The Kraken Wakes Reviews

A very novel game that shows just how advanced NPCs and divergent storytelling can be. Charisma AI seems to be a fascinating tool for developing games and I would love to see more applications of it in the future! The story of the game and your role within it also invites you to ponder a great many issues as you consider your actions. What is the role of press, politics and military in society? If you want to initiate change, how do you go about it? Whilst the graphics are somewhat basic, the core jewel of this game is the personalised story you can develop for yourself in a game where every NPC can be conversed with and relationships can be developed.

This game can't live up to the interesting core mechanic of speech recognition/NLP. I've had too many bugs in 30 minutes of playing - being locked out of rooms, items and characters becoming uninteractable, that kind of thing. This is a tech demo, not a playable game.

Pros: - Nice story and characters - When AI correctly understands you and gets back at you with a joke, can be hilarious - All the voices are generated on the fly, they may be stilted but it's really cool to have the NPCs actually say your name for once. It makes you think about how good the voices will become in the near future. - Makes you imagine how cool games will be when we finally have that text-to-speech system plugged on to GPT so we can finally spend the hours not doing the quests but chatting with our favourite NPCs like we always dreamed. Cons: - Snail simulator - Sup-par animations and graphics, it looks like it was hastily put together. - AI doesn't always understand what you say - Everything's slow, not just because there's a necessary lag on the text-to-speech - Did I say snail simulator Go for it for the concept. In 2040, when kids play immersive RPGs with NPCs chatting with them in natural language, you'll be able to say you were there at the very beginning, when it was only just starting and still buggy as hell. And they'll tell you to shut up. Try this game especially if you're not a native speaker of English. Helps you learn. Don't expect a pretty game or a normal-paced walking sim though.

the game has a great idea But they failed about Applying it , the game is not like that , you cant dream anything even the voices is are very provocative .

Actually a good game with potential. I loved the game and had fun with it! But i must say some things were not polished. -First of all, I was expecting more with talking to the characters. Sometimes it works but most of the time even though you say something differently they keep saying the same thing. And this happens for like %90 time! -Game has some bugs and crashes. My game crashed like 7 times on chapter 5. And i needed to play it again and again and lost minutes. -Some Characters accent's are kinda bad. It needs to change. I am not so triggered about it but it can be annoying after some time :d

The game has an engaging quality but it is not really a game. You are simply a passenger as the story plays out around you. You are able to talk to the characters but they ignore anything that is not right for the very tight narrative. So, basically, it is like watching a video and the much advertised AI seems to be missing. As a game it rates 1 out of 5.

As a tech demo it's sorta cool, but it lacks polish and doesn't live up to the potential that it promises. There are only few situations when the talking mechanic is used and it never really impacts the characters responses. I didn't go in expecting the story to change a lot based on what I was saying, but I did expect to be able to play around with the NPCs a lot more than what you can currently do in the first hour or so of gameplay.

Loved the first few hours but the final chapters were very weak and the game ended abruptly. The AI voices were not natural though its understandable. It could certainly have been much better had the animations been smoother as well. The game also crashed many times mostly just before the loading screen for a new chapter. I had to redo a few chapters just because of that. There was also an issue of the game completely freezing 2 times because of losing connection even though everything else seemed connected to the internet. Overall it was an okay experience. I certainly haven't played anything like this and for the first few hours alone i would recommend this game. If not for the AI conversation i don't think the game would've had enough charisma in it to entertain me all the way through till its mediocre ending.

this is an entertaining game whose topic is right up my alley. i have only played one game so far, which prompted you to type out stuff and that one didn't go too well. still i gave this a chance and i'm glad i did so. i have encountered only one bug, which made the game close, but since there are auto-saves at the start of any part, that wasn't a big deal, only a few wasted minutes. the story is captivating, characters are interesting and clear-cut, the AI does understand most of what you are saying, unless you get too 'creative'. at one time i couldn't help but deliver an insult to the boss woman and her reply was pretty hilarious. the voiceovers do sound mechanic of course, but except muriel, the office girl's voice, nothing irritated me in that regard. faking a scottish accent in AI might not be the best idea after all. all in all a great little game, highly recommended especially if you are into sci-fi/mystery literature or paranormal stuff. edit: ok, just finished it. the ending was quite meaninful and satisfying. on a less positive note, there have been more crashes (lost connection or freezes) towards the end. again, nothing intolerable.

I see what this game is going for. It's trying very hard to make the interaction between player and NPCs more naturalistic. Unfortunately, while, to be fair, the speech recognition is actually pretty good (at least with a decent mic and a borderline RP accent), the responses from the other characters very much follow binary paths irrespective of what you say. At some stages, you are even restricted to simple yes/no answers. The "source" material is one of my favourite books, a masterpiece of creeping dread and near-inevitable doom at the hands of an unknowable enemy. This game is primarily concerned with badly written headlines, logic leaps and a fixation on discussions in an office with the worst wallpaper this side of Homes Under The Hammer. It doesn't hang together, conversations rush along asking for your opinion on newspapers and letters without giving you the chance to read the things, and your editor, Freddy, is extremely creepy. The dialogue overall feels like it was translated TO English by someone who knew the language existed but not how it works. Graphically, this veers between interestingly impressionistic and empty sets, with character models that are the pinnacle of 90s technology. I assume this has been made for a VR environment, and so might work better there, but on a normal monitor setup it's empty and lifeless. If you've seen the Dire Straits Money For Nothing video, you'll know how the characters move. I'm not refunding it, this has at least given my stream £12 worth of fun, but I am very glad I waited for a sale.