It didn’t take long for No Sleep For Kaname Date, the third installment of Spike Chunsoft’s AI: The Somnium Files series, to get an audible groan out of me. That was thanks to two words I’ve grown sick of over the last six years: porno mag.
Those words will either mean nothing to you or activate some kind of Pavlovian response depending on how familiar you are with AI: The Somnium Files. See, the sci-fi series stars Kaname Date, a detective whose method of interrogation involves hopping into people’s minds and breaking through their mental locks via surreal escape room puzzles. But if there’s one thing that he really wants you to know about him, it’s that he loves porno mags. It’s not just his favorite thing to yap about in any one-liner he can squeeze between exposition; dirty magazines grant him super strength, like a perverted Popeye. Playing the first AI: The Somnium Files game will leave you sick of the running joke after 20 hours. If it doesn’t, then its sequel, Nirvana Initiative, certainly will.
But No Sleep For Kaname Date raises (or lowers) the bar again. It showcases a commitment to dead horse desecration not seen since Season 4 of The Sopranos. And it’s through that running joke that I’m finally able to understand why exactly I keep coming back to a series I have sworn off multiple times. That’s because now I finally get that AI: The Somnium Files isn’t a hard sci-fi mystery or a brainy detective saga. It’s a sitcom.
Positioned as an interstitial side-adventure set before Nirvana Initiative, No Sleep For Kaname Date is the video game equivalent of a bottle episode. Rather than centering around a serial killer investigation, Iris is kidnapped (seemingly by aliens) and forced to complete a deadly series of escape rooms on a live stream. Kaname Date takes the case, once again enlisting the help of Aiba, his trusty AI sidekick that lives in his fake eyeball.
Image: Spike Chunsoft
I’m tempted to say that the chapter jumps the shark, but that would imply that the series ever had its surfboard on the water. The appeal of AI: The Somnium Files has always been its ability to combine dense sci-fi mystery with unpredictable zaniness, creating a page-turner one way or another. It’s why I have played all three Somnium Files games to completion even when I wasn’t compelled by their hacky humor. No Sleep For Kaname Date keeps that energy up, but in a more compact story (around 10 hours shorter than previous games) that eventually trades in alien goofiness for some unexpectedly grounded character moments.
Large parts of the adventure are familiar. When I’m not interrogating characters at locations recycled from previous games or doing some occasional quicktime events, I’m Psyncnhing into people’s minds with Aiba’s help to get repressed information. That still plays out in the series’ signature puzzle sequences, where I need to pick the right text prompts to solve surreal problems. Each answer I pick costs time, and I only have a few minutes to work with, though I can use Timies to reduce how long each selected action will take. It’s still a love it or hate it system that’s in an awkward middle ground between text adventure and escape room.
Thankfully, there’s a much-needed tweak on the formula this time. I occasionally get to control Iris and solve the actual escape rooms she’s trapped in. These sections are much more traditional in nature, tasking me with picking up items, decoding ciphers, and testing my spatial reasoning skills. Right from the very first sequence, where Iris must track down statues and sand vials to escape a UFO, it feels like the Zero Escape spark the series has been missing. They’re more active puzzles compared to the “pick the wrong option, lose, and try again” nature of Psych sequences. No Sleep For Kaname Date feels like a proving ground for a gameplay pivot, and it makes a strong case for it.
But the more things change, the more they very much stay the same. The writing contains the same flood of juvenile jokes that has made previous games so difficult to grind through at times. Even with a truncated runtime, Date still finds time to go to the Lemniscate Entertainment Offices and starts mercilessly flirting with the secretary with comically enormous breasts. My issue isn’t even with the jokes themselves; this year’s excellent Promise Mascot Agency is just as lewd, and it’s a hoot. It’s more just that I wish the series would get some new material. How many times do I have to hear Mama talk about her big “balls?”
Image: Spike Chunsoft
All of that should have turned me off from the series by now, yet I still played through the entirety of No Sleep For Kaname Date just as I did with previous games. Even when I was swearing it off, I still felt compelled to see it all to the end. Why? What keeps me coming back to a series that so consistently keeps my eyes rolling?
I remembered my father’s own media habits. When I was growing up, he was a big sitcom hound. Every night during dinner, we’d have to watch The King of Queens. I found it maddening. Kevin James’ character was such an unredeemable schlub who never seemed to grow or change. The show was in a constant state of status quo and I never had a sense of where episodes fell on the timeline. It betrayed every rule of good TV writing, but my father found a clear joy in it. “Watch this,” he’d say when James was clearly telegraphing some kind of slapstick pratfall. Even if he hadn’t seen the episode, he knew all the cues and danced along with them, much like the Somnium Files’ Ota, one of Iris’ many superfans, always recites idol catchphrases on command. My father would later take that energy to shows like The Big Bang Theory, Bazinga-ing along with Sheldon.
That’s where one of my own mental locks opened. “Porno mag” is “Bazinga.”
Date, and the Somnium Files’ supporting players, are sitcom characters. They exist in this series to come out each episode and say their catchphrases. Each time someone says “porno mag,” you can practically hear the uproarious laughter of a live audience in the distance. And as stale as those running jokes can feel from an outside perspective, a sitcom’s appeal is its consistency. Viewers like my father aren’t watching to be surprised. They want to be in on the joke, pretending that they’re part of the writer’s room. Even in the darkest days of Everybody Loves Raymond reruns over gnocchi dinner, I eventually came to appreciate that appeal. Kevin James’ predictable buffoonery became a source of stability in my teenage years. I can’t say that it ever made me like the show, but I came to enjoy the fact that I could work out how every episode would go. It felt like solving a puzzle.
I believe that’s what pushed me through No Sleep For Kaname Date, a middling spinoff that still gave me the comfort of low-stakes TV. I could sit here and pretend like I hated it, trashing its one-dimensional characters, grotesque treatment of its female characters, and repetitive jokes. But after six years, I’m still tuning in to watch every new episode. For better or worse, this is my King of Queens.
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