Square Enix, a publisher never afraid to embarrass itself with the latest technological fad, has quietly released an “AI-driven” game onto Steam. And it sucks.
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Not the game itself! To say The Portopia Serial Murder Case is a bad game is unfair, because this 2023 experiment—a free download on Steam—is actually a remake of an adventure game first released in Japan in 1983, when “adventure game” meant “typing stuff into a computer”. And the quality of the game itself isn’t really up for discussion here.
What’s notable about this release is the fact Square Enix is using it as a testbed for “AI” tech in video games, and it has been an absolute disaster. While your first instinct might be to think that Square has used “AI” to generate dialogue or art, that’s actually not the case here; the publisher is instead using machine learning (which is what this actually is, not actual “artificial intelligence”) to help people play the game more easily.
As I’ve said, old text-based adventure games were a nightmare to both program and play because even if you knew—or thought you knew—the answer to a puzzle, its completion would be reliant on the user inputting the exact text required to progress. If you thought “kick door” would work, but the developers wanted you to “ram door”, then you’d be stuck.
This 2023 remake of The Portopia Serial Murder Case, on the other hand, is using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to try and link the player’s input to the correct or desired answer. Here’s an example of how it was supposed to work, showing how the NLP weighs up a user’s text input with similar sentences to help make this whole process easier.
Or at least, that was the idea. In practice, it just doesn’t work. The game’s reviews are about as bad as they could be, with users not just unhappy at the way a pioneering adventure game has been dug up as a showcase for machine learning, but the fact that the machine learning is broken, leaving players with text inputs that are just as frustrating—and in many cases more so—than the 1983 original.
