The Atlantic's Lemony Snicket AI game bans you after three off-topic questions

The Atlantic launched Lemony Snicket's Suspicious Incident in Dubious Park on July 13 for subscribers, with a wider public release set for July 20. It's a murder mystery set in a locked-down park where players interrogate a cast of eccentric witnesses and suspects to find the killer — part traditional whodunit, part visual scavenger hunt.

The game was built by training a separate LLM on each character's unique dialogue, motives, and backstory — work done in collaboration with Lemony Snicket, the pen name of author and Magnetic Fields accordionist Daniel Handler. Illustrations come from Eisner Award-winning comic artist Michael Kupperman. The Atlantic describes it as its first immersive-narrative game, and it fits into a broader industry push by publications to chase the puzzle-driven subscription model that has worked so well for the New York Times — though most outlets have stuck to crosswords and Wordle-likes rather than AI-powered narrative games.

The catch is how the game handles players who go off-script. Three innocuous off-topic messages earn you a ban from the game entirely — the reviewer told one character they loved them and got a strike, then asked another for life advice and got a second. Whether that ban is permanent is still unclear; The Atlantic hadn't responded to a request for comment at time of writing. The restriction exists because LLMs are notoriously easy to jailbreak, and The Atlantic clearly doesn't want its Lemony Snicket characters saying things they really shouldn't.

But the solution creates its own problem: the game feels punishingly restrictive for what are genuinely harmless interactions. It's a neat illustration of the core tension in deploying generative AI in a consumer product — lock it down too hard and it feels broken, give it too much freedom and it goes off the rails. Whether The Atlantic loosens the leash or players find a way around it remains to be seen.