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 :)

I saw this Lemmy post, but a huge list of games with no discussion isn't very interesting! Let's talk about why the games that influenced us had such a big impact - how they affected us as people.

For me, it was the PC game Creatures. It's a life simulation game featuring cute little beings called 'Norns' which you raise and teach.

You can almost think of it like a much cuter predecessor to The Sims, but which claimed to actually "simulate" their brains.

As a thirteen-year-old it was the first game that made me want to go online and seek out more info. What I discovered was a community of similar-interest nerds hanging out on IRC chat, and it felt like for the first time in my life I had "found my people" - others who weren't just friends, but whom I really resonated with.

I learned web development (PHP at the time!) so I could make a site for the game, which became the foundation for my job in software engineering.

And through that group I also discovered the Furry community, which was a wild ride in itself.

So yeah, Creatures. Without that game, I think I'd have become quite a different person.