All About Tickle the Friendly Status Effect/Party Member in Look Outside (1.5 Update)
The 1.5 Update to Look Outside changed things to where the Furnace can now be fought without having to kill Tickle as they can be recruited to hang around on Sam as a status effect. This gives a max HP reduction (seems to be 33%) but a few new abilities for Sam to make use of. As well, Henri the Tickmonger allows you to remove Tickle if you prefer not to use them and not kill them.
Tickle's shop only remains open while they're on the pipe so buy everything you need before recruiting or killing them. 50 HP converts to 1 friendship point (but if you have the blood ring equipped you can't give blood) so pick someone with lots of HP and just heal them up with bandages.
The mosquito knife just seems to be a decent dagger but it didn't drain life for me (possibly a bug?). The crimson ring very slowly restores HP when walking but removing it drops you to 1 HP. The blood cap and vampiric jacket have good stats and boost max HP noticeably with a permanent bleed effect while equipped. They do seem to combo well with Tickle's HP drain skill.
I'm not sure what Tickle Cheer actually does. Blood Jet does damage based on HP (never particularly high damage) but applies the acid debuff and usually gives two stacks of bleed to Sam. Tickle Bite usually hits for about 40-50 damage and drains that much to Sam which for a cost of 1 stamina is very good. Transfusion seems to heal for a bit more than the 50% HP cost but is another way to heal in combat or revive folks (I'd personally prefer Combat Medic for being a % heal on the target than 50% of Sam's HP).
There is a bug where if Sam is knocked unconscious then you'll lose the Tickle status effect when revived (and thus not be able to use Tickle's abilities). You can fix it by talking to Henri, passing over Tickle, and then taking them back to get the status effect again.
0:00 Finding Tickle (North two screens from the furnace)
0:11 Tickle's Conversation & Giving Blood
1:33 Buying Items
2:17 Crimson Ring Effect
2:35 Giving Blood with the Crimson Ring
2:49 Blood Clot Bomb
2:55 Vampiric Jacket & Blood Cap
3:20 Top Ten Anime Betrayals
3:38 Recruiting Tickle
4:04 Tickle's Abilities (and example fight)
5:42 Henri the Tickmonger
7:31 Tickle Bug Workaround
Look Outside can be purchased at https://store.steampowered.com/app/3373660/Look_Outside/
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