AI: The Somnium Files

Platform: Switch (also on PS4 and Windows)
Release: 2019

If you like adventure games and murder mysteries, then AI: The Somnium Files really should be on your radar It's the latest brainchild of Kotaro Uchikoshi, the writer/director of the Zero Escape trilogy, so naturally I was curious about it, but I didn't know much aside from the fact the protagonist was a detective with an AI that lived inside his cybernetic eye. And something about entering dreams.

But that was okay! With murder mysteries, less is more, and less chance of getting spoiled.

Even though this is the first game I played in 2020, I have a feeling it's going to be one of my top three by the end of the year. It was just that good.

Since it hasn't been out for more than a year, and it's a murder mystery, please be aware there are spoilers below, including the ending. I mean, how could you really talk about the success of a mystery story without covering the ending? If you're thinking of playing it anyway based on the director's previous work, just go for it. It won't disappoint.

Going into AI: The Somnium Files, I expected (given the plural in the title) we'd have a series of cases building up into one final one. It's the narrative structure I'd come to expect from other crime solving games out of Japan, like the Ace Attorney and Danganronpa series. But it's one long case, and it's really only in the second half that you're able to start piecing things together.

There are also multiple story branches, leading up to five different endings (not counting bad or joke endings), but the mystery is only solved once the last ending is completed, revealing the final pieces of how the events of the game came to pass.

The biggest divergence in the storyline happens early on, so for simplicity's sake I'll refer to the two halves of the story as the Serial Killer Branch and the Iris Branch, with the stuff prior to that as the Prologue.

The Prologue establishes who Kaname Date is, his job, his relationship with his ward, Mizuki, and that he has no memories from prior to six years ago, which is a nice twist to the hero with amnesia trope. Date doesn't know his past, but in the years since he's built up friends and seems like a well adjusted (and often dorky) individual.

I really like playing him for his serious game face and complete goofball interior life. He and Aiba, the AI that resides in his prosthetic eye, are the kind of friends who constantly bicker with each other, and their dialogue is the highlight of the game. Since they're neurally linked they can talk to each other without speaking aloud, and they'll even have conversations in the middle of dialogue with other characters. Sometimes this leads to people thinking Date is spacing out, but the best times are when he's annoyed with Aiba and his retort comes out verbally, leading people to think he's talking to himself.

You can also examine a ton of objects in the game (not surprising for a mystery game) and there are lots of silly lines from either Date or Aiba from examining things that don't have anything to do with the story. They both like puns and there are tons of nonsensical easter eggs (like apparently So Sejima's pond is the home of both a merman and a kappa).

The game's humor provides a welcome sense of levity because the murders themselves are gruesome, and the game makes sure you know what you're in for with the very first murder victim; a friend of Date's who is found tied to a merry-go-round horse with her left eye removed from its socket. She died from being stabbed with an ice pick.

Her daughter Mizuki (Date's ward) is found nearby clutching the ice pick, but can't speak due to her trauma, leading to the introduction of the game's central gimmick; the psync machine. By connecting the subject of the psync and the psyncer (Date's job), the psyncer is able to enter the Somnium, the subconscious mind of the subject. It's supposed to be a way for the police to get information from witnesses who can't (or won't) provide information.

Somniums are muddy though, and what the psyncer sees and how they interact with the world might not make any sense, but the game lays out the rules pretty clearly. The subject has to have knowledge of something that appears in their Somnium (you can't dream the face of a real person you've never seen), but the context might be different (you might dream of meeting a friend at a party, but you never actually went to one together).

Depending on how Date progresses through the Somnium and what memories he sees, the story can branch, and Mizuki's is the first branching point. In one branch, Date manages to reach Mizuki, who blames herself for her mother's death, and this leads to the Serial Killer Branch, and in the other he instead finds the body of a girl, Iris, and this leads to the Iris Branch.

The two branches play out significantly differently, though a few events happen in both since characters who are not yet affected by the deviation continue to do their own thing. In the Serial Killer Branch, it's not long before the body count starts piling up, and it's what I expected to be doing in the game; following a trail of bodies to the truth.

But in the Iris Branch, Date spends most of his time trying to protect the teenage Iris from getting killed. She's not actually dead, but because of what he saw in Mizuki's Somnium and upon seeing a mysterious corpse that looked just like her, he can't shake the feeling that something bad is going to happen to her, and Iris herself said that she's going to die soon, though she played it off as a joke.

Both the Serial Killer and Iris Branches have locks on certain routes so the player cannot proceed until they have more information (by completing the three endings available at the start), so the game ensures that the player knows the stories of most of the central characters before unlocking the last two endings and revealing what's really going on.

Looking at this as a piece of writing, Somnium Files is excellent with its foreshadowing and red herrings, which is critical for a murder mystery. One of my favorite conversations in the early game on the Iris Branch is Date and Aiba arguing and Aiba subsequently threatening to self-destruct in his eye socket. He demands to know why she even has that function, and she explains that she's a highly classified piece of equipment, so she should not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands, but admits that she does not have the ability to self-destruct without permission.

Though this conversation starts out exasperated and jokey, it ends seriously with Aiba suggesting a command code for Date to use should he ever need her to self-destruct. Feeling that a single string of numbers is not strong enough he suggests that she require a second confirmation from him. If the next thing he tells her within a minute is a lie, then she should consider that the second confirmation.

