Vaudeville

I reinstalled the game yesterday. When it first came out, I didn’t get very far because suddenly nothing worked anymore and no NPCs would talk to me. This time, though, I dug through the game files and found out that the context had simply become too large for the language model being used. No wonder—the game saves every line of dialogue verbatim. And I had been 66% through the game! So I started trimming the JSON files for the individual characters, since they contain a lot of repetition. That got the game running again, and I found new suspects… and then my context overflowed once more. So I started another game and began asking questions left and right, using what I had learned from the previous playthrough. “What do you know about XY?” The funny thing was that this turned up a surprising amount of interesting material. I was having so much fun that I went a bit overboard and started attributing things to the characters, which sometimes led to some absolutely ridiculous dialogues. For example, one character told me her memory was fuzzy, so I asked if that was because she’d been drunk. She blamed it on the trees, and I told her that even I know you’re not supposed to …

THIS GAME DOES NOT WORK. I have a brand new, high performance laptop and using my microphone to talk to characters, it just says "you," no matter what I say. If I try to type what I'm saying to them, I get no response. So I get to stare at characters. Also, WORTH NOTING - I started a new save file, and instantly quit... and that file was at 8% completion. I didn't do ANYTHING. I played two hours and am at 48%! And it can't LOAD A THING. THIS GAME IS THE EPITOME OF WHAT'S BECOME OF GAMING. Selling broken products, on "SALE" or not, that DOES NOT WORK is theft. Thanks for nothing.

everything is limited. like the ai and everything

dialogue randomly stops working, then i can't speak to them again unless i start a new save-- makes it impossible to make progress in the storyline

The game has an interesting gameplay loop in theory. That said, the game became unplayable when the ai used to run the NPCS just stopped working all together. Even when they did work, the ai hallucinates way too much to make the gameplay feel meaningful. Genuine best of luck to the devs. I hope they can fix the issues, as the idea has merit.

It was a fun experience, though it definitely needs to be improved. Talking to the AI NPCs is fun and can lead to completely unique stories for each playthrough. However, for the most part I've found that talking to these NPCs doesn't actually help you solve the murder mystery. Many NPCs make stuff up, or don't understand what you're asking, and sometimes they can break and go into dialogue loops. Solving the case seems to be almost impossible since you never actually collect any real tangible evidence. You just have to guess based on things that these AI NPCs have told you... And that's a problem when you can't tell which AIs are telling the truth. The game can be fixed by both updating the AI so it stays on track with the story, and also by adding in more gameplay elements other than just talking. Add in physical clues and evidence that can be found and matched to suspects so the case is easier to solve. Other than this, I still had an enjoyable experience which is why I'm giving it a thumbs up. Though if I gave it a star rating... it'd be a 3/5.