She has been dead since the opening minutes of God of War (2018), she has maybe fifteen minutes of screen time across two enormous games, and she is comfortably the most important character in the modern series.
Now she is getting her own game. Here is who Faye actually is.
The short version
Faye is a Jötunn – a giant of Jötunheim – and she was Kratos’s second wife and Atreus’s mother. Among her own people she was known as Laufey the Just, a warrior who spent her life protecting the last of the giants from the Aesir gods hunting them to extinction.
She died before the 2018 game begins. Her funeral is the tutorial.
Why the name Laufey matters
If you know your Norse mythology, the name is a spoiler.
In the myths, Laufey is the mother of Loki. In God of War (2018), the reveal lands in the final act: Atreus’s giant name, the one his mother gave him, is Loki. The moment recontextualises the entire journey – the boy you have been escorting is the trickster god, and his mother knew it the whole time.
It also quietly tells you what kind of writer Santa Monica has been all along. The answer was printed on the box art of Norse mythology for a thousand years and nobody looked.
She planned everything
This is the part that makes her the real architect of the saga.
Faye did not simply die and leave her family a sad errand. She engineered it. Consider what she set up before the story starts:
- She asked for her ashes to be scattered from the highest peak in all the realms – which forces Kratos and Atreus to travel to Jötunheim, the one place they needed to reach
- She marked the trees along the route, so the path was already laid out for them
- The Leviathan Axe, the weapon that defines the modern games, was hers first – commissioned from the Huldra brothers, Brok and Sindri
- She kept Atreus’s true identity from him until the journey itself could reveal it
Every step of that first game is a woman moving her husband and son around a board from beyond the grave. Kratos spends two games slowly realising he is following instructions.
What Ragnarök added
Ragnarök filled in the gaps and made her considerably less saintly – in a good way. We learned more about her history with Týr, her role in the wider war between the giants and the Aesir, and the fact that her marriage to Kratos was not the beginning of her story but a late chapter in a long, violent life.
Deborah Ann Woll voiced her there, and returns to lead Laufey.
The Golden Hand of the Jötnar
The new game introduces a title we had not heard before: Faye is the Golden Hand of the Jötnar.
In the Everywhen – the afterlife of the gods where the game takes place – that power is amplified. It lets her strike an enemy and physically separate the soul from the body, then attack the soul directly or use it as a weapon against everything else in the room.
It is the first time the series has given Faye an ability set of her own rather than describing her through what she left behind.
Why this game works
There is a reason a Faye game feels inevitable in hindsight.
For two games, Faye existed as an absence. She was a set of instructions, a scattering of ashes, a name carved into a tree. Kratos grieved her, Atreus idolised her, and the audience built a version of her out of secondhand accounts from people who were not always reliable narrators.
Laufey flips that. You are not being told about her anymore. You are her, in the afterlife, discovering that the plans you left behind are coming apart and that you are the only one who can go and hold them together.
For a character defined entirely by foresight, that is a great problem to hand her.
Where to start
If you want the full context before February 2027, our complete God of War story breakdown walks through the 2018 game, and the Ragnarök ending explained covers where the family stands now.
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