Square Enix, a publisher never afraid to embarrass itself with the latest technological fad, has quietly released an âAI-drivenâ game onto Steam. And it sucks
Not the game itself! To say The Portopia Serial Murder Case is a bad game is unfair, because this 2023 experimentâa free download on Steamâis actually a remake of an adventure game first released in Japan in 1983, when âadventure gameâ meant âtyping stuff into a computerâ. And the quality of the game itself isnât really up for discussion here.
Whatâs notable about this release is the fact Square Enix is using it as a testbed for âAIâ tech in video games, and it has been an absolute disaster. While your first instinct might be to think that Square has used âAIâ to generate dialogue or art, thatâs actually not the case here; the publisher is instead using machine learning (which is what this actually is, not actual âartificial intelligenceâ) to help people play the game more easily.
As Iâve said, old text-based adventure games were a nightmare to both program and play because even if you knewâor thought you knewâthe answer to a puzzle, its completion would be reliant on the user inputting the exact text required to progress. If you thought âkick doorâ would work, but the developers wanted you to âram doorâ, then youâd 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 playerâs input to the correct or desired answer. Hereâs an example of how it was supposed to work, showing how the NLP weighs up a userâs text input with similar sentences to help make this whole process easier.
Or at least, that was the idea. In practice, it just doesnât work. The gameâs 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 frustratingâand in many cases more soâthan the 1983 original.
Just an insult to a game with such an important legacy. Itâs actually a marvel how this manages to be a failure on all fronts.
TL;DR: The AI on showcase is so unsophisticated that it canât even discern that commands like âGo to studyâ and âGo to the studyâ are effectively the same. Even aside from the AI, the game lacks features that have been standard to Visual Novels for 20-30 years.
Zork (1977) had a better understanding of what your commands meant
…this software is meant to demonstrate the cutting edge technology of AI similar to chatGPT, but doesnât even comes close to that. You have to be specific with what you type otherwise youâd get a response as âHmm…â orâ We should focus at the task at handâ. Itâs quite odd suggesting that the reason of this software in the first place is to type out whatever we want to make choices (generated by the AI) for the story.
Early text-based RPGs are way smarter at responses than this.
Having finished the game, you need to be intimately familiar with the original to get through this mess. The parser feels totally arbitrary, sometimes requiring grammatical things like articles or possessive pronouns and sometimes not. Remove the broken AI junk and just add redundant nouns and such as text adventure companies did in the past. This is a stone cold classic, making it free and functional to modern audiences is the only adequate way to apologize for such a bizarre fumble.
That last review makes a good point! The Portopia Serial Murder Caseâdesigned by Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horiiâmay not be a household name, but as you can see from the fire in some of those reviews itâs still regarded as a very important video game. Itâs first-person graphics, dialogue system and open world design helped pioneer not just adventure games but the visual novel genre specifically, and itâs incredible that Square Enix would go to the trouble of remaking it with new visuals and not just let people play the original game.
