Remember those old-school text adventures where you’d die from dysentery, get eaten by a grue, or make one wrong move and plummet to your doom? The gaming landscape has certainly evolved since then, but there’s something oddly nostalgic about those unforgiving experiences that shaped many of us.

The recent release of Wayfarer, an AI model specifically designed to create challenging and potentially lethal gaming scenarios, has caught my attention. It’s fascinating to see this deliberate shift away from the overly protective AI we’ve grown accustomed to. The team behind it has essentially created what people are calling a “Souls-like LLM” - a reference that made me chuckle, thinking about my teenage daughter’s frustrated sighs while playing Elden Ring.