If you have not played AI: The Somnium Files, I do not recommend you pick up the new side story, No Sleep for Kaname Date – from AI: The Somnium Files. I don’t recommend you do anything other than go into the eshop of your platform of choice and purchase the absolute masterpiece that is the first game of the series. If you’re broke, wait a few weeks and it’ll undoubtedly be on sale for less than the price of your average fast food cheeseburger.
No Sleep for Kaname Date takes place an unspecified but seemingly short time after the first game. The story is once again told from the perspective of Kaname Date, a detective who conducts investigations partially by entering and exploring people’s dreams with the assistance of Aiba, his sentient AI partner who usually takes the form of his left eyeball. This time, however, he’s also been drafted to remotely assist Iris Sagan in the escape rooms where she’s been kidnapped and forced into. Meanwhile, his daughter Mizuki finds a strange, coffin-like pod in an abandoned warehouse with a sign that says, “Psync me,” taped to it.
Like many other modern adventure games, the structure consists of story segments that progress via selecting and examining objects, talking to other characters, and moving from location to location, mixed with more game-y elements, this time including escape rooms and “Psyncs,” the game’s terminology for when Date and Aiba enter and explore other people’s dreams. If, for whatever reason, you have opted to make this your first game in the series, the escape rooms will likely be the best part of the experience. Their puzzles were just challenging enough to be satisfying, and the environments were fun and interesting to explore. As is often the case with virtual escape games with chatty protagonists, the characters tended to give more information than I needed to solve the puzzle, rather than giving me the chance to think through it myself; other times, they were frustratingly silent while I struggled to figure out the solution. The banter, especially the back and forth between Date and Aiba, could go either way – I enjoyed it as a fan of the previous games, but I could see it getting annoying for the uninitiated, especially Date’s frequent dirty jokes.
A word of warning: in the second escape room, there is an unlocalized Japanese language-based puzzle. I was able to get through it without issue because I speak Japanese myself, but it would be unsolvable to people who don’t have the necessary vocabulary. Some incidental dialogue also doesn’t make sense because it’s based on puns, such as all the characters naming their favorite kind of cheese (chiizu) while looking at a map (chizu), but the puzzle is the only game-breaking instance.
But the Psyncs and character writing… that’s there for us, longtime fans. While this game offers new characters in the form of Hina, a Psync technician who loves escape rooms, and Akemi, the VTuber-esque Reptilian host of Iris’ escape rooms, quite a bit of the story is devoted to the characters dealing with the events of the first game. It’s almost more of a direct sequel than Nirvana Initiative, the second game. The emotions are still fresh, and the affected characters are still coping with their grief from the New Cyclops Serial Killings. I can’t imagine new players getting much out of these scenes.
As No Sleep for Kaname Date is part of a series, it’s important to discuss it in terms of its predecessors – after all, these games have a cult audience (which I am a part of) and come in with certain expectations. So, any series newbies who are still reading, here is where you can check out.
Series creator Kōtarō Uchikoshi was only tangentially involved in the game’s development; it was instead written and directed by Kazuya Yamada. I say this because you should not go in expecting a Uchikoshi game, as none of the hallmarks of his style are present. Most notably, there is only a single, linear storyline; though the menu offers a “Flowchart,” it’s more like a chapter selection, allowing you to go back and retry puzzles for bonus content. The only thing resembling story branches are the numerous joke endings, which, to their credit, are very funny.
I also found the Psyncs disappointing. Rather than the strange, dreamlike imagery of the previous games, the visual metaphors were straightforward to interpret. They functioned more to reveal backstory and explore feelings than to deepen the gameplay and enhance the mystery, focusing on eliciting specific memories from characters. On the other hand, they were more fun to play than Nirvana Intiative‘s Psyncs, which have stuck in my brain more as hellish slogs than challenging puzzles.
Still, it mostly does right by its characters. It’s always a risk when changing writers that characters become flattened, caricatured versions of themselves, but that hasn’t happened here. The richest development goes to the new characters, including Hina, who is… fine. She’s a stereotypical engineer character: too smart for her own good, somewhat obsessive, and lacking in emotional intelligence, but still goodhearted. The emotional scenes with the established characters certainly hit harder. The banter is also on point, as Date, Aiba, and the supporting cast bicker and argue even as they come through for one another.
It helps that the entire voice cast has returned, too; I played the English version, because that’s what I’m used to. Iris is a bit flat and chirpy here, but she’s a little more than an avatar for playing the escape games, so she doesn’t drag things down. Greg Chun and Erika Harlacher deserve special mention for Date and Aiba’s effortless chemistry, with Chun providing Date with enough charisma and likability that I don’t feel creeped out even when I want to push him down a flight of stairs, and Harlacher keeping the delicate balance of making Aiba feel like a person, but not quite human.
However, even if the gameplay is fun and the character writing is strong, by the time the credits rolled, I felt like something was missing. To me, Uchikoshi games, and by extension the AI: The Somnium Files series, always bring a feeling of awe at the end as everything comes together. The themes, the branching storylines, the character arcs, the game systems, and the emotional sincerity all unite and weave together in a way that I never could have imagined. No Sleep for Kaname Date, on the other hand, gave me the same feeling of accomplishment that I get at the end of any game, but I had no stronger emotional reaction than, “Well, that was fun.” It pales in comparison to how “Invincible Rainbow Arrow” still brings tears to my eyes.
Spike-Chunsoft provided me with a Nintendo Switch review code for this review; while I’ve played previous versions on PlayStation, the shift in systems only introduced a couple of hiccups for me. It’s not a particularly resource-intensive game, and the character models and environments still looked quite good. There were a couple of hiccups where the cutscenes struggled to fully load, but there was no lag that actively impeded gameplay. By far the most annoying thing was the Switch’s lack of anti-aliasing, which caused jagged edges to show up around the character models. Again, not game-ruining, but annoying. I was far more irritated by the tackiness of Iris’ bunny suit.
The game also has several extras that can be “purchased” using eyeballs earned by progressing through the story and accomplishing certain goals in the game, such as finishing Psyncs with over a minute left. Of course, there’s the usual album of production art; what’s unusual is that there are also extras I wanted to engage with. The best were comedic alternate versions of some of the game’s scenes, which were often laugh-out-loud funny. Yamada genuinely does seem to have a good grasp of the characters and a sense of humor; he’s just not a master craftsman of storytelling on the same level as the series creator.
It would be best for fans of AI: The Somnium Files to manage their expectations when picking up No Sleep for Kaname Date – from AI: The Somnium Files. There are no branching storylines, no jaw-dropping twist at the end that ties everything together, and little of the peculiar dream logic and imagery that made the first game one of the greatest adventure games ever made. What remains is an engaging visual novel with some fun puzzles and character writing that veers between entertaining banter and slightly schmaltzy sentimentality. It’s a good game, but without that Uchikoshi special sauce, it falls short of its predecessors.