Bots are not talkative

Last week, Square Enix announced a remastered version of the classic adventure game. Portopia serial murder case, that would be a demonstration of artificial intelligence technology. The tech preview is out now and, well, things aren’t going well.

For context, Portopia serial murder case is a classic adventure game from the 80s, authored by DragonQuestYuuji Horii. It’s actually the first official release in the west in years, and comes with a new visual style and layout.

Very similar to the original portopia, this new version is also a text parser adventure. This means you enter commands or speak them using speech-to-text in the new version to explore and explore. 2023 portopia uses the notion that you (the boss) are in command of Yasu, the junior detective. Obviously, he needs a more practical approach to killing.

The preliminary part of artificial intelligence technology is done through NLP or Natural Language Processing. I wrote about it a bit in the Square Enix preview announcement, but it basically means reading and understanding random language and then coming up with the correct answer. Basically, this is what many text adventure games have been doing for a while, starting with Zork up through facade.

This new version will use Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to help the detective understand the player’s instructions. It was originally planned to even generate natural responses for situations where the system did not have a predefined response. However, this was canceled as Square Enix concerned about the risk that AI will generate unethical responses.

So it’s ultimately a redone version portopia with lots of natural language tools under the hood and the ability to convert speech to text. How is it received? Not very good.

Talk to me Yasu

As of this writing, Square Enix AI Tech Preview Portopia serial murder case has a very negative rating on Steam, with only 10% of users leaving positive reviews. Most of them were frustrated with the real AI partner, describing situations in which Yasu just gets stuck in a response loop.

Not one to just read reviews, I decided to go on an AI adventure myself. Everything started fine. A few text bubbles gave me some context, and soon I met Yasu, my business partner. Our relationship was good at first. I asked him some basic questions asked after local suspects. In some cases, I had to revise what I said. But while I was asking the simplest questions in a very robotic manner, I was getting some information.

Then we went to the crime scene.

This is where I got trapped when I asked the simplest questions to Yasu. I can understand some of the difficulty with questions such as “was the murder weapon found at the scene”, although this question can still be answered. Others, such as “whether the victim lived alone”, did not seem to be able to gather any information.

take notes

Here I ran into another major snag. First, there is a list of important topics: suspects, places, and objects. But there is really no “diary” or any other record of what was said. Pen and paper seem like a necessity to remember anything but the most superficial details.

It also seems like the NLU renderer, a tool that Square features in their Steam promo images, would help refine and narrow down my requests. The problem is that I’m using a tiny keyboard without a numeric keypad that doesn’t have a button assigned to it by Square. There is also no key rebinding. So other than assigning a specific system shortcut to the rarely used Pause key, I’m out of luck. From sounds of itit doesn’t look like NLU would have helped much anyway.

Yasu doesn’t help much either. Every time I shook it like a magic figure of eight, trying to get an answer to my questions, I received frequent responses of “Hmmm” or “We should focus on the current task.” Leaving aside the need for odd, specific language in a technical preview meant to emphasize natural language understanding, there is very little guidance to inform you on how best to frame your responses.

V There are threads on the Steam Community Forums aggregation of correct phrases to obtain specific information. But at this point, we’re back to the original text parser problem we were trying to solve. My attempts to use normal language rarely worked, and even specific questions about information I knew Yasu didn’t click if I didn’t ask about them properly. In the end, I found that the best way to get a push in the right direction is to “ask around.” But this is something I would only learn from other players.

New case

Besides, it’s just not a very impressive remaster. I have cited past projects such as Famicom Detective Club who paid homage to their original work. Compared, portopia seems less alive or exciting. A mystery can never be interesting because I’m too busy trying to figure out my wording to be too invested in the drama that’s unfolding.

The characters don’t have much life, the backgrounds are fine, and it’s eerily quiet, which doesn’t feel intentionally creepy. At least it’s free. And if you’re terribly curious, you can have fun trying to get Yasu to tell you where he found the knife. As a technical preview, it still has some wrinkles that need to be ironed out. And as a localized version of a classic, it didn’t impress many people.

Eric Van Allen

senior news reporter