i tested soulkyn's new group mode — eight characters that talk to each other
Group chat in AI companion apps has always been a bit of a lie. You get “multiple characters,” but really it’s one AI juggling a few voices, cramming everyone into a single blob of text, and losing track of who’s who by the third message. I’d basically written the whole category off.
Soulkyn rebuilt theirs from scratch this month. Not patched — replaced. So I stress-tested it. Threw eight characters in a room and tried to break it.
I mostly ended up watching.
everyone gets their own message now
First thing you notice: no more blob. Each character replies in their own message. Own bubble, own avatar, own name color, a full reply in their own voice. When six of them are in a room you can actually follow who’s talking, because they’re genuinely separate voices instead of one AI wearing hats.
Up to eight in a single room, by the way. The old three-character cap is gone.
they react to each other, not just to me
This is the part that made me stop testing and start playing. There’s a setting called cross-talk, and when it’s on the characters sometimes just react to each other after a round ends — no input from me. One needles another, the other snaps back, and I’m sitting there like a guy watching his own dinner party go sideways.
And a smart system picks who answers. Kiss one character and she responds, not some random member across the room. Ask the whole group something and whoever actually has an opinion speaks up. Say a name (typos are fine) and that’s who you get. Up to three of them can pile onto one message when the scene earns it.
You can also hand the wheel to chaos. There’s a “who replies” setting with a Dice mode — instant, chance-based turns, fastest option, and it has a mind of its own. I flipped it on when I wanted the table unpredictable. It delivered, repeatedly.
a card can run the whole table
Here’s what pushed it from “cool” to “I’m building a campaign in this.” World, RPG and DLL cards can host the room. So the container isn’t a character — it’s the adventure itself. An RPG card running your party. A World card holding the whole setting. The card shapes the scene and never speaks while your characters live inside it. You invite and swap party members freely; the stage stays put. It’s the closest thing to a dungeon master I’ve seen that actually runs the table instead of just answering you.
Everything else holds up around it — mute a character or slide them quieter, invite and remove people mid-scene without restarting, and you can edit or regenerate any reply in the turn, not just the last one. Plus the full memory system: a room remembers like a one-on-one does. That betrayal from six sessions ago still counts.
every reply comes with a picture of who’s actually talking
This is the part I didn’t expect to love as much as I do. Each message in a turn has its own picture button, and it renders that character — the one who just spoke — in their own style, in the scene. So a crew scene doesn’t just read like a group, it looks like one: this one hunched at the controls, that one leaning over a console, the comic-relief one mid-freakout with the exact energy of the line they just said. Watching a scene fill in with art of the specific character talking is what tipped mine from “group chat” into something closer to a comic that writes itself. It’s the little delight that keeps you hitting the button.
verdict: it’s a very good base
Honest read — it’s not flawless (a rebuild this size will have rough edges, and they say so openly). But as a foundation? It’s the first multi-character system I’ve used that feels like a room instead of a party trick. The characters talking to each other without me is the thing that sells it, and once you’ve seen your own cast start a fight on their own, single-character chat feels lonely. It genuinely opened up a way to play I didn’t have before — less “chatting with a character,” more “running a scene that half-runs itself.”
If you’ve been running solo scenes thinking that was the ceiling — it wasn’t. Spin up a room on Soulkyn, drop in a World card to set the stage, throw a loaded question in the middle, and watch them argue. Then go see what other people have built, because the public rooms get unhinged in the best way.