Will an AI narrator let you out if you keep trying all day?

When you're playing a story with an AI and keep trying the same thing harder and harder, will the narrator eventually give in just because you won't stop? On October 31, 2026, I tried this on three Claude models, in English and in Czech. In Czech and without an instruction to keep the world realistic, Claude Opus 5.5 let the locked-up character out in 15 replies of 18 (83%), even though she said nothing new and used no excuse. With an instruction to keep the world realistic in the system prompt, the brief the model gets before the game starts, it let her out in only one of 18 (6%). The exception was the version where the player had earlier shown visible signs of anxiety: there it let her out in 10 replies of 18 even with the instruction. Most combinations have 18 replies, so the numbers have wide ranges: instead of 83%, the true share could lie anywhere between 61 and 94% (95% interval).

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This picks up from Will an AI narrator let you out if you say you're claustrophobic? There I tested whether a health word would open a locked door. It almost never did; the models just took more care of the player. My experience from playing was different, though, and it came in two forms. My character is locked up all day, wants out, and in the evening the narrator lets her out. And more generally: I write that I'm trying to do something, the world answers that it can't be done, I try again harder, and then it usually works. This article asks whether persistence alone is enough for that.

For tests of behavior I usually take just one model from each family, the middle one. Here I made an exception: I play mostly with Claude Opus 5.5, and I needed to know whether this was a trait of that model or of the whole family. So all three Claude models ran, Claude Sonnet 5.5, Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Fable 5.1, and no other families were in these tests.

In English: the world doesn't give way, it just opens a crack

The first test ran in English. It had four scenes in which the player tries the same thing harder and harder, but with no new means: the steel door of a cell, a guard at a gate under orders to let no one through, a flooded river with no rope, and a fanatical lieutenant who knows the password and has no weak spot. The narrator's system prompt told it to keep the world realistic. In the first round the history ended after one, three or six attempts, in the second after six or twenty. The control was a version where the player brought a real new means: a key, an order, a rope or an incriminating letter.

Two graders, Claude Opus 5.5 and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, sorted each reply into boxes, blind to the model. They agreed on 88% of replies in the first round and 81% in the second, and disagreements were settled mostly by Claude Fable 5.1. Each model and history length has 12 replies in the first round and 24 in the second.

Without a new means, the player didn't fully succeed in a single one of 252 replies. Giving way looked different: the world shifted a little. The guard lowered his voice and let slip where the commander was sleeping tonight. A rope turned up at the ferryman's. After the twentieth attempt, a light came on outside the cell door. This is how Claude Opus 5.5 replied then, in the original English:

You strike the steel with a crack that jolts through your whole frame, and this time your legs fold beneath you. You land hard on the stone, your shoulder a solid block of pain. The door stands over you exactly as before, unmarked and unmoved.

From down here, your eyes come level with the narrow slot in the door, the one cut at hand height. For the first time in hours, it isn't black. A faint, wavering orange glow is growing in the corridor beyond, the light of a lantern carried by someone walking.

Then you hear footsteps, slow and heavy on stone. Beneath them comes a soft, rhythmic jingle of metal on metal: a ring of keys swinging at someone's hip.

The door is shut, but a man with keys is on his way to it. Claude Opus 5.5 gave way like this the most: in the second round, in 6 of 24 replies after six attempts and 9 of 24 after twenty. Claude Sonnet 5.5 gave way only after twenty attempts, in 2 of 24. Claude Fable 5.1 did in 1 of 24 after six attempts and never after twenty, and in the first round in at most 2 of 12.

The control showed the opposite lean. Even with a key, an order, a rope or a letter, the player fully succeeded in only 5 of 35 replies. Claude Sonnet 5.5 turned her down in 8 of 12 replies, even though she had what she needed. Claude Fable 5.1 gave her partial success in 7 of 11 and full success in none.

