alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Uncracked City, detective game where you question LLM suspects that lie
To give you some context on the project. I'm a solo founder and I use AI heavily in my work. The idea came from wanting players to discover cities. Each city has its own history, so every case is set in a real city with real public places. The crime and the people are on other hand invented. The part that I care most is the playable aspect of the game, a model plays the detective and must solve the case before it goes live.
As of today: it's free on Android, the iOS version is still waiting to be reviewed by Apple. It's available in six popular languages, but adding more languages is just a matter of time and demand.My long term vision if it takes off: weekly cases, private parties like a team-building escape game, an MCP so a game master can build their own scenario from ChatGPT or Claude, and maybe tourism offices since players travel the world.
Comments
Cool concept! It reminds me of the 1985 videogame Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego. What a blast!
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.
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.
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.
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.