Detective’s Playground: AI-Infused Online Mysteries

Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple had it easy. You see, when they encountered a murder mystery, they only ever had to deal with the logic of a human mind and the complexities of a human heart. But what if the murder was masterminded by artificial intelligence?

With the advent of ChatGPT and other such AI models comes a series of websites and apps that level up a traditional murder mystery game. In some, you’ll be able to interact and talk with suspects for a single mystery. In others, the AI generates a new mystery every time you visit. The game is afoot!

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1. Solve the Murders

Author Screenshot by Mihir Patkar - No attribution required

Solve the Murders is based on a similar large language model as ChatGPT, where you play a detective who has to solve the murder mystery by chatting with AI-generated bots. At the start, you’ll be given a list of facts about the murder and the players involved.

You will need to ask suspects and police officers a series of questions. Uniquely, suspects are allowed to lie to you, but they will tell more truth as you learn more facts and can counter-examine them. Each fact you discover gives you one point, which you can use for other resources in the game. All facts are automatically added to the “Discovered Facts” ledger that you can check at any time.

The points you earn are tradable for a few acts, such as checking alibis, checking records, investigating scenes, and tailing suspects. If you’re stuck at any time, you can spend points to get a clue on how you should proceed. Once you’re sure about the whodunnit, use the one-time “Solve the murder” action to see if you got it right.

2. Gron

Author Screenshot by Mihir Patkar - No attribution required

You already know thatChatGPT can create fictional characters to talk with or let you chat with existing famous characters once the right data is fed. Gron leverages this power to make a murder mystery game like an old-school 8-bit RPG.

You play as Detective Samuel O’Connor, called to investigate the suspicious death of Elias Harrington, one of the wealthiest men in San Francisco. You’ll need to move around in the game using the arrow keys and interact with characters or objects using the Spacebar. The game gives you no indication that a character or object is important, so it’s all about using your detective skills.

When you interact with a character, Gron automatically starts a chat window. Knowing the right prompts and asking the right questions is important. For example, we asked a character if he is the only son and got an affirmative response, but when asked if he had any siblings, he quickly replied that he misunderstood the first question and he had a sister. As you ask more questions, use the in-game diary to record responses so that you can cross-reference different testimonies to deduce who the murderer is.

3. Mystery-o-Matic

Author Screenshot by Mihir Patkar - No attribution required

Move over,Wordle and its alternatives . There’s a new daily puzzle, and lives are at stake! Mystery-o-Matic generates a new murder mystery every day using machine-learning algorithms. It uses a few base elements and then creates permutations and combinations that set up a daily mystery.

The wording on the site isn’t crystal clear, so here’s the explanation. There are three people (Alice, Eddie, and Carol), one of whom will be murdered. There are four rooms (kitchen, living room, bedroom, and bathroom), and you’ll have to pay attention to the daily layout to see how the rooms are connected. Any character can move from one room to another in 15 minutes, but not two rooms in 15 minutes. You’ll also be told about four possible murder weapons (knife, gun, poison, rope) and where they were located. Finally, you’ll get a few statements from the three characters involved or based on what the police found.

Use the built-in investigator’s notebook to figure out who was in which room at what time and how they could have accessed a murder weapon. Once you’re sure about the solution, say who the murderer was, the weapon was, and the time of the murder. The game might get a little repetitive the longer you play it, but hey, where else would you get to solve a murder mystery daily?

4. Murdle

Author Screenshot by Mihir Patkar - No attribution required

Hollywood mystery writer G. T. Karber offers one new murder mystery logic puzzle daily at his website Murdle. The long-running successful website has already led to three books of murder mysteries, written by Karber and generated by “Moriarty”, a proprietary algorithm capable of planning a million murders a minute.

Murdle follows a similar system to Mystery-o-Matic, giving you three or four suspects, three or four locations, and three or four murder weapons every day. The mysteries get more difficult with each day, with Monday being the easiest and Sunday requiring the skills of Sherlock Holmes.

You play as Detective Logico and are given a series of clues and evidence, which you can use with the cross-referencing charting to match suspects, locations, and weapons. It’s best to start off with the mini-Murdle tutorial and then get to the daily puzzles. When you’re ready to make your accusation, you’ll need to say who the murderer was, how they did it, and where the ghastly act took place.

Create Your Own ChatGPT Murder Mystery

Yes, you can create a murder mystery game with ChatGPT by yourself. These murder mystery apps relieve you of the burden of giving the AI base information and data and then figuring out the best prompts to have it generate a mystery. But if you’re willing to learn those skills, you can soon set up a few templates of your own and construct a custom ChatGPT mystery.

A good place to learn how to set up these prompts is Reddit. On r/ChatGPT, you’ll find posts like creating a murder mystery with the characters of the sitcom Friends or the mystery inspired by the game Clue. How cool would it be to play a murder mystery based on your favorite fictional characters?

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