Marionette
The boss encounter, and the one most people lose. Only 35.1% of players have ever killed a Marionette — not because it is rare, but because the fight is decided by an object in the room before the fight begins.
Last verified 28 July 2026 · game version: launch build (22 July 2026)
A wind-up music box governs the encounter: wind it all the way down and the fight stops before it starts. Let the box play through its melody three times without winding it, and you face the Marionette with no real counter available.
Why 65% of players have never killed one
The Last Performance achievement sits at 35.1%, well below Freed (75.3%) and Silenced (87.8%). Those two are also just "kill this monster" achievements, so the gap is not about how often the Marionette shows up — it is about what happens when it does.
The reason is that the Marionette encounter is not a combat problem you can solve with reflexes or a better weapon. It is a timing problem attached to an object, and if you do not know the object matters, you will spend the melody doing something else entirely. By the time the fight is actually in front of you, the window in which you could have influenced it has closed.
The music box
The box is a wind-up. Left alone, it plays its melody and runs down. Winding it resets that clock. Two things follow from this:
- Winding it fully down stops the encounter before it begins. This is the clean answer — if you can get to the box and keep it wound, the fight does not happen.
- Three full melodies without winding removes your counterplay. At that point the Marionette arrives and the tool you would have used against it is spent.
The practical consequence is that the moment you hear the box, it becomes the priority. Not the quota, not the customer at the counter, not restocking. Everything else in the shift can wait; the melody cannot.
This is the encounter that most rewards role-splitting. One player owns the box for the duration — that is their whole job — while the others keep the store running. With proximity chat, the person on box duty can call the melody count out loud so nobody has to guess how much time is left. Splitting attention across three people who are all half-watching the box is how groups lose this.
Getting the achievement
Last Performance requires you to kill a Marionette, not to avoid one. That creates a tension with the advice above: winding the box down prevents the fight, which means it also prevents the achievement.
If you are hunting the achievement deliberately, you want the fight to happen while you still have counterplay in hand — which means letting the melody run but not letting it reach the third pass. Go in with a weapon already purchased and equipped rather than scrambling mid-encounter, and do it on a shift where the rest of the store is under control rather than during a night that is already going badly.
If you just want to survive the night, wind it down and move on. There will be another Marionette.
What we have not confirmed
We are not going to publish damage numbers, exact melody durations in seconds, or a claimed "best weapon" for this fight, because we cannot verify them yet. There is a lot of confident-sounding guidance about this encounter in circulation that traces back to a single unverified source. When we have timings we can stand behind, they will appear here with the date they were confirmed.