The Fifth Bell Tolls But Not For Me

Two more demos down. One still to go. I have to say I've been impressed with my picking skills this time. No complete duffers yet. 

On the other hand, there's only one out of the five I've tired so far that I might buy when it comes out, that being Hawthorn. Not every game can be for everyone, even the good ones.

I was going to write up both demos in the one post but to no-one's surprise, I'm sure, I've ended up saying so much about the first there's no room for the second. It was pretty amazing I managed to cram the first three into one post on Thursday. I'll try and get the final pair into one more post next week.

The Fifth Bell  (38 minutes - Not Wishlisted)

Playing this was an interesting experience but precious little of that interest came from the story or the characters, which is a bit of a problem for a game that so obviously styles itself on the great narrative-led, character-driven point and clicks of the past, particularly a certain very well-remembered series from the 1990s. 

I'll start there. I'm used to adventure games wearing their influences proudly, as badges of respect and honor. There's nothing wrong with that at all. In the case of The Fifth Bell, though, it sometimes felt as if the primary influence might be  The Da Vinci Code, not Broken Sword. 

The demo begins where, I assume, where the full game will too, with the player character talking to himself as he rides his motorcycle down the hill into Strasbourg in a beautifully animated scene that really didn't work at all for me, for a couple of reasons. 

For a start, it's so lovely to look at and such a surprise at the very beginning of the demo that I didn't really take in anything I was being told. Consequently, when I arrived in the town square, I had no idea why my character was there or what he was supposed to do next.

Secondly, although I've never been to Strasbourg, I was under the impression it was a fairly large city. As you can see from the screenshot, the introduction makes it look like a small market town, as you approach it down an empty, country lane. It does look more like a city when you get there but it's still disconcerting.

All of which brings me naturally on to the graphics, which are by far the most striking and appealing thing about the game. That could also be a problem because this is one of nearly twenty per cent of all demos in the current Next Fest that come with an AI warning. In this case, AI was used "for the 2D background art, character sprites, and audio". All particularly problematic uses for many people.

I read an informative and revealing article on AI by Rob Fahey at GamesIndustry today. It makes a number of telling points about the dubious utility of AI, evidence against which is beginning to mount up now many companies, large and small, have had a year or two to try it. We're nearing the moment when the promises made for the technology are either going to be broken or fulfilled and it seems more likely to be the former than the latter. 

Fahey also observes that, even if the utility is there, it will come at a cost that might be more than most businesses will be willing to pay. Not only are the AI companies beginning to ramp up their charges in an attempt to claw back some of their vast investment but opposition from the end users, gamers, to any use of the technology at all seems to be both increasing and hardening. 

Those two factors combine to make the whole affair seem much less attractive than it did a year ago. Then, the worry would have been being left behind in the gold rush; now the safe option looks like sticking with the tried and true.

None of which necessarily impacts a game like The Fifth Bell, which looks to me as though it might be the work of a single developer. For someone making their own game, the attractions of automatically generated art and sound must seem extremely enticing. 

And the results are mildly encouraging, in a way. As I said above, the visuals are the best part of this game. The scenes are pretty to look at; well-composed and coherent. I suspect they're also mostly AI-generated, even in their final form.

The Steam AI proviso says they were "extensively edited, cropped, and manually integrated by hand", which initially makes it sound as though the end result was mostly the work of a human, until you realize what it actually means is that someone took the AI-generated output, tidied it up a bit, trimmed it to size and added it to the game. 

I'm not sure how rigorous the editing can have been, either. I spotted one error that certainly should have been caught in that editing process but wasn't. The game is set in 1994, when the currency in France would have been the Franc. The text of one puzzle correctly asks you to get hold of a one-Franc piece to make a call from a payphone but the menu boards inside and outside the cafes show all the prices in Euros, a currency not in use until almost a decade later. 

In fact, if I was going to be really picky, they also show what look very much like 2026 prices, not even the correct prices for the earliest date the Euro would have been use, namely 2002. It just shows how careful you have to be if you use generative AI and how much clean-up work you could end up doing.

Perhaps the most obvious warning sign, though, is that, as I suggested in a previous post, I could somehow sense the AI in the screenshots on the game's Steam page even before I read the disclaimer. Once I got into the game itself, that sense that something was subtly off intensified.

Would it have put me off playing, had the story grabbed me more firmly than it did? No, I can't say it would. The pictures might feel a bit bland but they're not unattractive. Plenty of hand-drawn games have art that looks a bit wonky to me so it's not an aesthetic deal-breaker. If anything, found the odd, sidling, diagonal movement of the main character, presumably not the result of AI, more disturbing than the slightly flat backgrounds.

  

Leaving the visuals for a moment, what about the sound, for which AI was also at least partly responsible? Here I found the artificiality harder to ignore and less worthy of a pass. 

One of the core requirements of an adventure game of this stripe is convincing, engaging voice work. The Broken Sword titles are the gold standard. I can hear George and Nico's voices in my head even now and Mrs Bhagpuss, who hasn't heard them since the 90s, still occasionally imitates them in conversation for comic effect. The voice acting in that series, and in several other adventure games I've played, often does as much of the heavy lifting as the plot or the puzzles.

In The Fifth Bell, the dialog isn't all that inspiring to begin with but the vocal interpretation sometimes drags it down a little further. It's not bad, as some human voice acting I've heard in games has been. It's mostly just a bit flat and unconvincing.

The thing is... the voice-work here isn't very good AI. There were a handful of minor line misreadings that I would say were typical of AI, which I would have thought, once again, should have been dealt with in the edit. And it wouldn't have been hard. I've heard - and indeed created - more convincing speeches generated by free online resources. 

After I'd finished playing, I copy-pasted a chunk of my own prose into Suno and had it create a spoken-word version, just to see if I was being over-critical. Suno did a better job on the first attempt and a much better job once I'd tweaked it a bit.

That only took me about a quarter of an hour, most of which was spent listening to the output. I don't think it would be hard to produce some convincing voiceover for an adventure game using AI. On the other hand, I'm sure I could do a better job myself, just reading it aloud, and so could most people, I'd have thought. I'm not sure voice acting is a part of the creative process that really needs much automation.

The parts of the game that apparently don't have AI at the back of them are the story, the gameplay and the mechanics. The last of those is easy to dispose of: the mechanics are solid. Nothing much wrong with them at all. Everything works, nothing is more awkward than the average adventure game, which admittedly isn't saying a lot because the entire genre is generically fiddly. I didn't come across any bugs or glitches.

Gameplay is absolutely traditional for the genre. Walk around, inspect things, pick up anything that isn't nailed down, talk to anyone who'll talk to you, do whatever they want you to do, solve problems and remove obstacles by using Item A on Item B... We all know the drill. 

