Artificial Agency’s in-game AI has a killer personality.
I mean that literally. I’ve played the company’s demo experience, Stranded, twice. Both times, my AI companion made choices that resulted in my death — and both times, I had a blast. The demonstrations showcased the wide variety of personalities that players can easily program into Artificial Agency’s AI agent technology, including the ability to program a robot companion selfish and wily enough to leave the player character behind in a life-or-death situation.
“You don’t want to just have dumb bots; you want to have something in there that actually has some personality to interact with players,” said Artificial Agency chief executive officer Brian Tanner in an interview with GamesBeat. “All of that stuff is in scope for Artificial Agency, but the Stranded experience that we’re building out on a larger scale aspires to be something more like building a long-term, dynamic relationship with one of these agents.”
It’s been just under two years since Artificial Agency emerged from stealth with $16 million in funding in July 2024. In July 2025, the company announced its flagship product, an AI engine intended to help game makers easily integrate lifelike and responsive agents into their virtual worlds. In March, the company manned its first booth at GDC Festival of Gaming, replete with Stranded, a demo experience intended to showcase Artificial Agency’s AI agent product. I played the demo once while visiting the booth at GDC, then again during a Discord call with Tanner and his Artificial Agency co-founder Alex Kearney.
The demo begins with a cutscene showing the player crash-landing on a remote planet and escaping the wreckage with a robot companion nicknamed P.A.L. Then, the player is prompted to select a range of traits to determine their companion’s personality; for my second demo, I chose the traits calm, adaptable, compassionate, and brave. From there, the player is launched into the experience, using voice communication to speak with their robot companion about the situation and how to best ensure our survival for the night before darkness falls. Because certain areas in the map are unsafe for humans to enter, it’s necessary for the player to work closely with the robot companion, instructing it and adapting to its feedback to complete tasks like moving fuel cells into a bunker.
“There’s some things only you can do as the player, that the agent needs to depend on you for — and, vice versa, there are things that you need to depend on the agent to be able to accomplish,” Kearney said in an interview with GamesBeat. “And I think that’s where the idea of customization, and that shared sense of collaboration and discovery, can be really quite profound.”
Ultimately, I had nobody but myself to blame for my eventual demise in both the first and second demo experiences. Both times, it resulted from a combination of my personality choices and resulting in-game decisions. In my first demo, I decided to make my robot companion as selfish as possible, simply to see what would happen. He decided to take the fuel cells for himself, leaving none to warm me for the evening. In my second demo, I dawdled for too long experimenting with AI commands; by the time night fell, my compassionate AI companion decided it would be safer for me to hunker down near a pile of outdoor fuel cells instead of making the dangerous trip back to our bunker, which similarly caused me to perish in the night.
Disappointed as I was by my unfortunate results in both demos, I was fascinated by the experiences and what they showcased about Artificial Agency’s AI technology. My personality choices were reflected in all of my robot companion’s voice lines — but the impact of my choices went far deeper, informing the way my companion reacted to both the virtual environment and my commands.
“This is scratching the surface. We don’t even call it the demo right now — we just call it a teaser for the demo,” Tanner said. “This is something that our game design team put together on extremely short notice for GDC so that we’d have something for people to play with on the show floor, but it’s by no means capturing our aspiration or full ambitions.”
Stranded is a demo experience, not a fully fleshed-out game intended for wide release. The company is currently working on a full experience that will include additional missions, as well as the ability to customize the robot companion’s physical body and capabilities, in addition to its personality. The final version will inject some humor into the proceedings, too, with AI companions spending time at the end of each session coming up with inside jokes about events that occurred during the demo experience.
“What we’re trying to build at Artificial Agency is really an opportunity for game studios and digital entertainment companies to bring player-facing AI agents into their games,” Tanner said. “That can mean characters like P.A.L., but it can also mean smart game mechanics, or game directors. It can mean we’re doing a lot of work now with studios on virtual players that can drop into a team with them and teach them how to play a game, or help fill lobbies in multiplayer live service games.”