Someone playing Refractive Entertainment’s recently released action-RPG Luminary for less than an hour accused the team of using AI for the game’s only voiced character. The player said the voice “killed it” for them. There was just one problem: It wasn’t AI. It was actually the developer’s wife doing her first-ever voice acting gig.
Refractive Entertainment launched Luminary into Steam Early Access on August 11. It’s a resource-gathering action-adventure sandbox with an art style that’s giving Fable meets Immortals Fenyx Rising. It’s cute-looking and well-received, with a “Mostly Positive” rating out of almost 350 Steam reviews. But for an indie developer who says his game’s success lives and dies by its Steam review score, one particular negative review caught the creative director’s attention.
On September 10, user NyteKnyte posted a short Steam review after only 0.4 hours with the game to say that Luminary looked good but “the awful AI-generated voice killed it” for them. “Feels off, like an AI game,” NyteKnyte said in their review. “Hopefully its temporary and gets better, but [the AI voice] killed it for me.”
Not long after this review hit the game’s Steam page, Refractive Entertainment responded, saying that the “awful AI-generated voice” that NyteKnyte decried was actually the creative director’s wife.
“While my wife might not be the greatest voice actress out there (that was her first time), I can assure you she is a real person and not AI haha,” creative director Keith Kolod said. “We don’t use AI at all in our game, we’re just some indie game devs doing our thing with the resources we have.”
Kolod even shared the negative review on X on September 11 to wonder publicly why people just “automatically assume” that every voice in an indie game is AI just because it doesn’t sound like AAA quality. He also thanked those who played Luminary and complimented his wife’s portrayal of the Temple Guardian.
In Discord DMs with GameSpot, Kolod said he doesn’t have any issues with people using AI for any reason, especially in game development and for voiceovers. However, he doesn’t use the controversial technology because voiceovers are a way for him to “leave parts of me, my family, and friends” in the games he makes.
“That said, Mikell did NOT jump to the opportunity,” Kolod explained. “She is shy, felt like it would be bad, and didn’t want to hurt the game. I told her this part doesn’t need a lot of ‘acting.’ It’s an ethereal goddess who should feel calming to the player as though she has delivered this speech to hundreds of Luminaries over centuries, and that I believe she could do it. The first few takes of recording you could tell she was extremely nervous, even though it’s literally just me and her at my computer and a mic. [She] stumbled on words, worried about all of her inflections and how certain words sounded, but with enough takes and only reading a couple sentences at a time, I thought we got a pretty decent run. She was happy it was over.”
Kolod said the whole reason he built Luminary was so “me, my wife, and son [could] play together.” As a Souls and Elden Ring fan, he wanted something that could introduce newer players to the action-RPG genre without the punishing difficulty of those games while creating something his whole family could enjoy together. Luminary is that for Refractive Entertainment. With no funding, no publisher, and no other job bringing in income, Luminary has a lot of expectations on its shoulders. For Mikell, lending her voice to the game wasn’t about becoming a professional voice actor or saving money. She did it because she wanted to help her husband succeed.
“This was my wife’s first time voice acting, she wasn’t a huge fan,” Kolod told GameSpot. “You know how it is–everyone hates hearing their own voice in a recording who isn’t a professional. As [much] fun as we had together doing it, it may be a hard sell for me to convince her to do it again. She really just helped me out of love and wanting to see me succeed with Luminary, and helping in any way she could.”
Despite the AI accusation, Luminary appears to be off to a promising start for the two-person team at Refractive Entertainment. Two weeks after its Steam Early Access launch, Kolod took to X on August 25 to share that the action-RPG had generated over $100,000 in sales in just one week, with the team pulling in approximately $70,000 in revenue after Steam’s cut. Not bad for a two-person studio with no funding and no publisher.
The attention surrounding Mikell’s voice has apparently brought even more eyes to the game, too. Kolod told GameSpot that posts about the story on Reddit and elsewhere have generated views, likes, upvotes, and more wishlists, though he said the team has yet to see that attention translate into a comparable bump in sales. And perhaps nobody was more surprised by the whole thing than Mikell herself. Before Kolod pushed the update to the game containing her voice, she had one request for her husband (who will celebrate 15 years together in November):
“Ok, but I don’t wanna hear if people hate my voice in reviews or on X. I did what I could.”
“Little did she know it would turn into our biggest story,” Kolod said.