square enix, a publisher that’s never afraid to embarrass itself with the latest technological fad, has quietly released an “AI-driven” game on Steam. and it sucks.
Not the game itself! Say The case of the Portopia serial murder 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 “putting stuff into a computer”. And the quality of the game itself isn’t really up for discussion here.
What’s notable about th is release is the fact that Square Enix uses it as a testbed for “AI” technology in video games, and it was an absolute disaster. While your first instinct might be to think that Square used “AI” to generate dialogue or art, that’s actually not the case here; the publisher is instead with machine learning (
As I said, old text-based adventure games were a nightmare to both code and play, because even if you knew—or thought you knew—the answer to a puzzle, its completion would depend on the user typing it in Exactly Text required to continue. If you thought Kick Door would work, but the developers wanted you to “ram door,” then you’d be stuck.
Great for work or play
This laptop features a 15.6-inch touchscreen, an Intel Core i3 processor, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, a webcam, and more. It also has a variety of ports for connectivity, giving it versatility as a display or even a desktop replacement.
This 2023 remake of The case of the Portopia serial murderon the other hand, uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to attempt to associate the player’s input with the correct or desired answer. Here’s an example of how it should work and shows how the NLP balances a user’s text input with similar phrases to simplify this whole process.
Or at least that was the idea. In practice it just doesn’t work. The game’s ratings are as bad as they can getwith users not only dissatisfied with how a groundbreaking adventure game has been unearthed as a machine learning showcase, but also with the fact that machine learning is broken, leaving players with text input just as frustrating – and in many cases more so – than the original from 1983.
Just an insult for a game with such an important legacy. It is actually a miracle how it is possible to fail on all fronts.
TL;DR: The AI in the showcase is so straightforward that it can’t even recognize that commands like “Go to study” and “Go to The study” are practically the same. Aside from the AI, the game lacks features that have been standard for visual novels for 20-30 years.
Zork (1977) had a better understanding of what your commands meant
…this software is supposed to demonstrate cutting-edge AI technology similar to chatGPT, but doesn’t even come close. You have to be specific in what you type, otherwise you’ll get a response like “Hmm…” or “We should focus on the task at hand”. It’s quite strange to assume that the purpose of this software is primarily to type in whatever we want to choose for the story (generated by the AI).
Early text-based RPGs are much smarter at answers than this one.
After you’ve finished the game, you’ll need to be familiar with the original to get through this mess. The parser feels completely arbitrary, sometimes requiring grammatical things like articles or possessive pronouns and sometimes not. Clean out the broken AI junk and just add superfluous nouns like text adventure companies have done in the past. This is a stone cold classic, making it free and functional for a modern audience is the only appropriate way to apologize for such a bizarre faff.
That last review makes a good point! The case of the Portopia serial murder-Designed by dragon quest Creator Yuji Horii – may not be a household name, but as you can see from some of these reviews, it’s still considered a very important video game. The first-person graphics, dialogue system, and open-world design helped push not just adventure games but the visual novel genre in particular, and it’s incredible that Square Enix bothered to make it happen to redesign it with new graphics and not just let people play the original game.