The Old Road
A small action/RPG where you explore an abandoned village and crypt with him alongside you. You can solve simple riddles together and fight monsters.
A Tamagotchi-like dog with an attitude problem.
Varkos lives in a little 3D jar on your desktop. Talk to him, play with him, and watch him live his little life. Free. Fast. Fully local AI.
No server calls. No ads. No analytics.
NVIDIA GPU · 12 GB VRAM recommended (16 GB recommended).
9 GB of space required. Linux and iOS versions coming soon.
A fairly powerful computer is required. The models are well optimized, but still very resource-hungry. A weaker model will be used for weaker hardware which impact your experience.
In the past few months I have been working on weekends on an AI gaming companion, initially for Skyrim (write-up here). I kept thinking if I could make a version that is fully local (works offline too). The Skyrim version still relied on cloud infra calls for certain heavier operations. Could it be made self-contained? So I decided to take my logic, repurpose and reduce pieces of it, and package it.
Varkos is a dog that lives in a jar. You can talk to him, pet him/scratch/slap, feed him, show him an image (drag and drop) for him to look at and decorate his jar with, play with him, have him listen to music etc etc.
If you’re bored, you can just ignore him (he stops asking after a while, though he might complain about being ignored), and he’ll just go about his day in the jar. Roam around, chase his tail, mark the tree, fall asleep, chew a bone or play with a ball. Right-click on his status bar icon to tweak settings (always on top, rendering quality, check for updates, or delete the large downloaded models).
I have tested this on an M4 Max MacBook and a Windows PC with an RTX 5080. It runs in real time on both. In the video above you can see footage from both machines. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to test it on multiple machines/configurations/os-versions or microphones, so I cannot guarantee its performance across the board.
First you have to summon him
The first screen of the app is a book. Once you open the book, put your hand on the sigil (which activates microphone permissions), and then speak out the invocation aloud, with confidence and no fear in your heart. He can tell. He won’t like it.
If all goes well, and the phase of the moon is just right, your new fluffy digital pet will be bound to a little 3D jar. For your amusement. And, of course, your protection. Your predecessors used crystal balls. You may not have a crystal ball, but you probably have a liquid-crystal display. Good enough!
He has his own little life when you’re not interacting with him, and goes about his day while the app is running. You don’t have to keep him entertained, though he might vie for attention. Sometimes it’s just nice having him there.
If you’re courageous enough, you can even take him out of the jar for a bit. Two small games are included. You have to guide him like Morpheus once upon a time guided Neo, to escape animal control agents from a landscape of cubicles.
I will be adding more updates and scenarios, but the interesting parts should come from him learning from your interactions.
About every 20 minutes of active time, if there are enough new experiences, a message will appear that Varkos is recalculating, appraising his experience and slowly rewriting his own personality.
Because it’s fun? Because it’s a whimsical use of AI and the challenge of making everything run locally was pretty cool.
Speak into your microphone. Varkos replies out loud, with captions to follow along. You can also type text to him.
Yes. Disconnect from your network and test it if you like. And it will stay that way. I'm not in the business of data. I don't care about your prompts. Not in any business, this is free.
There is a check for updates, but it doesn’t run automatically. You have to right-click the status icon and select it manually.
I am supporting only English for now, however the models are multi-lingual. Can't promise no issues though.
Yes. The app has a Mute All Sound setting. Captions and animations keep working. The microphone has a separate control.
Certainly! He’s a demon, not a gremlin.
Not currently but working on it. I will be open-sourcing pieces of him for people to use. I’ve already open-sourced the voice module here: pocket-tts-raven. Soon I will be releasing his voice recognition/turn recognition logic, and then more pieces.
I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to open-source “HIM”, but more of a general framework on how one can build such companions, piece by piece as things get more stable. Maybe even an API so people can add characters in more games.
Yes! I have released it for Mac and Windows. Pretty preliminary version, but I wanted to rush and get it out. I will be adding more polish over time, as well as Linux and iOS versions.
Of course. Though if you start believing or hearing things but most importantly if things start moving around your house on their own, you must stop immediately and