Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Mar 3, 2022

  Waited about a half hour for it to finish downloading all of its initial stuff, then it crashed my computer so hard I had to press the power button to reboot (which I've never done with this computer in the year and a half that I've owned it, so thanks for that..). Should've been a cool concept but I was genuinely afraid it was going to destroy my hardware during that hard freeze and crash. Tested on RTX 2070 Super
• gamedeal user

  Mar 16, 2022

  I like the idea, but I was unable to play the game. The game makes you install many gigabytes worth of content after launching it in order to run the AI. My entire playtime was spent installing the AI with the game running, which runs up the playtime dangerously close to being nonrefundable. After reaching 100% installation of the AI, the game just froze at the debug screen, not allowing me to play. Restarting the game after reaching 100% AI installation forces a reinstall of the AI. I've tried using several different AI options (8gig and 16gig), but neither would finish installing after reaching 100%. Again, I have not been able to play a single moment of this game due to complications with the installation. Refunding - something's clearly broken here. I'd like to revisit this in the future.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 5, 2022

  It looks worse than a DOS game, doesn't make sense 90% of the time, occasionally is fun, requires a modern supercomputer to play. Welcome to the future of gaming.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 22, 2022

  Oh man, I'm excited to review this one. This game is honestly what I'd always wanted AI Dungeon to be. If you've never played AI dungeon, it's designed as a text adventure sort of thing, except using one of the GPT AI models, allowing for infinite possibilities. Which is nice and all, but AID has... problems. I wont go into those here, but they're easy enough to research. But also, it wasnt designed in quite the way I would have liked in terms of actual "gameplay". You didnt have stats or an inventory or stuff like that, and getting the AI to remember things you might be carrying was extremely limited and required that you babysit the memory function. Among other gameplay-esque things it was lacking. AI Roguelite though does away with pretty much all of those issues, and brings its own wild flavor to the table instead. Well... to an extent. We'll get to that. I want to state right away: I love this. I'm a big fan of AI tech of this type, having used GPT models (including the mighty GPT-3) and other AI types for awhile now. So finding an entire game revolving around that? Oh yes. It looked good. And it IS good. This game offers quite a bit here. Your adventure will see you going through all sorts of areas, each containing a variety of things. Most areas will have two branching zones that you can move into from that area (or you can go back to a previous area of course), a couple of friendly NPCs, and usually 2 monsters present at once. Sometimes, there are other things too, such as a resource node where you can mine... er... things, or perhaps a crafting gizmo, often themed around things like armor or weapons. Right away, in any of these locations, you're presented with all sorts of choices. Monsters, for instance... you choose when to fight them, you usually dont get into a full combat situation just at random (however, some interactions could make the AI decide to begin a combat, but this seems rare). Or you can talk to any NPC at any time, and you also have the option to give them any of your screwball items as gifts. You can search the location for items using a button at the bottom of the screen (though each location is limited in how many times you can do this), you could perhaps use an item from your inventory... maybe check that weird compass made of teeth you just found to see what it might show you here. One of the best parts of the game is actually how it presents these choices to you. I often find with AI Dungeon or similar things that, well... I'm not always the best at coming up with ideas. But this game loves to handle that part for you. It creates the "content"... and then I decide how to interact with that content. I *love* that. It's exactly my style of gameplay with this sort of thing. And really, it's how a text adventure should be. An old text adventure game like Zork never just went "you're in a room... what do YOU think is in the room?" after all. I also quite enjoy how combat works. You get a classic turn-based battle system here. You've got some basic stats, slots for equipment, and of course consumables and active skills. You could use basic attacks, or items, or skills, whatever. What makes it extra brilliant is what all these things DO. While some stats and things are of the "basic" sort (all things that go in a weapon slot have an attack value for instance, and many items have a "favorable text bias" value), other things are not so basic. That skill that your equipment gives you... it's never going to be just "does 40 damage and paralyzes". Oh, it'll often have a damage value (as the game always uses those) but the effect beyond that or HOW it does the damage... that's where it gets wild. I had one skill that was a "hedgehog shield". The description was that it was like this burst of flying needles used to interrupt the enemy and deal damage. But the AI came up with that description... it wasnt a pre-programmed thing. So when used, it would DO that. It would play out all sorts of often funny descriptions of a burst of needles trying to interrupt