After another three year gap, it’s time to psync back into the ABIS once more with the third title of the AI: The Somnium Files series. While the previous installment, Nirvana Initiative, operated largely as a direct follow-up to the first title and featured different protagonists, No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files takes us back to the protagonist of the first game in yet another new, weird adventure.
What Was I Doing Again?
No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files is something of an interquel, taking place shortly after the events of AI: The Somnium Files. It also features a few characters introduced in Nirvana Initiative, though they’re a bit more out of focus as this isn’t their story yet.
Like with Nirvana Initiative, you get a question at the start of your playthrough asking if you know certain details that only someone aware of the events of the first AI: The Somnium Files would likely know. As far as I can tell, answering this correctly only changes a couple of lines in No Sleep For Kaname Date’s script.
That being said, given that the first game was a murder mystery from the get-go, naturally there are at least a handful of indirect spoilers that are simply inevitable given what these games are. One particular plot point that happens a few hours into the first Somnium Files game is so integral to multiple characters’ motives in this game that it ends up spoiled by default, even if it leaves out the “how” or “why”.
As per the last two reviews, I will only be covering a broad overview of the game at hand, so this review will be as spoiler-free as I can reasonably make it. To get it out of the way here, I suggest that you should probably play the first game at a minimum before playing this one. Nirvana Initiative is less important, though it probably helps to have a bit of context (not to mention attachment) toward certain members of the supporting cast who get their development in that game, given how irregularly they show up in this one.
It is worth noting that series writer Kotaro Uchikoshi took more of a backseat on this title, working instead as an “assistant scenario director”.
Lizard People
No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files briefly starts out with our protagonist, the titular Kaname Date, escaping some agents before watching a surreal scene with a bunch of people getting sucked up into a UFO. This is made only stranger by seeing a friend of his, Iris Sagan (a rather kooky young woman whom he saved in the first Somnium Files), sucked up along with them.
Iris awakens to find herself in a Sumerian-themed UFO, effectively kidnapped and put in a strange rabbit costume. A monitor turns on to reveal the “host” of this game, a vtuber-looking reptilian girl named Akemi, who tells Iris she needs to use her “third eye” to escape. Iris is allowed one phone-a-friend lifeline, which she naturally uses to call on Date (and his AI-eyeball buddy Aiba) for aid.
This sets up an extended investigation into these strange events: where is Iris, how can she survive, who is Akemi, and what the heck are aliens and all these sci-fi shenanigans doing here?
Seek A Way Out…Again
I often referred to the Somnium puzzles of the previous two games as being similar to the escape rooms of the Zero Escape series. This made sense given how much of Team Zero Escape worked on these games, but the Somnium puzzles had a much more surrealist element due to taking place in peoples’ dreams. This time however, we also get actual escape rooms. Like…the gameplay is staggeringly similar to Zero Escape, complete with identical sound effects, only this time they’re played in third person.
The escape room sequences are generally more complex than the Somnium puzzles, not to mention substantially more time-consuming. They operate how escape rooms would generally be expected to, i.e. they’re extended puzzles where you’re supposed to find objects or clues and use them or combine them in specific contexts to make progress towards eventually escaping a closed room. There is a bit more sci-fi flair to the puzzles this time at least (e.g. the first escape room features a gravity-changing button).
One mechanical difference between the No Sleep For Kaname Date and Zero Escape escape rooms is that several in this game are split up between multiple characters. Each of them operates in a separate room, and you can press a button to switch between them. On a regular basis, actions done in one character’s room affect another’s, and sometimes objects need to be transferred between. This ups the complexity a bit, and would be nice…if the game didn’t feel the need to absolutely baby you so much of the time.
Stop Helping Me Please
By far my biggest problem with the escape rooms in No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files (which by the way is an annoying mouthful of a title) is that I felt like the game had frustratingly little faith in me as a player to actually figure them out on my own. The game often felt like it was trying to steer me towards what I needed to do next instead of actually letting me do so myself, even when I had the game set to its Hard difficulty for escape rooms. If I looked at an object in my inventory, it’d often say something like “you should use this object on that door”, and if I looked at the door it would be like “don’t we have an object that works on this door?”. Even worse is the amount of needlessly repetitious text in spots. For example, picking up an object where the HUD says [object name], Date would say “huh, [object]…” and then Aiba would say “it appears to be [object]” in the same text string. There are often too many characters filling space at the same time for no significant benefit. Some communication between characters makes sense to at least do a little bit of guiding in the right direction, but the way the game does it is overkill, even on the difficulty that is supposed to reduce the number of hints.
