A few days ago we informed you that Square Enix announced the almost imminent launch of Square Enix AI Tech Preview: The Portopia Serial Murder Case. The title, which can already be downloaded for free on Steam, is a remake of the classic graphic adventure directed by Yuji Horii and released in 1983 for the NEC PC-6001 and later released on other consoles such as the NES. where it would be the first narrative game on the platform. This title is considered a direct precursor to visual novels and has influenced creators such as Eiji Aonuma and Hideo Kojima.
However, the reception of the new version of this great classic was not very good. At the moment, the game has “very negative” reviews on Steam, with players pointing out various flaws in the voice processing technology used.
Square Enix registered the The Portopia Serial Murder Case trademark back in November 2022 and has since been working on this remake, which uses speech-processing artificial intelligence to recognize what the player types are typing into a text field. Thus, it aims to replace the dynamics typical of visual novels and classic adventure games, in which we have to write very short commands and try to find the one that the game asks of us.
However, users report that the technology is imperfect, to say the least. On many occasions, reviews mention that the controls of this new version of The Portopia Serial Murder Case are more cumbersome than the original game, since the tool doesn’t recognize certain simple actions that were easy to perform in the original, such as: B. picking up objects or moving from one room to another.
It’s currently unknown if Square Enix plans to improve the technology in any way, or if this demo was simply a preview of the AI they are developing. The company has insisted, yes, that the AI will not be used at any point to generate new content, but rather tries to facilitate user interaction with the various actions that can be performed in the game.
