Murder Mystery

For Dutch Design Week 2023, Enversed wanted to show that it works with AI. ChatGPT was less than a year old, and almost nobody had talked to a game character yet. I built this showcase in a few weeks, and the murder even takes place at Dutch Design Week itself.

Four suspects pace their holding cells on security-camera feeds. You get 10 questions, asked out loud, then you point at the killer. There's no dialogue tree. Each suspect is an AI character with their own secrets and a voice cloned from my colleagues and me. They lie, accuse each other and sometimes let a hint slip. We wrote the personalities with SkillFull, grounded in real psychology.

Every AI reply also carries the suspect's emotion and stress level, which picks the video playing in their cell, up to a full confession if you push hard enough. A colleague did the design, videos and dossiers, and I did all the development.

The finished game is a 10-minute voice interrogation that runs unattended at events. Guess right and you win, guess wrong and the killer walks.

In August 2026 I rebuilt it in a few days in Next.js, this time as a platform with an admin dashboard where Enversed can write whole new cases without code. Replies now stream in, so a suspect starts talking after about one second instead of three or four. The suspects sit on stylised CCTV feeds, and you get graded on your questions afterwards.

At Dutch Design Week, visitors of every age were amazed that the suspects actually talked back. The game is still playable at Enversed Experience Center and returns to DDW every year. It was my first AI project, and its voice pipeline became the base for a whole series of AI projects after it.