On April 23,Square Enixre-released the classic mystery text adventure The Portopia Serial Murder Case worldwide viaSteamas a tech demo intended to showcase a brand new language-based AI. Square Enix AI Tech Preview: The Portopia Serial Murder Case, as the full title of the game-cum-tech-demo reads, features an AI known asNatural Language Processing— NLP for short.
In theory, NLP allows players to type commands directly into the game and thereby guide in-game progression through the written word alone. If — as per the example used on the game’s Steam page — the player were to type in the words, “Ask around,” then the NLP would turn these words into instructions for the player’s in-game assistant Yasu to follow, and the process of asking around would begin.
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However much decent sense the NLP AI makes on paper, in actuality it does not work effectively, as over three hundredvery negative Steam reviewsare vocally attesting to (viaPC Gamer). “The ‘AI’ in this game is a joke,” writes Steam reviewerZuro127. “It’s basically a normal parser game to begin with, but it tries and fails to use ‘AI’ to parse them instead of the tried-and-true methods that everything else uses.”
“The AI natural language processing feels broken at times,” adds fellow Steam user But Thou Must in areviewposted on Tuesday, noting with amusement that the game ended up responding more readily to inputs in Japanese even when the language setting was set to English. “Kind of defeats the purpose of releasing it outside Japan, though,” But Thou Must concludes.
A common sentiment across the review board is one of disappointment, if not sorrow. “What sucks the most is knowing this is the only version of Portopia we’re ever gonna get in English,” laments Steam reviewsdate. “This is, genuinely, one of the most important games of all time […] it’s what inspired Hideo Kojima and Eiji Aonuma to start making video games.”
Despite its significant influence on the video games industry as a whole, prior to the launch of Square Enix AI Tech Preview: The Portopia Serial Murder Case this week, The Portopia Serial Murder Case had never received an official English release. First published for PC-6001 computers in 1983, the game has taken a certifiable forty years exactly to make its way West. What a shame, then, that its first and jubilar Western release is so riddled with issues as to ruin the experience.
