Square Enix's AI department has released an updated version of the adventure game "The Portopia Serial Murders" (opens in new tab) as an "educational demonstration of the AI technology natural language processing (NLP). "The original game was released in 1983, Not only had a profound influence on visual novels and graphic adventures in Japan, it also inspired a generation of game designers, and the 2023 version, available for free on Steam (opens in new tab), is unlikely to have the same impact. In fact, user ratings are currently 92% negative.

The NEC PC-6001 version responds to typing in a text adventure style, with the usual limitations. As Square Enix stated when announcing the release, these older parser input controls "had a common source of frustration: players knew what action they wanted to perform, but could not do it because they could not find the proper representation. This problem was caused by the limitations of PC performance and NLP technology at the time.

The AI technology preview version of Portopia promises to solve this problem with state-of-the-art natural language understanding (NLU). In practice, this does not work very well. When trying to investigate a bar related to Kozo's death, the system did not respond to "ask the bartender," "talk to the bartender," "ask about the murder," or "ask the bartender about the murder." It turned out that I had to type "ask about Kozo" to get a response, but I couldn't find the right phrase and felt like I couldn't do anything about it.

In Portopia, you can confront NPCs with the evidence you find while asking them questions. However, "show me a picture," "show the bartender a picture," "show the bartender a picture of Kozo," and "show the bartender a picture of Kozo. So I hit pause and opened the NLU Visualizer. It said, "Show the bartender a picture of Kozo Yamakawa."

Even with that level of accuracy required, it doesn't feel like we've really come very far in the 40 years since the original release. Portopia's newfangled AI, often dour, could not distinguish between "light" and "writer," declaring that the input "Please ask about Kawamura" was only 98.4% similar to the same sentence "Please ask about Kawamura." Don't ask me how I can be 100% sure. Simple actions such as using a key to open a safe or looking behind a picture took multiple attempts to find the right word, and were as frustrating as a 1980s text adventure.

If anything, it felt like a step backward from the earlier attempts at communicating with robots that typed sentences, such as in "Starship Titanic." It was a painstaking game to guess which words the robot was programmed to recognize, but at least it was occasionally surprising, such as returning an opinion about music when asked about the Spice Girls, which was possible in 1998, when the robot was "a little more sophisticated than the Spice Girls.

User reviews on Steam have similar complaints. One person said that "the AI is really unhelpful," "especially when you ask 'where is X' and your partner keeps answering WHO instead," and a fan of the original lamented that "to see a classic and influential adventure game like 'Portopia' treated this badly is a It's very disappointing," they lament. This is the first official English version of this game, but it doesn't work anyway." He added, "The text input processing is significantly worse than the adventure games of the late 1980s/early 1990s. I see no reason to play this, and I see no reason for Square Enix to try to pursue AI. This should never have been released."

If you're wondering why Square Enix didn't use the chatbot technology it now pretends to be AI to generate new responses to your input on the fly, at one point they did. The company's AI department stated (open in new tab), "This technology preview initially included features based on natural language generation technology." However, the NLG feature has been omitted from this release, as there remains a risk that the AI could generate unethical answers."

The company's AI department also stated that the NLG feature "was not included in this release.

If you feel like banging your head against a text input box for a while, just download the AI Tech Preview: The Portopia Serial Murders on Steam (opens in a new tab). At least it's free.