I tried to start a fistfight with Conan the Barbarian in this 'AI chat game,' but he chopped me in half before I could land a single punch

pcgamer.com:

There have been a good few videogames based on Conan the Barbarian over the years, but this one is a little different from most. It's a text adventure called Tavern of Treachery, and it's all about running into the infamous Cimmerian during a night on the town and making friends with him—or not, if you want to try your luck.

Tavern of Treachery comes from Heroic Signatures, a subsidiary of Conan Exiles developer Funcom, and of course there's a connection between the two games. The tavern in question—the Dusky Coil Inn—is a location in Conan Exiles, and Funcom is using it to promote the recently-released second chapter of the Age of War update. Functionally, though, it's a completely separate thing: You don't need to be a Conan Exiles player to access the adventure, and what happens in the Tavern of Treachery stays in the Tavern of Treachery.

The adventure makes some unspecified use of AI: The Tavern of Treachery announcement says developers «wish to balance some of the freedoms of AI with the tailored scenarios and characters of Conan’s world.» The game page itself describes it as an «AI chat game,» and warns that it might go a little sideways now and then: «Fret not over the occasional deviation from lore, for this whimsical AI game, though valiant, can sometimes falter in its storytelling. It's all in good, light-hearted fun, after all!»

The invocation of AI may be a little off-putting, but in my brief experience it's really just a good text parser, light years beyond what adventure games 40 and 50 years ago could do. I wasn't particularly choosy with my phrasing and struck a conversational tone with my inputs, but the game handled them all and generally reacted as I intended: When a guy tried to rip me off on the