ReLU Games’ Uncover the Smoking Gun is a detective mystery game where we play as an AI Detective, tasked with solving crimes relating to robots. While I’m a big fan of detective games, what initially piqued my interest was Uncover the Smoking Gun’s use of AI in its dialogue system, allowing players to ask the NPC robots whatever question they want in order to gain information rather than relying on a multiple choice system. This is somewhat a step forward for detective games, where players may feel creatively limited in terms of what questions they want to ask NPCs when there’s a particular question brimming on their mind. However, with AI use in creative works being so controversial right now, my biggest question was whether it was worth it in Uncover the Smoking Gun, or would it have been better off with a multiple choice dialogue system?
Uncover the Smoking Gun has five levels, each exploring a different case and part of a wider story. We must go to each scene, collect evidence, and question the robot NPC(s) present. At our disposal is an evidence board, similar to the one used in Shadows of Doubt, though I found this one to be a bit more fiddly and ended up just taking paper notes. Each case will have several questions to answer to show that we have gathered a full understanding of the story by the time we are done. Our efforts are then graded, and we can see how much we uncovered (and didn’t) in a form of a newspaper clipping which will summarise the case and critique our performance.
Vibrant, comic-style graphics are used in Uncover the Smoking Gun which I found to make the game stand out. But while the gameplay graphics themselves look great, I wasn’t a fan of the use of AI in decor such as paintings and photographs. Not only is this a more controversial use for AI than for NPC questioning, I also just don’t think it looked very good in this instance. Certain characters look different in each picture of them as AI often can’t continue to replicate the exact same face in certain situations, and it was also really obvious that AI had been used based on the art style of these images. Of course, in the world Uncover the Smoking Gun is set in, some occurrences of this use of AI actually fit well within the setting, but most of the time they did not.
The music gives off a mostly chill vibe throughout Uncover the Smoking Gun, but grows more intense during certain discoveries. I personally found these intense moments to be a bit too intense for a mystery game, more leaning into a horror tone. I also found the main track to get a bit repetitive, especially as it was mostly the same tune played through each case – which can grow irritating in puzzle games in particular.
In terms of gameplay, I enjoyed the storylines of each case. They all represented a certain scenario in terms of AI’s growth and how it could be used in the far future. Uncover the Smoking Gun’s intro states that each case involves a murder and a robot is the killer… but this isn’t true as not all the cases start off as murder cases. And while I found the cases to be satisfyingly challenging to solve, there were quite a few non-AI-related quirks which made solving them frustrating.
For one, every single PC password was incredibly easy to work out. The majority of the time it was a birthday, which I would consider to be not a great effort in challenging players to work these out. The rest of the time, they could be worked out using a scrap of paper usually within the same room, or even on the desk itself. I think at this rate we may as well have just not had the passwords at all, in fact at one point the password to reboot an AI called Pandora was literally ‘Pandora’. I also found the case questions to sometimes have awkward phrasing which made it difficult to understand what answer the game wanted me to provide. And while I didn’t mind the grading system, I didn’t like the fact that it doesn’t tell us why we received that grade and what we’re missing, giving us little incentive to go back and correct where we went wrong.
But Uncover the Smoking Gun’s biggest flaw is unfortunately the thing that drew my interest to begin with. Quite frankly the AI NPCs are a headache to work around and I think the developer should have just stuck to multiple choice question answers. The AI doesn’t seem to keep track of the conversation, so I often found myself going around a loop with it, rephrasing questions differently until it finally understood what I’m trying to ask. Because of this, it’s often unclear whether the AI is giving us the wrong information because it’s misunderstood our question, or because it’s intentionally lying to conceal information from the detective.
One example of this was a murder that took place between 10:00pm and 11:00pm, so I asked the security robot that was supposed to be watching the cameras where it was at this time. It told me it was updating from 10:20pm to 10:50pm, so I asked where it was when the cameras were wiped at 11:20pm. It told me it was rebooting. So, I pointed out this contradiction, which the AI then apologised for getting its “wires crossed” and confirmed that the reboot was part of the update so it was out for longer than 10:50pm. It also took me a lot longer than necessary to squeeze out of this robot whether the victim was seen, alive, on camera from 10:00pm to 10:20pm before it started updating.
The NPCs are also programmed to have different personalities, but I found many of these personalities to be incredibly annoying. One robot wouldn’t stop making jokes, and when I reminded it that I was investigating a murder here and a father had died, it apologised and said it would stop making jokes, only to then continue again in the next sentence. Another robot, an art curator, would follow up every answer to my questions with a random and unnecessary art fact. I believe these were supposed to be quirky but I just found them unbearable. Thankfully, most of the time we can get away with solving the cases by relying on evidence alone rather than trying to get information from the AI NPCs.
Uncover the Smoking Gun has taken an experimental risk in using an AI dialogue system. In theory, it gives the players the added challenge of thinking of the right questions to ask rather than relying on multiple choice dialogue options, and also gives them the freedom to be creative with their dialogue. The downside is that this AI isn’t programmed well enough for this to be a worthy risk, and instead ends up just becoming a bigger obstacle than necessary when investigating each case.
Jess reviewed Uncover the Smoking Gun on PC with a review code.
