When I was a little lad it wasn’t particularly easy to find weird games. Sure, they existed, but when scouring the shelves of my local video game emporium I was generally just greeted by colourful platformers and intriguing RPGs. Now in a modern age where indie darlings release every single day, there’s no shortage of weird stuff for me and my sicko brethren to dive into. It’s truly a golden age for those who value curiosities over AAA excitement, and they don’t come much more curious than the AI: The Somnium Files series. Whether you’re already a fan of these bizarre brain adventures or not, you should absolutely play the latest game No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files.
No Sleep for Kaname Date features all the series characters you know and love, and centres around everyone’s favourite pornography obsessed Psycher: Date. Plucky internet idol Iris has been kidnapped, and all the signs are pointing to it being an alien abduction. By using his investigative skills alongside the powers of his AI Ball Date won’t rest (or I suppose sleep) until he finds out what has happened. There will be a whole lot of twists and turns on that journey though, so strap in and prepare for a wild ride.
There are three different types of gameplay you’ll experience in No Sleep for Kaname Date, so let’s start with the most straightforward. In investigation sections you’ll take Date from place to place looking for clues, in a first person point and click style. Familiar and new locations are full of items to investigate, and people to chat to and scan with your magic eye. You’ll get to see a lot of Date’s perverse personality in these sections, which might not sound great but his teenage boy mindset is oddly charming somehow. Aiba (Date’s eyeball companion who we’ll discuss more soon) is always perfectly primed to dismiss his disturbing comments too, and they’re a compelling duo to spend time with from start to finish.
After your first investigation into Iris’s whereabouts you’ll discover a mysterious machine, which you soon find out contains a human hooked up to some sort of life support. The machine comes with a note that says “Synch with me”, and at a loose end on the case that’s exactly what Date’s boss asks him to do. Those with experience with the series will know what that means, but the rest of you are in for a wild ride.
Synching with somebody essentially means using a machine to go inside their mind, where you’ll have six minutes exactly to explore their messed up thoughts and hopefully uncover some information you need. These are the Somnium sections of the game, and they’re just as much fun as ever. In these sections you’ll play as Aiba, and will have to try and find mental locks that need breaking in the mind of whoever is in this machine. This generally means following obscure clues to different items and investigating them in a variety of ways, but with every precious second ticking away this isn’t always easy.
Every item you interact with in the Somnium parts of No Sleep for Kaname Date will take a specific amount of time off your clock, so figuring out the important things to examine or interact with (like a giant paper aeroplane or a floating advertisement script) is very important. You can also use TIMIEs to help with this time loss, which modify the time costs of various actions. Using a TIMIE to take seconds away from an action is pretty straightforward, but finding the best action to half or even set to a specific number can help even more. The added tension and ridiculousness of these sections make for one hell of a good time, and there are also plenty of difficulty options to switch between if you find them too much.
The third (and all new for this entry) type of gameplay in No Sleep for Kaname Date puts you in control of Iris, who is trapped on an alien spaceship and is being forced into making her way through a series of escape rooms. These feature much more traditional puzzle solving, and are for the most part exceptionally entertaining. If you like uncovering codes to open locked doors, working out how dice fold together and of course placing umbilical cords into drawers then you’ll love breaking out of these alien locations.
I found most of the escape room parts of the game to be really enjoyable, but some of them had me well and truly stumped. With the help of Iris’s friends on her watch phone you do get given hints on how to proceed, but often these aren’t a lot of help and certainly weren’t enough to get me out of a few sticky situations. There were multiple days where I’d pick up my Switch 2 excited to play more No Sleep for Kaname Date, spend fifteen minutes trying to solve a particularly tough puzzle, and then turn off the console in frustration. With guides and YouTube playthroughs to use after launch most won’t hit the same brick walls I did, and I’m incredibly jealous of that.
No Sleep for Kaname Date is a wonderful entry in the AI: The Somnium Files series, and so much of that is down to its absolutely wild story and the characters that inhabit it. It has some seriously clever hidden secrets too, like alternate endings you can find which immediately end the game. Maybe Date should just leave Iris in peril and go off into the sunset with the receptionist at his work, or maybe you’ll find another of the dozens of silly little options. Despite some high risk moments and shocking twists this is a game that always retains its silliness, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
There’s a lot to love about No Sleep for Kaname Date, but it isn’t a game I’d recommend to everyone. Some will absolutely find its perverse protagonist a bit much, and newer players might also struggle to keep up with the vast number of weird and wonderful characters introduced that series super-fans already know all about. There’s also the ever-present issue of having to replay Synchs that you fail to complete in time, which is always a drag.
No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files is as entertaining as it is baffling, and its new escape room sections add a lot to the series. I must admit these sections did frustrate me pretty intensely on more than one occasion too, but hopefully sharper minds will cope better. Even with a handful of issues I still had a blast with Date and his bizarre buddies, and if you’re a connoisseur of weird games you probably will too.
