First, I need to tell you that I’m new to the A.I. Somnium series. This is the second entry, while there were already additional DLC stories after the first episode. So I start with a disadvantage. But… I am very familiar with the Zero Escape games from the same author, and this is very much in the same vein. If you know none of those, the simplest way to explain the genre is… a mix of visual novel, puzzles, and a captivating story with cliffhangers. When I say puzzles, in this episode most of them are about escaping rooms in which you are trapped in. More on that later.

Who is Kaname Date?

So where does the name Kaname Date comes from? He’s a detective and he is the main character you will be playing.

He’s not the only one, as you will also take control of other protagonists in the game, like Iris, the idol girl who gets kidnapped from the beginning of this episode. Kidnapped by… aliens! And Date is on her trail to find her and bring her back to safety. I won’t go deeper into the story since it’s the point of doing the whole game. Remember I mentioned escaping rooms earlier? When you play Iris, you are responsible to make her escape the current room where she is, sometimes within a certain time limit to avoid certain death. Such rooms have no apparent exit, or an exit that seems unreachable, and you need to find objects, mechanisms and other devices in the room to manage an exit. It’s usually not obvious but there are many clues around you, so with some gray matter you are able to figure things out after a while. Trial and error is mostly what it takes. So, fairly similar to Zero Escape. Some puzzles require several characters to work together, making things a bit more complex.

But in this episode, things move rather slowly. Solving puzzles after puzzles does not bring much new stuff on the table. You get to meet new characters that help you in your quest, you access new tools, but things are rather slow… Zero Escape was slow too, but they did a much better job to build the tension up, by bringing up some cliffhangers more often than here.

Note that in A.I. Somnium, as the name indicates, you are not always in the real world but you go into some kind of dream world (the Somnium) using a special machine, to communicate with the memories and thoughts of certain people. And that means more puzzles in the dream world.

This usually gives you more clues about what to do next in the real world and how to advance the story. When you are in the Somnium mode, however, it’s less about puzzle solving and more point’n click with a very simple script to follow through. There is not much thinking involved. You typically only have 3 minutes in the dream world, and every action you take can make you lose precious seconds. 3 minutes is only counted when you are free to move - when it’s dialogues or cutscenes, the time stops, obviously. But don’t worry. Losing against the clock only means you get to retry the sequence another time, and they may decrease the difficulty this time to give you some additional time. So, it’s a fake time pressure.

I forgot to mention that Date is constantly aided by Aiba, an small A.I. assistant that only Date can see. Aiba can help him look for online information, scan the area, and make witty comments about people they get to know, including Date, of course. When you are in the dream world, you control Aiba (who turns into a slender female character, no shit), instead of Date - I guess the explanation is that Date’s mind is in control but only Aiba can interact with the dream world or something.

A Niche Audience?

This game is clearly aimed at otaku and teenagers with the usual tropes: Date is a middle-aged pervert obsessed by girls (one end that you can get to fairly quickly involves Date forgetting about his mission to flee with a girl around his arm), keeps a curated collection of hentai magazines, and has a tool to Xray people and reveal what they have under their clothes… suffice to say. All the women characters possess huge breasts, even the nerdy, geekie sidekick that supports you when it comes to cybersecurity matters. It’s expected in the genre, so I don’t mind, but it does scream ‘cliche’ now and then. And frankly, only Japanese games get such a pass. Nobody in the West (or pretty much anywhere for that matter) would dare to go that far these days.

My biggest problem is that I could not get interested in the story, despite all the effort to push attractive women on you. Iris is missing, and you go around trying to find where she is gone… hours after hours, you progress fairly slowly, and whatever you find out about the machination against Iris is just… not great stuff. They should have hired George RR Martin but I heard he’s too busy NOT finishing A Song of Ice and Fire.

Also, I don’t care for puzzles (I hate Myst with passion for example) but if there’s a good reason to solve them, a good motivation (Portal 2 and its progressive world discovery comes to mind), I’ll groan but I’ll do them and finish the game. That’s why I could manage to go thru the different scenarios of Zero Escape, as it made me come back to find out how things were going to end. Characters getting killed, an mysterious enemy watching over you, an unknown hostile territory, and a potential traitor among your group… Zero Escape had a very good recipe to make you care.