I found all the puzzles reasonably easy to solve without a walkthrough. Most of the solutions were at least semi-rational although I think it's fair to say no-one in any adventure game ever made has ever behaved entirely rationally. The characters were quite engaging for the most part. The builder was amusingly aggressive, the girl and her disturbingly photo-realistic dog were charming, the waitress was suitably harried and irritable...

The plot is mildly involving. During renovations, someone discovered a modern cassette tape, hidden impossibly in a medieval wall in Strasbourg cathedral. On the tape was some kind of dire warning about not allowing a fifth bell to ring. I was never very clear what would happen if it did or why the character I was playing, Evan Marek, an archivist, was involved in trying to find out but I was willing to go along with it.

The biggest problem is the sudden start I alluded to earlier. Most adventure games begin with a fairly lengthy, slow set-up, during which you get to know the characters as they're slowly drawn into some kind of mystery. The Fifth Bell, in contrast, begins with a short voice-over and then there you are in the cathedral square in Strasbourg with not much of a clue why. I didn't find it to be a start that engendered much commitment.

The writing itself is a bit of a mix. As I said, the character dialog can be entertaining but the item and location descriptions are workmanlike at best. In general, it all feels a little perfunctory except when people are talking, at which point it sometimes seems like the writer might be having too much of a good time.

All in all, I didn't think it was a bad demo or that it's likely to be a bad game but even as a fan of the genre, I wasn't motivated to add The Fifth Bell to my wishlist. I already have a few point and click adventures on there and a couple more in my Steam library that I haven't gotten around to playing yet. All would seem to have more going for them than this one.

That said, based on the demo, I'd say it will probably be perfectly fine. If you're an adventure gamer who can't get enough of the genre and you're sanguine about AI usage, I'm sure you could do worse. That's damning it with faint praise but the demo, which I haven't finished and most likely won't, makes it feel like that sort of game. 

A Warm Drink And A Comforting Toy - The Lucy Dreaming Demo

Just a very quick post today since normally I'd be at work at wouldn't be posting at all. Instead, I'm on "holiday", which is to say I didn't book any time off at all before the cut-off point so someone just gave me a bunch of weeks and this is one of them.

That's how come I was able to spend the last hour playing through one of the demos I downloaded the other day, Lucy Dreaming. Fifty-two minutes to be precise. A very good length for a demo. 

And it's a very good demo, too. Exemplary, in fact. If I was going to rate it specifically as a demo, I'd give it five stars. 

It's not only the right length - long enough to get the measure of the game but not so long it feels like you've actually started playing it for real - it's also a satisfying gamelet in its own right. Playing through it feels like a complete experience and also like a tailored one, not a fragment of the full game ripped loose from context.

Which is a clever trick because in a way that's exactly what it must be - the introduction to the full game. Not even the first chapter, more like the prolog. Only you can tell it's been adapted for the demo, not just pulled out and dropped in as-is from the self-referential little asides that contextualize it as a version specifically designed to be played in demonstration mode. 

Plenty of demos do that. They put up walls or pop up messages with some variation on "Not included in Demo". That's better than just leaving you to figure out why something isn't working but the Lucy Dreaming demo goes further. It incorporates the explanations into gameplay, so when you try to interact with something that's not relevant to the subset of the game you're being allowed to see, it tells you so within the same framework it tells you everything else. 

That sounds a bit vaguer than I meant but unfortunately (Or more properly the opposite of that.) I was so engrossed in the gameplay I neglected to take any screenshots when it happened, leaving me either to paraphrase from memory or fall back on a broad overview of the technique. 

Oh, alright then, I'll semi make one up. It was close to what I'm about to tell you but I can't remember the exact phrasing. You can take it that it was more amusing than what I'm going to come up with, though.

The whole demo takes place in Lucy's house. It starts in her bedroom and from there you can explore the upstairs landing, the downstairs hallway, the lounge and the garage. There are three more doors you can't enter - her brother's room, her parents bedroom and the bathroom. Oh, and the front door and the garage door, which lead to the outside.

The garage door is locked. The front door opens but there's just no option to go through it. Lucy's brother, Lloyd, is in his room and he's not about to let his little sister come in. Lucy very reasonably balks at going into her parents bedroom, commenting she doesn't even want to think about what they do in there.

That leaves the bathroom. You can try to go in there but when you do, Lucy tells you the bathroom isn't available in the demo. And then she adds that it's just as well she doesn't need a wee.

It's only a little thing but it adds to the feeling you're not just playing a demo but a short game that someone has really thought about. That's one example I can remember but there are a few more and they added to the sense that Lucy Dreaming is a game someone cares about.

But you can tell that from everything about it, really. One thing that often annoys me in adventure games is the way you can only examine objects that you'll need to use. Lucy Dreaming feels a bit like one of those open-world RPGs that claim if you can see somewhere you can get there, only in this demo that translates to if you can see an object, you can examine it.  

That's a lot of work, adding a line or two of text to everything in the house and, again like those open-world RPGs that let you open every single container in the world, it risks annoying the player almost as much as making most of it inert would. If you're going to tag everything with a line of dialog, you have to make most of them worth the click and Lucy Dreaming manages to do it. 

At least it does in the demo. Which, as I said, is less than an hour's gameplay. Whether the writer(s) can keep it up for the whole game I suppose won't be apparent until its too late, if you've been suckered into buying it by the attention to detail in the short version and it turns out not to be sustained. But then, we should be alert to that risk. It's there in every MMORPG ever made. The starting zones and tutorials are always the most complete and polished part of the game. Never judge an MMORPG by its tutorial.

Lucy Dreaming, of course, is no MMORPG. And anyway, I really don't think that'll be the case here. It feels like one of those hand-crafted labors of love that wasn't a labor at all to the people who made it. It has that sense of the creators having fun and of that fun transferring well to the audience.

Which brings me to the advertised "British Humour" (British spellings look really weird to me these days. I've been using American spellings for so long...). As a British person (That's what it says on my passport, anyway.) I'd have to say that I really didn't notice much "British" humor in the demo at all.

British accents, yes. Lucy herself speaks in a British accent that I found very easy on the ear. Not exaggerated for comic effect. Just a naturalistic Northern burr. The only other speaking part in the demo, Lucy's dad, only gets a couple of lines and those are enunciated in such a strained and peculiar way, as appropriate to the circumstances, I couldn't really tell what accent he had.

A British accent, though, even a Northern one, does not in and of itself constitute humor. There are plenty of jokes in the demo, some of them quite funny, but none that I noticed seemed particularly nationalized. 

The house itself looks like a British house but I'm pretty sure it could pass for one in any number of other countries. It's a child's bedroom, a couple of hallways and a garage. How different, culturally, can those be between English-speaking nations? The lounge is the most British - English, really - of them all but even there it has a ceiling fan and I can't say I've ever been a suburban home in this country that had one of those. We don't get the hot weather to need anything like that.

