House House were kind enough to keep a video of my hands-on session with Big Walk, filmed by one of the participating PRs. Generally, a full video of a preview event including player audio is a lifesaver for a journalist, struggling to keep notes while pushing buttons. But in this case, I don't want to watch the Big Walk video, because then I would hear what the other players were saying when I wasn't there.

You see, I fell down a cliff midway through Big Walk, and spent the night floundering about in the ocean. Eventually, a developer armed with a big, ball-shaped lamp tracked me down and ushered me back up, hoisting me onto his shoulders so that I could leap to a rock. Nights in Big Walk last moments. I was gone for the length of a luxurious toilet break. But still, those were moments in which the others were gathered, waiting for me. Perhaps they were making fun of me. I don't want to know.

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Like many people at companies preoccupied with discovering the next "goose that lays the golden egg", Half-Life 2 and Portal writer Erik Wolpaw has been "poking around" with generative AI. He and a small team at Valve have been testing out different applications, in what Wolpaw assures us isn't a "concerted" effort at implementing the soul-regurgitating, workforce-abrading gadgetry in any particular new game.

Wolpaw's current feeling is that generative AI isn't very good at anything "creative", like cracking jokes. But he does think Large Language Models could make for entertaining NPC voice reactions in games such as Grand Theft Auto and, indeed, Wolpaw's own Left 4 Dead, because AI is marvellous at being a fawning little gopher. It is fantastic at "going along with whatever insane thing you say and kind of adjusting to the flow of that".

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The code Bandai Namco were kind enough to send me for puzzle platformer Little Nightmares 3 included a swathe of bonus costumes resembling characters and monsters from the previous games. Another way to phrase this would be that, before I'd had a chance to get to know this game's duo of very brave, very doomed children, the game offered me a way to paint over their identities with something I recognised from a time I enjoyed myself in the past.

Hmmmmm, thought I. Then I thought it again. But longer.

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