Today at The MIX's Fall Showcase, indie publisher Raw Fury and developer Clifftop Games revealed Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer, the second installment in the point-and-click Kathy Rain series. In this new urban thriller, down-and-out private eye Kathy Rain will embark on her most dangerous case yet—pursuing the notorious serial killer, the Soothsayer.

Three years following her investigation in Conwell Springs, Kathy Rain is on a brand new case involving a string of murders that have paralyzed the metropolitan city of Kassidy. Players must help Kathy Rain find clues, gather evidence, connect the dots, and confront the murderer before the hunter becomes hunted… will this case define her career, or cast her as the next victim of the 'Soothsayer'...?

As we go from April to May, we have something of a void of new game releases, with the biggest release being a game that puts you in charge of a factory. As for the rest of this coming week's releases, you can look forward to doing some farming, working as a detective, cosplaying as an alien, working in a lab and finishing the week in office with a party royale.

Foundry / This week's major release / Thursday 2 May / Early Access
Foundry is a first-person (first-robot?) factory builder with complete creative freedom set in a procedurally generated and infinite voxel world. Land on an unexplored planet and design a giant automated robot production facility under the watchful direction of your AI friend, Carl. Steam Link

At the turn of the 1980s, most PC adventure games were played using only the keyboard. In those days, adventure games didn't use action menus like more modern games, but simply presented the player with a command line where they could freely input text to decide the actions that characters would take and proceed through the story. Free text input systems like these allowed players to feel a great deal of freedom. However, they did come with one common source of frustration: players knowing what action they wanted to perform but being unable to do so because they could not find the right wording. This problem was caused by the limitations of PC performance and NLP technology of the time.

40 years have passed since then, and PC performance has drastically improved, as have the capabilities of NLP technology. Using "The Portopia Serial Murder Case" as a test case, we'd like to show you the capabilities of modern NLP and the impact it can have on adventure games, as well as deepen your understanding of NLP technologies.