As for the dialog, most of which is Lucy talking directly to you, the player, I'm pretty confident you could give the same script to an American actor and you wouldn't have to change more than the odd word or two. If it was the Britishness of the humor that sold you on the game, you may be disappointed. You're not going to see much of it in the demo. Can't say I was sorry about that. 

Graphically, it's retro as has been the fashion in a large corner of the adventure game market for a while now. There's an admirable attention to detail and the color palette is easy on the eye. What's not to like?

Also, it is quite specifically an Adventure Game. There are several fourth-wall-bending gags about that. The demo is never afraid to go meta-fictional, another thing that predisposed me to like it.

Gameplay is rock-solid point & click puzzle-solving. Examine everything, pick up everything that looks remotely useful, figure out what to use on what. We all know the drill. 

In the demo you have to complete half a dozen tasks to get Lucy ready to go to sleep. All of them are completely realistic, like putting on some calming music, getting her into some suitable nightwear and making her a warm drink. As you complete each one it crosses itself off a list, which made solving each puzzle feel oddly satisfying.

The puzzles themselves are very fair. Most are even rational, although I wouldn't have warmed Lucy's bedtime drink in quite the way the game expected. Then again, she's a small child. I can totally see a child doing whatever it was Lucy did. 

No, I'm not going to tell you. Go play the demo if you really have to know!

Mostly, though, I thought I knew exactly what to do and I was almost always right. The problem was figuring out how to do it and the solution was usually guessable in no more than a couple of tries, which is the mark of a good point & click in my book. I never once had to look for a hint so I don't even know if there's an in-game hint system. If the whole game is as well-designed, you won't need one.

All in all, as I said at the start, this was an exemplary demo. Or maybe not because at the end of it, although I'd had a great time figuring out all the puzzles, I didn't immediately wishlist the game. That's because the demo gave me almost too vivid an impression of what it would be like to play the finished article and I wasn't sure I liked the idea of that as much as I ought to, if I was going to buy it.

Sometimes you need just a little grit to make the pearl. (Apparently that's not really how pearls get made but a cliche is a cliche.) I wouldn't remotely call this demo too slick or too easy but after I'd finished it I didn't get the feeling I needed to find out what happened next. Maybe the demo was too well-constructed and complete in itself

I might still pick the game up at some point but I have the feeling there are other Adventure games I might find a little more compelling. Still, don't let that put you off trying the demo. If nothing else, it's a fun, self-contained, satisfying experience all of its own. 

Tails Noir: Preludes - Completed

Truly, really, super-short post today and I mean it (Maaaan!) Lots of annoying things kept getting in the way of sitting down to write so it's too late to do anything much. Still, I don't want to skip a day and luckily I have one very quick and easy option backed up, ready to go, which is that

I finished another game!

Yes! I know!  What the hell is happening?

I think I mentioned in a post a couple of days back that, having knocked off Crowns and Pawns, I might go back to another game I'd left off half-way through and try to finish that next. The game in question was Tails Noir: Preludes, a prequel to the excellent Tails Noir.

I finished the original and I could have sworn I wrote about it but there's no Label for it. Except, yes there is. Only when I played it, it was called Backbone and the prequel was called Tails: The Backbone Preludes. Both games have apparently been renamed since. (In fact, the url for the prequel on Steam still refer to the original title, although the one for the first game doesn't.)

Anyway, Backbone or Tails Noir or whatever it's calling itself today is excellent and I highly recommend it. And now I can confirm that the prequel is also very good indeed and I recommend it too.

Except I wouldn't fully recommend it to someone who hadn't played the first game. I wouldn't not recommend it - it's a complete game in its own right and I think it can be enjoyed for what it is - but it really exists mostly to explain and elaborate on the motivations, actions and backstories of characters in the earlier game. (There's also a Prologue, basically the first chapter of the main game, which is free on Steam and acts as a kind of demo.)

I don't consider much of what comes next to be a spoiler but I'll leave that thought out there just in case...

The main reason I would be a little wary of recommending TN:P as a standalone experience is that it doesn't really have an ending. Well, it has lots of endings since it's one of those games you can replay many times, making different choices to see what happens, but given that the future for all the characters is set in stone by way of the original game, all you're ever going to get with the prequel are beginnings.

Or, more likely, possibilities. It's as though you're seeing alternate timelines in the past, all  of which are going to lead inexorably to the same future. 

None of which diminishes the immediate impact of the stories you hear, all of which are very "noir" indeed. The game is not a laff riot. 

I won't go over the milieu, characters, mechanics or aesthetics again. The prequel is extremely similar, not to say identical, in all those respects to the first game and if you want to know what I thought about all of that you can read it here. The prequel has more of the sense of a series of inked vignettes than the enmeshed but ultimately coherent storylines of the older game but other than that it's very much business as usual.

Both games are fairly short in absolute terms and also exactly the same length. And I mean exactly. They each took me 4.9 hours to complete. 

That's just for a single playthrough. Many people will multiply that run time by at least as many times as there are characters, looking to find out what happens if they make different decisions along the way. 

I hardly ever play any "choices matter" games more than once, which is why I prefer "choices don't matter" games. Tails Noir: Preludes is very likely to be an exception. The moment I finished I immediately wanted to go back and replay two specific sections to handle things differently, which is very much not a reaction I usually have and a big plus point in the game's favor.

Anyway, for once I'm not going to go on at inordinate length about it. I really don't have a lot of time to post today. For once I really am going to keep it as short as I said I would. 

Having wrapped up two games I left off playing part-way through more than a year ago, I feel like I'm on a bit of a roll. I can think of another I left in a very similar position and a couple more that I started and then gave up on quite quickly. Instead of buying anything new just now, something I keep thinking about doing, I might see if I can't clear up one or two more unfinished titles first.

If so, next up is Lake. That's on Prime Gaming so I can't say exactly how many hours in I am but How Long To Beat has it at only six hours for a non-completionist run and I surely must be quite close to that already. 

Maybe I can finish it before the weekend...

Crowns And Pawns: Completed

Here's a rare event. I finished a game! Yes, I know. Doesn't happen very often, does it? And even more unicornly, it's a game I wishlisted after playing the demo in a Next Fest. And then I bought it. And now I've played it. Seriously. What are the chances?

The game is  

Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit   

Inevitably, it's a point and click adventure, very much in the classic style. The demo reminded me strongly of the Broken Sword series, which I consider to be the gold standard for the genre. I'm always on the lookout for games that follow closely in that tradition, which is why I wishlisted it. 

The weird thing, though, is that when I reviewed the demo back in February of '22, I wasn't all that enthusiastic. In my summing-up, I described it as "...quite bland... adventure gaming by numbers" and concluded "... if it turned up for free on Amazon Games or Epic or somewhere like that... I'd probably play it.... I'm not sure I'd pay money for it, though."

