Several years ago I played Event[0]
It’s a sci-fi exploration/“walking simulator” that sees you stranded on an abandoned luxury space vessel, with only the vessel’s “AI”, Kaizen, for company. You can free-type whatever you like, and Kaizen will respond as best ‘he’ can, being helpful or unhelpful at times, opening and closing doors for you, giving you back-story on the ship and the people on it if you ask the right questions.
I’ve been looking for other games that use natural-language interaction and really coming up dry. I found a couple of horror-genre PC-simulator games like s.p.l.i.t (creepy!) and the demo of No Players Online (which was really fun by the way) and while both of those showed fake “chat apps” in the screenshots which got my hopes up, they are 100% programmed where you just press (any) keys and a pre-determined message types out letter by letter.
I don’t have my hopes up too high, because I realise that building this kind of interaction in a game is very difficult. It’s probably not worth it unless it’s the core focus of the game, and even then it’s going to have big problems. Event[0] itself was terribly flawed, as it’s clearly just using programmatic word matching, and often the responses are nonsensical or unrelated to what you asked.
That said, there were times it managed to shine, and in those moments it felt great, and I felt great for coming up with the right thing to ask, rather than being railroaded with predetermined options.
If you’ve got anything that might scratch a similar itch, please tell us about it :)
I played Starship Titanic as a kid, and loved it! Its one of four or five games I still kept the original PC “Big Box” for, all these years later.
The text parser being used only to talk to characters isn’t a detriment for me, it’s a feature! Clicking on things is much more intuitive for interactions, so just like Event[0] (which works the same way) I consider that a plus. Thinking about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if the devs of Event[0] were actually inspired by Starship Titanic…
As for AI, that’s something I imagine we’ll see more of in the future. Something like KathaaVerse isn’t that exciting to me as it’s mostly a thin wrap around an LLM - which as you say is liable to go off the rails, and it’s not a rich experience.
For it to be compelling to me it needs to be a curated game first, with environments and interactions and actual programmed mechanics, and then AI second to potentially enhance that game experience with rich and natural conversation. It will be a fun match when someone gets it right.