AI: The Somnium Files

AI: The Somnium Files is a fascinating adventure game whose convoluted plot is easily outshone by the quirky characters that inhabit its absurd world – which is a great thing, as the story by itself is a bit shallow and quite, quite repetitive.

On a rainy day, a woman called Shoko Nadami is found dead on a merry-go-round with an ice pick stuck in her left eye socket – the eyeball was carved out while she was still alive. Special Agent Kanami Date is immediately called to the scene, as he knew the victim and could have more insight into what happened. Date works for ABIS (Advanced Brain Investigation Squad), a secret police department tasked with solving crimes by “understanding and penetrating the human mind,” which is corporate speak for having a magical machine that allows Date to visit and manipulate a person’s dreams (the Somnium world) to gather information – the rub being that dreams are the final boss equivalent of unreliable narrators.

At their most dependable, dreams are random narrative projections of our inner thoughts and repressed feelings. If you dream that your boyfriend is betraying you with his best friend, this doesn’t mean he’s actually betraying you with her – so don’t be weird –, but that you either considered that possibility while awake, or that you yourself envision betraying him so often you’re now fearing he would do the same. Or many other options: no one can say for sure because dreams are not reliable. That’s the whole point. Likewise, if Date sees a man killing Shoko Nadami in his dream, it doesn’t mean he killed her in real life – he could just really hate the woman. Any “proof” or information Date believes he obtained in the Somnium is sketchy at best, and would never hold up in court – a judge would laugh all the way back to their mansion if he tried.

The whole concept of Date’s special department is totally ludicrous, then, but that hardly matters because AI: The Somnium Files, perfectly aware of its own nature, makes the correct decision of doubling down on the absurd: this is the type of story where the hero defeats several armed thugs by throwing a porn magazine in front of them or considers that the multiverse exists just because a corpse suddenly vanished from where he found it. This is why the time limit for staying in the Somnium is the icing on the cake: Date wouldn’t be able to uncover trustworthy secrets if he explored someone’s dreams for five straight days, and yet he must solve the most horrible murders while visiting it for just… six minutes. There are videos of huskies screaming that are almost twice that long.

And the Somnium is even crazier than these dogs and tanuki’s ballsacks. There, Date must solve puzzles to break “mental locks” and uncover the truth hidden in the deeper layers of his suspect’s mind – who Date drugged to get into the machine unwillingly, but let’s not dwell on that. For Date’s sake. These puzzles are appropriately built around dream logic, so if we want to make the thorns covering a room’s light switch disappear, we just have to ask Aiba to smell the winter iris that’s lying on top of a table: by smelling it, she’ll suck the plant inside her nose, destroying the faraway thorns. Obviously. And if we ask Aiba to punch the skeleton who’s casually sitting on a bench, we make the entire room crumble down into nothingness, Aiba fall into a dark abyss, Date gasp in shock, and you ask who the hell Aiba is.

She’s the “autonomous artificial intelligence, birthed from collective nanotechnology” who resides inside Date’s left eye, of course. ABIS installed her there to assist Date in the investigation, granting him impressive superpowers such as X-Ray Vision (which he often uses for the noblest of purposes) and immediate access to online databases. In the Somnium, Aiba takes the form of a beautiful half-naked young woman, – she knows how to get to Date – and it’s Aiba who performs actions there, with the detective just issuing the commands.

Puzzles in the Somnium may be absurd by nature, but there’s usually something connecting the wild dots, and pointing us at the right direction, like for example a similar movement pattern between objects: when we see a merry-go-round spinning with the strength of a thousand suns and the head of a panda just a couple meters away doing the same, it hardly comes as a shock when we stop the panda’s head and the merry-go-round imitates the action. Things make some sense in the Somnium; we just have to pay attention and keep an open mind.

We may have just six minutes to solve each of them, but as Christopher Nolan taught us many times, time is relative in dreams. If we stand still in the Somnium, so does time. And if we perform special actions, such as smelling the winter iris or punching the skeleton, we spend a specific amount that’s conveyed beforehand – which can vary from 5 to 90 seconds. This adds a bit of tension to experimentation, but we can easily replay each Somnium as many times as we want if we fail – and there are even checkpoints between each mental lock. So, to spice things up, some actions also hand us an item that decreases the cost of the next one, if we decide to use it: a special action may have the prohibited cost of 999 seconds, but we can spend an item that makes any action cost just 20 seconds and make it viable, for example.

Most Somniums also have bifurcations on them, which we can find by stumbling upon repressed memories that Date wasn’t looking for initially, or by simply choosing to focus on one puzzle instead of another. These forks in the dreamworld lead to different paths and endings – this is from the creator of the Zero Escape series, after all – but unlike the brilliant 999 and Virtue’s Last Reward, here the multiple timelines feel tacked on, lacking a good plot or thematic justification.

But unlike the Zero Escape series, The Somnium Files has a much lighter tone, which constantly veers into the fantastic. There’s an action sequence that has Date dodging bullets while looking for a porn magazine that wasn’t there (men…), and a climactic scene where Date invades the house of a corrupt politician whose goons are all the same bald guy – and they appear all at once as if they were an army of Agents Smith.

