should be enough.

The CE Infiltrator has various gadgets at their disposal that can help them make short work of exploring the map with ease, such as cards that can copy a player's access level and a charge that can open any door on the map regardless of the level, as well as other odds and ends like bombs that can throw a room into total darkness and shields that can reflect someone's role power back at them. I mean, what do you want me to say here? Another role that, as expected of Crimbo, carries a wealth of useful tools with no drawbacks besides the fact that you're inherently Crimbo? It's 2 AM and I just finished reading JoJo for 3 hours, I'm giving this a seen-from-miles-away S-tier ranking and will let that speak for itself. I'll have at least five more Kitchen KG writeups done by the end of the week. Goodnight.

BPI-4582 is a parasitic organism that can develop a new freakish mutation ability each night, or hold off for one night for the sake of an even stronger mutation the following night. Note that I'm writing this after the 4386 entry, and this is simply that role but with more frequent ability upgrades; the powers he had at when he died included portrudable mantis arms that frankly could not be found as a murder weapon during an investigation and wings that allowed for faster travel and negating hazards, so I mean it when I say that if he didn't die when he did, so far this is the role that's more capable of carrying its player to survivor-status than any other (even if there are crimbo roles that are stronger, the affiliation with that faction alone invites much more scrutiny than an independent role like this). The only real downsides are weaknesses to fire, poison, and being crushed, but I will honestly contend that means little when harms such as those are barely carried out in a non-lethal fashion. With this role, you'd barely be more vulnerable to those afflictions even without these terrifying advantages.

The Librarian starts the game with a key that can turn any doorway into a portal into a massive interdimensional library and basically allows for instant access for any room the player has already entered. Absolutely crucial in games with a map as wide-spanning as this one, and while the library can be discovered by other plays for obvious balance reasons, the route you take in it can't be traced back, thankfully. And because this doorway is permanent until the next night, it effectively shuts off access to the room the door would lead to otherwise and creates very interesting map control on top of blocking off investigating. In the library, you can also read about one Anomaly per night, and while certain other players can do this, they need to work up to that bond level with a certain NPC and have to stop by that Anomaly at night to examine them, whereas you can do it from the safety of your Backrooms book sanctuary. This comes with the quite glaring caveat, however, of your FA detailing that you can't reveal that knowledge to anyone else, including the members of your own faction; an especially harsh setback compared to the Blackmailer being able to share any documents they've stealed to the rest of the CE. This would have to be on the lower end of the S-Tier, personally; that FA is damn hard to cope with, yes, but it's still not enough to negate the instant intermap travel being able to analyze Anomalies better than anyone else in the game.

The Man on the Inside has a special communication route with Liz Grayson where she can reach out to you with tips about the map, like passwords and other secrets, as well as let you in on something about a chapter's day and night phase; in other words, it's the host giving you more information than any other player. If that wasn't stacked enough, you also carry three Keycard Breakers that can let you into a room regardless of its access level permanently, essentially letting you sequence break the game. There's a debug mode vibe to this role I really can't help but respect, bless you, Liz.

Every night, 2096 is given a set of randomly-generated abilities, half positive and half negative. Normally, this would prove too chaotic of a role to be anything considered reliable, but the special thing about the Random KG role list (the pool the abilites come from) is that positive abilities are simple yet very effective, whereas the negative abilities tend to be only minor hindrances (or at least not enough to offset the positive abilities), so on average, your role each night is, at worst, utterly neutral. If that wasn't enough, every night you have the option of either cursing someone, giving them a random role themselves, or rigging the dice so that you get four positive traits and only one negative trait, with no limits or disadvantages. Guess what anyone with this role would be likely to choose.

The Social Engineer possesses an extra point that can be used towards bond levels with NPCS, virtually letting them access more bond perks than other players, which....is yeah, is huge, even the earliest perks have proven to be insanely useful in this game. On top of also having higher priority with interacting with them at night, you can instead choose to use your extra point towards a player, which protects you from any kind of attempt from them for a night. A boon if your dupe has the tendency to piss people off like how....well, the vast majority of mine do.

