Voice-controlled murder mystery Dead Meat hits Steam this year, but its embrace of generative AI might spoil a great idea

I don’t want to talk to a game. I assume I’m not alone in this, because the tech’s been around for donkey’s and barely anyone tries to use it. Mass Effect 3 tried voice commands. Socom U.S Navy Seals shipped with a headset. "Dunno if I wanna be shouting out tacticool commands in my living room," wrote a Redditor on the subject four years ago, speaking to my very soul in the process. "Gimme the clunky buttons instead".

Thankfully, you can also use your keyboard to interrogate suspects in murder mystery Dead Meat. It’s a moody, slightly goofy noir puzzler that lets you ask anything you want. Whether this means you’ll always get a worthwhile response, I’m not sure. "Want to discuss their alibi? Probe them on the meaning of life? Confess your love? Or just troll them mercilessly? Your words hold power, and anything goes," reads the Steam page. Here’s a trailer.

As you may have guessed by now, there’s a caveat to this seemingly boundless NPC reactivity - Meaning Machine are using what they call their ‘Game Conscious (tee-em) AI system’. "The advent of generative AI has the potential to kickstart a golden age of creative experimentation and innovation," they say. "But only if creative people remain at the helm."

Here is my drive-by reaction to this: if you don’t value the written word enough to have a writer create unique, intentional dialogue, then why make a game based around conversation? Same for actors - there’s an undeniable choppy tinge to the character’s voices you don’t get with a real human reading a whole line like they mean it. But then again, I’d be lying if I said Dead Meat felt devoid of personality. Its characters are certainly a far cry from the Nvidia AI NPC James spoke to last year, and the dialogue they’ve shown off doesn’t give me any overt slop vibes (edit: actually, kinda.)

On the one hand, co-founder and tech lead Ben Ackland says he’s been working on AI for games for over six years "before it was cool", which you’d think might insulate them from some of the rabid gold-rush evangelism we’ve seen recently. One the other hand, their website shows off a separate system called ‘battle banter’ by having it add AI battle barks to Elden Ring, which feels about as close to missing the point as you can get. Sparing dialogue and deliberately lonely encounters? I barely know ‘ers.

All I can really say is this: Dead Meat looks interesting enough (perhaps even interesting enough for me to actually talk to it) and I’m still learning. I’m off to go have a re-read of the four parter Michael Cook did on generative AI for us. Don’t do any murders while I’m gone.