But I did. I payed £8.49 for it on Christmas Day 2023. I can't remember buying it but given the purchase date I suspect I got a Steam Gift Card or similar for Christmas that year. Don't remember that either. In the same purchase I also bought Tails Noir: Preludes, which I've started but haven't finished. Maybe I'll get back to that one next.

Crowns and Pawns took me just under eight hours to complete, which works out at about a pound an hour. Looked at objectively, it's not great value. It's cheap enough, sure, but I've played Star Resonance: Blue Protocol for almost exactly as long and it hasn't cost me anything. 

I pick on that one specifically because I was playing it in between sessions of Crowns and Pawns and enjoying it just as much but I could name-check any F2P title, really. Is it any wonder smaller studios struggle to get attention for games when they have to charge money for them and there's so much of equal or higher quality available for free?

But... there are no major Free to Play publishers pumping out endless, throwaway point and click adventures. Not that I know of, anyway, although if there are any, I'd love to hear about them. For the dedicated teams hammering away at all those intractable puzzles and coming up with endless streams of witty one-liners, I guess the main problem would be all those giveaways from Amazon Prime Gaming. Prime seems determined to hoover up every P&C game ever made and hand it out for free to bulk out the ever-decreasing value of their offer.

 

Except, like having a show that goes into syndication back in the golden age of network television, having your five or ten year-old adventure game picked up by Prime or Epic might be the payday the developers were always hoping for. How much do they get, I wonder?

It seems the actual numbers are safely tucked away behind NDAs but this reddit thread, which includes a couple of replies supposedly from developers who've taken the shilling, suggests it's a flat fee upfront with some sort of payment for new accounts registered (In the case of Epic.). Whatever it is, for most of the aging adventure games I claim, it has to be a bonus. None of them are going to be generating much in the way of new sales by now.

So, was Crowns and Pawns any good? Yes, it was, thank-you for asking. 

I didn't like the opening, which had nothing much to do with the rest of the game. I can see why they didn't use it for the demo. If they had, I'd never have wishlisted it, let alone bought it. I disliked it so much, I stopped playing after I finished it and didn't pick the game up again for more than a year.

I suppose out of politeness I should insert a spoiler warning here. Like anyone cares...

The game begins with that peculiar "Prologue" set in Chicago, in which Milda, the protagonist, and her friend and roomate Dana, meet some annoying jerk about some job Dana is trying to get. There's a whole lot of infuriating business where you have to stop a busker from playing, get some guy a drink, print out fliers and pack your bags, none of which I found remotely amusing or entertaining and all of which seemed to take fucking forever.

Having played the whole thing now, I can see it's supposed to be giving you some backstory to Milda and Dana's relationship, setting her friend up to be a useful contact later in the game, but why it all needs to be presented in such a tedious fashion beats me. It feels like a different game altogether and a much less enjoyable one.

Once you get past that, though, the remaining 90% of the game is pure adventure. Milda arrives at her dead grandfather's cottage in Lithuania (Big spoiler - he's not really dead!), all of which you can read about in that demo review I linked earlier because the demo is pretty much that whole chapter.

From there the action moves to the capital, Vilnius, then to Belarus (To fix the result of an ice-hockey game.) and then to Siena in Italy. All with trips back to Vilnius in between. You get to see a lot of Europe, some views of which, particularly the many churches you have to break into along the way, look to have been taken directly from life. 

There's a lot of business with seals (The kind you use to put wax on documents, not the ones that honk horns in the circus - if you live in the 19th century.), codes, invisible ink, secret compartments... all the good stuff you expect from the genre. You have to read old books and look at old pictures and compare this with that and come to conclusions.

All of which requires a considerably more robust and coherent UI than the one you're given. I ended up using a walk-through quite a bit. I almost always knew what to do, I just couldn't figure out how to make the game do it. Often the way with these things, I find.

Some of the mechanics seem to get forgotten along the way, like the notes function on Milda's phone, which you sometimes use to combine facts you've discovered so as to learn something new but which mostly just seems to sit there, doing nothing. Or maybe I missed a bunch of stuff. That's always possible.

If so, it wasn't anything that got in the way of finishing the story, which ends in ludicrously dramatic fashion with a seismic collapse in a cave beneath the vaults of a church in Vilnius. The game begins like an episode of a failed sitcom starring two wacky girls just out of college and ends like the climax of an Indiana Jones movie. It's a bit of a leap.

One thing I did like about the ending is that you get the choice of grabbing the eponymous, extremely valuable and possibly magical but also allegedly cursed crown or letting it fall into the abyss, to be forever lost. I chose to let it go, which gave me an achievement only 17% of players have got, so I'm guessing greed wins out for most people there. Or possibly megalomania. 

The whole plot feels far from convincing throughout. There's something about KGB psychotronic experiments and a history professor who wants to rule the world using telepathy. There's a hint of magic that could just be an over-active imagination and an awful lot of quite detailed historical information concerning the Baltic States. Religion comes into things a lot and so does architecture, not to mention the rules of ice-hockey. It's all quite educational.

Mostly the puzzles are logical and realistic - for the genre. There are a couple of annoying "action" sequences involving precise timing that I could have done without. Also, if you're going to require a librarian to go to the far end of a library to retrieve a book so Milda can do something while she's away, I'd suggest not making that book the Necronomicon. That was one I had to use the walk-through for because I assumed it was a joke. 

Speaking of jokes, they're pretty good, on the whole. I wasn't rolling around but I did chuckle a few times. Milda and Dana have several good exchanges and Milda's friend Joris, at whose apartment in Vilnius she stays (Nothing happens between them, or not in my play-through it didn't, anyway.) has a droll sense of humor.

Altogether, I had a good time playing Crowns and Pawns. I've played plenty of worse adventure games. It's strengths are the graphics, which are very pleasing throughout, the characters, who are all either likeable or boo-hiss as appropriate and the setting, which is original.  

The mechanics are mostly very sound. Using items from inventory and combining them is intuitive and straightforward. Most things work as you'd expect. Movement is mostly walking slowly but you can double-click to move instantly from location to location including, within scenes, from door to door, which is very welcome. It's just a few of the more elaborate options that don't feel as polished as they could be. 

One innovation I can't recall seeing in a point&click game before is the option to change Milda's appearance, just as you would in an RPG. They could have made a bit more of that, I thought. If the game tells you about it, I missed it. I only discovered it by accident when I noticed Milda had left her travel bag by the sofa in Joris's flat.

I clicked on it out of curiosity and it opened a window where I was able to change her clothes, style her hair and add accessories. As far as I could tell, what she wore didn't make any difference (Except the one time she had to make herself a fake hockey fan shirt so the driver would let her on the bus.) but as you can tell from the pictures, I made good use of the option anyway.

