As you might easily surmise, No Sleep For Kaname Date – From AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES is not your normal game. Part escape room game, part visual novel, and part psychedelic mental exploration, it’s honestly hard to quantify this unique release from developer and publisher Spike Chunsoft. They’re certainly not joking about the M rating though, as there is an absolute ton of sexual references that would go a good way toward making even a jaded teenager blush.
While it’s a stand-alone game, No Sleep For Kaname Date is not even a mainline entry in the A.I. The Somnium Files series. Instead it slides in right after the first game and before AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES – nirvanA Initiative to tell a whole new story about Kaname, Iris, the internet idol from the first game, and their friends. Iris was participating in an escape game, but something has gone horribly wrong and she’s been kidnapped. This sets the stage for the entire game and things are pretty wild.
If you’ve played the first game, you’re already familiar with Kaname Date and how incredibly pervy he is. No Sleep For Kaname Date leans into this hard and there is a non-stop stream of inappropriate sexual innuendo and bizarre commentary throughout the entire experience. If you’re expecting a serious mystery, you might want to look elsewhere because this is a strange fusion of the Zero Escape series, the original AI series and a conversation between old men at a sex shop. Kaname uses frequent references to pornography and surrounds himself with friends that share his love of it. On top of that, he’s also able to use the Wink Psync ability from nirvanA Initiative to see inside the heads of various women in the game, sometimes with remarkably intimate results.
Ok,now you’ve got the idea that Kaname Date is a perv. A perv who is literally powered by porno magazines. Moving on past that (assuming you can), the game starts out with you playing Iris, trapped in an escape room that looks like it’s going to kill her. This portion of the game allows for a choice of difficulty each time around, so if you don’t want to work too hard at the puzzles, that’s an option. Like typical escape rooms, you’ll have to search for various items and clues to get out and it’s all very convoluted, but they’re all solve-able.
There are more escape rooms in the game, which is the biggest departure from previous games that No Sleep for Kaname Date makes aside from a more tongue-in-cheek narrative approach. Adding in this new element seems to fit nicely with the overall vibe of the AI series, but the puzzles are definitely odd and as they add more people and plot in, increasingly complex as well. Each one has multiple people, activities, and options available, and you can definitely fail and die, even though only the last portion of an escape room has an actual timer, giving you lots of time to consider your approaches and decisions.
Escape rooms allow you to explore the area much like the visual novel segments of the previous games. Your cursor highlights key elements and you can hit a button to show all interaction points (always a win). Examining things allows you to talk to others via communicator and read any text available. Anything that can be picked up is automatically added to your inventory as well and can be examined, rotated, and zoomed in on in the item management screen. Some items can also be combined to create something new in order to solve puzzles but it’s easy to tell which things are combinable because the system simply won’t allow anything that isn’t. Most of the combinations are fairly self-evident though and occasionally require you to be paying attention to various story triggers before they can be combined, even if you’ve already figured out what to do. As you progress, the rooms change and more options and items open up until the final timed segment before the end. Once you’ve completed the rather odd escape room, the story shifts to the fairly interactive visual novel format the AI series uses and then occasionally also adds in the PSync Somnium explorations you were likely expecting from the first two games.
Somnium is extremely similar to other versions of the game, and Kaname guides Aiba (his eyeball AI) through the mental landscapes of people to find out what’s going on. As before, moving in Somnium speeds up time used and making wrong decisions burns extra time. The puzzles in Somnium are extremely non-intuitive and will challenge you to make the correct selections even with hints. Slowly, you’ll piece together the actual memories and thoughts of people but it’s an arduous process made more challenging by the timer that is constantly counting down to your demise. Finish and you’re rewarded with the information you’ve been seeking. It’s an interesting premise that’s difficult to break down in words easily and previous games have used it so there’s no need to further explain here.