Character interactions are mostly funny, too. Take Date’s roommate, the little Mizuki, as an example. They love each other – he’s like a father to her –, but often disguise that love with harsh words and open acts of hostility. “You’re more crocked than a hernia,” Date says to her once, while Mizuki tells him that she hopes he dies soon, so she can collect the insurance money. One time, Date is in the hospital, badly hurt, and Mizuki stays by his side the whole time. But when he finally wakes up, the first thing she says to him is, “Hey, Date. You’re sooo stupid, you know that? Grade-A, first-class, king of the idiots.”

Here’s the thing: Mizuki is the daughter of Shoko Nadami, and Shoko was an absent mother even before being brutally murdered: she resented her daughter because, like any kid, she demanded too much attention. Mizuki’s father, Renju, is not better in the slightest: it’s Renju who basically gives Mizuki to Date to raise, openly admitting she would be better off with the detective. Shoko and Renju, despite all their cunning and intelligence, are that kind of parents who never stopped to think about what having a kid actually entails, and ended up stuck with something that requires the very thing they never could afford to spend with no one but themselves: time. It’s no wonder, then, that after having been rejected her whole life, Mizuki feels the need to mask her affection with displays of disdain and violence.

This is a recurring theme in the game. One of the major characters is a young girl called Iris (yes, that winter iris in the Somnium was symbolic), whose upbeat demeanor seems to hide some sort of trauma – she’s the opposite of Mizuki in a way. If Mizuki covered herself in thorns, Iris became needy, locked in a desperate search for a father figure to replace the one she never had, trying to find it in any older man she comes across, be it in her boss, Renju – poor Iris –, in her mysterious uncle, or even in Date, whom she just recently met.

Her biggest fan is Otto, an obsessed boy who also lost his father and, just like Iris, had to be raised by a lonely but loving mother. But, unlike Iris, Otto became spoiled and began to take his mother’s love for granted: he’s often rude to her, having learned to expect her unconditional love without having to show a single speck of gratitude. But Otta still has his heart in the right place (he’s loyal and kind and would do anything to protect his mother if he thought she was in danger), so he just needs someone to slap him hard on the face. And since his mother is not able to support them anymore, Otta’s also crushed by the responsibility to provide for his home, especially after deciding to earn money by becoming a writer – poor Otta.

Even though character interactions in The Somnium Files are mostly humorous, there’s always that underlying melancholy that elevates the dialogue. The game’s most memorable moments, then, come precisely when that melancholy finally erupts to the forefront, dominating the atmosphere and tone, such as when Mizuki asks Date if he considers her family even if they’re not blood-related: “A family is a perfect ordinary relationship in the most ordinary way,” she says, “Like, you say, “I’m home!’ and you get a, ‘Welcome Home!’ back. Doing those ordinary things automatically, without even thinking about it, is what a family is. That’s maybe why me, and Mom, and Daddy weren’t able to be a family.”

It’s fascinating how Mizuki ends up unintentionally providing a good defense for Otta’s actions here, pointing out how there’s comfort in the routine, in the certainty of knowing people will always be there for you. The allure of family may be precisely that, after all. But there’s a hidden trap in someone becoming a rock in your life, an unyielding anchor: you may start to take them for granted.

So, when The Somnium Files is putting the spotlight on its characters, it’s working wonders, being funny and touching, but when it decides to turn the focus back to the plot, it’s when it becomes tedious. There’s the fact that the major villain is incredibly shallow in their personality and motivation, with their whole gimmick managing to be even more convoluted than Tenet. But the biggest problem here, the biggest one, without a doubt, a single doubt is… repetition.

Each time characters refer to past events, the game briefly pauses to play a clip of that event… each time, no matter how many times before it was already referenced. Sometimes, it’s a clip of a dialogue that’s repeated many times, such as when a waitress mentions to Date that Renju was one time looking for Iris, and we have to watch that scene time and again until we’re screaming “I already knoooow!” to the screen like a raving lunatic. Sometimes, it’s just a simple picture showing the location the characters are currently talking about, but even this tiny bit of context starts to become overbearing over… time. Take the Cold Storage Warehouse, for example: we go to the Cold Storage Warehouse, investigate the Cold Storage Warehouse, and explore the Cold Storage Warehouse countless times during multiple timelines in the game, so when a character mentions the Cold Storage Warehouse… we already know the bloody place. Intimately. We don’t need a picture of the Cold Storage Warehouse to appear each time the Cold Storage Warehouse is mentioned.

To make matters worse, on the original Switch, this clip may sometimes cause the game to briefly pause while it loads, disrupting the flow of some tense conversations. And The Somnium Files never stops doing that: even during the epilogue, when a certain character shows symptoms of her condition, the game will stop everything to remind us of the nature of said condition. But we’re in the epilogue, so if someone doesn’t know or remember that information at this point in the story, well, bless their hearts but I don’t know how they even managed to get this far. It’s one thing to make eventual – keyword here, can’t stress it enough – callbacks to previous events in case the player hadn’t touched the game in a while; it’s another altogether to design the game for someone with Alzheimer’s.

But nonetheless, AI: The Somnium Files is still a very competent – and at times very touching – adventure game. There’s potential here for much more, however: the sequels will just have to display a bit more faith in our ability to remember things.

June 15, 2025.