I also notice now that two of the slots, bracelets and earrings, are empty. That suggests I must have missed something along the way. I don't think I care enough to go back and look for whatever it was I missed. 

The game has a "Mostly Positive" rating on Steam and I think that's fair. I feel mostly positive about it too. Would I recommend it, though? 

Well, for a Point&Click fan, yes I would. It does more than enough right to keep the craving at bay for a few hours. For the casual player, though, probably not. There are a lot of similar but better options out there. And quite a few of them are free. Or will be if you wait long enough.

My Prime Picks For April

I wasn't going to post anything today, for reasons of extreme laziness and lack of motivation, but I just claimed two of this month's Prime giveaways so I thought I'd mention them for mentioning's sake. I'm not going through the whole lot because a) I doubt anyone cares and b) it's not a very exciting slate but I will just call out a handful of titles that might well be of some interest to someone reading this.

For starters, there's something called Minecraft Legends, which appears to be an RTS set in the Minecraft universe. Is there a Minecraft universe? And if there is, do people refer to it as the MCU? Because that could be confusing.

Anyway, the game is available on Prime separately for PC and XBox, which is weird. I didn't know Prime gave away console titles or if I did know, I'd forgotten. I did think about claiming it but seeing I've never even played Minecraft, it seemed like perhaps that should come first. And I have no plans to play Minecraft.

Three other titles came under consideration. There's one called PaleoPines, which has the tags RPG, Simulator and Indie attached to it. It also has a lengthy description, something that's all too often absent from games in the Prime offers. 

Reading that, it seems to be an Animal Crossing/Stardew Valley clone with added dinosaurs. Graphically, it looks as if it's aimed at fairly young children although that may just be the art style, not the gameplay. 

I really don't like farming games, I'm not a big dinosaur fan and I have Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp for all my imaginary socializing needs so although this looks like something I conceivably might play, I'm passing.

I was initially a little more interested in Let's Build A Zoo. As a concept it sounded like it might be a pleasant diversion, especially with the sci-fi element of gene-splicing thrown in: 

"Try your hand at DNA splicing, and stitch together over 300,000 different types of animals, ranging from the majestic Giraffephant to the peaceful PandOwl."

Then I looked at the screenshots. It's done in that top-down, pixel-art style I can't stand. Hard pass on that, then.

Finally, I thought about Deus Ex: Invisible War. It's an RPG/Shooter set in the DeusEx world. I'm discovering somewhat late in life that I quite like shooters and I already know I like RPGs so that seemed promising. As with Minecraft Legends, though, I've never played DeusEx. It seems a bit premature, not to say presumptuous, to start with a spin-off. 

Come to think of it, I might own DeusEx from a previous Prime giveaway. Maybe I should play that instead.

So, what did I take?

I took Gamedec and Mutazione, neither of which I'd heard of but both of which sounded right in my wheelhouse. (Where does that expression come from?  What is a "wheelhouse" and why would  something that was in it feel comfortable?)

Gamedec is "a single-player cyberpunk isometric RPG" Better yet "You are a game detective, who solves crimes inside virtual worlds." Now that's an intriguing set-up, although I'm not sure it's an original one. 

Best of all "The game continually adapts to your decisions and never judges." I do so hate a judgy game, don't you?

That one may well get played at some point. I have a good record with cyberpunk adventure games - I've played a few now and enjoyed most of them. Even finished some...

Mutazione is an indie point&click adventure and my record with those is even better. This one sounds quite intriguing: 

"A mutant soap opera where small-town gossip meets the supernatural. Mutazione is an adventure game where the juicy personal drama is just as important as the high-stakes adventure part of the story. Explore the Mutazione community as Kai as she cares for her ailing grandfather. Discover magical gardens, new friends, and old secrets. They can survive an apocalyptic meteor strike, but can they survive their small-town drama?"

I do like a bit of small-town drama. The graphics are stylized but charming and it's rated Pegi7 so I was a bit surprised by how eerie and disturbing the trailer made it look. Not that those are necessarily bad things in the context of an adventure game. It has an "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating on Steam so I'm optimistic.

Anyway, those are my picks for April. 

Text And Subtext - An Adventure With Morrissey And The Smiths

Yesterday, I was somewhat surprised to find I didn't have enough new music bookmarked to fill a post. It's certainly not that I haven't been listening to plenty. It just looks as though I haven't been keeping a note of what it was.

When that happens it's usually either because I've been listening to familiar artists doing what they do, something I enjoy but don't necessarily find worth sharing, or because the new stuff I've discovered sounded good to hear once but not so good I wanted to call attention to it. That happens a lot.

Still, I wanted to do something musical on a Saturday. It always seems like the day for it. Luckily for me, late last night something really quite peculiar popped up in my feeds. 

To save everyone the trouble of following the link, it goes to a piece at NME entitled

"‘The Smiths Are Dead’ is a new Commodore 64 game about Morrissey". 

What the hell?! So much to unpack there.

Firstly, it's a text adventure. Apparently people still write those. I guess if you're going to revisit the 'eighties it's on point. Do people still play them, though? I mean, I loved a good tesxt adventure back in the day but I can't make myself enjoy them now.

Secondly, it's for the Commodore 64. That's still around? Well, yes, apparently. When I started reading the article I assumed it would be some kind of emulator project. Then I got to the part that said "While it is currently out of stock on the Amiga Store, fans should sign up for email notifications for when it is available again."

Unless you're Square Enix, you can't run out of stock of a digital product. And the Amiga Store (It exists.) hasn't. They've run out of cartridges. The Smiths Are Dead is (Or I guess I should say was and probably will be again, some day.) available in physical format. Specifically, cartridge. Go figure.

I do not intend to turn this into an investigation of why anyone would a) want to develop software for the Commodore 64 in 2023 or b) issue said software in a physical format that - to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge - the original C64 discontinued in favor of tape and disk the first chance it got. 

At this juncture I ought to say I never liked the Commodore 64 and never owned one. I preferred first the ZX Spectrum and later the Amiga 500. I actually still have an Amiga. It's fully functioning as far as I know, or at least it was the last time I used it, which would have been some time in the early 'nineties. Very, very occasionaly I toy with the idea of getting it out and looking at it but somehow I find the urge very easy to resist. As for using it... let's get real.

Never underestimate the draw of the nostalgia market, though. And I guess if you're going to tap that, it makes sense to double down. A Venn Diagram of the Smiths, home computing, the 1980s and adolescent angst would look like one big, filled-in circle, after all.

