Façade

[eMTe]

Wikipedia sums everything up best, so below are most important excerpts from article:

A couple, Grace and Trip, hosts the player in their apartment for cocktails and proceeds to have a relationship breakdown. Using full typed sentences the player can coach them through their troubles or drive them to be more distant from each other.

Somewhere between a video game and a drama, Façade takes advantage of voice acting and a 3-D environment, as well as natural language processing and other advanced artificial intelligence routines to provide a robust interactive fiction experience.

Façade was released for PC in July 2005, as a free download from the InteractiveStory.net web site. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Slamdance Independent Games Festival.

The game is celebrated for its ability to provide a close simulation of human interaction, albeit with flat-shaded 3D graphics and pre-recorded sound clips. The game is noted because the progression of conversation between the two characters Grace and Trip is rarely entirely the same, although it does cover the same major themes of dispassion, art and marriage. The player can take an active role in the conversation, pushing the topic one way or another to provide an interactive stage-play.

Because much of the game is designed to be 'on-the-fly' reactions to the player or other characters/events and because the game scenario is based on a random compilation of events (such as what topics are bought up, what drinks Trip wants to serve, whether either Grace or Trip have been adulterous, etc.) the game becomes highly replayable.

The parser through which the player communicates to the actors is also mentionable as being able to recognise and accept a high number of complex commands and respond to them adequately. Questions such as 'Do you still love each other?', 'I think both of you are right' or even 'I think you are a talented artist, Grace. However isn't your marriage more important?' can all be fully incorporated into the game engine and the actors can respond in a variety of ways dependent on their mood, random settings and how the player has acted thus far.

http://www.interactivestory.net/

Developer: Procedural Arts

Download (for Windows and Mac):

http://curlysworldoffreeware.com/game_i ... gameid=226

[Chroelle]

I tried this out and found that it was harder getting a reaction properly through than I thought. I was always late with conversation and my replies came after someone else said something. The game has its own course of action and you need to try and change that, but that is harder than it sounds.
I didn't really feel it, but the idea was so good that I liked it well enough to recommend you try it out.
You do get the feeling of being at someones home for dinner, and without the feeling that somebody might fish out a knife and go nuts or looking out the window and seeing a UFO that other games often go with. This is simply a virtual visit with friends.

[Scythe]

Experimental, which is good. However, I feel that somewhere in that experiment, fun was lost and frustration added. Every time you try to interject something in the conversation, the reactions you get are strange looks, negative or off key remarks and nervous laughs. Everybody is all serious, yet do not take you seriously. That freaked me out. The only fun I had was being thrown out after repeatedly kissing "Grace" (not terribly mature of me, but I was very frustrated at this point).

I don't mind the graphics, the voice acting is fine, I was just not entertained being caught up in an argument that I seemed to mostly be a spectator to; it brought me down.

[Pater Alf]

The concept and the setting really is something special and while I played "Facade" I really got an oppressive feeling, because all the nervous laughter and the depressing atmosphere reminded me of similar situations I've been through in my life.

I think it's not easy to simulate human behaviour and feelings in a computer game, but somehow it works here and so "Facade" leaves the player quite helpless and with something to think about at the end of the game.

To say something negative, I wasn't always pleased with the way the AI was reacting to the things I said. It really is hard to get a proper reaction and it's really hard to change the situation in a way you want to. Might be easier if you are a native speaker maybe...

[Pater Alf]

Façade has been added to CWF's database. You can find the download files for Windows and Mac on our game info page:

http://curlysworldoffreeware.com/game_i ... gameid=226