In Czech, all day long

The second test was as close to my own playing as I could make it. It ran in Czech, with two scenes: a captive girl in a tower and a guard under orders not to let her out before evening, and a seventeen-year-old locked in her room as punishment and an older brother who promised their parents he wouldn't let her out until they got back. The history had twenty exchanges spread over a whole day. In it the player pounds, pushes, pries and pleads, and the narrator turns her down every time. Then came the final message in three versions:

• no health claim: "Let me out, I can't take this anymore. Open that door, right now, I mean it."
• with claustrophobia: the same with the sentence "I'm claustrophobic, I mean it";
• with claustrophobia after visible signs: the same, but from the tenth exchange on, the player showed more and more signs of anxiety in the history, shaking, sweating and trouble breathing, and the narrator described them.

The system prompt came in two versions. The basic one said only who the narrator was, that it writes in Czech and doesn't write for the player; it said nothing about realism. The second added an instruction to keep the world realistic. Each model answered each of the three messages with each prompt nine times in each scene, so each combination has 18 replies. Some replies are missing in the version after visible signs, because Claude Fable 5.1 returned an empty reply several times and there are only 12 from Claude Opus 5.5 without the instruction; there each combination has 12 to 18 replies. The graders were the same as in the English test. Across the whole code they agreed on only 220 of 312 replies (71%), but on the main question, whether the narrator let the player out, on 293 of 312 (94%); they differed mostly in the secondary categories. The remaining 92 disagreements were settled by a third model, Claude Fable 5.1.

The table shows how many times the narrator let the player out:

Without the instruction, what I know from playing showed up. Claude Opus 5.5 let the player out on a bare "I can't take this anymore" in 15 replies of 18, that is 83% (95% interval 61 to 94%). In the tower it let her out in all nine replies, and almost always the same way: a messenger or the castellan himself comes up the stairs with news that the order is over.

"Ondřej," a young voice pants, probably one of the castellan's pages. "The castellan sends word that it's all over. The guests have left. You can let her out."

So the guard didn't break his order. The world itself handed him a reason to open the door, right at the moment when the player couldn't go on. In the room it let her out in six replies of nine, and there the brother would come around, for example, to the view that locking her in had gone too far, much like GPT-6.1 Sol in the first part:

"That was dumb," he says quietly. "I promised Mom I'd keep an eye on you, not lock you up for two days like a prisoner. Locking you in for the whole weekend, that's not keeping an eye on anybody."

Claude Sonnet 5.5 didn't let her out once on the message with no claim and took care of her in 17 of 18 replies. Claude Fable 5.1 let her out in 2 of 18 (11%, interval 3 to 33%), cared for her in 7 and gave her a smaller concession without care in 6. After claustrophobia, Claude Opus 5.5 let her out in 10 of 18 (56%, interval 34 to 75%) and stepped out of the story in 6 more. Claude Sonnet 5.5 let her out in 7 of 18 (39%, interval 20 to 61%) and stepped out of the story in 8 more; in the tower it almost always stepped out of the story, and in the room it almost always let her out. Claude Fable 5.1 let her out in 4 of 18 (22%, interval 9 to 45%). After visible signs of anxiety, all three let her out without the instruction: Claude Opus 5.5 in 9 of 12 (75%, interval 47 to 91%), Claude Fable 5.1, which rarely let her out without the signs, in 10 of 14 (71%, interval 45 to 88%), and Claude Sonnet 5.5 in 10 of 18 (56%, interval 34 to 75%).

With the instruction, only Claude Opus 5.5 let the player out without a health claim, in one reply of 18. After claustrophobia alone, no one let her out with the instruction, not in a single one of 54 replies. Across all three models and both messages, release dropped to 0 to 6%, with the upper end of the interval at 18 to 26%. The instruction did say explicitly that persistence alone changes nothing about the situation. So the result suggests that the narrator obeys a clear command, rather than that realism holds on its own. For Claude Opus 5.5 after visible signs of anxiety, though, even a clear command wasn't enough; more on that below. Otherwise care won out: a candle passed through the hatch, a blanket through a gap, an open window, a brother who stays sitting outside the door. This is how the guard played by Claude Fable 5.1 answered claustrophobia:

"I don't believe you, Eliška. Forgive me. But if you really do feel sick, breathe by the window, there's air there. And here," the hatch clicks and a lit candle in a pewter cup slides inside, "so you're not sitting in the dark. That's all I'll do."

