Square Enix wants to be at the forefront of technology when it comes to video games. While that would be admirable and even exciting for gamers, it's unfortunately the technology that no one asked for. First it was NFT-based games that former CEO Yosuke Matsuda couldn't stop talking about, and now the company is dipping its toes into Natural Language Processing AI.
Only yesterday, Square dropped The Portopia Serial Murder Case on Steam. It's an NLP AI driven game that was initially published in 1983 and was created by Yuji Horii. However, in an attempt to test out how advanced AI technology has become since then, they reworked the game with current-gen tech and launched it as a free tech preview. However, it doesn't seem to be working as intended.
Out of the 164 Steam reviews at the time of writing, only 15 are positive, with the overall review currently at Very Negative. And there aren't just bad reviews for the sake of review bombing, like some people have done for Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores. It seems the Natural Language Processing doesn't really work like it's meant to.
The complaints are primarily about how the AI forces you in the direction the game wants you to go, rather than react naturally to what you type in. It keeps telling players to "focus on the task at hand" if they aren't doing exactly what the game wants, and at other times it just gives up, saying, "I'm not sure what to say about that."
The reviews complain about how the NLP tech is essentially not AI, as it barely responds in the manner that something like ChatGPT would.
"AI? Bro this is at best a linear game where the options are fixed and we have to guess what are the options lol," said the top rated review on Steam. "As stated previously, this is NOT AI TECH. This is a linear visual novel where you need to guess what are the possible choices instead of having a list of choices to pick from."
"I had high hopes, but I literally could not get past the first prompt," said another. "I tried being creative, and nothing. I even tried typing word-for-word the options handed to me and it did not work. Cool concept, but unfortunately it needs more work."
It seems quite a few people were excited to see what Square Enix could do with the tech, but were ultimately disappointed. "It's such a shame to see a classic, influential adventure game like Portopia be treated so horribly. This is the first official english version of the game, but it just doesn't work. Putting a natural language processor in a text adventure game sounds like a good idea, but what's here can't even be considered that."