As we enter the third week of April, things are looking up a bit when it comes to new game releases, at least if you're into RPG or adventure games. The major release this week is a new take on the action RPG genre that comes from a German developer. The rest of this coming week's releases involves episode two of a more humorous take on the zombie apocalypse, a halibut in space, some mildew, Waterworld in all but name and finally an eyeball.

No Rest for the Wicked / This week's major release / Thursday 18 April
From Moon Studios, the award-winning developers of Ori and the Blind Forest and Ori and the Will of the Wisps comes No Rest for the Wicked, a visceral, precision Action RPG set to reinvent the genre. The year is 841 - King Harol is dead. As word of his death echoes throughout the kingdom, the crown passes to his arrogant, yet untested son Magnus. Even worse, the Pestilence, an unholy plague not seen for a thousand years, has returned. It sweeps across the land, corrupting everything and everyone it touches. Madrigal Seline, a ruthlessly ambitious figure in the church, sees the Pestilence as a chance to prove herself in the eyes of her god. 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.