What’s interesting about No Sleep For Kaname Date is that you can easily miss things depending on your approach to dialogue. Hit the right selections too soon and dialogue options simply disappear, adding to the replayability of the game. The same can be said for Wink Psyncs that you can absolutely skip and even sections of the Somnium dives that you can bypass, foregoing the extra eyes you might gain. Eyes are like currency in the game and you can use them to unlock a variety of bonus content in a separate menu in the main screen which we’ll get to in a bit. You can also die, even in the visual novel sections of the game, and selecting the wrong choice may occasionally lead to your abrupt and dramatic demise. When this happens, you can always restart from the last checkpoint as the game brings you to a selection screen of key points to continue from.
No Sleep For Kaname Date is a fantastic looking game despite all the weirdness and odd mechanics. Characters are fully realized, interesting, and occasionally spectacularly weird in true anime fashion. The cel-shaded 3D art is excellent, the facial mapping features are surprisingly realistic, and the backgrounds are nothing short of artistic masterpieces. Half of the game could have come out of a digital reimagining of Salvatore Dali’s surrealist landscapes and not felt a whit out of place. It’s a true visual smorgasbord and one that you’re going to enjoy thoroughly. This consistently high visual production quality is a hallmark of the series and really brings up the overall feel of the game, minimizing some of the terribly sexual dialogue and adding a dark, gritty feel to the game.
The soundtrack is equally impressive, taking from previous releases and creating new tracks as well. Music design and incorporation is exciting and adds dramatic flair to tense scenes as things get particularly odd in Somnium or the escape rooms turn more and more deadly. It’s a soundtrack you’re guaranteed to enjoy and the sound effects are smooth and well-executed as well, blending into the music in a way that is more than reminiscent of theater movies. The voice acting is top notch as well, with Kaname, Iris, Ota and the whole cast of characters being fully voiced in English and performed exceedingly well. The characterizations are taken seriously even when the dialogue is bizarre, making the experience more immersive. It must have been a tough script to record and this is some impressive voice acting, so you’re going to want to listen through every scene rather than skipping ahead!
Eyeballs. Forgot about eyeballs. While you’re in Somnium, you can earn eyeballs by finding hidden items or looking at additional content within the mindscape. You also get evaluated on your success in the game providing additional eyes. You can only use eyes in from the main screen in the bonus menu and at first, you’ll have way more eyes than you know what to do with. That’s because only a few things unlock as you play, various static dream images and concept arts that you can buy for a handful of eyes. There are four sections to the bonus menu, but almost all that content is locked until you complete the game, so there’s some incentive for you to gather up those eyes!
With three very different main components to the gameplay, No Sleep For Kaname Date is paced a bit inconsistently however. Shifting between slower escape rooms, comedic dialogue sections, and the somewhat more rapid Somnium segments with a few quick time events thrown into the mix here and there creates a bit of dissonance. While it’s great that there’s a wide variety of gameplay ideas, they feel kind of mixed together without completely gelling and as a result, the overall experience from playing the game comes off a bit patchwork. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just that it’s more like playing a much more advanced Mario Party in a way. Here are several full types of game mechanics that we’re going to combine into an overarching story and you can just kind of sort it out as you go. That might not sit well with everyone.
No Sleep For Kaname Date – From AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES is a odd, niche title that has some intense and unfettered creative design. If you liked the first game, you’ll probably love this, but expect it to be much lighter and weirder than the other games in the series. The design and finish quality is high though, and the puzzles are interesting, even if the story only moves ahead in fits and starts depending on where you’re at. No Sleep for Kaname Date is a melting pot of ideas, concepts, and just playing oddball stuff that somehow manages to work despite itself and ends up being a strangely entertaining game, though it definitely won’t appeal to everyone. At $40 it isn’t the cheapest, but it’s not a AAA price either and you’re going to get your money’s worth out of it. Just…be prepared for a lot of pornography discussions.
This review is based on a digital copy of No Sleep For Kaname Date – From AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in docked and undocked modes and played equally well in both. No Sleep For Kaname Date – From AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES is also available for Switch 2 and PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.