Anyway, like it or not, "The Smiths Are Dead" text adventure for the Commodore 64 is a thing that exists. It's set right at the point when the band has just split up (Hence the title, which also plays on the Smiths' album "The Queen Is Dead", as absolutely no-one reading this needed to be told, I'm sure.) and the game takes Morrissey's perspective as he prepares to record his first solo album. The cast features a list of characters well-known to anyone familiar with the British music scene of the time:

• Steven Patrick Morrissey 'Moz' is the ex-singer of The Smiths and the character we will take during the adventure.
• Gail Colson is my manager and the person who should help us redirect our career after the breakup of the group.
• Geoff Travis is the owner of the Rough Trade record label, which published the music of The Smiths.
• Stephen Street is a producer and a very prolific and valued musician in the English indie scene.
• Vinny Reilly is the ideologue of Durutti Column and a genius with the guitar.
• Andrew Paressi is a multi-functional artist who accompanied Morrissey at the start of Morrissey's solo career.

If you want to know more, I guess you'll just have to play the game. Always assuming you have a Commodore 64. With a cartridge port. And that the game ever comes back into stock. (Oh, alright. It is available as a digital download from itch.io as well. You can play it using an emulator. I might even do just that, one day.)

In the meantime, why not let's have some Smiths numbers? Everyone loves the Smiths, right? Just like everyone hates Morrissey, now. 

Only, we've all heard the songs so many times. Do we really need to hear them again? So let's have some covers of Smiths' songs! And heaven knows there are plenty to choose from. There can scarcely be any eighties' songwriters more covered than Morrissy and Marr.

Unfortunately, an awful lot of the covers sound an awful lot like the originals, something I've never really seen the point in. Covers ought to sound as unlike the originals as it's possible to get without not sounding like them at all. 

Also, just because there are so many and because I've decided to do this on the spur of the moment rather than work up to it over a number of weeks, I just don't have the time to sift through the thousands of faithful, respectful versions of This Charming Man and How Soon Is Now? on YouTube in search of something interesting, irreverent or original.

Luckily for me, plenty of people have done that already, so all I needed to do was leech off their hard work. At least, that gave me somewhere to start. From there, I relied on YouTube's recommend algorithm to throw up a few more that hadn't been included in every Best Smiths Covers list ever.

I've favored covers that have videos, but some of the best ones don't have any moving pictures, unfortunately, so I've had to accept a few static images as well. Also, since the game starts when the Smiths stop, I'm throwing in a few Morrissey solo numbers, god forgive me.

Enough preamble. Let's jangle!

The Boy With The Thorn In His Side - Holden

OMG! This is gorgeous! And double points for naming the band after a Salinger character then covering a Smiths' song. Talk about teenage alienation!  

Holden are a French duo. I'd never heard of them. It scares me how many great bands I've never heard of. It scares me even more how many I'll never hear at all.

How Soon Is Now? t.A.T.u

The oft-maligned, frequently misunderstood, always inspirational t.A.T.u, who I've loved ever since a blowhard I couldn't stand stormed out of a Yahoo Group I was in just because someone (Not me, sadly.) had the temerity to say they liked All The Things She Said when it first came out. Until then I didn't have any strong feelings one way or the other but I figured if he thought they were some kind of threat to the natural order, they had to be a force for good.

I really love the way Julia breaks the lines in strange places, like between "the" and "heir". It's typical of the idiosyncratic way the two of them phrase. They may not be the strongest singers but they're wonderful with a lyric. True storytellers, both of them.

This Charming Man - Stars

Here in a forceful, if louche, live rendition, opening with a heartfelt plea by frontman Torquil Campbell in which he exhorts everyone to go out and start a band withtheir friends so they'll never lose touch with each other.

I did that. Didn't work. Haven't seen any of them for decades. Just sayin', Torquil.

Girlfriend In A Coma - Mojo Nixon

I could have sworn I'd featured this one before but search says not. I seem to remember a conversation with Wilhelm about Mojo Nixon in the comments. Maybe it was at TAGN. 

I recommend watching this all the way through. The second half is the best part.

Ask - The Roberts Family

See? Not everyone's a cynic! Recorded during lockdown, apparently, although it looks like they're outside a beach hut. I hope you like the song because we're getting it again in a minute.

Let Me Kiss You - Nancy Sinatra feat. Morrissey

It's not like I was going to let this pass once I knew it existed. Nancy sounds sublime as always and the arrangement is gloriously crazy. Morrissey looks exceptionally sinister in that picture, though, doesn't he? Even by his terrifying standards, which is saying something.

Cada Dia Es Domingo (Everyday Is Like Sunday) - Mexrrissey

Again, I was almost certain I'd used this before but no. It's not even in my archive. I must just have watched it and moved on. Morrissey, of course, is famously Big In Mexico. So is Lana del Rey so I guess it balances out.

You're The One For Me, Fatty - planetbumi

I'm not sure how big Morrissey is in Indonesia these days but there's one hell of an indie scene in Jakarta that seems open to anything remotely redolent of the 'eighties and 'nineties so I guess he's doing okay. I always thought this was one of Moz's more overtly comic numbers, although it needs constantly to be stressed that almost all Morrissey lyrics are inherently amusing, usually intentionally so. 

It also can't be repeated often enough that the Smiths are actually a mosher's delight. All that angsty bedroom misery goes straight out the window once you hear these tunes played in a club. I never saw the Smiths but I did see Smiths tribute band These Charming Men once and believe me, it was exhausting! Pretty much like what you see above, really.

Just a couple more and then we'll wrap it up, I think. The longer I go on doing this, the more curious and exotic covers I'm finding. We could be here all day if I don't exert some self-discipline; something no-one ever accused Morrissey of doing.

Ask - Nina Shallman

I promised another version of Ask and here it is. Shimmering, I think, is the word. The dynamics on this are superb but where does that xylophone-style keyboard motif come from? It's not in the original, unless it's meant to be the guitar part. Sounds more like Peter Sarstedt's Frozen Orange Juice to me. 

Don't you just love the way she smiles so happily all the way through "It's the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb that will bring us together"? And yes, there are seven bombs. I counted.

The Light 3000 - Schneider TM

There Is A light That Never Goes Out is probably a lot of people's favorite Smiths song. It's hard to replicate the initial impact of the first hearing, when it kind of rips your soul out. Even harder in a cover, which is why this glitched, bleached-out rewrite works so well. Go elsewhere, get to the same place.

This Night Has Opened My Eyes - WDRL

I was checking to see if Juice WRLD had ever covered a Smiths song, because it seemed like something he might have done (He hasn't. Didn't. Sad.) when I found this instead. Actually, that's not quite how it happened but I wish it was.

While I'm wishing, I wish I'd been the one to leave the comment on YouTube that says "This song makes me feel like I’m driving home late at night after dumping a body in a lake." Not that I've ever done anything like that...

C'mon! Now you're wondering, right?

Okay, I know I said two more but let's make it the round dozen. I mean, Morrissey would want imperial measures, I'm sure.

Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others - Lilly Hates Roses

They're Polish. According to the text as translated by Google "Lilly Hates Roses, taking on the work of the British, pass well-known songs through the filter of their own sensitivity and already developed style. The result is unique arrangements in which The Smiths' music takes on an even deeper expression."

