What makes a great video game sidekick

Video game sidekicks get a rough deal in critical conversation. Reviewers lavish attention on protagonists, worlds, and villains, but the companion character sitting two steps behind the hero is often reduced to a note about combat usefulness or dismissed as escort-mission dead weight. That's a mistake. A well-designed sidekick does things a protagonist structurally can't: they observe the hero, react to the world independently, and give the player someone to care about who isn't themselves. When it works, the sidekick reframes the whole game.

The companion as mirror

The most effective sidekicks reflect something back at the player character that the protagonist can't easily voice. Atreus in God of War Ragnarök works partly because he forces Kratos to confront his own silence. The boy asks the questions the stoic warrior won't. That dynamic creates dramatic tension without relying on exposition, and it makes Kratos more legible as a character than almost any cutscene could.

The same logic applies to Elizabeth in BioShock Infinite or Clementine in The Walking Dead. Both are technically followers, but their reactions to what happens shape how the player reads events. Strip them out and you lose not just company, but interpretation. The world becomes harder to understand emotionally because there's no second perspective anchoring it.

This is why purely functional sidekicks, companions whose only job is to carry inventory or mark objectives, feel hollow. They're not characters. They're a UI element wearing a face.

Agency without getting in the way

One of the hardest design problems in companion character work is the tension between believable agency and not frustrating the player. A sidekick who behaves too predictably reads as a puppet. One who acts without warning can break immersion or, worse, break a stealth run.

The best solutions tend to give sidekicks clear, consistent motivations that players internalise quickly. Ellie in The Last of Us Part I doesn't feel like a liability in stealth sections because her behaviour follows a legible logic: she hides, she waits, she only engages when things go loud. Players build a model of her in their heads, and that model holds. Surprise comes from story, not from broken pathfinding.

This contrasts sharply with escort-mission design, where the companion moves unpredictably toward danger and the player becomes a babysitter. The failure mode isn't the sidekick being present. It's the sidekick having no coherent goal that the player can predict and work with.

Dialogue that earns its length

Companion dialogue is where games most often overcorrect. Developers, worried that a sidekick will feel thin, pack them with contextual commentary, lore delivery, and motivational speeches. The result is a character who never stops talking.

The problem isn't volume. It's relevance. Sidekick dialogue earns its length when it responds specifically to what just happened, not when it delivers a pre-written observation that could slot into any moment. A companion who says something sharp and particular after a difficult fight is more alive than one who runs through three lines of flavour text every time the player opens a door.

Silence is underused. Companion characters who can sit quietly with the player communicate trust. That's harder to write than banter, and it's considerably more effective.

What great sidekicks share with great villains

It's worth noting that the design principles behind compelling sidekicks aren't entirely different from those behind memorable antagonists. Both require a consistent internal logic, a set of values that don't shift arbitrarily, and a relationship to the protagonist that illuminates something. As discussed in what makes a great video game villain, the best antagonists reframe what came before them. The best sidekicks do something similar from the other direction: they reframe the protagonist, often in real time.

The shared mechanism is perspective. Villains and sidekicks both work by giving the player a second point of view on the events they're living through. That's a structural role, not just a narrative one, and it explains why both are so difficult to get right.

Sidekicks in open-world games

Open-world design creates a particular challenge for companion characters. In a linear game, the sidekick's arc can be choreographed to hit specific beats. In an open world, the player may wander for hours before advancing the story, and the companion has to remain coherent across all of it.

Games like Skyrim solved this by making companions largely reactive and personality-light. Lydia will carry your burdens, follow you up mountains, and die in a dungeon without comment. She works as a utility. She doesn't work as a character. If you've spent time with open-world RPGs, you'll know the feeling of a follower who exists in the world but doesn't belong to its story. The contrast with something like open-world RPGs built around narrative companions is significant: games that invest in follower characterisation hold players differently, even when the open world itself is shallower.

The fix isn't necessarily more dialogue trees. It's giving the companion a stake in the world that exists independently of the player's quest log. When a sidekick has their own opinion about the factions you're choosing between, the cities you're visiting, or the choices you're making, they start to feel like a person rather than a passenger.

Why this keeps mattering

As game budgets have grown, companion characters have absorbed more of that investment. Motion capture, full voice work, dynamic facial animation: the technical floor for a sidekick has risen considerably. But technical quality doesn't guarantee emotional resonance. Players can tell when a companion is sophisticated and empty at the same time.

The games that get it right tend to start from the same place: they decide what the sidekick is for dramatically, not just functionally, and they design every system around that purpose. The companion who matters most isn't the one with the best AI pathfinding. It's the one the player thinks about when the credits roll.