Vaudeville 2023 detective game

Vaudeville (2023, Sweden)

Three women were brutally killed in Vaudeville and it is up to you, a detective, to find out who killed them. You start with only the basics, but through dialogues with suspects you can learn new facts and discover new leads in the case.

Vaudeville is an experimental game, which uses the AI technologies to generate dialogues of the NPCs in real time, and like most of the experiments, this one is quite funny too. While the basics of the game are rather typical, the use of AI (or to be precise machine learning, because there is no AI as such) was an interesting gimmick. And gimmick is the right word - while it is interesting that each time you can get slightly different answer from your suspect, not all of the answers make perfect sense and the game just lacks the structure that is usually linked to a scripted gameplay.

On one hand it is refreshing to be able to ask the open questions and see how the suspects will answer, but with limited capabilities of what creators call AI (and which is in fact machine learning), the effect is often somewhere between helpful and comical. But afterall it is an experiment, it might lead to a better games in the future, but the direction Vaudeville is taking the genre is not really a step forward, it is a gimmick stretched to be called a game.

With not great graphics, inconsistent replies from the characters you will stumble upon and shortcomings of the technology Vaudeville is a weird production.

Can you solve a mystery like this one?

GIVE IT A TRY ❱