things, and the AI would take it from there. Maybe the needles would bounce off an enemy's armor. Or maybe it'd get them right in the face, or even end up in the ground, with the enemy going "hah! I'll just jump over that" and performing some wacky move of its own. You never *entirely* know what a skill will result in, but that result is always heavily influenced by the description, and these often quite useful abilities have traditional cooldowns. Really, combat is darned fun, at least in my estimation. Well, everything is, really. But it depends. See, the problem with AI is that it is limited by the power of whatever is running it. Even a smaller model will put a huge strain on your GPU... you sure aint gonna be running one of the huge GPT models on your own machine. The weaker your machine, the smaller the variant you can use. And the smaller the variant, the more utterly deranged the AI is. The smallest variant is almost unusable. But you have options beyond just those. If you have an Opus account with NovelAI, you have the option of linking to that and having that process the text elements... this is what I use, and it works wonderfully. NovelAI is bloody expensive though, and if you're using that, chances are you already had an account. The nice thing though is that there is another AI of pretty much the same type offered for a very small subscription fee of... $2 per month, I think it is? I havent tried that one myself, since I already have NAI. I hear it's just as good though. That being said, even the best AI can get... kinda funky. AI often seems to almost have good days, and bad days. On a good day, it'll all flow wonderfully and make sense. On a bad day, it'll get sorta... distracted. It wont follow things as well and will tend to get loopy sometimes. This isnt specific to just this game: Every AI I've tried anywhere has always had this strange trait. So, you need some patience with it when it's acting like that. Absolutely does not ruin the experience, mind you... I'm just pointing out that it does this. And really sometimes that occasional lunacy just adds to the fun. You get used to that, believe me. For images, the game now offers Stable Diffusion. SD is powerful. Seriously amazing. And even the strong variant can be run on your GPU... if your GPU is strong enough. You do need quite a beefy one to get the truly good stuff. But if you can get it maxed out... it's great. I've been constantly blown away by the amazing art it puts out. It's VERY different from the warped art you see in the screenshots (SD wasnt involved in those). The problem: SD has a tendency to bug out every now and then. It is currently an ongoing issue, where it'll get sort of caught on something and outright stop working (which you can spot in the debug window). This can get quite frustrating, but the dev is absolutely aware of it. It'll get worked out over time, I'm sure. When it DOES bug out though, it tends to STAY bugged out, and if you restart the game with the offending whatever still present in the area or in your inventory, it'll react to that and stop generating images again. So just keep in mind that as of this writing, this aspect doesnt work quite right (and I'll update this review when it changes). And really, the game is in early access for a reason. I imagine that developing with this stuff is probably really bloody difficult, and there ARE bugs. Be prepared for that when you dive in. Overall: Super fun and with boatloads of potential. You do need some patience here... both for early access and also the fact that AI requires you to wait while it ponders stuff... but if you've got that patience? You're gonna have a blast and it'll keep you coming back for more.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 1, 2022

  I started my adventure as a sentient 2001 Toyota Corolla living in New Tokyo in the year 2059, and in my adventures I: > liberated New Tokyo with an old man called Except, who is nude aside from frozen ice on his legs > tore down a Hula Hut > fought multiple police robots, leaving the police station in ruin > turned into a reanimated anime girl with cybernetic enhancements, known to all as Etsu the Undead > slaughtered an entire population of zombies on the Planet of the Undead > travelled to the End of Time, where I met my companion, the Eternal God Emperor of Mankind, who is literally just a 38 year old Asian man > left Except to die again on the frozen streets of New Tokyo > fought and killed the literal physical embodiment of entropy by throwing a burger at it > seduced an actual, real nuclear winter > ate a bag of radioactive waste and died > met a blue frog called Tapeworm > went to New Tokyo through a portal, where I learned the year was now 3059 and my liberation 1000 years ago had caused it to become the most technologically-advanced city in the world and remain so for centuries > mowed down actual gods with a handful of dead rats > asked the Eternal God Emperor of Mankind for a Cheese Snack, then got immediately attacked by demons > asked him again, this time he actually gave me one (it was a LEGENDARY item) > killed a Virus Infected Cyborg Toilet by infecting it with another virus > swam in a pool of blue slime > ate a Fatty dog > killed the Dead City Gangster Squad by throwing an Error Hat at it > told the Eternal God Emperor of Mankind that the Blue Slimes' Home Depot smelled like dog, to which he replied telling me his name is actually Kyoji > ate a Poisonous Nightshade and died a legend, becoming the greatest cyber goth girl to ever exist And my adventure isn't even over yet.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 29, 2022

