I wasn’t sure what to expect from No Sleep For Kaname Date. As a big fan of the AI: The Somnium Files games, it’s hard to picture where in the timeline a third entry could fall that would cleanly follow up on the ending of the second game, while also giving us the characters that this one seemed to be specifically focusing on. Much like how the series tasks you with disregarding your main options and seeking out a hidden third path, that’s the exact route that the developers have ended up taking with this No Sleep For Kaname Date.
This game is neither a prequel nor a sequel – in carving out a hidden third path for themselves, the team behind this title have made a game that creates it’s own context somewhere vaguely in-between both entries. While it doesn’t deliver a satisfying continuation of the main narrative as a result, it still ends up being a really enjoyable, fan-pleasing side-story that I couldn’t help but smile at.
No Sleep For Kaname Date sees the return of the iconic investigative duo from the first game – perverted slacker ABIS agent Kaname Date and his cybernetic AI, the eyeball-shaped companion Aiba. Protagonist duties don’t squarely belong to them, though – you’ll also spend a lot of the game playing directly as Iris, the iconic bubbly social media influencer that the first game revolved around. I’ve already talked a bit about how this game is heavy on fan-pleasing moments for people who enjoy the rest of the series, but it’s also surprisingly packed with send-ups to creator Kotaro Uchikoshi’s other iconic sci-fi murder mystery series, Zero Escape.
Iris suddenly finds herself kidnapped by a UFO and trapped in a mysterious set of escape room puzzles that are part of something called The Third Eye Games. These puzzles literally play out like gameplay from the Zero Escape franchise, all the way down to minute aesthetic details like the “SEEK A WAY OUT” message popping up at the start of a puzzle or the iconic item pickup sound effect returning from 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors.
Much like those games, puzzles in this title are also incredibly absurd, and are nearly impossible to gauge at a base level. The items you need to find, the combinations you need to concoct, and the reactions you need to unfurl to escape each room feel like they’re being made up on the fly – it’s equal parts maddening and entertaining, but rarely feels unfair. In the moments where it does, the game provides some precise difficulty options and hint systems that you can toggle between pretty freely as you play. For a purist, you can stick to hard mode and never use the Seek system that points out your next item to interact with. For a story-focused player or someone struggling with a particular puzzle, the malleability of the difficulty and hints is really helpful for ensuring that the frustration of these escape rooms never boils over.
Between solving escape rooms as Iris, you’re also doing familiar investigations and Psync dives as Kaname Date. These play out exactly as they would in prior games, with nothing new mechanically going on to spice them up. If the entirety of No Sleep For Kaname Date were just these investigation scenes, they would be a bit of a drag considering how familiar and almost formulaic they’ve become. But drizzled in between the escape rooms, they help ground the experience a bit and keep it feeling like a proper AI: The Somnium Files entry, while also helping break up the gameplay a bit.
All these moments ultimately serve to support and amplify the writing of the game – that’s something that No Sleep For Kaname Date delivers on in spades. Characters are consistently funny, weird, and absurdist in that way that I love so much. Part of me is still frustrated that the game sort of captures so many of these characters in a bubble of sorts, presenting flanderised versions of them that don’t reflect the growth or changes they go through in the main series. It’s especially frustrating to see Kaname Date and Mizuki presented in the way they are, because the versions of these characters that come later in the story are so much more interesting to explore.
At the same time, this game delivers some really exciting new character interactions that I was sorely missing from the last game. Tama the flirty and air-headed AI companion always felt like such an exciting character to see Kaname Date interact with, and finally having moments in this game where the two of them bounce their idiocy off each other is so much fun.
Ultimately, if you come to No Sleep For Kaname Date looking for a continuation of the story from the first two games, or a title that carves a brave and destructive path for itself the way that games from Kotaro Uchikoshi tend to do, this ain’t it. What it is, though, is like a really creative and entertaining filler arc from a long-running anime. The events of this game might not entirely matter in the grand scheme of things or push the more serious elements of the narrative in any particularly exciting direction, but it is full of fun character moments, wild puzzles, and so much of the charm and absurdity that made the first two games such a blast.