Interrogation Room Komiya

Interrogation Room Komiya is a small, complete detective puzzle that runs in a browser. You are a detective questioning Komiya, a 72-year-old former locksmith held over a pawnshop break-in. A hanging scroll has vanished from the safe, and you have from 9pm until his lawyer arrives at 11pm. Every question costs time. You get 20 moves, five exhibits and two meters to manage: how rattled Komiya is and how defiant he is. Pressing raises both. Offering tea calms him. Staying silent slowly unnerves him. Push his defiance to 100 and he stops talking altogether.

The goal is not to exhaust every dialogue option. It is to catch him in contradictions. The exhibits include a camera still of an old man with a walking stick at the back door, a homemade lock pick stamped with “Ko,” and an unpaid hospital bill. Break four lies and you earn the decisive question. A confession gives you an S, A or B grade, and the difference between those grades is how efficiently you spent your moves. It is a compact piece of design: one room, one suspect, one clock and a handful of facts that have to line up.

The game was made by Yuji Horii, the creator of Dragon Quest and co-writer of Chrono Trigger, using Claude. According to Horii, it took about 30 minutes. He compared it with his work on The Portopia Serial Murder Case in 1983, when he wrote the story, drew the art and programmed the game himself, and said that with AI, even someone who cannot draw or program can make a decent game by explaining what they want. The post drew nearly three million views in two days.

The most important design choice is that there is no live language model inside the game. Every line is pre-written and the player chooses from menus. That keeps the interrogation deterministic, cheap to run and impossible to break. AI was used to build the game, not to improvise the suspect at runtime. For anyone making narrative games, that is the copyable lesson: use the model to generate and edit content during development, then freeze the result. A constrained, authored conversation beats a free-form chatbot when you need pacing, fairness and a reliable ending. Note that the game is Japanese-only, so English-speaking players will need translation help.