Square Enix’s latest game, the remake ofThe Portopia Serial Murder Case, has been a huge flop. The title, which usesSquare Enix’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology to remake the classic from the 80s, has received overwhelmingly negative reviews on Steam as users believe it does not work at all.
Ever since the release of programs such as ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Midjourney last year, the whole world can’t stop talking about AI. Sometimes, AI can be used for some novel achievements such as generating pretty realistic images or awhole game in under a minute using ChatGPT. However, this technology is also proving to be fairly flawed sometimes.
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Now, Square Enix’s recent attempt to recreate the classicThe Portopia Serial Murder Casehas been a complete failure, as the free game is currently sitting at a Very Negative review on Steam, with only 11% positive reviews. This title was supposed to be a demonstration of how Natural Language Processing could be used to create games. It seeks to recreate a fairly classic text adventure detective game from 1983 that was never released in the West. However, the prompts do not seem to be working at all.
On Steam, it’s not hard to find comments from disappointed gamers who thought the game would be as good as some of theother Square Enix remakes. Most people complain about using several prompts, only to be ignored by the title, as it does not understand what the user is trying to say. Others are angry that gamers still need to guess words as they would in the original title, and it seems to work even worse now than a game made with technology from the 80s.
Square Enix seems to be betting a lot on new technologies, and some of them are faring just as badly as this misguided case of AI. For example, the company has recentlystarted a partnership with the Web3 company Elixirto promote its future NFT games, which are not a very popular idea with gamers right now.
These are far from the only controversies regarding Square Enix recently. Last week, the physical editions of theFinal Fantasy Pixel Remasterswere sold outvery quickly. This created a parallel market for scalpers that sold the base games for as much as $300 (instead of the normal price of $75), with the $250 Anniversary Edition fetching as much as $1,200 in some cases. The problem prompted many fans to complain about the decision not to release enough physical copies of the collection.
