No Sleep For Kaname Date - From AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES Review

The latest entry in Spike Chunsoft’s AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES series, No Sleep For Kaname Date - From AI - THE SOMNIUM FILES, is a bit of an odd beast. On the one hand, it’s a fanservice-loaded midquel between the first two games, while on the other, it explores escape rooms for the first time in the series. The fact that I’ve only played a small portion of the first AI: The Somnium Files beforehand does also mean that a lot of that fanservice went over my head. Remarkably, however, I found that I rather liked my time with No Sleep For Kaname Date, despite not recognising half the cast.

The plot starts off absolutely bonkers, with the internet idol and major series character Iris Sagan (known by her fans as A-set) seemingly getting kidnapped by a UFO and being forced into an escape room by a reptilian hostess named Akemi. Iris manages to use a device on her wrist to get in contact with series protagonist Kaname Date, a special detective called a Psyncer who can delve into people’s minds, for assistance. From there, you play as Iris (and others) in the escape rooms and Date in the outside world trying to locate her.

From there, the storyline doesn’t get particularly more “out there”, but there are still fun twists and turns. There are a few late-game reveals (which I ain’t spoiling) that recontextualise much of the game’s events; some of these left behind an awkward aftertaste that soured earlier moments and made some situations come across as more mean-spirited. However, if you go in with more of a light-hearted comedy mindset where things are rarely serious, the messing around in No Sleep For Kaname Date becomes a lot more palatable. That being said, the plot does at times go for actual drama and it tends to hit those few moments very well for tension and catharsis.

The story also features a bunch of entertaining characters, with most returning from the first game and its sequel, AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES - nirvanA Initiative. For large swathes of the cast, they just get a scene to show off their wild personality to avoid bloating the relatively shorter storyline. Despite that, the strong vocal performances sell them well, even with their brief screentime, and the inclusion of a good handful of alternate joke endings provides plenty of room to expand on them.

The few members of the cast that do receive focus make for an excellent comedy group, with everyone bouncing off of each other and poking at one another’s insecurities for explosive scenes. Date and Aiba, the snarky AI ball in his empty eye socket, are a fantastic duo as usual, with both serving as the perfect straight man to the other’s eccentricities, and their voice actors’ performances helped a lot to sell how out there they could both get. Iris, however, gets pushed aside for other characters in the escape rooms to shine as the game goes on, and it feels like the story spends more time on people talking about her rather than focusing on her own characterisation. By the end, she feels more like a prop than a person, which is a shame for her playable debut.

There are also two new characters, with the previously mentioned reptilian escape game hostess Akemi and a technician named Hina Tsukiyono, who works with Date and just so happens to love escape rooms. Very convenient, I know. In any case, Hina gets a lot of time to shine, and that is time well spent; she’s one of those genius gremlin characters that can do amazing things with a keyboard and is always down to clown. She and her voice actor have excellent comedic chemistry with Date and Aiba, and Hina’s happy to go along with a surprising amount of bits.

Sadly, the player only gets Hina’s help as an escape game expert for one of the escape rooms, but thankfully, they’re still a lot of fun. They’re pretty close to the escape rooms found in another popular Spike Chunsoft series, Zero Escape, even going so far as to use a similar “Seek a Way Out” message right at the start of each segment. These sections of the game see you play a variety of characters exploring themed chambers like a point-and-click adventure title: picking up anything not nailed down and using them to solve different puzzles.

Most of the time, these escape rooms flow neatly, with every solution you find obviously opening up the next step towards your goal. When more characters are added to the mix, it can feel like the amount of options available to you increases by a frightening amount, but No Sleep For Kaname Date is careful not to overwhelm the player. Sometimes, this means that a given character’s slice of the escape room doesn’t actually have much to do, but as long as you ignore the in-universe antsiness these fictional people must be feeling, this does help to keep things moving.

For the most part, the puzzles and item interactions make sense, and there are a few different difficulty settings that adjust how frequently the characters voice their thoughts (or rather, provide the player with hints), just in case the thought process doesn’t click. I did find myself seeing a lot of prompts to lower the difficulty because I kept checking things in the environment in an attempt to make sure I’d gotten all the dialogue or because I wanted to double-check what someone or something said. I might have appreciated a way to increase or decrease the frequency of these prompts, but even though they came up a tad too often for me as a paranoid and forgetful player, it seemed a good system for most.

