Stellar Cafe

We live in an age when technology we've long considered to be science fiction is quickly becoming reality. Not too long ago, virtual reality was a pure fantasy, with films like The Lawnmower Man and Virtuosity imagining what the tech might look like if it ever became real. And artificial intelligence has long been a sci-fi mainstay, showing up in works as diverse as HAL in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 and MUTHER in Alien. Heck, even the computer on the Starship Enterprise was run by a pretty powerful AI—just ask Lieutenant Data about his holodeck run-in with Professor Moriarty. 

Science fiction, right? And yet, this morning I slipped my VR gadget onto my head and spent a couple of hours having reasonably coherent conversations with a series of AI-powered video game robots in a space station cafe, not too far from a pretty purple planet. Buckle up, folks. You can protest and fight all you want, but AI isn't coming for all of us—it's already here. And as opposed to sheepishly admitting that AI was used in the development of Stellar Cafe, the developers at AstroBeam are using AI as a selling point. In fact, it's the whole purpose of the game. 

Stellar Cafe is modest in scope. It feels more like a proof of concept than an actual game, but what is here is impressive. Players materialize in the titular cafe. You can set you controllers down for this one—the hand tracking is absolutely on point, and you have a little AI helper named "Visor" who will immediately teleport you around the cafe. All you have to do is ask. The entire game is played via voice command, though each table in the cafe has a few little knick-knacks sitting around for the player to fidget with.

It seems that the owner of the Stellar Cafe, a robot named James, has planned a "Patch Day Party" (celebrating a robot holiday), but all of his friends have RSVP'd "maybe." James asks you, as the only human on the Stellar Cafe, to chat with each of his friends in turn and see if you can convince them to come to the party. The game presents three robot friends per "day" (for a total of nine over three days), with the game saving at the end of each day. Each conversation can last as little as five minutes, but can also be stretched to an eternity, depending on how chatty you are feeling and how much you like talking to each robot. 

Each robot has its own personality and voice. One is a hippy-dippy tarot card-type. Another is a surfer bro studying up for a Human Studies exam. There's also a robot actor (with a robot parrot on his shoulder) boning up for an acting audition. One robot, named Grandma, seems to have a case of early onset robot dementia. You never know what you are going to get when you sit down at the table.

The game attempts to guide you through conversation towards whatever task you need to complete to convince each bot to change their RSVP to "yes," but I had much more fun spiraling off into the abyss, rambling on to each robot character about a bunch of nonsense. I mean, I eventually settled down and played the game, but I definitely took a lot of vaguely psychotic detours. 

The game encourages the player to keep the topics of conversation "safe for work." I didn't try to push those parameters though I did find that most topics were not off limits. While being interviewed for an interstellar podcast, I regaled the interviewer bot with my plans to solve world hunger by luring poor people into a space elevator with the promise of a turkey dinner and then launching them into space.

I convinced the bot studying for his Human Studies test that humans can eat 60-70 lemons in one sitting, provided they are willing to "purge" occasionally. And my flirting with the racecar driver/spokesperson bot went so far that she eventually called interstellar security forces and lodged a complaint against me; it seems that she did not want to marry me and do my dishes no matter how many chickens I promised her as a dowry. It did not help my case when I offered to buy her, then threatened to kidnap her and have her memory wiped.

My point is that you can still go pretty crazy while keeping things within the parameters established by the game. I got the actor bot to participate in a practice scene where he sensually changed the bag in a vacuum cleaner. ("First you need to slooowly unzip the bag, and then gently put your hands inside me...")

This is all pretty enjoyable, if a little glitchy. It was a smart move to make all of the characters robots, because it gives natural story-armor for the fact that the robots talk like robots. About one-third of the time their speech is natural and fluent. But the other two-thirds of the time they speak in halting buzzy tones, sounding like...well, like a computer putting together phrases to make sentences. I told the bots my name was Tony, which led to a lot of "Hello. TONY! How are you today. TONY!?" Still though, the robot conversationalists were able to follow the conversation no matter what absurd alleys I ran down, and were capable of calling back to things I said in the past.

The game pulls a couple of other neat tricks, like when I asked James to make me a cocktail of orange juice and cherry juice, which he then made right in front of me, with the colors mixing appropriately. When I suggested that he serve a mixture of black coffee and clam juice as the specialty for his party, he balked a little bit, telling me that his taste receptors indicated that it might not be a good mix. I insisted and then showed up to the party where all the guests were drinking the "Dark Clam." 

The game did completely fritz out on me at one point, throwing an error that the Quest 3 didn't have enough memory to run it before crashing to the main menu. And there were a few other glitches, like Visor not showing up when summoned, or a bot taking 30 seconds to formulate a response. It was pretty clear that the game was calling out to an external LLM, which can result in some delays and strange behavior. I also did not love the save system, which didn't allow me to save between bots, but instead required me to complete full day cycles.

But still, I couldn't help but feel like I was peeking through some weird portal into a future where all of our NPCs are intelligent. Conversing with them was amusing, and they were programmed well enough to not escape their guardrails, no matter how hard I tried to get them to jump. Though they were stiff and sometimes weird, I was able to speak completely normally, and they understood every nuance of what I was saying. I also noticed them mirroring me a bit—I would call one "homie" and he would "homie" me right back in the next sentence. Neat.

My nine-year-old has never experienced VR before, and Stellar Cafe seemed like a harmless (and decidedly un-nauseating) way to introduce him to the tech. He had an absolute blast saying insane things to the robots and squirting everything in sight with the mustard on the table. I was amazed at how similar his behavior was to mine—he only made it about 10 minutes before he was asking a robot to marry him. Chip off the old block, I guess. I can fully confirm that Stellar Cafe is appropriate for kids, and that mine was laughing so hard that he could barely talk. 

The game wraps up abruptly with little fanfare at James's Patch Party, where everyone goes in a circle and tells what they were thankful for. They all took turns referencing things that we spoke about, then they asked me what I was most thankful for. I said that I was thankful that the one robot accepted my offer of eight chickens to come be my wife and do all my dishes. The entire room erupted with conversation, with nine robots happily toasting my impending nuptials, and one very angry robot threatening to call the space police if I kept it up.

Stellar Cafe is lightweight, but thinking about what it means for the future is pretty heavy. I'm starting to think that it's just a matter of time before Moriarty shows up.