In this episode of A.I. Somnium, the pace is just too slow and the story is just right to make you go to sleep, albeit this is probably not done on purpose, despite the title. The puzzles are OK-ish. Not too difficult, and you get some extra hints in case you are really stuck. I rarely needed them. And most of the stuff made sense, in a twisted way. You can carry, use and combine objects together to give them extra properties, and there’s quite a lot of reading involved to understand what you need to do with the different tools or objects available to you. The gameplay loop is typically:

• get all the objects you can around you
• find out what they can do on the places where you could use them
• use them in the proper order
• unlock the next part of puzzle
• rinse and repeat

The whole concept of the Escape scenes with Iris is to use your third eye, i.e. to find a new solution out of the room that is not immediately obvious. Typically this means not falling for the proposed solution, but finding a better one. I really want to give you an example, but I’ll be light on the details: you could use something that could work to escape but would kill Iris as it would contain a poison, so you first have to find a way to neutralize the poison - that’s the third way in this particular case. But it’s different every time.

Very Well Made, as Usual

Production-wise, it’s what you can expect from any Spike title. There’s a certain level of quality you can get every time. A lot of visual novels rhyme with low effort, borderline shovelware, but this ain’t one of them, oh no. In No Sleep for Kaname Date, everything is well designed, the UI is clear, not confusing and works well, graphics are probably a little simple but I would not be surprised if they targeted the Nintendo Switch hardware in the first place. Thus this is what you get in the end for the PC version too.

Everything is made of 3d environments, even the static visual novel scenes that could have been done in 2D. Good effort, and very well done. The worst part is the obnoxious sountrack of the Escape scenes involving Iris; unimaginative, bland as hell, annoying, it really did not help me to keep focused on the problem at hand. The rest of the soundtrack is not bad, I’m not sure why they felt compelled to throw shit music at you when you had to deal with the puzzles. Guys, I don’t like puzzles already, don’t make it worse.

The game can either be played in English or in Japanese. Usually this is a good thing right? Note that there is NO way to mix English subtitles with Japanese voices. You have to start the game again in Japanese from scratch if you want the different audio. That’s a stupid decision but this is not the first time I see this happen in the world of (Japanese) visual novels.

The English voice-over is… pretty bad. It’s like they took some of the worst anime voice-actors that tend to exagerrate their lines all the time, and brought them together for the game. Add to that the obnoxious tone of some of the female leads. It made me wish for the voice-over not to exist in the first place. However the translation work is pretty good. Some things are very clearly hard to translate, such as some very specific Japanese jokes that just were lost in the way. But there were no issues that would hinder the understanding of the whole plot of the game. I could not spot any typo either, so there’s clearly a very good and clean QA process at work at Spike.

I have a huge respect for people who care about polish, and Spike is definitely one of the companies that do. So while I can’t say I was excited by the content of this episode, the overall quality is just very solid from start to end.

Reverse Logic

So, as you can see, I’m not sold on this episode. But at the same time, I keep hearing good things about its prequel! The original A.I. Somnium. So now I have some extra motivation to go back to it (it’s in my games backlog anyway!) and check it out. I’m likely going to find the same set of characters, this time with a superior story (and less escape puzzles?!).

So this may be all the good that comes out of A.I. Somnium: No Sleep for Kaname Date. It’s not bad, it’s not great, but it can serve as a reminder that this series exist if you haven’t touched it yet. However, if you are beginning with the Escape genre, I would absolutely recommend you start with the Zero Escape series first, though. I can vouch for that one anytime.

Steam Deck

The game is available on Steam but does not get a Verified rating because of two issues:

• It requires a launcher (which works perfectly, by the way, and displays very nicely on the Deck’s screen)
• Some of the text input in game does not explicitely make use of the Steam Deck keyboard.

Those are very minor issues, that are really no-brainers. The game works exactly as expected and I spent most of my time with it on the Deck. So technically not Verified for good reasons, but it’s as close as it gets. Note that you will need a TDP of at least 7W to 8W to run the game at a comfortable 60 FPS. A little bit on the high side in terms of power consumption, in light of what’s there to see on screen, to be honest.

So there you have it. I will probably return once I do the original A.I. Somnium episode, to tell you more about the series.

Note: we received a key from the Publisher to review this game, while this has no bearing on how we assessed it.