![\"A](\"https:\/\/platform.theverge.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2025\/08\/game_story.avif?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100\")
<\/a><\/p>\nImage: Hidden Door<\/p>\n
I was given access ahead of Wednesday\u2019s announcement, and for one story, I chose a variation of Pride and Prejudice called \u201cCourtship and Crimson,\u201d which means there are vampires. I told Hidden Door that I was a vampire hunter that\u2019s driven by \u201can uncompromising sense of duty and a thirst for vengeance,\u201d and the game threw me into a social event where I immediately spotted what I thought was a vampire. There were some prepopulated options, but I wrote my own \u2014 to immediately attack the potential enemy with a weapon \u2014 and the game let me do so. (It turns out the \u201cvampire\u201d was an illusion!)<\/p>\n
While playing, you\u2019ll collect cards with things like characters and locations that you can look back on as a refresher for key parts of your story. The narrator also has a deck of cards with plot points you can occasionally pick from to guide where you want the story to go.<\/p>\n
Where Hidden Door differs from a general-purpose chatbot is that it will create in-universe limits on what you write. With ChatGPT, for example, I asked it to create its own version of Pride and Prejudice and vampires. Then, I wrote that I had a magical, unbeatable bow with silver arrows. ChatGPT let me generate it without any hesitation and let me use it to quickly defeat every vampire on Earth and eventually the galaxy. It\u2019s not precisely \u201cunrealistic\u201d (since vampires aren\u2019t real), but it short-circuited any kind of challenge or satisfying narrative. With Hidden Door, when I tried to pull a similar trick, the game stopped me and gently encouraged me to try and strike up a conversation to gather information instead.<\/p>\n
Sometimes it felt like Hidden Door was simply limiting my options, though. In a Wizard of Oz instance, I tried to make the \u201cdaring,\u201d \u201cdanger addict\u201d reporter that I was playing get in an apparently hypnotized porter\u2019s face, sending repeated instructions to throw a punch or grab them. The game gave me a \u201cyou failed\u201d message. It might have been pure (and unusual) bad luck on dice rolls. But even when things go well, I feel like I can sense the strings pulling the stories in a specific direction instead of letting me spend too long with random characters.<\/p>\n
It would be one thing if this resulted in a genuinely great narrative, but the storytelling can feel disjointed. So far in my testing, each story feels like a series of sometimes entertaining beats guided firmly by the AI narrator behind the scenes. In one scene in my vampire story, an orchestra conductor continued feeding me information to set up a mysterious plot thread \u2014 even as I had my character pay basically no attention to him and instead focus on stabbing and killing a vampire version Lady Catherine. In a live tabletop game, there\u2019s also the added camaraderie of bullshitting with your friends; going back and forth with an AI just isn\u2019t the same.<\/p>\n
Hidden Door\u2019s character creator. Image: Hidden Door<\/p>\n The game has some rough edges. The narrator\u2019s thinking can take a long time, often many seconds, and while waiting for something to happen, I would often get distracted and click away from the tab. A few times in my vampire story, the game also seemingly copied and pasted an extensive description of my sibling into the text, including an errant misplaced period.<\/p>\n Still, a focus on familiar narrative worlds could make Hidden Door a compelling way for some people to interact with an AI storyteller. Unlike rolling your own story with a chatbot from a big AI company, Hidden Door doesn\u2019t let you just break all the rules to instantly win, so you have to work within the logic of each story as you\u2019re playing (even if that logic involves vampires or the magical world of Oz). And the platform\u2019s usage of public domain and licensed works means (theoretically) that the stories you\u2019re playing through aren\u2019t violating any sort of copyright infringement. Hidden Door says<\/a>, \u201cMost authors we work with are deeply involved in the creation process.\u201d<\/p>\n The best thing that I can say about Hidden Door? Even though I have my problems with that vampire hunter story, I\u2019m intrigued about what happens next.<\/p>\n <\/a>Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Jay PetersClose Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n PlusFollow<\/p>\n See All by Jay Peters<\/a><\/p>\n AICloseAI<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n PlusFollow<\/p>\n See All AI<\/a><\/p>\n GamingCloseGaming<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n PlusFollow<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nJay Peters<\/p>\n