If I wanted to make the puzzles any easier, I’d play on the lower difficulties. Those offer a hint button if you need it, and characters will be even more talkative about the solutions. This is an M-rated game, presumably for an older intended audience than that of a game like Detective Pikachu. If you’re struggling to figure something out or just don’t want to think about it, there are plenty of difficulty options already. I would hope that setting the game to Hard would allow me to figure things out by myself, which I often would as soon as I saw an object even before the game told me what it was for anyway. Instead, I just felt like I was being backseated at several points, which dampened any satisfaction I would get from solving the escape rooms myself. Escape rooms operate a lot more on logic and “this stands to follow that” reasoning, so let me decide for myself if I want to figure it out by myself or let the game steer me in the right direction.
Even on Hard mode, the only escape room that really gave me much trouble was the fourth one, and that was less a result of complexity and more of it just having a spot of questionable design in how a particular interaction worked. In concept the escape rooms were generally fine and somewhat fun to do, but I can’t help but feel like I’d have been able to enjoy them much more if I was left to solve them by myself instead of watching several characters all constantly trying to solve it for me. Otherwise, they may as well have just been a cutscene instead of a, you know, gameplay section.
There are also significantly fewer Somnium puzzles in the game compared to the other installments. These at least operate a lot more like those of the previous two games: you have 6 minutes to explore someone’s dream and get to the root of something in their psyche. Alas, only one of them stood out to me as a highlight in this title as the one Somnium that felt like it was really trying to do something interesting, and the others were rather forgettable.
Stakes and Mistakes
Outside of the puzzle room sections, the Somnium Files games are mainly point-and-click adventure games focused on their story and characters. Unfortunately, No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files really doesn’t add much new or interesting to the franchise in this department either. The story really doesn’t feel necessary given the previous two games were pretty self-contained, nor does it do enough to justify itself as a compelling experience of its own.
Part of the problem with this game being an interquel is that there’s not really much that it feels allowed to do with the cast of the games sandwiching it. Date’s character arc was largely resolved in the first game, as was that of several other characters. The arcs of several characters from Nirvana Initiative aren’t able to really happen at this point in the timeline, lest there be a disruption of continuity. And because it sticks so close to the core cast of the other games, it feels woefully lacking in real narrative tension, likely because it can’t do a lot with long-term consequences that might conflict with future events. I know I criticized Nirvana Initiative for a bit of retconning, so I appreciate them not trying to mess around with continuity too much here, but this game feels comparatively almost lacking for ambition at a conceptual level. There are a share of alternate endings that make for the bulk of the unexpected parts, but these are basically all total gag endings rather than interesting what-ifs.
There are a handful of new characters as well, notably Akemi and a new assistant at ABIS named Hina, so that does give at least something new to work with. Sadly, outside of their designs, the new characters don’t particularly stand out among this comparatively eccentric cast. The story does explore more empathetic themes, which is a direction I appreciate given how much less this game really operates on suspense this time around. Honestly, I wish they had leaned harder into a different direction of that sort, because it felt really lacking in that edge-of-your-seat suspense. Even then, however, the good parts still ended up feeling undermined a fair bit by questionable themes. Beyond that, it feels like most other aspects are but retreads of stuff we’ve already done with this series (and even more so if you’ve played the Zero Escape series, which was also worked on by Kotaro Uchikoshi). Which gets into another major writing issue I have with this game: the existing cast just feels significantly worse this time around.
