You can get Square Enix’s new AI-powered murder mystery game for free next week

While concerns about AI putting all of us out of work are understandable, creators are finding ways to utilize AI to remove some of the more tedious elements of their jobs. For example, on Monday, publisher Square Enix will release a tech preview of a murder mystery PC game that uses an AI technology known as Natural Language Processing (NLP) to enable a non-player character (NPC) to understand and respond to the player’s instructions.

Square Enix brings AI-powered game to Steam

The technical preview is a modern update of Yuji Horii’s 1983 adventure game, The Portopia Serial Murder Case. Players would freely input text on to a command line to progress through the game, but because of the limitations of the hardware and software, players were forced to find the exact right wording that the game might actually understand.

40 years later, personal computers are infinitely more powerful, and NLP is significantly more advanced. As you can see in the video below, the game is far more likely to comprehend the player’s prompt, making for a smoother and more fun experience:

The Square Enix AI Division initially planned to include Natural Language Generation (NLG) technology as well, which would have allowed the game to generate a natural response to a prompt that wasn’t programmed into the game — basically, ChatGPT.

“However, the NLG function is omitted in this release because there remains a risk of the AI generating unethical replies,” the developer explained. “We thank you for your understanding. We will consider reintroducing this function as soon as our research succeeds in creating an environment in which players can enjoy the experience with peace of mind.”

Keep in mind that this is just a preview, but if you want to see how developers will implement AI into their games in the near future, it’s worth checking out. You can download Square Enix AI Tech Preview: The Portopia Serial Murder Case for free on Steam on April 24.