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AI: The Somnium Files
What a journey of a game. They simply do not make them like this.
The story in AI: The Somnium Files is enthralling. It had me engaged and immersed for almost the entire runtime. The twists were shocking and the mystery was a mindfuck throughout.The characters were great, albeit their models looked a little uncanny. There were some things that bothered me, but the vast majority of the game was just absolute entertainment.
Story
The game opens up with a scene that piques the players curiosity, and manages to keep them guessing for almost the entire runtime. Every answer you find opens up new questions and the plot just gets thicker and thicker the whole time you play.
The way the separate story lines are laid out is nothing short of genius. They all relate to each other just enough that you slowly start piecing the bigger picture together as you play, but none of them repeat more than a handful of short scenes from each other. Each new story line blows everything you thought you knew from the last out of the water, leaving the player confused with a burning desire to learn more. Your understanding of what things are connected expands while your understanding of how things are connected is shattered over and over again. The feeling of excitement, exasperation, and befuddlement you experience is real and visceral, and it's insane how well the game manages to create those moment at every turn.
That all alone is impressive, but the craziest thing about it is that the player can discover these timelines for the 1st time in any order and still have an equally engaging and brain-melting experience. It's insane how good the writing has to be to create anything like it, a truly unique gaming experience. I will say that I'm glad I did the Mizuki ending as late as I did, because I do think that it would've really gotten into my head for the rest of the playthrough and I wouldn't have been able to assess evidence with an open mind, but who's to say?
Locations
I'm definitely the type of player that impulsively clicks on every little thing in my environment, and this game had no shortage of fun little things to discover in doing so. It's a small detail, but I appreciate it, especially since this practice has oft detracted from my experience in other games that use, in my opinion, too many words to describe the mundane. Some side characters and decorations even had their own little stories that would develop as you clicked on them multiple times at different points in the game (the name "Kagami" comes to mind here, but I can't recall why).
Action
The one thing that felt really out of place in this game was the action sequences. The "Date and everyone else is obsessed with porn" bit gets old really quickly. They feel like a complete tonal detachment from even the goofier parts of the rest of the game and absolutely shattered my immersion like nothing else. For what it's worth, I did appreciate that even Date's porn addiction had a lore justification, but even that could've been communicated without going that over-the-top. I got excited to do a few quick-time-events, but all I could think about was how stupid the sequences looked, not just due to the bad jokes but also the situational bullet immunity and impossible "calculations" made by Aiba. The only saving grace of these encounters is that nothing that happened during them was plot relevant. As long as the general idea of what happened is communicated, the specific details are hardly important, which can't really be said about most of the rest of the game.
Bluntly put, the bit was only funny once, but even if we make a concession that comedy comes in 3s, they did this like, 9 times.
Somnium
The parts of the game that took place in Somnium were neat. I do wish they'd used a shader that didn't make my GPU shit itself, but at least it didn't make the game unplayable. Some of the psyncs felt really arbitrary, but others actually made quite fun puzzles to solve. I really enjoyed some of the "ah-hah" moments the game set up where the contents of a particularly confusing psync suddenly clicked. Sometimes, little details wouldn't come up for the rest of the game, and there were certain pieces I only put together upon watching another person's playthrough as to why certain things made sense to appear in somnium.
Other Notes [SPOILERS]
- While I completely understand how central and critical AI is to the core of the game, I don't really understand why it's like, the main part of the title. I personally would've called the game "The Somnium Files" and left it at that. Easier to type out. Granted, I believe that the connotation (and sense of mystique) associated with AI has probably changed considerably since the game's release, who knows if I'd've felt the same in 2019.
- I feel blessed that my GPU only had issues when I stood still or checked maps in certain somniums, neither of which were critical (or even all that useful most of the time). There were like, 2 or 3 times over the course of the whole game where I really wished I could use the map, and even then I could do it quickly. Not really saying that this reflects well on the game or the developers, it was just nice for me.
- Finding other people to watch play this is annoying since I want them to experience the game in the same order I did.
- It occurred to me after completing my run how fuckin' smug Rohan must've felt pretending to be Falco when interrogated.
- The only continuity error in the entire game is when Hitomi uses her right arm to dance in the credits, which is rather easy for me to forgive, and may well have been considered by the developers, only to be subsequently ignored to create that moment.
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I really feel like the final psync with Boss at the end of the Annihilation route is well executed. It takes everything you've learned about somnium throughout the game and puts it to the test.
- You make progress by recognizing and replicating a pattern, but there are still little things to figure out on the way.
- Your understanding of the outside world allows you to make deductions within somnium.
- Conserving good timies for when you need them, but otherwise using them liberally.
- Doing actions that have nothing to do with progression to get good timies, saving time overall.
- Doing actions that have nothing to do with progression to burn bad timies, saving time overall.
- Experimenting to learn how things in Somnium interact with each other.
- Literally every ABIS employee will share state secrets with anyone under mild pressure, unless the person requesting the information happens to be Date.
- Somewhat to my own chagrin, I was positively delighted by the final credits sequence at the end of the game. I don't think I've enjoyed video game credits this much since Portal 2, which is about the highest praise I can give. You've just been through the most intense part of the game immediately after the saddest ending, and then you get, well, "the dance". I hate to say this of something so goofy, but to me, it truly was profound.
- I don't know how difficult this is to achieve, but I liked how despite the game being a work of science fiction, I was always able to deduce if something seemed like it would be far-fetched or implausible in universe, I could tell when something felt "off" even without any of the characters telling me. This only ever broke down in action sequences.
- Never have I ever played a game where so frequently did I offer my own thoughts, only to progress the dialogue and have one of the characters say nearly the exact same thing I just did. I don't know if they just have a great sense of how the player will be thinking, or if they just created scenarios that deliberately limit likely reactions, but I thought it was cool and funny.
- I think it's kind of neat how the way the story is presented literally ONLY works as a video game. You literally could not have the same experience in any other medium, which I feel is kind of neat for a visual novel.
- It deeply saddens me to know that I almost certainly will not be experiencing a game story this compelling any time soon.
- I REALLY liked how the skip button worked in this game, it was like fast-forwarding a cassette tape. It made it so that re-starting a somnium, even from the very beginning was never too frustrating. Good implementation.
Final Thoughts
This game was absolutely incredible. It certainly has it's quirks, and I'm sure it's not for everyone, but as for my experience, I was absolutely floored. This game spends 30 hours melting your brain, and then somehow ties up every lose end and puts a cute little bow on it in the last 3. No detail was extraneous, everything made sense. Even given the writers were probably working backwards, this level of consistency is impressive.
There were some things I didn't like about it, but they were so few and far between that it seems silly to let them lower my regard for the game as a whole. I genuinely had an amazing time playing, I was continuously engaged from start to finish, and I would implore anyone who likes a good story and can put up with some "anime bullshit" to play this for themselves. It invoked real emotions in me and was just a banger experience throughout, right up to the end of the end credits. After some deliberation, and I don't say this lightly, I have decided this is the 4th ever game I'd award full marks. It really was something truly special.
10/10
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