  I typed text with my fingers, asked an NPC to throw me a weapon, he did, and it showed up in my inventory. In another game, I went to appeal a goddess to annul an arranged marriage, and the goddess liked talking to me so much that she joined my party. I threw coins, from my inventory, at bandits I was in a battle with. The bandits grabbed the coins, became peaceful, and the battle ended. I got XP. I poured special alcohol on a drunk, giving him the status effect "true drinker", and after he was done being sick, his opinion of me increased. The game decided I then took a shot of tequila, and announced that it was "a good day". At that moment I got a quest saying I needed to go into hiding. My character was an elderly woman. Hardcore. 10/10 That said, the AI isn't a genius. It will randomly misinterpret the text and kill the wrong character, and will sometimes break narrative flow with random objects, happenings, and impossibilities. But, for me at least, it's worth looking past all that. This is exactly my sort of thing! I tend to enjoy randomly generated weirdness anyway, but on the better models this is much more than just that. You can have a genuine adventure, albeit a quirky one sometimes. Take screenshots of your best items, characters, and happenings and post them to the discord! https://discord.gg/ctudxM4b I tried the game with the 4Gb text model and was suitably impressed, so I tried it with the cloud compute subscription (to use a large, smarter model) and things became shockingly coherent (knowing already that text AIs are not perfect), even when fed a weird starting scenario! (Such as: a Dimension Wizard starting at the Dimensional Nexus tasked with exploring and reporting on alternate realities of the Multiverse.) But you have to have clear expectations: running the AI locally will take time to generate turns. For me, with a 6Gb VRAM graphics card running the 4Gb text model, running each turn takes well over a minute. If I choose the smallest AI model, turns are less than a minute, BUT the AI's ability to reason and produce coherent results drops heavily, and it sort of messes up the quest generation. Nevertheless, being able to pass the turns quickly is very nice and there are still fun results.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 9, 2022

  It's honestly a step in the right direction, and as for the fun factor, there's plenty potential, however, at this point I cannot really recommend this game for several reasons: 1. loading the model gives makes my computer freeze for a minute at random, which isn't too bad, but it did crash it once, so that does make me worried regarding performance and how safe the program itself is. 2. The models don't deliver a very cohesive narrative experience at the moment, regardless of whether you're going for a serious or comical playthrough. 3. On top of that, you may die randomly due to some misunderstanding or the AI bugging out. 4. The interactions are weird, and you may sometimes try to put 2 and 2 together and the result will come out as something unexpected and wild, which may be funny, but less so when your interaction is supposedly "I hug my wife" and the result is "her head explodes and everyone dies". 5. While funny, the crafting system is bonkers, and you may find yourself "mining cow with your own decapitated corpse" and "finding rotten meat" inside. Also, combining the two aforementioned items will probably generate a Milk Beer if you combine them in a kitchen sink. These are all interactions in the game, but they get old pretty quickly. Overall, much like AI Dungeon, the game shows potential, but to actually be considered an enjoyable experience, there needs to be something more - and the current models require way too much GPU, and deliver way too little.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 28, 2022

