Uncover the Smoking Gun has you solve a murder mystery by interrogating ChatGPT-speaking suspects
Well, that didn’t take long. After tech demos from the likes of Nvidia inviting us to chat with NPCs whose entire conversations are generated by AI, it looks like the first game built wholly on that controversial idea is due to arrive this year. Uncover the Smoking Gun puts its ChatGPT-powered dialogue front and centre, as the player’s detective interviews robot suspects to solve a murder case.
The upcoming game is effectively a straightforward solve-the-murder mystery, as the player investigates the scene by picking up items to examine them, collects relevant evidence and interrogates NPCs to work out who’s to blame for the crime. Once you’ve worked out enough solutions, it’s a case of filling in a series of questions - both to identify the culprit and answer related mysteries, such as “Who deleted the data?” - to prove you’ve cracked it and earn a grade for your performance.
The thing that sets Uncover the Smoking Gun apart then - read that however positively or negatively as you like - is its central use of AI to generate the conversations that players have with the suspects in each case. Interacting with one of the game’s robot suspects - they’re all robots, presumably a handy cover for any distinctly unhuman responses - allows you to write freeform questions in a chat box, whether that’s “What were you doing last night?”, “When did you leave?” or even “What’s your favourite Steely Dan song?”
The robot suspects then use ChatGPT running behind the scenes to generate their dialogue on the fly. In practice, based on the first gameplay clips, that results in exactly the kind of perfunctory speech you’d expect from a game created by AI rather than actual human writers who understand how to give characters distinctive personalities and memorable quirks - despite developers ReLU Games saying they have apparently “imbue[d] each character with distinct features that align with the case”.
ReLU - who are owned by South Korean giant Krafton - are focused on experimenting
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