Show HN: Uncracked City, detective game where you question LLM suspects that lie
65 points - yesterday at 9:20 PM
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.
This looks very interesting, but the Italian copy on the website is poorly translated. For instance, nobody would write an explanation of what you need to do speaking to the player in the courtesy third person (Perquisisca i luoghi, Smascheri la bugia). Other sentences are written poorly, for instance "Nel gioco, «Segnalare» sotto una battuta ce la invia direttamente.". I haven't played the game, but if the translations are not up to par, it might be worth to publish it in English only for now
JadeNBtoday at 10:08 AM
Why does the Android app need to collect device ID?
springtimesuntoday at 8:57 AM
I’m just curious, are you old enough to have been inspired by Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? That was my first thought when reading this. I loved the computer game growing up and I wanted to be on the game show so bad.
noufalibrahimtoday at 8:17 AM
Interesting idea. I was toying with a similar concept of a investigative journalist in a noirish town who's tasked with uncovering the secret identity of a vigilante.
It always struck me as absurd how obvious the fact that Clark Kent is Superman was to the whole audience. The characters in the story never seemed to understand it.
nazgu1today at 8:29 AM
I wonder if the cases in the game are created by AI as well. From my experiments LLMs outputs are rather mediocre, without "creativity", suspenses or plot twists
unintelligibledtoday at 6:08 AM
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.
reactordevtoday at 3:35 AM
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.
vigilantpumatoday at 8:15 AM
“Each suspect answers in their own voice. Some of them lie.”
EVERYBODY LIES.
wolfy1993today at 8:25 AM
I had too much fun with this acting like a schizophrenic batman asking everyone who Harvey dent was and to SWEAR TO ME
ghgrtoday at 6:19 AM
Cool concept! It reminds me of the 1985 videogame Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego. What a blast!
draugadrottentoday at 9:14 AM
I went to the website to play the game, and was disappointed that it was only a marketing web site for a phone app. Why not let me play the game?
loloquwowndueotoday at 3:25 AM
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.
patrickskimtoday at 6:26 AM
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.
dgellowtoday at 8:34 AM
I think you should disclose on the website that the game is using LLMs
krembotoday at 8:05 AM
I enjoy asking ai to play with me Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego. You can ask for different variations, difficult levels and ask it to add images.