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I’m just curious, are you old enough to have been inspired by Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? That was my first thought when reading this. I loved the computer game growing up and I wanted to be on the game show so bad.

This looks very interesting, but the Italian copy on the website is poorly translated. For instance, nobody would write an explanation of what you need to do speaking to the player in the courtesy third person (Perquisisca i luoghi, Smascheri la bugia). Other sentences are written poorly, for instance "Nel gioco, «Segnalare» sotto una battuta ce la invia direttamente.". I haven't played the game, but if the translations are not up to par, it might be worth to publish it in English only for now

When I was growing up there was a wonderfully made interactive “novel” game on early Macintosh called Sherlock Holmes. I’ve always wondered when we’ll get to a point where this can be done ad-hoc with any potential crime thriller. LA Noir introduced nuanced facial movements and dialog chains but I keep going back to that 1990s era Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective.

You should probably put some better examples of writing in the first trailer, especially if the game involves a lot of reading. Asides from just sounding horribly bland, there's only two sentences of dialogue shown and the character says "honestly" in BOTH of them.

I wonder if the cases in the game are created by AI as well. From my experiments LLMs outputs are rather mediocre, without "creativity", suspenses or plot twists

Interesting idea. I was toying with a similar concept of a investigative journalist in a noirish town who's tasked with uncovering the secret identity of a vigilante.

It always struck me as absurd how obvious the fact that Clark Kent is Superman was to the whole audience. The characters in the story never seemed to understand it.

I have LLMs as players in a hidden-information word game. Models would often leak hidden info in their reasoning, so you had to filter what each side sees. Sometimes you have to be aware that these LLMs can be sneaky at times.

The game is not bad. I tried it out and solved the Paris case. I liked the style and the locations.

I don't think I had to actually use the LLM chat at all though? It felt like suggested questions were all that was required.

There's an element of "just go everywhere and click on everything" too. For example having to return to a previous location to find someone now has a vital clue for you on how to solve a new puzzle. I'm not sure how you are supposed to know you should to back there. That kind of gameplay isn't that much fun.

haha very neat! Just curious how are you planning to make it free with the inference cost? Even with a luna or haiku its still a non zero cost to run per session.

“Each suspect answers in their own voice. Some of them lie.”

EVERYBODY LIES.

Seems really interesting, i am actually most excited about this side of AI. Like making your own mini simulation and having ai live out their lives or something along the lines of it

MCP's in video games seems very interesting. I've played a lot of games with level builders and they can be insanely complicated. That could definitely cut down quite a bit and allow a lot more people to create cool stuff.

I love this kind of game and I'm excited for AI to make them more individual and I really hope that sometime soon we'll get to a point where these AI-requests don't have to go to a datacenter but can be done locally on one's own machine.

Cool concept! It reminds me of the 1985 videogame Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego. What a blast!

Very cool - happy to feature this in my AI and gaming newsletter. Let me know how I can contact you!

I enjoy asking ai to play with me Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego. You can ask for different variations, difficult levels and ask it to add images.

Why does the Android app need to collect device ID?

Talking to lying LLMs is what I do all day for work. Can’t imagine I’d want to do the same in my free time.

Any reason this requires an app? A quick look suggests nothing at all that cannot be done on a simple website.

I had too much fun with this acting like a schizophrenic batman asking everyone who Harvey dent was and to SWEAR TO ME

I think it's a bit unfortunate that you used AI for all the non-core elements of the game like the artwork. I do think that a game with judicious use of gen-AI allowing you to go "off the rails" has potential, but it's going to take a lot of hard work to make it OK and not chock full of all the AI clichés. It can be a good game, but you need to avoid not only to make it not look like slop, but avoid it BEING slop, and it's like you don't quite appreciate the problem when using AI for things you don't even need to use AI for.

Nice idea! i'll give this a go tonight :)

I am curious - are you using on-device LLM for this?

I think you should disclose on the website that the game is using LLMs

No browser version? :(

I went to the website to play the game, and was disappointed that it was only a marketing web site for a phone app. Why not let me play the game?

Sounds like work to me.

Show HN: Uncracked City, detective game where you question LLM suspects that lie

No, no, no. The LLM suspects can't lie. That requires intent. They're "hallucinating." Yeah, that's the ticket.

add me as a beta tester

no thank you

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