Uncover the Smoking Gun PC Review

Unless you are avoiding any kind of technology these days there’s a good chance you are at least somewhat familiar with the booming world of AI. From images to music to research papers… AI is being put through its paces. In perhaps one of the most fitting uses… Uncover the Smoking Gun uses AI to give robot suspects a voice and enable the player to question them with more freedom than would normally be expected.

For those of us of a certain age adventure games made up a large part of our early computer gaming. The ol’ parser adventure games had players type what they wanted to do “book suspect for driving drunk” or “pull the sword from the stone”… they were fun but they were always limited by the expected inputs the programmers put in and allowed for. AI opens the options up by having a greater fluidity to its responses and understanding. Having said that… there are of course limitations, but ReLU games have been quite clever by making their characters robots… so any limitations actually work completely within the context of the game.

The overall feel of the game is a generous amount of those previously mentioned adventure games (even moving into the latter, point and click era Police Quest titles) and perhaps a slight dash of Bladerunner. You start in your office and a case is sent to you. You make your way to the location and set about looking for clues and questioning the suspects. Your assistant informs you of what to look for when questioning as certain responses will occur when your suspect is likely to be telling a lie or the truth. You can arrange your clues in a “pin board” fashion, linking relevant clues to each other to help piece together what happened. When you are ready you fill out a little form stating what you believe occurred, who did what, how etc. Once you have submitted your report you are presented with a newspaper article that goes over what you achieved (or didn’t) with the case. If you are happy enough you can move on… if not you can try again (which is very handy for honing in on your details).

But it’s not all murders that are providing mystery… you keep receiving items in the mail that hint of something more personal… a mystery within a mystery! This helps to add a bit more breadth to the game and provides a bit more story telling. Speaking of storytelling… as you progress you might notice the cases seem to raise questions about the difference between AI and humans… if there is a form of melding of human and machine… at what point are they still human and at what point do they become essentially just another machine? You can develop some deep philosophical notions if you want to whilst investigating the cases.

Ultimately, it’s a bit of fun, it’s pretty low stress… the crime scenes aren’t particularly gruesome and the art style is a bit like a more realistic version of Job Simulator… which is kind of fitting given the main characters. This setting with these protagonists/antagonists works well with the AI chat format… I’m not sure it would work quite so well with human suspects without starting to sound a bit artificial… but here it works.

Grab a copy if you want to play with what AI can do in the world of gaming or if you just feel like being a detective for a while.