Date’s perverse tendencies in AI: The Somnium Files could at times be grating, but the humor with and around him was generally varied enough and didn’t prevent him from being an enjoyable character. Unfortunately, this time Date just comes off as borderline one-dimensional, with significantly fewer glimpses into that emotional depth that made him endearing. His humor here almost feels one-note, written as if the joke about his enjoyment of porn magazines is escalated to the point that it’s now only thing that makes him funny (seriously, I would be content if I never had to read or hear the words “porno mag” in a game again after playing this with how much they beat that joke into the ground). This spreads to much of the rest of the cast and it just got tiresome, especially since there aren’t really a lot of new characters to mix up the interactions or add new dynamics. There are a couple of scenes of characters interacting that rarely had the opportunity in previous installments, and these were a breath of fresh air, but they were few and far between. While it still has some funny scenes, the comedy is a lot more stale and hackneyed.
Speaking of the rest of the cast, the mystery in this game is dumb. So much of it operates around characters doing unusually stupid and irrational things beyond stuff that makes any sense for their character, and they’re also regularly caught off guard by things they shouldn’t be. While this series would sometimes stretch my suspension of disbelief with certain cutscenes and story ideas, the ways in which this game broke it and frustrated me in the process were considerably more mundane. Several characters withhold information they have very poor or irrational reasons to hide, which is just plain frustrating in how so much conflict feels completely contrived as a result. The plot reveals felt less like proper twists and I found myself more frustrated by characters who I’d otherwise grown to like.
What was similarly disappointing is that I felt like there were missed opportunities with this game. Iris at times toed the line between major character and plot device in the first game, so this felt like an opportunity to at least do a bit more with her, even if it just meant spending more time with the character. Unfortunately, she still doesn’t show up much in the story outside of the escape rooms, and even those are diluted on account of splitting those puzzles across multiple characters.
This game feels written in a way that the writers had the characters and their comedic shtick described to them, but with only a fraction of the heart that made them endearing enough (or heck, what makes them funny) to be actually invested in them and their journeys. They just aren’t as enjoyable this time around.
Presentation
No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files runs with basically the same visual style as Nirvana Initiative, with the more updated visual models of certain characters compared to the first game. While still not great, I do think the action scenes improved a little bit over the previous two games in terms of choreography, even the ones not played purely for comedy.
Keisuke Ito returns as composer yet again. The music is still pretty good, although a substantial amount of the music in this game is recycled from the previous two installments. I also still like the voice acting this time around, even if I don’t love the script they’re reading from. There are a couple of noticeable oddities though with the directing, such as a couple of names being mispronounced.
For the first time in the trilogy, I played the Switch version (on the original Switch). It runs fine, albeit noticeably worse than the PC versions. I did experience a crash (while playing pre-release), but the game autosaves to prevent that from being too painful. Given this is an adventure game that doesn’t rely too much on precise inputs, it’s a sufficient way to play the game especially if you want to play it on the go.
Verdict
No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files just feels more like a mediocre fandisc than a proper, satisfying entry of this series. It doesn’t need to exist, nor does it particularly justify its existence on its own merits. It’s too limited by being set in between the far more eventful games in the series, both in its plot and its characters. While Nirvana Initiative felt like it might have had a bit too much ambition and stumbled at the end for it, this title feels woefully lacking for any real ambition and stumbles the entire way. Most of the tension feels rather unconvincing, the comedy is a lot more one-note, and the cast of characters are at their worst in the trilogy. The game just doesn’t feel like it has enough trust in me as a player to actually solve its escape rooms myself, even when it ostensibly gives me a difficulty choice on how many (or few) hints I want.
At the very least, the other games are pretty self-contained, so there isn’t really much obligation to play this one. It has its moments here and there, it’s shorter than the previous titles, and I was seldom outright bored, but it’s a struggle to come up with a major selling point even to series veterans, let alone to people who haven’t played these games.
WAIT FOR SALE ON NO SLEEP FOR KAMAME DATE – FROM AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES
If you are looking for another visual novel, you may enjoy KANADE. We have also covered a wide variety of visual novels both original to English and localized from Japanese, which you can check out here.
Thank you to Spike Chunsoft for providing a Nintendo Switch review code for No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files.
Been playing games since my papa gave me an NES controller in the early 90’s. I play games of almost all genres, but especially focus role-playing, action, and puzzle-platform games. Also an enjoyer of many niche things ranging from speedrunning to obscure music from all over the world.
