Larry

Larry is a talking skull and your companion for the whole game. You find him in the Inquisition dungeon at the very start, sealed in a stone sarcophagus, and break him out with a pickaxe. He rides in your bag while you escape the town and has an opinion on everything. Sarcasm, as he says, is kind of his thing.

At the Inquisitor base he asks to be put on the box by your bed (“I don’t like being stuck in a dark sack”). From then on he stays at home, and most of the story that happens around the base involves him.

Tips from Larry

Many of Larry’s lines in the introduction are the game telling you what to do:

• When you are too weak to open the sarcophagus, he points you to the mushrooms. Eating restores energy.
• If you pick up armour and a sword but leave them in your backpack, he tells you to equip them. The story checks for the pickaxe, the armour and the sword look only at your hotbar.
• When you reach the base, he tells you to go to bed. Your first sleep there unlocks the technology tree.
• The first time you walk out of the house with 30 or more insanity, he notices the spark of madness in your eyes and suggests good food and wine. The insanity tutorial follows.

After Sweet Dreams, he wakes you with an idea from the Inquisitors’ notes: they raised their own zombies to fight the others, and he bets they did it in a room near the morgue. That room is the Resurrection Lab. When you open it, he tells you that lightning strikes the tower every Envy day.

Larry’s stories

While you work, Larry reads the notes scattered around the base and pieces together what happened before the apocalypse. He tells you in three parts, and each part becomes available only after a number of sleeps: 1 sleep after your first burial, then 4 more, then 4 more. After each round, walk out of your house to hear it. Nothing else in the game advances this chain, so it moves along on its own as you play.

For the third part he needs to loosen the donkey’s tongue. Bring him 2 Beer in Comrade Donkey, sleep once more and leave the house to see how it ends. The chain gives no items or reputation; the reward is the story.

Playing Robert

The two old bandits in the forest have the explosives you need for the old mine. Robert, their dead leader, now a skeleton in their camp, was the one who hid their treasure, and his word is the one they would take. Larry agrees to play him in Can’t See The Forest for the Iron. All he needs is a Simple Candle put inside him, which he keeps. He says to do it at night, but any time works. Dressed up as Robert, he tells the bandits that the real treasure was their friendship, and they hand over the explosives. The Quarry page has the rest.

The portal

When the Goddess in the swamp tells you to repair the magic portal, ask Larry about it (Any Portal in a Storm). From the Inquisitors’ notes he knows it stood on a hill north of the town, granted wishes, never ended well, and vanished right before the outbreak. The Goddess said its soul is bound to someone strange and obsessed with symbols, and that leads you to the Astrologer, Gunter, with symbols all over his floor.

Gunter was only “a side character” the last time. He sends you to the man who activated the portal, now a monk at the foundry under the old bathhouse, reached through the water tunnel. The portal itself turns out to be in Gunter’s tower, and from then on each fragment you find goes into it there. You get a Story.

Two fragments on his list

Two of the seven fragments sit on Larry’s part of the story tree:

• Green Fragment. Once the Lust fragment is in the portal, the fourth, Envy, is somewhere in the debris of the Sluice Area. The area has to be taken from the zombies first (Operation POTATO).
• Even More Portal Parts. When five fragments are in, you ask the magic mirror for the sixth. It remembers a well-guarded Inquisitor base, looks again and sees “a funny donkey drinking with… a talking skull”: your own base. The Wrath fragment is in the debris there.

With the Wrath fragment in hand, Larry reminds you that as your friend and companion he expects a wish of his own. The mirror shows where the last fragment is: in the throne room of the Royal Palace, with a second Keeper, his wife, and another, better-looking talking skull. The palace is in the middle of the infected district, and Larry knows who can get you in: Davy the Dagger.

The last battle

When you set out for the last battle, Larry stops you. He rides along in your bag, as in the old days, because he wants to meet that other skull. In the palace it turns out they know each other: the other skull, Garry, calls him Lucius, Larry calls him Jove, and they share the same curse. At the portal, when Garry wants to make a wish for the two of them, the Old God asks you to keep them on probation for another decade or so. Larry finds that fair. If you choose to go home at the end, his last words are “I’ll miss you, my friend!”