It didn’t take lengthy for No Sleep For Kaname Date, the third installment of Spike Chunsoft’s AI: The Somnium Recordsdata collection, to get an audible groan out of me. That was thanks to 2 phrases I’ve grown sick of over the past six years: porno magazine.
These phrases will both imply nothing to you or activate some type of Pavlovian response relying on how acquainted you’re with AI: The Somnium Recordsdata. See, the sci-fi collection stars Kaname Date, a detective whose technique of interrogation entails hopping into individuals’s minds and breaking via their psychological locks through surreal escape room puzzles. But when there’s one factor that he actually needs you to find out about him, it’s that he loves porno mags. It’s not simply his favourite factor to yap about in any one-liner he can squeeze between exposition; soiled magazines grant him tremendous power, like a perverted Popeye. Taking part in the primary AI: The Somnium Recordsdata recreation will depart you sick of the operating joke after 20 hours. If it doesn’t, then its sequel, Nirvana Initiative, definitely will.
However No Sleep For Kaname Date raises (or lowers) the bar once more. It showcases a dedication to useless horse desecration not seen since Season 4 of The Sopranos. And it’s via that operating joke that I’m lastly capable of perceive why precisely I hold coming again to a collection I’ve sworn off a number of instances. That’s as a result of now I lastly get that AI: The Somnium Recordsdata isn’t a tough sci-fi thriller or a brainy detective saga. It’s a sitcom.
Positioned as an interstitial side-adventure set earlier than Nirvana Initiative, No Sleep For Kaname Date is the online game equal of a bottle episode. Reasonably than centering round a serial killer investigation, Iris is kidnapped (seemingly by aliens) and compelled to finish a lethal collection of escape rooms on a stay stream. Kaname Date takes the case, as soon as once more enlisting the assistance of Aiba, his trusty AI sidekick that lives in his pretend eyeball.
Picture: Spike Chunsoft
I’m tempted to say that the chapter jumps the shark, however that may suggest that the collection ever had its surfboard on the water. The attraction of AI: The Somnium Recordsdata has at all times been its means to mix dense sci-fi thriller with unpredictable zaniness, making a page-turner a technique or one other. It’s why I’ve performed all three Somnium Recordsdata video games to completion even once I wasn’t compelled by their hacky humor. No Sleep For Kaname Date retains that power up, however in a extra compact story (round 10 hours shorter than earlier video games) that finally trades in alien goofiness for some unexpectedly grounded character moments.
Massive components of the journey are acquainted. After I’m not interrogating characters at places recycled from earlier video games or doing a little occasional quicktime occasions, I’m Psyncnhing into individuals’s minds with Aiba’s assist to get repressed data. That also performs out within the collection’ signature puzzle sequences, the place I would like to choose the correct textual content prompts to resolve surreal issues. Every reply I choose prices time, and I solely have a couple of minutes to work with, although I can use Timies to scale back how lengthy every chosen motion will take. It’s nonetheless a adore it or hate it system that’s in an ungainly center floor between textual content journey and escape room.
Fortunately, there’s a much-needed tweak on the method this time. I often get to manage Iris and clear up the precise escape rooms she’s trapped in. These sections are way more conventional in nature, tasking me with selecting up objects, decoding ciphers, and testing my spatial reasoning abilities. Proper from the very first sequence, the place Iris should monitor down statues and sand vials to flee a UFO, it feels just like the Zero Escape spark the collection has been lacking. They’re extra lively puzzles in comparison with the “choose the improper possibility, lose, and check out once more” nature of Psych sequences. No Sleep For Kaname Date appears like a proving floor for a gameplay pivot, and it makes a powerful case for it.
However the extra issues change, the extra they very a lot keep the identical. The writing accommodates the identical flood of juvenile jokes that has made earlier video games so tough to grind via at instances. Even with a truncated runtime, Date nonetheless finds time to go to the Lemniscate Leisure Places of work and begins mercilessly flirting with the secretary with comically monumental breasts. My subject isn’t even with the jokes themselves; this yr’s wonderful Promise Mascot Company is simply as lewd, and it’s a hoot. It’s extra simply that I want the collection would get some new materials. What number of instances do I’ve to listen to Mama discuss her large “balls?”
Picture: Spike Chunsoft
All of that ought to have turned me off from the collection by now, but I nonetheless performed via the whole thing of No Sleep For Kaname Date simply as I did with earlier video games. Even once I was swearing it off, I nonetheless felt compelled to see all of it to the tip. Why? What retains me coming again to a collection that so persistently retains my eyes rolling?
I remembered my father’s personal media habits. After I was rising up, he was a giant sitcom hound. Each evening throughout dinner, we’d have to observe The King of Queens. I discovered it maddening. Kevin James’ character was such an unredeemable schlub who by no means appeared to develop or change. The present was in a continuing state of establishment and I by no means had a way of the place episodes fell on the timeline. It betrayed each rule of fine TV writing, however my father discovered a transparent pleasure in it. “Watch this,” he’d say when James was clearly telegraphing some type of slapstick pratfall. Even when he hadn’t seen the episode, he knew all of the cues and danced together with them, very similar to the Somnium Recordsdata’ Ota, considered one of Iris’ many superfans, at all times recites idol catchphrases on command. My father would later take that power to exhibits like The Huge Bang Idea, Bazinga-ing together with Sheldon.
That’s the place considered one of my very own psychological locks opened. “Porno magazine” is “Bazinga.”
Date, and the Somnium Recordsdata’ supporting gamers, are sitcom characters. They exist on this collection to come back out every episode and say their catchphrases. Every time somebody says “porno magazine,” you possibly can virtually hear the uproarious laughter of a stay viewers within the distance. And as stale as these operating jokes can really feel from an outdoor perspective, a sitcom’s attraction is its consistency. Viewers like my father aren’t watching to be shocked. They need to be in on the joke, pretending that they’re a part of the author’s room. Even within the darkest days of All people Loves Raymond reruns over gnocchi dinner, I finally got here to understand that attraction. Kevin James’ predictable buffoonery grew to become a supply of stability in my teenage years. I can’t say that it ever made me just like the present, however I got here to get pleasure from the truth that I may work out how each episode would go. It felt like fixing a puzzle.
I consider that’s what pushed me via No Sleep For Kaname Date, a middling spinoff that also gave me the consolation of low-stakes TV. I may sit right here and faux like I hated it, trashing its one-dimensional characters, grotesque therapy of its feminine characters, and repetitive jokes. However after six years, I’m nonetheless tuning in to observe each new episode. For higher or worse, that is my King of Queens.
