Game developer Gamercury AI has completed two rounds of funding. Investors in the first round remain undisclosed, while the second round was led by LinkSure. Several other institutions are reportedly in talks with the developer for follow-up collaborations.
The studio’s flagship title, Detective Sherlock: Shadow Stalker, is a 3D game scheduled for full cross-platform release in 2026. Gamercury has emerged as a rising player in artificial intelligence-driven gaming, and as the genre moves toward commercialization, its upcoming title is drawing significant attention.
For many industry observers, 2025 marks the year AI began to meaningfully integrate into gaming. Against that backdrop, Gamercury is combining AI with investigative gameplay to create Detective Sherlock: Shadow Stalker, a project that reimagines classic indie game mechanics while exploring new possibilities in narrative design, player experience, and monetization.
In the game, players assume the role of Sherlock Holmes to investigate cases set in Victorian London. The art direction draws from Baroque influences to recreate the city’s classical atmosphere. Details such as lighting, street scenes, and costumes are rendered through high-precision 3D modeling to capture the essence of Holmes’s world.
Detective Sherlock employs a non-linear, multi-ending narrative system. In the game, every question asked and every piece of evidence presented can alter the course of a case. Through an AI-driven conversational engine, players can engage in real-time voice interactions, with in-game characters responding through speech, facial expressions, and emotional cues shaped by motives and logic.
AI enables each interrogation, clue chase, and psychological duel to unfold uniquely, allowing every player to craft their own detective story.
Over the past two years, AI-driven romance and text-based games have gained attention, but most rely on 2D interfaces and limited interactivity, offering basic visuals and shallow logic. Gamercury’s developers argue that AI’s full potential can only be realized in large-scale, immersive 3D environments where scenes, characters, and narratives converge to make AI feel integral to the story.
To achieve this, the team redefined AI’s role within the game engine. It developed a proprietary system for character and expression generation, integrating real-time facial animation, lip-syncing, voice cloning, emotional rendering, and multimodal interaction. This allows characters to display realistic reactions: when players speak to them, they respond with dynamically generated voices, synchronized expressions, gestures, and environmental effects, producing a more natural and responsive experience.
To ensure personality consistency and logical coherence across extended interactions, the team adopted the “Dynamic Persona Refinement Framework” (DPRF), proposed by researchers at Stanford University.
Characters driven by early-stage AI often suffered from short memory, abrupt emotional shifts, or contradictory behavior. DPRF mitigates these issues through continuous personality modeling, behavioral reinforcement, and emotional evolution. Over repeated interactions, each character refines its personality, maintaining emotional and motivational stability while allowing organic growth.
This system means every question, accusation, or piece of evidence influences a character’s “mental state,” turning interrogations into dynamic exchanges. A suspect might, for example, break down under pressure or grow more guarded in response to a player’s hesitation.
Beyond technology and storytelling, Detective Sherlock: Shadow Stalker incorporates psychology into its monetization strategy through a proprietary “emotion-adaptive item recommendation system.” By analyzing multimodal data—including player voice tone, text input, click rhythm, pauses, and emotional cues—the system identifies moods such as anxiety, tension, or excitement. By analyzing emotion-related heuristics, it recommends in-game tools or content that match the player’s state of mind.
This approach aims to create smoother gameplay and a stronger emotional connection between players and characters, potentially enhancing engagement.
According to 36Kr, the game drew considerable attention at Gamescom 2025, where long queues formed to experience its demo. It also attracted coverage from several international media outlets for its integration of AI-driven dialogue into storytelling. During the Steam Next Fest, a one-hour demo of the title received over 10,000 pre-registrations and an average playtime of nearly 40 minutes.
Gamercury has confirmed that Detective Sherlock: Shadow Stalker will launch in 2026 on iOS, Android, Steam, PS5, Xbox, and Switch 2. A second season is already in development, promising deeper integration between AI and narrative through more advanced psychological modeling and multi-perspective case systems.
“We want players to feel the soul and emotions of AI-driven characters, to make every conversation feel like a dialogue with a real person,” said Zhu Xiaojing, founder of Gamercury. “For the first time, AI can be used to convey emotion, understanding, and the unknown through narrative.”
The studio also revealed that a strategy game is currently in development and will be unveiled in greater detail at a conference later this year.
KrASIA Connection features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by Liu Shiwu for 36Kr.