Modern text adventure [I] Doesn’t Exist releases September 9th

DreadXP has announced that developer LUAL Games’ text adventure [I] Doesn’t Exist will launch on PC September 9, 2023.

Described as “Classic Zork meets existential crisis,” [I] Doesn’t Exist has you awaken in an unfamiliar forest and has you use your noodle to try and escape. However, things promise to not be as they seem, which is great because they already seem weird and unsettling.

Like many text adventures of the early PC days, [I] Doesn’t Exist doesn’t just provide you with walls of descriptive text. It also uses graphics to depict its strange world. Beyond that, there are animations, so you don’t have to rely on your unreliable imagination to paint you a picture.

[I] Doesn’t Exist also touts the use of “Natural Language Processing” to support its parser and make things more intuitive. While this means the use of AI, the developer is quick to clarify that it isn’t involved in the creation process and is just to make the language parser more natural. In their words:

“Publisher DreadXP and developer LUAL value the authenticity of human-made narratives, and none of the in-game text in [I] doesn’t exist is AI-generated. The Natural Language Processing technology utilized in the game is not affiliated with ChatGPT or other similar AI platforms and utilizes only the player’s input to access pre-written responses by the game’s super-cool writers.”

That’s rather comforting because we all know how well it went when Square Enix tried to make a text adventure using AI.

[I] Doesn’t Exist launches on PC on September 9, 2023. A demo is available to try out right now.