Square Enix: The Portopia Serial Murder Case AI Tech Preview Gets Very Negative Reviews on Steam

Earlier this week, Square Enix launched a remake of The Portopia Serial Murder Case. The game first launched back in 1983 in Japan as an adventure game. It is now available for free on PC via Steam, and unfortunately, its reviews on the platforms are abysmal. This makes it Square Enix’s worst reviewed game till date. Here’s digging deeper into what is up with Square Enix’s latest, The Portopia Serial Murder Case.

The Portopia Serial Murder Case (1983) relaunched for PC as AI Tech Preview

Square Enix has now relaunched 1983’s The Portopia Serial Murder Case on Steam as an educational software demonstrating the AI technology of Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP today has evolved as a technology that allows computers to easily make sense of “natural language,” that is, the colloquially spoken language. Square Enix has incorporated this technology into the game to counter what they say posed as a challenge in adventure games back when The Portopia Serial Murder Case first released.

First, some context for what adventure games meant back in 1983, when The Portopia Serial Murder Case first launched. Adventure games back then involved gameplay based on “command inputs.” This meant that players typed in texts to decide the actions of the characters. The Steam page of The Portopia Serial Murder Case now reads:

Free text input systems like these allowed players to feel a great deal of freedom. However, they did come with one common source of frustration: players knowing what action they wanted to perform but being unable to do so because they could not find the right wording. This problem was caused by the limitations of PC performance and NLP technology of the time.

Therefore, with the modern technology of NLP, along with other AI technologies like Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Speech To Text (STT), and Natural Language Generation (NLG), the experience is expected to become much smoother and player friendly. But as per the reviews on Steam, that’s hardly the case.

The Portopia Serial Murder Case- Square Enix’s worst launch till date

A reviewer on Steam writes that the game “barely works.” Further reviews reveal how the game is unable to comprehend commands synonymous to those it is programmed to understand. The Portopia Serial Murder Case now stands at a “very negative” rating, within three days of launch. Only 13% of the 349 user reviews for the game were positive, at the time of publication.

Some are even saying that the AI “feels broken at times.” This review sums up what many players’ complaints are with the title: “They say they removed the AI component due to safety concerns… so this doesn’t even have the tech that it was supposed to be a preview of in the first place.”

It’s ironic how Square Enix launched something to remove a “common source of frustration,” only for it to ironically become the common source of frustration. Square Enix’s AI Tech Preview of The Portopia Serial Murder Case is now available for free on Steam.