Square Enix’s free AI visual novel launches to negative Steam reviews

Square Enix is known for showing interest in emerging technologies. The company made a number of investments in cloud gaming, is actively working on blockchain/NFT driven games and now with AI constantly making headlines, the company is jumping in there too. As a technical demonstration of its old AI tech, Square Enix has released The Portopia Serial Murder Case for free on Steam. 

Square Enix bills this as an “educational demonstration of Natural Language Processing, an AI technology”. The game itself was originally developed in 1983, and AI has come a long, long way since then, so by modern standards, this game's ageing AI doesn't stand up as particularly impressive.

This view has been shared by the majority of curious gamers who have tried the game out on Steam so far. The game has a “Very Negative” overall rating on Steam, although this is based on less than 250 reviews due to the niche nature of the game.

Most of the reviews point out the linear and rigid nature of the game's chat box. The game is always looking for certain prompts to unlock the next piece of story. Silly questions immediately get ignored, but more reasonable questions that you may expect the game to have answers for also go unanswered. Most are questioning whether the game is actually running any form of AI.

Unfortunately, this is the first official English release for this game and due to its experimental and free-to-play nature, we don't know if Square Enix has any more updates planned.

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KitGuru Says: Have any of you tried this out of curiosity? 

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