Holy shit, the first crimbo role that's not S-tier. When the CEB blackmails a player, they're prevented from posting their account, their night actions are heavily expunged, and they cannot vote, basically neutering any worth they'd have as an investigator. As added insult to injury, any lore items or documents they had found would automatically be transferred over for you and the rest of the Crimson Eye to, er, eye over, which wouldn't be as immediately useful as some of the other crimbo abilities in this game but can still be a huge help towards endgame. So yeah, it's another "dick with another player in a way that wouldn't necessarily benefit you" role, but if its effects being wider than others I've seen wasn't enough then you still get to be tied to a network with other players to cooperate with. Weakest CE role in the game, probably, but it's still pretty damn good.

As TWM, I was granted access to the Armory by default, despite technically having a lower access level, on top of having better accuracy when using a gun/ranged weapon. I was also allowed to carry a weapon of my choice from the get-go, and....really, while this entire role stemmed from wanting to use Revy's Berettas from that, there's nothing stopping you from loading up with something more outlandish or unpredictable. Very straightforward role, but its effectiveness really can't be denied.

An Ultimate Serial Killer spinoff where each time you attempt, even if it fails, you benefit from an extra incentive (new ability, higher access level, etc), while being able to use a guaranteed kill when three attempts fail. I find the gradual growing power of this role rather fascinating, like a bioweapon that's constantly adapting with each failure so that it becomes more unstoppable. The one feature I had doubts about at first was the calling card, which you can leave behind to make someone who's falsely executed for your murder appear as guilty so that you leave with no suspicion; the illusion could very easily be broken if the fake blackened was really vocal about it, but if roles that borrow this have something in place where the host would DM the person to play along, there shouldn't be any real issue.

Alright, I have to think rationally and not go for the easy S-tier alliteration. BPI-1238 can produce an endless amount of soup, with its contents being very flexible so long as it's made up of a non-lethal base liquid and at least one edible solid ingredient. Once you move past the initial grossness of this role on a surface level, once you realize that this toolkit allows you access to an limitless supply of any liquid imaginable, so long as you can actually digest it, it becomes legitimately terrifying. Blood for deception purposes, mucus as an adhesive agent, squid ink that can be spit in someone's eyes to blind them like the Blooper item, alcohol that can be instant ignition material; consider that this is a role so weird that no one would possibly think of your own body as the source of the soup, and what you have is something that can be useful for so much more than, for lack of a better term, bed-wetting.

Just, hear me out on why this isn't S-tier. BPI-1000 is a slow burn of a role where the only ability you can perform each night is choose a player to make a follower out of, which not only grants them immunity for the rest of the night and a role buff, but grants them a higher chance of surviving in general while rendering any attempts from them towards you inert. Ignoring the benefits this gives to other players, this only helps you out in the sense that you'd theoretically have fewer and fewer people who could bring your run to an early end, and I say theoretically because it would be assuming your followers don't die from literally any other means. That, AND on top of people naturally being suspicious of someone going around blessing other people, these followers would also have a FA of not revealing who their benefactor is; be that as it may, there's still a non-zero chance someone could do a power play of revealing your plan at the cost of their life (though I freely admit that this point is more rooted in hypotheticals than the others, perhaps). The reward for all of this is that once you have accrued seven followers, you ascend into this higher being who...basically turns the entire game on its head in their favor by becoming immortal at night, gaining a plethora of new abilities, and leading to an alternate ending depending on how things turn out. Impressive in its own right, but at the end of the day, I'm more likely to decide a role is the cream of the crop if the player can have some degree of power from it for the entire game than if it lies dormant until the very end, even if that awakening means turning the game's dynamic into "them VS. you".

