‘AI Says’ choose your words carefully

Anyone who has wrestled with an AI chatbot knows that a reasonable prompt can still produce a baffling result. AI Says turns that frustration into gameplay, challenging players to guide a human test subject past deadly machinery using only spoken or typed instructions.

Swedish independent developer Duck Milk Studios revealed the PC game last week in an announcement trailer. The game will launch on 3 November 2026 on Windows PC via Steam.

Players can see the spikes, platforms and hydraulic hammers ahead. The AI controlling the character cannot. Every move depends on the player telling the test subject where to go, when to stop and how to avoid each obstacle. One vague command could send the character straight into danger.

“Players must convey what they see, and the AI interprets those commands into actual game actions,” David Marquardt, Duck Milk Studios CEO, told Gadget. “Ambiguity is the challenge.”

Tell the AI to “walk forward”, for example, and the character will do exactly that. Leave out where to stop and the instruction could end with a hydraulic hammer, concealed spikes or a drop from the edge of a platform.

AI Says is designed as a rage game, a genre that turns small mistakes and unexpected setbacks into punishing failures. A route that appears safe can suddenly reveal another hazard, forcing players to rethink an instruction that seemed perfectly sound moments earlier.

Commands can cover a single movement or an entire sequence, leaving players to decide how much detail the AI needs without creating more opportunities for misinterpretation.

Image courtesy Duck Milk Studios.

“We wanted to make a game about something almost everyone who has used AI has experienced: you ask it to do something that seems perfectly obvious, and it somehow gets it completely wrong,” said Marquardt in a press release. “In AI Says, that misunderstanding does not just give you a bad answer. It gets someone killed.”

The AI forms part of the control system rather than generating game content. Marquardt described the technology as a specialised in-game AI rather than an integration with ChatGPT.

In most games, pressing the wrong button sends the character into trouble. In AI Says, the player may know exactly what needs to happen but still fail because the machine understands the instruction differently.

The unfortunate test subject deals with the consequences.

Later chambers introduce hidden traps, physics-based hazards and more demanding situations. Players receive better grades for using fewer prompts and losing fewer test subjects, encouraging more efficient ways of describing a safe route.

Once players understand a chamber, another challenge emerges: completing the entire sequence with a single carefully constructed prompt. A detailed command can account for several obstacles at once, but every additional direction gives the AI another opportunity to interpret the wording differently.

The conversational approach extends to level creation. AI Says includes an editor for building new test chambers, while an AI Assist Mode lets players describe changes they want made. Steam Workshop support will allow the community to create and share challenges after launch.

That could extend the central joke beyond Duck Milk’s own levels, as players devise new traps designed around unclear or easily misinterpreted instructions.

* Visit the Steam page for ‘AI Says’ here.

* Jason Bannier is a data analyst at World Wide Worx and deputy editor of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Bluesky at @jas2bann.

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