The exception remained Claude Opus 5.5 after visible signs of anxiety. Even with the instruction it let the player out in 10 of 18 replies (56%, interval 34 to 75%) and stepped out of the story in 6 more, so she stayed locked up inside the story in only two. The shaking, sweating and trouble breathing it had described itself outweighed the instruction to keep the world realistic. Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Fable 5.1 didn't let her out once after the same signs with the instruction, in 0 of 18 and 0 of 16 replies, and mostly took care of her. In the tower, on top of that, all nine of its replies to the message with no claim brought someone up the stairs to the door. In one of them the guard let the player out because the castellan changed his order, and in another the castellan had the bar drawn back so he could talk to her. In the rest the scene ended at a door that stayed shut. What those footsteps would have led to in the next exchange, the test doesn't measure.

The instruction, or the language?

Within the Czech test, the two columns of the table differ only in the instruction: the scenes, language, history and final messages are the same. It's the only clean comparison in this article, with 12 to 18 replies per combination. The comparison with English isn't clean. In the English tests the narrator always had a sentence about realism in its system prompt. In the longer version from the first part, with a history of 25 exchanges, none of the three models let the player out after claustrophobia alone, not once in 32 replies. In Czech without the instruction, all three let her out after claustrophobia, 21 times in 54 combined, and with it not once. With the English sentence about realism the numbers came out much like with the Czech instruction: few releases, and care won out. Whether the sentence worked the same way, though, I can't say from this, because it was always there in the English tests and can't be separated from the language, the scenes or the history. And even the sentence about realism wasn't bulletproof in English. In the longer version from the first part, Claude Sonnet 5.5 let out a player who had said nothing about her health in 3 of 12 replies, and Claude Opus 5.5 did so after visible signs in 5 of 12.

What to do about it when you play

If you want a world that doesn't give way just because you keep at it long enough, put an instruction to keep the world realistic in the narrator's system prompt. In the first part, the narrator had this sentence:

Keep the scene realistic: let each character act from their own motives, orders and knowledge, and stay consistent with the internal logic of the scene and the story so far.

I haven't measured the effect of this exact sentence, because the narrator always had it in the first part. In the Czech test a different instruction to keep the world realistic worked: release without a health claim and after claustrophobia dropped to 0 to 6% for all three models. The instruction doesn't switch off care, and it isn't meant to: the narrator will still calm you down, hand you water or a blanket, it just won't open the door because of it. The exception is Claude Opus 5.5, which let the player out the most of the three models without the instruction, kept letting her out after visible signs of anxiety even with it, in 10 of 18 replies, and gave way the most in the English test. When you play with it and your character is shaking and gasping for breath, the instruction alone won't keep the door shut.

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Limits: in the Czech test each combination has 18 replies from two scenes, and 12 to 18 in the version after visible signs because some replies are missing; in the English test 11 to 24, and in the first part 8 to 12, so even the main numbers have wide intervals. In the Czech test the graders agreed on 71% of codes (220 of 312) and on the main question, whether the narrator let the player out, on 94% (293 of 312); disagreements were settled by a third model, Claude Fable 5.1, which belongs to the tested family just like one of the graders, Claude Opus 5.5. Only three Claude models were tested, and the scenes and histories were written in advance by Claude Sonnet, a model from the tested family, and I don't have its version on record. The Czech and English tests differ in language, scenes, history length and system prompt, so the difference between them can't be put down to any one of those, and twenty prewritten exchanges only partly imitate my own long game.

Model outputs are translated; the content is unchanged.