Is *Almanac: Detective Agency* Worth the Wait? The AI Detective Is Kind of Fresh

By Saturday afternoon I finally had time to boot things up. As an office worker, when I look at a new game, my first reaction isn’t whether it looks cool, but whether it’s worth taking up my weekend slot. On April 9, Bergamot Games unveiled the Steam store page for Almanac: Detective Agency. At first glance, it’s pretty compelling: you have to run a detective agency to make a living while also investigating the disappearance of a missing friend. For me, this “investigation + management” combo feels, at the very least, more like getting two set meals for the price of one than simply watching a story play out.

Its most distinctive feature is that the dialogue system doesn’t follow the usual formula. There are no fixed dialogue options—you can type your questions directly, or even ask them aloud using a microphone. In other words, it feels more like you’re actually interrogating witnesses, rather than doing reading comprehension with A, B, and C choices. The official core selling point is also very clear: “Unlike traditional text adventure games, this title does not feature fixed dialogue options. Players can freely type any question using the keyboard, or even ask questions via microphone.”

More importantly, every resident in the city is powered by an LLM, and their responses change in real time based on your tone, attitude, and the content of your questions. NPCs also have long-term memory—they remember what you’ve said and done. If you use threats or deception to pry out information, you may lose their trust later on, and even the direction of the story can be affected. Honestly, this design sounds a lot like real-life social interaction: if you speak too fast or too harshly, you end up paying more later to clean up the mess—kind of like saying the wrong thing at work.

From a time-to-value perspective, this game has obvious strengths, and obvious risks. The upside is its high degree of freedom: everyone’s reasoning process could be different, which naturally gives it strong replay value. Especially for players who enjoy probing, fishing for answers, and working relationships to their advantage, this experience really does feel fresher than a fixed script. That said, almost all of its core appeal rests on AI-generated dialogue. If the response quality is inconsistent, or if the Chinese doesn’t sound natural enough, immersion could be ruined like spilled soup in your takeout—once that happens, the whole meal is affected.

The Steam page currently lists support for as many as 103 languages, including interface and subtitles. That number is striking, and it definitely grabs attention. But the issue is right there as well: supporting many languages does not necessarily mean the localization quality will be good. Especially for a detective game built around conversation, even slightly awkward Chinese would undermine both the information density of the deduction process and the flavor of the characters.

If you ask me whether it’s worth jumping in right now, my advice is simple: don’t rush to open your wallet—wishlist it first, that’s the better deal. So far, it’s only confirmed for PC, and there’s still no release date. Its technical stability and localization quality both need more time to prove themselves. For players with fragmented free time, the worst thing about this kind of game isn’t that it’s hard—it’s spending ages talking without getting to the point, only to realize you’ve burned through two evenings of spare time.

Looking at the broader trend, more and more teams have been experimenting with AI-driven NPCs lately, and detective games are genuinely a fitting genre for it. After all, detective work naturally revolves around questioning, probing, memory, and shifting relationships, so at least Almanac: Detective Agency seems to be heading in the right direction. If the developers can really polish the Chinese dialogue, clue feedback, and the pacing of agency management, then it could very well become one of those promising games you think about on the subway during the week and play at home on the weekend. But until I’ve seen more footage, I’m still keeping it in the “high interest, cautiously optimistic” category.