Topic: No Sleep for Kaname Date: From AI The Somnium FIles (Switch / Switch 2) Review

[Shaymin]

We got a safe in the trunk with escape rooms in a stack.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/71797/no-sleep-for-kaname-date-from-ai-the-somnium-files-switch--switch-2-review

The last AI: The Somnium Files game (nirvanA Initiative) included several references to scenario writer Kotaro Uchikoshi’s previous series Zero Escape, including a shot-for-shot recreation of the first escape room in that series - but it wasn’t the focus of the game. That was still on the “Somnium” sequences proper. With the third AI: The Somnium Files title however, all pretense has been abandoned and now the game is half escape room, half Somnium - and it’s a mix that works well for the most part, even though it does come across as a bottle episode of the series.

Nice guy but definitely on A List somewhere..

No Sleep is set sometime after the 2019-released first game in the series, and doesn’t make reference to anything specific in the sequel that I could recall - making it more of an interquel. Kaname Date is the focus of the story as his young friend / local idol Iris has been kidnapped by an alien (?) group of unknown origin and forced to play a series of “Third Eye” escape room sequences in order to get to safety - later accompanied by other characters who have to be swapped between using the analog sticks during the escape sequence. The series’s trademark “Somnium” puzzles (creepy time-based 3D exploration sequences) also return, but the focus is clearly on the “new” escape rooms to the point that a new character obsessed with them is introduced to serve as a guide to the rooms and an audience surrogate for everything else.

During my playthrough I was definitely enjoying the escape rooms more. They give more opportunities for the characters to play off each other and provide a lot more variety in puzzles: I think the only reason the Somniel sequences happen is because it’d be weird to not have them. The first Somniel, which literally hooks up to a locked medical pod so it’s not clear whose head you’re going into, could easily have been combined into the second one or left out entirely. There’s a lot of flexibility in the difficulty of the puzzles: you can have hard Somniel sequences but easy escape rooms or vice versa. The investigation sequences in between puzzles are perfunctory, but I stumbled pretty hard into a bad ending at one point because of something that would be standard in most any other detective game of this type (clicking everything).

One point in retrospect that made me appreciate the 2022 sequel was less of a focus on Date, whose one joke about being powered up by adult magazines wore pretty thin in 2019. Sadly, that comes back to the fore here, as the other playable characters from the sequel got largely demoted to extra - along with most of the other people in the cast. About halfway through the game there’s only two new named characters in the game. The end result is that the game passes very quickly: I may have been playing on a lower difficulty for puzzles, but it’s pretty simple to do a full “escape” -> “investigate” -> “Somniel” cycle in about an hour.

Although the review is based on the original Switch version of the game, it was also transferred to the Switch 2 for a couple of sessions.  Though it ran fine on the original, the 2 did provide a major upgrade in dealing with the puzzle sequences and cutting down on load times. There was some question about possible sound issues with the Switch 2 version specifically, but I didn’t notice anything. The main technical demerit is more of a question, as some of the ingame achievements have their text in Japanese; I’m not sure if this is a style choice or just a case of unlocalized text that would need to be cleaned up in a patch post-launch. The graphics are wisely reused from the previous two entries, and the escape room tunes help you focus on the puzzle at hand.

Anyone here know what that text translates to?

Obviously the simplest solution to get some Uchikoshi-helmed escape games would be if the Zero Escape trilogy were cleaned up a bit and brought out on modern Nintendo hardware. But in lieu of that, No Sleep for Kaname Date will probably keep you up for a bit as you try and puzzle through some of the nastier puzzles.