I only ran into two moments where I felt the need to look for an outside guide, of which one was my own fault for taking an ill-timed break and forgetting information that should have been fresh in my mind. The other of these was a lot more frustrating, as it was the final part of an escape room. You see, each of these levels ends on a special “Third Eye” gimmick, where danger ramps up and the player has a limited amount of time to figure out a third answer when the two straightforward options presented to them are impossible. It’s a neat way to ramp up the tension and instil a bit of panic, especially in the few instances when that third choice doesn’t start out as obvious.

However, one puzzle in one of these sections gave me trouble to the point that I had to brute force it. Likely, I’d missed something the game considered obvious, because even the hints were of no help. There were symbols that related to numbers that, in turn, made up a code I needed to enter. I knew the mechanics of how to get the combination I needed, but I didn’t have the right symbols. I looked around, and neither the symbols that appeared to be the right ones nor the other set of symbols I could find worked, so I had to give up and enter every possible combination, which was made doubly annoying with a timer counting down every second.

Thankfully, the Somnium segments that return from the past AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES games were a lot more consistently great. These feature Date and Aiba delving and exploring into the psyches of given characters and playing around with a six-minute time limit (which only moves at full speed when you move). Similar to the escape rooms, you control Aiba and run around environments looking for anything to interact with. Yet rather than grabbing different items and solving puzzles, you instead have a limited selection of ways to interact with a given object, each of which costs some number of seconds and provides you with a special modifier called a TIMIE that can be spent to reduce (or in some cases, increase) the time spent on a decision. Only one choice per object is the correct one that will allow progression, but sometimes it can be worth it to go for a “wrong” answer to acquire a valuable TIMIE.

Unlike the escape rooms, which were fun and had interesting themes but didn’t offer much insight into characterisation, the Somniums are basically all characterisation wrapped up neatly in a time puzzle. Even with a lot of reused locations from the rest of the game, every element has something to say about the subject character of a Somnium and every layer you uncover feels like you’re really learning more about them. Sure, them being so dense with character insight means that when you inevitably go over your six-minute time limit and have to try again, you have to skip through a bunch of dialogue, but it makes for an engaging experience.

I struggled with clearing Somniums far more than I did the escape rooms, both because of Joy-Con drift sending Aiba walking into the distance and my own poor decision-making skills, but working back through the events of the game and plotting out a path felt far more engaging than the few times that I failed in the escape rooms and had to consult a guide. Somnium is undoubtedly more stressful, but it’s fun to have to strategise and plan out the best routes. Plus, completing a given Somnium lets you replay it with no time limit, thereby giving you the opportunity to explore all of the “wrong” choices that go entirely off the rails and swing for the comedic fences, which is a relaxing sort of victory lap reward that I love to indulge in.

A large part of what made going through Somnium over and over again not only bearable but outright fun was how nice the game was to look at. No Sleep For Kaname Date sticks to the anime-styled visuals seen throughout THE SOMNIUM FILES, and the reused characters and environments still look expressive and detailed from any angle. Most new details, like some of the wacky Somnium visuals tacked onto the environments, the full escape room areas, or the new character designs, stayed in tune with these design philosophies, fitting in very well with everything else.

Working alongside it was an eclectic and mostly techno soundtrack that kept up the eeriness in the plot’s darker moments, with plenty of bops to amp you up when the story takes a turn for the weird or the action-y. On reflection, nearly half of the tracks go a bit far into keeping up the creepiness and while they are effective for a scaredy cat like me, they can’t help but sound samey when listened to altogether. In particular, the main menu theme, “No Sleep For Kaname Date”, is rather beautiful to listen to on its own with the ethereal vocals that echo throughout the rest of the songs, but it absolutely acts as a dour tonesetter, feeling far more serious than the game it precedes.

That’s not to say the soundtrack doesn’t work for me — it absolutely does, when it decides to swing for the fences. My personal favourites, “Strange Reptiles” and “Distortional Knighthood”, are feasts for the ears. “Strange Reptiles” feels like it comes out of a WarioWare title, keeping up a suitably strange and groovy tune that does a fantastic job of blending eerie tones with an exciting upbeat. “Distortional Knighthood”, in turn, feels like a response to “No Sleep For Kaname Date”, reusing the vocals alongside gentle instrumentation that feels almost like a lullaby.

As a sequel, No Sleep For Kaname Date - From AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES hits all the right notes, even if the tone feels at times mismatched. Aside from one glaring gameplay segment, the new escape rooms are a fun addition to the series’ formula and the Somniums remain a solid experience. The game looks and sounds great too, though the reused visuals and occasionally repetitive soundtrack can detract from that. The plot is consistently interesting and engaging, in spite of how it winds up being very unlike how it appears at first; if you can accept that Iris isn’t really the focus despite everyone talking about her all the time, you’ll enjoy it.