“Your eye has been opened.”
Have you ever played the Zero Escape games? I haven’t touched them in years but I remember enjoying them quite a lot and ya know I was a little curious to replay them. That was until a good friend of mine recommended I play the same creator’s other work, A.I The Somnium Files, a detective visual novel that apparently gets just as crazy as Zero Escape! Wanting to make a friend happy I figured hey, why not might as well try it and I booted it up excited to see what awaited me. I should have known what to expect here, but I still had a wonderful time regardless.
I’ll save the story for later but graphically this game is pretty great! The 3D models can be a little offputting at times, but the environmental design is fantastic and the game isn’t really afraid to get a little weird at points, leading to a lot of amazing variety in what the game wants to show you. It makes the game feel rather fresh, and you’re never lingering in an area for too long before moving to the next so you don’t really find yourself getting bored here, it’s a great time! I ended up listening to all the voice work here as well this run and I found myself pleasantly surprised with just how well acted everyone is in the game. I usually expect no effort in these kind of performances just based on prior experiences, but Somnium managed to genuinely surprise me with how well acted it all was! Special highlight to our main character Date here, he is fantastic, and there were moments where I swear he had a gun pointed to him in the studio, it felt so genuine with how much emotion he put into the performance. The soundtrack here is also great, though considering this is from the same guy who made Zero Escape, it doesn't really surprise me, though I do think I lean towards Zero Escape’s soundtrack more here.
Considering it’s a visual adventure novel, you don’t get too much gameplay here besides reading text, but the gameplay that is here is pretty fun! You’;ll be exploring different scenes, looking out for different clues, participating in QTES from time to time, it’s all rather standard stuff, but the game’s intriguing so I never really got bored during the basics. If it was just that though, Somnimum would end up being pretty standard, and thankfully the game offers another gameplay style that really kept me intrigued, the Psync sequences. These moments have you jumping into the brain of someone else and solving adventure game esque puzzles in order to progress further in their mind, revealing more of the plot in the process. The game encourages heavy exploration, with you trying out various different commands in order to figure out just what to do, but you can’t be too careless as you have a time limit to manage at the same time. Certain events take away a certain amount of time and it’s up to you to choose the correct ones so you can clear it before your 6 minutes are up. It’s not set in stone 6 minutes though as you can find items known as TICKS that decrease/increase the time spent performing an action. The increase ones are obviously bad, though it’s hard to avoid them and the game makes you take a few sometimes, making you really consider what you do, but the lower time ones come in various different forms such as ½, ⅙, reducing it o one second, reducing it to 10, you got a lot of options here, and the best way to tackle each Psync is to figure out where each one is best used. Psync’s usually show up at the end of a day too, serving as a perfect bookend to that day’s events, and there’s not really a single bad one here or one that felt unfair in terms of how it was designed. The only one I kinda struggled with was one of the later ones as the time limit was incredibly tight, but once I figured out what to do, it became a piece of cake.
You play as Kaname Date, a police detective who’s investigating a case known as the Cyclops Killings, which involves the victim's left eye being removed upon death. As the bodies begin to stack up and up, and you start to get closer andI closer to the truth, Date begins to realize just what exactly he stepped into here, and how much of a mistake this all may have been. In typical Uchisoki fashion, the game’s plot starts rather standard with a pretty basic mystery setup, but slowly unravels itself to be more and more batshit insane the farther you get into it, ending with something you never really could have predicted, but can look back and see the game had been foreshadowing it since the very beginning. Out of all the works I played from him, I think Somnium stands out as my favorite plot wise here, the game knows just how much intrigue to set upon you to keep you further going, while making sure to not hold out too much so you aren’t left frustrated at what the solution could even be. There’s not really a single bad character here, and even ones that are written to be hateable have some soft sides to them, and I genuinely grew to care for each member of the cast no matter how much some could frustrate me, the character work here is simply incredible. Date especially, where he can come off as kind of an idiot, but when he needs to lock in, he does and he’s willing to do anything he can in order to protect the people that he loves. The way he bounces off of other characters incredibly well too, he’s really good at banter here, and it made me wanna see all the optional dialogue purely to see what he has to say next. There’s a lot of heart behind his character, and while I did feel a little indifferent to him at the start, the way he opens up more and more is just great, and I found myself sobbing at quite a few scenes involving him as the game went on.
Much like Zero Escape, the game presents a flow chart to you, as you discover route after route, with one final route being revealed at the end that wraps up the entire mystery. This is also handled great here, as the way you get each route is by solving each of the Psync sequences in different ways. None of these alternate solutions are too tough to figure out, and the game has a pretty good flow chart that helps put you on the right path if you're stuck on where to go. Unlike a lot of other visual novels I played,I can’t really think of any routes outweighing the rest in terms of quality. Each one is kinda perfect for what each one wants to do, though I do wonder how much is based on how I played the game. I kinda lucked out in my playstyle with how I went about it, as the routes I did kinda naturally led to the next ones I did, solving the mysteries set up in the route I beat, working as a giant sort of web that got more and more untangled the farther I got in. None are too long either, each one is about the same in length besides the final one obviously, so the pacing is incredible between each, and they end right before they can get a little exhausting, making me more ready and prepared to head into the next route that awaits me.
It’s not all perfect though, there were a few minor issues the game presented to me throughout my runtime, and while none were game ruining it was enough to be noticeable, and I can’t help but reflect back on the low moments. The QTE sequences here are pretty bad, they don’t really require any effort at all and while they can be pretty humorous at times, actually playing through a few of them can feel like a little bit of a slog, and I was just ready for each one to end by the time I started them. Minor complaint as well but some of the humor didn’t hit as hard as it could have. The game’s hysterical don’t get me wrong, but the game does rely on a few creepy jokes here and there that while I normally don’t mind, sometimes it can take up what a character is, making me groan a little depending who shows up. The game could also feel a little too linear at points, which granted isn’t a bad thing for what the game is, but finding clues really just amounts to clicking through a dialogue tree and hearing what each character has to say. I suppose with the detective setup here, I expected a bit more of searching here and there, and while the game does have a few evidence presenting moments, it's not enough to totally immerse me in the role, and I suppose I just wanted a bit more of that. This could easily be nitpicking though, it was just something I felt as I went, coming off as more underbaked then I would have expected.
All in all, I’m glad I finally had the motivation to sit down and check out the Somnium Files. It was a game that I’ve had rotting in my steam for years now at this point, though I never really gave it the time of day as I was busy with other work at the time,but now that I’ve fully played through it, I’m happy with what I experienced! It’s an incredible journey from beginning to end, and while they got some minor issues here or there, everything else came together to make one of my favorite stories in recent memories, and it makes me a little curious how the sequels hold up. A part of me is a little curious how a sequel will work with how the game ends, but I suppose I’ll see, but for now I’m happy I stepped into the world of Somnium, and I can’t wait to see these characters again someday.
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