I don't know about all that but I like it.

And finally. We really couldn't do all of this without Rick Astley and Blossoms, could we? Their joyful reappropriation of the Smiths back catalog in recent times has gone a long way towards making it feel comfortable to listen to some of these songs again. I'm sure all Smiths' fans who've been having issues with Morrissey never shutting the fuck up would like to thank them.

Which song to choose, though? Oh, alright...

Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now - Rick Astley and Blossoms

It always was a bit of a plodder if we're honest but it's still a crowd-pleaser anyway. Not the finest sound quality but feel that crowd reaction.

And with that we're done. Until next time.

Come On, Irene!

I wasn't going to bother doing an Amazon Gaming post this month. The games are getting less and less interesting, while the weekly release cadence makes a monthly post feel less purposeful. 

It is crazy hot, though, and I don't have the energy for anything complicated, so here it is, more than a week after I got the memo, my handy guide to September's free games on the platform. Ignore it as usual. It deserves no better. 

September 7: Football Manager 2023 - I think this is the big ticket number for the month, god help us all. It's not even available directly from Amazon. You have to go through the Epic Games Store to claim it. Also, if you live in Brazil (Or, more accurately, have a Brazilian IP address.) you can forget it:   

"Please note: Football Manager 2023 is not available in Brazil."

That was actually the most interesting thing about the game for me so I thought I might ask Bard what the issues were:

 "Football Manager 2023 is not available in Brazil due to licensing restrictions. The Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) has not granted Sports Interactive, the developer of Football Manager, the necessary licenses to use the names, logos, and other intellectual property of Brazilian clubs and players.

In the past, Sports Interactive has been able to reach licensing agreements with the CBF, but these agreements have lapsed. The CBF has been demanding higher licensing fees in recent years, which has made it difficult for Sports Interactive to reach an agreement.

The lack of licensing in Brazil has led to a number of workarounds. For example, there are a number of mods available that add the Brazilian leagues and clubs to the game. However, these mods are not officially supported by Sports Interactive and can be difficult to install.

Another workaround is to purchase a copy of the game from a region where it is available, such as the United States or Europe. However, this can be expensive and may not be legal in Brazil."

I haven't checked any of that but it's pretty much what I imagined so I'm happy to accept it, unlike Brazilian gamers, who I imagine are probably quite cross. They're welcome to my copy. I won't be using it. Pass.

September 14: Ozymandias: Bronze Age Empire Sim - Another one you have to go somewhere other than Prime Gaming to get, in this case GOG. I'm starting to wonder if Amazon are really committed to the Prime Gaming platform any more. 

I have no interest in these kinds of sims, which have always seemed to me like the kind of thing itinerant accountants might play on their laptops, alone in their generic hotel rooms, as they while away the dead hours of the evening. Ben Wyatt from Parks and Rec would love it, I'm sure. Good storytellers like Wilhelm do a stellar job of making these things sound a lot more interesting than I suspect they really are so I'm occasionally tempted but I always manage to resist. Pass.

September 14: Absolute Tactics: Daughters of Mercy - A turn-based tactical rpg with a "mixed" rating on Steam. Hold me back, someone...

I'm not sure I've ever actually played turn-based tactical rpg. I've read plenty about the genre, not least from Tipa, who once again makes them sound like they could be fun. Just not fun for me, I'm pretty certain. 

There is a dog in it, which tempts me slightly, and it is native to Prime, which is a definite plus but... nope, I think not. Pass.

September 21: Dexter Stardust: Adventures in Outer Space - Finally! Something to interest me. This is a "classic point and click adventure" in which "taco-loving Dexter Stardust... and his good friend Aurora, go on the greatest adventure of their lives and discover the mystery of the Robot from the Planet X!" 

Saves me having to buy Starfield, I guess. Which, obviously, I wasn't going to do anyway. Remind me why I bought that new graphics card again, because apparently the kind of games I get excited about  would run on perfectly well on the PC I took to the recycling center two years ago. Claimed (Or it would be if I didn't have to wait another two weeks...)

September 21: Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate - Say what, now? The elevator pitch for this is "Chess, but you replace your entire army with a royal shotgun". Ever get the feeling some people just have too much time to think about stuff? Also, crowbarring "royal" into that tagline really loses the impact. Just sayin'.

I can play chess (Badly, of course.) but I don't like to. I've never found that gussying the game up with fancy graphics or larding it with whimsy made it seem any less tedious. This one doesn't even have the fancy graphics going for it. The funniest thing on the game's Steam page are the minimum specs:

System Requirements

Minimum:

• OS: Windows 7
  
• Processor: yes, you should have one
  
• Graphics: you'll need a screen
  
• Storage: 80 MB available space
  
• Sound Card: if your computer can play sound, you should be good
  
• Additional Notes: in theory, if your computer can run Windows, it can run Shotgun King

Is this really what they expect us to pay a Prime subscription for nowadays? Pass.

 

 

September 28: Unsolved Case: Murderous Script Collector’s Edition  - Another bloody Legacy Games hidden object "game". PASS in ALL CAPS!

 

September 28: Hundred Days — Winemaking Simulator - Seriously? You're just trying to get a rise out of me now, right? I realise there is literally nothing someone won't simulate these days but wine and video games seem like a really poor match. 

I watched the trailer until the painfully awkward voiceover told me "I failed and failed again until I got better", entirely without irony. Someone wrote that. Hard to believe, I know. Then someone had to read it aloud without laughing. I wonder how many takes it took? Pass.

And that's the lot. Not very impressive although I guess I should be satisified there's even one game I quite fancy. As for free loot in games I play or used to play or might play, I found a few worth grabbing.

I took the New Journey Pack for Blade and Soul. I had to have it - there was a hat. A beret, in fact. I really will play again one day. Honest! 

There was a hat in the Guild Wars 2 bundle as well but it was a fuzzy quaggan hat and I already have one of those. Probably. I have some fuzzy hat with bobbles, anyway. Doesn't mean I don't want another.

And finally there was the not at all creepy [Storage Maid] Fairy Irene for Black Desert Online. Giving away people isn't weird, is it? In fact it's an employment contract to hire her they're handing out, although I'm betting I don't have to pay her, so "employment" is something of a euphemism for "slavery".

Muddy as the ethical waters might be, Irene sounds just too handy to turn down:

"Moving items between storage has never been easier with Irene, your trusty storage maid that's available whenever, and wherever. Irene can move your item(s) of choice to and from the storage of the major city of the territory your character is located in."

I remember storage being a bit of a nightmare in BDO so anything that makes it more user-friendly is a must-have. You know there are going to be AI rights one day and NPCs are going to be striking over stuff like this. Enjoy it while it lasts.

