THE ALLIES
The 4 figures in Ada's Trail you can choose not to kill. Beat one of them down and the run stops for a verdict; spare it and it fights beside you, levelling off its own kills and growing a signature power you never get to use yourself. You keep one at a time, and you can lose it for good.
The roster
All 4 of them are named elites on THE RIFT, and every one is a fight before it is an ally. What each grows into is under its name.
AMELIA EARHARTFULL BROADSIDE
GRIGORI RASPUTINDEEPENING FROST
LUCKYRUNAWAY LUCK
NIKOLA TESLACHAIN LIGHTNING
How the party works
A companion holds station about 34 px behind you and fights only what comes within 230 px of YOU — the party works around the hero and never runs off to clear the map. Past 320 px it drops whatever it was fighting and regroups, and left further behind than 420 px it stops trying and simply rejoins you. These are party members, not escort quests.
Every one of them hits at 50% of what its weapon says, and grows 4% harder and 10% deeper per level of its own. The damper is the whole design — a party that could carry a fight would be answering the game for you — and the menace meter deliberately ignores companion damage for the same reason: a party doing well is not the hero being too strong.
The party is ONE. Spare a second figure and the one you had is retired on the spot — whatever armor you had lent it comes back to your bag, and everything else about it is gone, including every level it earned. Choosing who walks with you is the point; collecting them is not.
They are beaten DOWN rather than killed, and DOWN is where they stay. Nothing in the world stands one back up: not time, not clearing the room it fell in, not the merchant, not the walk to the next venue. What wakes it is a bottle of SMELLING SALTS off the trader's shelf, USED out of your bag, and it comes round groggy on 20% of its health.
Nor do they mend themselves — there is no regeneration at all. The only thing that fills a companion's bar back up is one of YOUR medkits, spent by pressing its portrait: a kit puts back 80% of the companion's health scaled by that kit's own quality, so a light one is a patch and a superior one nearly whole. A friend is a supply line. Budget for it before a boss.
They talk. A companion's own kill floats one of its lines about 35% of the time, never more than once every 6 s — banter rather than a ticker. Every line each of them has is on its page, behind a cover.
The bottle in question is SMELLING SALTS — every trader stocks it, and it is the only thing in the game that does this.