No Sleep for Kaname Date evaluation: the Somnium Recordsdata go full sitcom Players Area

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 form of Pavlovian response relying on how acquainted you might be with AI: The Somnium Recordsdata. See, the sci-fi collection stars Kaname Date, a detective whose technique of interrogation includes hopping into folks’s minds and breaking via their psychological locks by way of surreal escape room puzzles. But when there’s one factor that he actually needs you to learn 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 energy, like a perverted Popeye. Taking part in the primary AI: The Somnium Recordsdata recreation will go away you sick of the operating joke after 20 hours. If it doesn’t, then its sequel, Nirvana Initiative, actually 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 in a position to 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. Slightly 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 reside 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.

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 method or one other. It’s why I’ve performed all three Somnium Recordsdata video games to completion even after I wasn’t compelled by their hacky humor. No Sleep For Kaname Date retains that vitality 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 performing some occasional quicktime occasions, I’m Psyncnhing into folks’s minds with Aiba’s assist to get repressed data. That also performs out within the collection’ signature puzzle sequences, the place I want to choose the fitting textual content prompts to unravel surreal issues. Every reply I decide 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 find it irresistible or hate it system that’s in a clumsy center floor between textual content journey and escape room.

Fortunately, there’s a much-needed tweak on the components this time. I sometimes get to regulate Iris and clear up the precise escape rooms she’s trapped in. These sections are far more conventional in nature, tasking me with selecting up gadgets, 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 energetic puzzles in comparison with the “decide the flawed choice, lose, and take a look at once more” nature of Psych sequences. No Sleep For Kaname Date looks 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 incorporates the identical flood of juvenile jokes that has made earlier video games so troublesome to grind via at instances. Even with a truncated runtime, Date nonetheless finds time to go to the Lemniscate Leisure Workplaces and begins mercilessly flirting with the secretary with comically huge breasts. My challenge isn’t even with the jokes themselves; this 12 months’s glorious 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 massive “balls?”

All of that ought to have turned me off from the collection by now, but I nonetheless performed via everything of No Sleep For Kaname Date simply as I did with earlier video games. Even after 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 constantly retains my eyes rolling?

I remembered my father’s personal media habits. After I was rising up, he was an enormous 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 excellent TV writing, however my father discovered a transparent pleasure in it. “Watch this,” he’d say when James was clearly telegraphing some form of slapstick pratfall. Even when he hadn’t seen the episode, he knew all of the cues and danced together with them, very like the Somnium Recordsdata’ Ota, one in every of Iris’ many superfans, at all times recites idol catchphrases on command. My father would later take that vitality to reveals like The Massive Bang Idea, Bazinga-ing together with Sheldon.

That’s the place one in every 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 return out every episode and say their catchphrases. Every time somebody says “porno magazine,” you’ll be able to virtually hear the uproarious laughter of a reside 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 stunned. They wish to be in on the joke, pretending that they’re a part of the author’s room. Even within the darkest days of Everyone Loves Raymond reruns over gnocchi dinner, I ultimately got here to understand that attraction. Kevin James’ predictable buffoonery turned 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 fake like I hated it, trashing its one-dimensional characters, grotesque remedy 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.