And that was my lot for this month. This could well be the last of these posts. I guess it depends how short of things to write about I get and how many heatwaves we have...

"I'm Not Sure What To Say About That"

I got quite excited the other day, when Nimgimli pointed me to something Square Enix were trying out on Steam. They're calling it a "Tech Preview" and the description describes it as "a demonstration of Natural Language Processing (NLP), an AI technology".

As far as I can tell, Square have grubbed up a very old adventure game called The Portopia Serial Murder Case, originally released in 1983 (!) for a system called the NEC PC-6000 and force-fed it their proprietary AI tech to see what might happen. According to Wikipedia, the original game has suffered similar indignities in the past, having been ported to a few other long-forgotten platforms before eventually making its way into the mobile market and finally arriving on Windows and Steam as a shill for Square's "natural language processing technology."

Again according to Wikipedia, TPSMC ,as I'm going to call it to save all that typing, went down pretty well in Japan on its original release and was seen as being influential in the development of the visual novel genre. It sounds like the kind of game I'd enjoy, with its "point-and-click, murder mystery plot, open world, suspect interrogations, nonlinear gameplay, dialogue choices, and alternate endings" which, as a review in the Official XBox Magazine a few years back pointed out, were "standard for 2015, but way ahead of its time in 1983".

The Tech Preview is free to play on Steam so I thought I'd give it a try. I was somewhat surprised at the size of the download which, at more than 8GB, seemed like it would have required a government supercomputer to run in 1983, not a rinky-dink home computer. The System Requirements actually ask for 15GB though, so I guess I got off lightly.

Those requirements also contain a curious note about Speech Recognition: "Voice Input (Speech To Text) requires CUDA cores. (*1) VRAM 8GB and above required when using “Medium” in Voice Input quality settings. (*2) VRAM 16GB and above required when using “High” in Voice Input quality settings. Keyboard and/or Microphone support only." It seems to suggest you can play the game by talking to the characters rather than typing your conversations and reading their replies. 

That's something that would very much have been seen as the expected future of computing back in the 1980s, when Japanese tech giants were throwing vast amounts of money and effort behind the so-called "5th Generation", one of whose fundemental principles was to replace keyboard input with the spoken word. Much like videophones, which were a solved problem by the early '90s but which failed to attract any kind of interest from the public, speech recognition, when it was perfected, turned out to be something most people didn't want - and arguably still don't.

Still, I'd like to try it in an adventure game whose gameplay revolves around interrogation. It seems like a natural fit, especially when you throw in AI. I'm already excited for the inevitable and probably imminent integration of language processing AIs like Bard and ChatGPT with Smart Speakers and Virtual Assistants like Alexa and Siri. To see something like that in a game would be amazing.

There's only one drawback. I don't have a microphone.

Okay, technically I do have one. I actually have several, including two integrated webcam/mics that I acquired when I foolishly bought into John Smedley's lucicrous SOEmote fantasy ,of which the less said, the better. 

What? You don't remember SOEmote? Oh, what the hell...

I guess if you have a naturally gurning, cartoonish face like Dave Georgeson, maybe it would seem like a good idea, although evet then it would actually have to work...

Anyway, while I might theoretically own some mics, I don't have one to hand and even if I did, I definitely don't want to start fiddling around trying to get this game to recognize it. I mean, I might, if I thought there was the least chance of it actually working, but I've tried the text input. "Fool me once..." as they say.

About that text input. Y'know, I've played a lot of adventure games. I was already playing them when TPSMC first came out, back in the very early '80s. I used to sit there, with my first wife, in our first appartment, typing keywords and phrases into the ZXSpectrum's rubbery keyboard, hoping to see some kind of acknowledgement or recognition on the portable TV in front of us.

A decade and a half later I'd do the same thing, with Mrs Bhagpuss leaning over my shoulder and making suggestions, as we plowed our way through Broken Swords #1 and #2. Even EverQuest used a text parser before someone at SOE finally got around to adding clickable keywords.

Any - all - of those text parsers were orders of magnitude better than whatever the hell "Tech" it is that Square Enix thinks they're previewing here. And I'm not the only one making that assessment. As I write, the game or demo or whatever it's supposed to be has Steam's lowest possible rating - Very Negative - and in my opinion it's lucky to have a score as high as that.

Try some choice comments from angry reviewers:

"...the "AI" in this game is a joke. It is perhaps even worse than the text parsing of the original game, from 40 (!) years ago."

"GEEZ It's like they didn't even try...."

 "Zork (1977) had a better understanding of what your commands meant"

"Early text-based RPGs are way smarter at responses than this."

"basically it understands less inputs than the original King's Quest"

"This is a fascinating idea, but the execution is... I'm not sure it even rises to the level of "weak." It's not in evidence at all."

Aha! I think we've hit on the problem!

"Barely works. They say they removed the AI component due to safety concerns... so this doesn't even have the tech that it was supposed to be a preview of in the first place."

Well, that explains a lot. Okay, it doesn't explain how the game as it stands is literally worse than the basic, acceptable standard of games of its type from the era in which it was made, but it does answer the question I was asking myslef throughout the whole of the five (Count 'em - five!) minutes I could stick playing the blasted thing, namely "AI? What AI?"

I thought I should check if the allegation was true, so I asked Bard. Bard, being an actual generative AI, not a pretend one, was quick to give me the full story:

Hi Bard, Can you tell me if Square Enix has disabled the AI component of their tech demo for The Portopia Serial Murder Case?

Yes, Square Enix has disabled the AI component of their tech demo for The Portopia Serial Murder Case. The demo was released on April 24, 2023, and it allowed players to interact with the game world using natural language processing (NLP). However, the AI component was disabled on April 27, 2023, after players began to exploit it to generate offensive and inappropriate content.

In a statement, Square Enix said that they were "disappointed" that the AI component had been used in this way. They said that they were "committed to providing a safe and enjoyable experience for all players" and that they were "working to improve the AI component so that it can be used in a more positive way."

The disabled AI component was a major disappointment for many players who were looking forward to trying out this new technology. However, Square Enix has said that they are working to improve the AI component so that it can be used in a more positive way. It is possible that the AI component will be re-enabled in the future, but it is not clear when this will happen.

Other than Bard's curious ability to predict the future (Check the dates it's quoting - I almost missed it.) and fondness for repeating itself, that seems to be a reasonably accurate account of what happened. It's corroborated by this report at BeyondGames.biz and many others as well. 

So much for that "preview". It does invite the question "Why leave the bloody thing up with the claim the AI's still in there, then?", but since this is Square Enix we're talking about, I wouldn't expect a coherent answer.

Someone is going to get this tech hooked up and working effectively but clearly that someone is not going to be Square Enix, who seem to be about as realistic in their expectations and as technologically capable of achieving them as Smed and Smokejumper's SOE. 

And we al know what happened to them...