Welcome to our latest recap of what’s going on in the indie game space. One very well-known indie found its way to iOS devices this week, though there are other new releases worth highlighting and plenty of other upcoming games to tell you about.
First, though, there was a (paywalled) story in Game File this week that caught my eye. It’s about how Google’s AI Overviews feature offers up false video game tips. That’s a problem the developers of a game called Trash Goblin — a cosy shopkeeping game in which you chip away at junk to unearth trinkets you can restore and sell — have been dealing with.
AI Overviews offered incorrect information about the game to some players, as well as the crew at Spilt Milk Studios when they tested the responses. For instance, AI Overviews suggested that a player could damage a trinket when they were removing debris from it, which is not true. It also in some cases delivered the correct information, but pointed the user to an incorrect source. In addition, AI Overviews offered information about another game entirely. This is obviously not ideal for players or the team behind Trash Goblin.
We’ve seen many cases in which AI Overviews get information blatantly wrong. Like other large language models (LLMs), it guesses what the next word or words should be in its responses based on its training data. LLMs are about generating sequences of text; they’re not designed to deliver facts (one reason why there’s a disclaimer on AI Overviews that reads “AI responses may include mistakes”). They often just make stuff up.
If you’re looking for help with a game, you’re far better off finding a community of players you can chat to. You might be able to find a clear, helpful guide to the game in question on an actual video game website, written by a professional video game guide writer. If, that is, you can evade AI Overviews to get to those websites in the first place (thankfully, it’s easy to turn off AI Overviews for your Google searches).
New releases
IO Interactive is independent, which means Hitman World of Assassination fits within our remit here. This week, the bundle of three core Hitman games from the last decade arrived on iPhone (iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, as well as the iPhone 16 lineup) and iPad. Supported iPad models are iPad Pro and iPad Air (M1 chip or later), as well as the A17 Pro iPad mini.
Hitman World of Assassination is a sandbox stealth game in which you’re given a mission (usually taking out a target) and it’s up to…