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 :)
Thank you for all the suggestions!
Buddy Simulator 1984 looks great because it (seems to?) combine text chat with other gameplay.
I honestly did a bad job with the title of the post (entirely my fault!) because most people have been going straight to the text adventure genre for recommendations, and that wasn’t what I had hoped for.
Text adventure games are easy to find. So are games that simply involve a lot of typing of any kind.
What’s not easy to find are games which aren’t necessarily entirely text-based or text parsing in their interactions, but have natural language chat as part of their gameplay loop.
So they could be absolutely any genre - walking sim, puzzle, horror - anything! Even an FPS or an RTS! Of course, I struggle to imagine how a game could fit natural language chat as part of a single player FPS, but if someone did it, I’d be interested!
In all, what im trying to find is a pretty specific, weird and rare non-genre that doesn’t fit established categorisation, and that’s why I needed Fellow Humans to help.
So, thank you for the Buddy Simulator recommendation. I’ll certainly be playing that :)