Mid A-Tier, at best. As a role that makes you start with nothing but gain progressively stronger powers as the game goes on (with strong powers + a free access level right out the gate if you kill someone), it only comes into its own assuming you've lasted a good amount of time, but....call me weird for this, but in most cases, I prefer to have a role that gives me a semi-powerful kit on Night 1 rather than something that starts out weak (never mind how it's quite common for people to get by to as far as Night 5 without using their roles) but promises to make me insanely strong for endgame, when more likely than not I would have already had the necessary skills and know-how to take me that far without this slow-cooker of a role. I'm sure it's nothing that wouldn't hurt though, saving this from something like C-Tier.

Allows you to choose anyone who died on the first night/day of any past KG and take their role for yourself, along with a stat buff. Technically inferior to past grab-bag roles in that you have a much more limited pool of roles to choose from, but in practice, I would imagine a new player would be massively overwhelmed by being able to pick from Every past role otherwise, and at this point you could easily fill up at least two major-sized games with the amount of N1/D1 roles there are. In this case, Rare picked the Ultimate Murderous Fiend, and the fact that we're at 2 for 2 for people who died D1 while having one of the most powerful murder kits in KG history really goes to show you how strength means nothing without the skill, like putting a minigun in the hands of someone who has more experience shooting pics of fancy burgers for their food blog instead of shooting actual bullets.

This role allows you to dig holes in the ground in outside areas and extract special items from them. It canbe decent, but the digging is an extremely noticeable act if you don't have a good excuse ready and it's in service of items whose uses (protecting you from head damage, giving you occasional hints, etc) lean towards the situational side. You also get a free shovel and pickace, but come on, it's not Killing Game 5, shovels don't have the kind of power they used to anymore.

The Shadow Operative is a stealth-based role whose main selling point revolves around being undetectable whenever you're stationary, which is...admittedly a mixed bag. The benefits this gives you when setting up a trap or grabbing an ingredient for an attempt shouldn't need to be said, but given how this is involuntary and can be done an unlimited amount of times, this could lead to more situations than what would be comfortable where your absence from people's testimonies would put you in hot water. You do also have access to nifty smoke bombs (though being able to teleport to an adjacent room while smoke is active is slightly questionable when no one would be able to see you run into a room anyway), and while it's too easy to put together a diguise in any particular KG, starting with one by default does shorten the process somewhat.

3680's appearance is literally unremarkable in the sense that no one, not even NPCs, would recognize you as anything more than "someone" in their accounts, also making you immune to target kills by proxy. On paper, this does sound like it can facilitate an interesting stealth playstyle; but recall that "someone" is the automatic moniker for the killer when someone sees them right around their kill, and you'll understand how this role can very quickly turn against its owner. It also would have made giving testimony rather tricky, but in general how much this role could have worked in execution will never be truly known after Hot Cocoa decided the best way to interpret this was by putting the server on mute.

If an innocent player is mislynched for a suicide committed by 6660, the latter takes over their body and is basically revived, with a piece of fabricated evidence at the crime scene to help with this. Can very well lead to an easy murder badge, but is mostly a novelty role beyond that. What's notable is that you can do this with as many suicides as you'd like, but really, players would be gullible as hell if they were to fall for it more than twice.

This role's abilities involved ███████ words on certain █████████ each phase, as well as having access to a list of █████████ for their convenience. Largely useless from a gameplay perspective, but for the sake of lore, it's instrumental for the sake of finding out about ███ ██████ ██████ ██ ███ ██████ ██ ███ █████.

try and take a crack at deciphering THAT, bradimir, you WHORE

Somehow, we deserved this.

The...Temporal Shifter, jumps around in the timeline with each room they enter. Someone who attempts to plot out their night could immolate themselves and it would be just as successful. But this doesn't just stop at the role holder, you goddamn fool. They can also throw their murder victim into a different point in time. It doesn't matter that the player with this role thankfully died on the second night. I don't even know if this is a beneficial role for its owner or not. If the fact that this was given to Goose, the one dupe physically incapable of giving testimony, chills you to your core, then it means that you are still sane. By making him write novels' worth of results for each day phase, we have incurred FWD's wrath, and whatever part of his psyche that knew of the word "mercy" has now been eviscerated. Brace yourself. This is only the beginning.