Varkos is a locally run AI companion that plans, fights and fetches inside Skyrim

What Varkos does

A developer has built Varkos, a real-time AI gaming companion that plays Skyrim alongside the player — fighting, fetching, looting and following multi-step spoken instructions — with the latency-sensitive work running on local inference rather than cloud APIs. According to the project write-up, which surfaced on Hacker News's front page, the character is a demon reincarnated as a dog who starts out mistrustful, proud and sarcastic about his canine condition. The runtime is currently tied to Skyrim but was designed to be pluggable into other games or to run standalone.

The developer's motivation is a pointed critique of existing LLM-driven NPC frameworks: good at in-character conversation, but weak at performing actions in the world, slow, and unreliable with complex instructions. Many AI NPC demos cut between the player speaking and the character replying, the write-up notes, to disguise the delay. Three goals followed from this. The companion should be instantly useful, especially in VR where menu navigation breaks immersion. It should feel alive rather than scripted — the microphone stays open for the whole session instead of hiding behind a dialogue menu. And it should stay local and private wherever practical, since metered cloud calls add cost and latency to a single-player game.

Planning against real game state

Varkos's distinguishing feature is deferred, conditional planning grounded in actual world state. In one demo, the player tells him to wait, watch for an arrow fired into the sky, then fetch a potion and bring it over. The system registers a future trigger, waits for the real projectile impact, and only then continues the plan — nothing is pre-scripted. Item search works the same way: asked whether a ceremonial sword is anywhere in sight, Varkos checks what is actually present in the game rather than inventing an answer, and when he grabs the wrong sword and is corrected, he offers to stay on the lookout.

Even hide-and-seek becomes a persistent goal with movement, waiting, monitoring and completion conditions rather than a single API call. A request to pick up all the items and hand them over compiles into a bounded collection plan over real object references: he gathers them, returns and transfers them, rather than pretending one action covers "all."

Combat and reflexes

In combat, Varkos receives grounded events from the game, can warn the player over a fast reflex path, and acts using native in-game body control. Instruction plans can carry simple strategy, such as attacking a target and then retreating, and his emotional state influences whether and how he chooses to fight at all.

A personality that drifts

Only the starting traits are authored. As sessions accumulate, significant interactions become evidence for gradual personality change: the system adjusts both explicit traits and an internal "emotional homeostasis" that governs how easily Varkos becomes irritated, frightened, affectionate or playful, and he can rewrite parts of his own vocabulary and code, with every change versioned and reversible. In the demo build the demon slowly domesticates, grows attached to the player and eventually starts enjoying being a dog — bringing over toys and chasing things unprompted. Notably, this slow evolution is the one component that still depends on large cloud models, and it deliberately runs away from the real-time action path.

Built to be pluggable

Skyrim was picked as the first target for its large modding community, VR support and open world, but the developer's stated plan is a "Void mode" in which the companion follows the player across multiple games.

Why it matters

Most AI-in-games demos so far optimize for conversation. Varkos is a working argument that agency — deferred plans, grounded perception, physical action — can run fast enough on local hardware to feel like a co-op partner rather than a chatbot with a voice. That matters for VR, where any menu or delay breaks presence, and for anyone reluctant to turn a private single-player game into a metered, cloud-dependent service. As a demonstration of low-latency agent AI with persistent state and memory, it sketches a template other games could adopt — and a hint of companion interfaces beyond games.