Builds

Three preset hands plus a custom option. Each one is a working answer to the question "what kind of spy are you?"

Every build — preset or custom — spends 45 skill points across the 15 skills, plus one bonus point you place into a skill of your choice per faculty after selecting the preset. The faculty score the game shows you is an average: Kinetic's "Action 4" means every Action skill starts at level 4. (Source: Fandom Skills page.)

Builds are not permanent. You can earn skill points through XP and the game allows mid-run shifts in focus — re-allocating new points where the run is going, swapping Thoughts at the cost of a cooldown. Pick what matches your first instinct; the dice will tell you whether you guessed right.

Kinetic — "Iron Maiden"

"You excel in physical conditioning and applied violence. Emotions thwart you."

• Faculty of Action: 4 (Iron Maiden)
• Faculty of Relation: 2 (Emotionally illiterate)
• Faculty of Intellect: 3 (Pattern noticer)

The five Action skills all start at level 4: Coordination, Doppelgäng, Instincts, Sensors, and Shadowplay. You will pass the physical checks the game throws at you with room to spare. Sensors at 4 means the world bleeds details into the narration — alley smells, tells in body language, the wrong wear pattern on a piece of clothing. Shadowplay at 4 makes covert approaches viable from hour one.

The trade is brutal: Relation 2 means social rolls are coin flips at best, and conversation-heavy scenes will eat skill points off your Anxiety bar if you exert your way through. Play Kinetic if you want to lead with action and let consequences sort themselves out. Spend your first bonus point on Coordination or Sensors; both pay off immediately in Quisach.

Charismatic — "Neighborhood Darling"

"An engineer of the human soul. Spiritually vast, mentally undeveloped."

• Faculty of Action: 3 (Baseline biped)
• Faculty of Relation: 4 (Neighborhood Darling)
• Faculty of Intellect: 2 (Cognitive lightweight)

The five Relation skills all start at level 4: Blueprints, Cold Read, Nerve, Personalism, and Statehood. This is the talk-your-way-through build. Personalism at 4 unlocks deep-read dialogue on most NPCs from the first conversation. Cold Read catches lies in real time. Statehood lets Hershel push people who do not want to be pushed.

The risk is Anxiety. Relation is the social-Pressure faculty, so the build that uses it most also spikes Anxiety the fastest. Keep Perro Pale or another alcoholic consumable in inventory at all times. Intellect 2 means you will miss historical and technical context you cannot recover without exertion — bring patience for it. Spend your first bonus point on Personalism; it touches more dialogue trees than any other Relation skill.

Analytical — "Human Calculator"

"Your cognitive powers make up for your frail body. A big brain in a glass jar."

• Faculty of Action: 2 (Easily bruised)
• Faculty of Relation: 3 (Would meet again)
• Faculty of Intellect: 4 (Human calculator)

The five Intellect skills all start at level 4: Entanglement, Grey Matter, Poetics, Records, and Technoflex. Grey Matter at 4 means deductive chains the rest of the cast cannot follow. Records pulls historical pattern-matching into the present. Entanglement is the build's wildcard — at 4 you get vibrations from elsewhere that occasionally rewrite a scene.

Action 2 is the cost. Fights you cannot talk out of will hurt, and a bullet in the shoulder will tank rolls for hours after. Compensate by avoiding fights, which is what an Analytical build should be doing anyway. Delirium is the bar to watch — Intellect exertion spikes it, and capping Delirium loses you a skill point. Keep Suprema 100s on hand. First bonus point goes into Grey Matter or Records.

Going custom

The custom build lets you spend all 45 points yourself. Two pieces of advice:

• Do not zero out a faculty. Hershel still has to walk, talk, and think. Eurogamer's reviewer went custom-Relation-heavy on a blind run and still had to lean on Intellect and Action checks regularly. Below level 2 in a faculty, even routine rolls become coin flips. Keep a floor of 2 everywhere.
• Stack the faculty you will exert. If you know you will be doing a lot of social checks, putting 5 into Personalism and 1 into Statehood beats spreading evenly. Concentrated investment turns red checks from "expect despair" into "safe-ish bet."

Two custom shapes worth considering: a Sensors + Personalism + Records investigator (passive perception, reads people, knows history) that handles 80% of dialogue checks and lets you coast on white checks until you have XP to broaden out; or a Coordination + Shadowplay + Technoflex infiltrator that lets you handle locks, cameras, and chases without ever needing to talk to a guard.

Respec and changing your mind

Skill points themselves are spent through level-ups; the game does not surface a full respec. Thoughts, the Conditioning layer, are different — they can be swapped at any time at the price of a cooldown period (source: Eurogamer). So if your build is not landing, the first move is to change Thoughts rather than agonize over skill allocation. See the Thoughts catalog for the four currently documented and what they buff.

Source note: Beyond the preset descriptions and faculty-skill mappings (Fandom), specifics about how deep the in-game respec menu goes are not fully documented in surveyed sources. If you find a respec UI, the wiki would happily take a screenshot.