  If Steam was using any intelligent AI it was showing me this game in my news feed instead of the multiple free MMORPG’s I never play at all. Unfortunately Steam did everything possible to hide this game for me since March 2022 and so did Steam to my other 200+ Steam friends. It’s not on anyone’s wishlist or library, which is absurd. While I have a 2000+ games library with RPG’s, turn-based strategy games, rogue-lites, likes and dungeon crawlers, AI Roguelite never appeared in any feed, which means Steam’s intelligent software to determine what I probably like to play isn’t working at all. Anyway, I’m finally aware of this amazing and cheap application, thanks to one Steam friend who picked it up recently and when reading the storepage I was interested instantly. After picking it up I played 6 hours straight until morning and then I was too late for my real life job…One more turn…and one more… What you see is what you get. You first have to change some settings in the options screen which text module or graphics module you want to use. You can use a (paid or not) cloud based service like Koblin or Novel AI to connect with the game, or simply your own GPU for text generation. The last one (4 GB version in my case) works better then the cloud one since it generates incoherent text. The GPU one is slower, but shows very realistic outcomes. Same for graphics. If you have any NVIDIA GPU you can let it do the image generation for you (4, 6 and 13 GB version). I only tried the 4 GB version and Wombat so far. Wombat is the fastest (free cloud based) and the 4 GB GPU version somewhat slow (Wait time is minutes per image), but the results are amazing. It simply generate custom images based on text input on the fly and with some exceptional quality. The high quality images are 512 x 512 pixels and can have 40 or more literation’s so the images are true to the text description always. You can add multiple prefixes to the image generation. You want them sketchy, oil painted, blue or yellow only? It’s all possible. You have all freedom in whatever prefix you want to use (yes, also adult ones). When everything is setup properly you can let the game generate a starting setting for you with locations, names, factions, stories and whatever your own imagination can think of or you fill in the start game form yourself with your own keywords. Everything is possible. And when you click play you are in your own RPG game, with your own story, the generated images (can take a while to load them all per level), stats, skills, items and locations. From here you can do whatever you want. You have choices, fights, locations to visit, skills and items to use that are all generated on the fly. And whenever you want you enter free text to any NPC, the world itself or whatever you can think of and the game delivers instant and endless fun to your liking. This is an amazing experiment and shows an AI is capable of generating stories and graphics based on players input on the fly. This already is and will be a huge part of game design in the future and to see this simple tool working so well makes me happy for what comes next. I did not much indepth research about the developer and studio (yet), but I believe originally it’s a music composer who designed this game (tool). And to be honest the soundtrack while playing is very nice to listen to. I hope my review will give some more, well deserved, attention to AI Roguelite. Thanks for reading.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 29, 2022

  Funny, but incoherent and arbitrary not only in content but also in "gameplay". Hit point bars and weapon stats appear utterly meaningless as combat will end at any time with instant death for you or your opponent, for no reason at all. The conversation parser is fascinating and could almost be fun to play with; however, every time you talk to an NPC they dislike you more and more unless you give them a gift, effectively punishing you for using the system at all. Underneath all this frustration, every turn or action takes a real-time minute or more to complete, making the whole thing a complete exercise in masochism. Review date December 29, 2022 early access. There are some amazing ideas at play here; maybe in a few years this will actually be worth playing. I look forward to checking back later, but for now, avoid this mess.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 1, 2023

  First things first, this fundamentally is not a game like Skyrim or other RPGs you might be hoping this is. This is not some hyper open ended version of such traditional RPG games; instead this is a AI assisted story telling tool which carries a load of positives and negatives depending on what your looking for. To put what this is into perspective. Imagine you are playing a traditional table top RPG with a friend, but you are both the DM and your friend has schizophrenia. Sometimes you are able to write and play an extremely compelling story other times the experience is fundamentally nonsense as characters randomly die instantly, settings completely fall apart, and NPCs are invented like they are guest stars on a 90s sitcom. 90% it will be a mix of both and depending on what your tolerances are for that such information is a deal breaker or deal maker. If you like weird jank that will pretty much always surprise you you are in. If you like the idea that at any second the story could go haywire for good or bad then you are in. If you understand the fundamental flaws, limitations, and positives and negatives to AI trying to tell a limitless story then you are in.