It was a great scene that showcased both their relationship and their professionalism, and I really was hoping that one day that conversation would pay off. Even if it didn't, it was funny and enjoyable for its own sake, but fortunately it did!

As far as red herrings go, the game is also great about throwing in scenes that suggest Boss cannot be trusted despite being presented as a supportive friend. She knows Date from pre-memory loss, but also refuses to discuss the circumstances of the original Cyclops Killer case with him even though they are presently dealing with the New Cyclops Killer. There are clear differences in the killers' MO, so there's some leeway when she says the cases are unrelated, and the details are classified. But narratively we know there has to be something that ties them together, especially since they happened six years ago, which is right when Date lost his memory and was given his present identity.

Boss ends up being on Date's side the entire time, and there are good reasons why she hid what she did from him, but the constant deflection and even committing a murder in one scene (which turned out to not be her) did a really good job of casting doubt on her character, and it did this without making her look like a solid choice for the villain. I was frequently waffling between whether I could trust her or not.

The Serial Killer Branch really ups the body count and at one point Boss asks Date to think about what all the victims had in common and to think about who ties them together, which is really good in trying to figure out the culprit. I actually sat back and went through all the surviving named characters to try figuring out who would kill the victims, but at that point in the story it's actually not possible to discover the culprit (but interestingly, Boss is one of the few characters who is not cleared by doing this).

The second half of the game begins when the first lock on the Iris Branch lifts and from there we ping-pong between the two locked routes (one on each major branch) to get the rest of the story. On one path, five people are dead, on the other, only Shoko, the initial victim, appears to be dead. It's pretty wild and difficult to summarize all the details, so for a high level recap, it turns out the psync machine is capable of switching bodies between psyncer and subject.

You always have a six minute time limit when doing Somniums, because that's how long it's supposed to be safe for Date to be in there without his consciousness being subsumed by the subject. But in actuality, by staying in too long, the psyncer's consciousness pushes out the subject's and the subject's consciousness goes into the psyncer's. Consciousness goes first, memories second. What happened to Date six years ago was that the psync broke off before it was complete so he only got his consciousness and virtually none of his memories after the body swap (he has vague impressions of things from his previous life, but details are missing).

The body swapping is probably the game's biggest stretch in a story that otherwise likes to present as hard science fiction, but for what it's worth, it tries to keep everything else as grounded as possible (including that Date has unknowingly been getting medicinal supplements to address hormonal deficiencies native to his host body).

Because the real killer has been body hopping throughout the game, that's why the string of murders on the Serial Killer Branch makes no sense and it's not possible to pin down a motivation for a single culprit who knew all of them. But with one exception, all the victims are tied to Date. Date is the lynchpin, and it's specifically because the real killer wants to torment him before getting his old body back, which Date is presently inhabiting.

The game does pretty good by its details, including why it took six years for this to get going again, how the two Cyclops cases come together, and it's completely possible to figure out who the real culprit is before Date names him himself. This made the late story quite a ride as details kept coming out and missing gaps kept getting filled all the way up to the final confrontation.

Saito Sejima is probably not the most compelling villain in gaming, but he plays his psychotic nut job role well, and he's intelligent enough to be able to mimic the behaviors of the bodies he inhabits without tipping people off. It's pretty freaky when inside his Somniums (which you unknowingly visit twice) while he's inside the bodies of other people.

Why does Iris have memories of the original Cyclops Killings? Was she watching them as a little girl? No, it's because those are Saito's memories.

It's also pretty crazy when you realize that what he's been doing the entire Serial Killer Branch is daisy-chaining the victims after using them as his hosts. He uses Renju's body to kill Shoko, then uses Iris to kill Renju, and so on. The reason the killings stop in the Iris Branch is because Date freaks out when he thinks he sees Iris's body in Mizuki's somnium and tells Iris not to go outside no matter what, so she never takes the invitation from Saito-inside-Renju that leads to Saito taking over her body.

The climax is excellent though, with both Saito and Date back in their original bodies for the final face-off, with the only thing really marring the ending being Aiba's sacrifice. They really build up that all her systems and backups are being shut down because she and Date have done rogue, so when she (still inside Date's old body, now inhabited by Saito) requests the self-destruct code it's with the knowledge that she will be gone forever.

It was a beautiful scene with Date's lie (the second confirmation code) being that he hates her and never wants to see her again. But then the game undercuts itself in the epilogue when, surprise, Aiba has been rebuilt!

Despite that, I was pretty happy with the game. There are some strange things that broke my immersion (like the various mercenaries' improbable porn fascination, to the point they'll stop a shootout to go look at women's underwear), but those largely disappear by late game and the rest of the story is good enough that I found myself able to overlook the few tonally deaf moments. And even when I was going through them, I was still having a good time thanks to the strength of Date and Aiba's banter.

If you're squeamish this might not be your cup of tea. There was one murder I really didn't like since I do consider myself a squeamish person, and even if there aren't always clear visuals, the implied level of gore is high. But the bones of the plot are good, and like Date himself, the game also knows that it doesn't need to take itself seriously 100% of the time. The final ending still has baggage hanging over a few characters, but nearly everyone is alive with a brighter future ahead of them.