Kaname Date and other familiar characters return in a new, smaller entry in the AI: The Somnium Files series that adds escape game puzzles alongside the familiar gameplay from its predecessors.
No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files
Developer: Spike Chunsoft
Price: $40
Platform: Nintendo Switch (reviewed), Nintendo Switch 2, PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a Switch code for review.
I’m a huge fan of AI: The Somnium Files. While I don’t put the sequel on quite the same level, I still thoroughly enjoyed it, as detailed in my review. With that in mind, you can imagine how excited I was over the announcement of No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files, a new game set in between the first two.
No Sleep for Kaname Date kicks off when a UFO seemingly abducts the idol Iris. Her captor tells her she must escape from the room she’s in by solving puzzles, but she’s allowed to contact one person for help. She calls ABIS Special Agent Kaname Date, the protagonist of the first game, who returns here in the starring role. Although Date doubts that she’s actually been abducted by aliens, he and his AI partner Aiba begin an investigation into Iris’s kidnapping, while lending her support with the situation she’s found herself in.
There are three main types of gameplay: Investigation, Somnium, and Escape. Investigation segments have you talk to people as Date to gather information. These are the simplest in terms of gameplay, as you use a point-and-click interface to bring up conversation topics with other characters and investigate the environment. While it isn’t necessary to investigate most things, you can find humorous dialogue and other secrets, including a handful of joke endings. Some parts also include action sequences where you must react to quick-time events to survive, but these only occur a handful of times.
In Somniums, meanwhile, you explore a character’s mind as Aiba and interact with their dream world to overcome mental locks and learn the secrets they’re hiding. You have a 6-minute time limit, although time moves more slowly when you’re standing still, and you must make good use of time-modifying “Timies” to perform all necessary actions within the limit. The Somnium puzzles are more straightforward here than in the previous games and mainly rely on you paying attention to the story being told by the Somnium to choose the correct action. However, the time limits are restrictive enough that you need to take it seriously. If you don’t manage your time well, you’ll need to use your limited number of retries to restart from a previous checkpoint. Each Somnium also has three hidden eyes for you to find. Finding hidden eyes and performing actions rewards you with eyes that you can spend to unlock bonuses. Fortunately, once you’ve cleared a Somnium, you can replay it with infinite time if you want to explore more thoroughly and see all the interactions.
Investigations and Somniums are both returning elements from the first two games, while the third style of gameplay is new. Escape segments are standard escape game situations like those you might find in Zero Escape, where you need to find items and solve puzzles to leave a locked area. The puzzles include both inventory-based logic and riddles. For example, you might find a button you can only interact with by using the correct item or inspect a series of statues that hint at a code you need to enter. Later sections make you switch between multiple characters trapped in different parts of the escape room, which makes the puzzles even more challenging and fun. They can get pretty tricky, too. Each Escape segment includes a timed section, and I was especially surprised by the difficulty of the puzzles there. Fortunately, other characters give you hints, the number of which depends on your difficulty setting.
No Sleep for Kaname Date lets you set the difficulty for the three gameplay types separately, which is a great feature. Hate QTEs but love challenging puzzles? You can set the Investigation difficulty to its easiest mode for infinite time and no penalty for mistakes, while cranking the Escape difficulty up to get fewer hints and shorten the timer. Feel the opposite? On the easiest setting for Escape segments, the characters eventually just give you the answer if you fail enough times. Being able to set the difficulty independently for each gameplay style is a great choice for a game that has such distinct types of gameplay.
Now, the story is what I was most curious about, especially since it’s set in between the two major games. It features not only returning characters from the first game, but also some of the new characters from the second. I was a little disappointed that we didn’t get to see Date meeting them for the first time, but it was nice to see so many familiar faces, although their roles are minor. My biggest concern was that No Sleep for Kaname Date would feel like a filler story, and while it does have an “another day in the life of an ABIS agent” feel compared to the first two games, the story has some touching character moments. It even devoted more time to exploring one returning character’s mental state and motivations than I expected. I couldn’t help but want more from a Somnium Files story after the wild rides the previous games took me on, but it was still enjoyable.
It’s also filled with humor, if not quite as much as before, and the joke endings are especially good. Once you beat the game, you can also unlock bonus short stories and scenes by spending eyes, and a lot of these are really funny. Some bonus content is only unlocked based on scenes and secrets you’ve found in the game, which provides a great deal of incentive to go back through. Fortunately, despite lacking the branching paths of its predecessors, the game has a flowchart from which you can replay any section, although you have to reload your save to access it.
While No Sleep for Kaname Date doesn’t quite reach the heights of the previous games in the series, it’s still enjoyable as a shorter game with some nice character moments. Overall, as someone who loved the first two games, it was just nice to spend time with these characters again.
The Final Word
No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files brings back the Investigation and Somnium gameplay from the first two entries while adding puzzle-based Escape gameplay as well. Tricky puzzles will keep escape game fans busy, while the story tells a smaller-scale but still enjoyable mystery.
MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
