Bonus Blood Pact - AI: The Somnium Files

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_FjI6YGASw

Happy Thursday everyone, Bloodworth here. For the Patron Party, we wanted to bring something extra to as many reward tiers as we could so I decided to do a Bonus Blood Pact for this month. In addition to that, I thought it would be a good opportunity to lift the curtain on an extra part of that process that’s usually exclusive to Blood Pact members. My playthroughs are always public, but I also write a bit of a “book report” at the end of the month for $60 patrons and encourage everyone else to share their thoughts in the comments. For this bonus episode, I’m giving all our patrons a chance to see this last element as well so you have some idea what’s happening in the tier.

As I was working on this in secret, it didn’t entail the usual process of having polls to select the game, but over the past year, we’ve gotten repeated requests to play AI: The Somnium Files. Most recently those requests have been coming from Sigma, but I’m sure they’re not the only one.

AI: The Somnium Files is a Japanese visual novel with light adventure elements. I’ve played a fair share of games like Phoenix Wright, Hotel Dusk, Trace Memory, etc., but those are more typical adventure games with more focus on puzzle solving and item collection. AI is much more dialogue heavy with sparse gameplay elements every now and then. You can see my first three hours in the video above, but I have been continuing the game since then, and I’m currently about 14 hours into it. So be aware that there are some spoilers ahead.

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After all the buildup, it’s a bit awkward to admit, but I have to say that I’m not really feeling the hype on this one. It’s not terrible, but it’s not grabbing me, and I feel like I’m rolling my eyes at it pretty frequently. It leans pretty heavily on a lot of common Japanese themes almost to the point that it feels like there was a checklist they were trying to get through. One of the main characters is a teen idol, you pay a visit to the yakuza, you go inside a video game at one point, and there are dirty jokes at every opportunity that often feel like they’re overreaching or out of place. At one point you even stop a mob of armed gunmen by tossing a bra and a pair of panties in the street. A group of them stop shooting at you, put down their guns, and gather around the underwear in a circle as if it’s the most amazing thing they’ve ever seen.

I don’t mind it much, but another funny quirk is the absolute obsession with eyeballs. The protagonist has lost an eye and had it replaced with an AI named Aiba (written to sound like eyeball). The murder victim has had her eye removed. The yakuza boss’s brother lost vision in one eye. The world’s central AI system is based around the Wadjet Eye. And while they first draw a reference to Iris being named for flowers, they eventually say, guess what, the iris is also a part of the eye. I’m sure there are other references I’m forgetting too, but it’s all over the place.

Ok, one more nitpick that I just have to get off my chest, but gameplay-wise, I find it really annoying how much background stuff you can click on without it producing anything of value. You click on a chair and the game pulls up a dialogue box that says “This is a chair,” and this happens with about a dozen items in every scene. Even if you’ve been in that location multiple times before, it marks items as “unread” so if you haven’t checked them out in this specific scene, you need to click on them again just in case. It wouldn’t be a problem if every object had the same worthless text, but once in a while, there actually will be a touch of commentary, or it will prompt a joke, or you’ll even get an important chunk of backstory. So it’s frustrating to have to click around on all these filler objects that have nothing to show beyond what you already see when mousing over them.

Alright, I don’t want to sound like I’m hating the game either. I’ve still got a ways to go, but elements that first felt like detours, like meeting Iris, now seem more important than the original murder. The Psync sequences when you dive into someone’s dreams are pretty fascinating as well. Even though the puzzle solving is pretty basic, figuring out how the pieces fit within the timer system keeps things on edge. The abstract nature of the dreams is also pretty crazy since going in to look for clues is never as straightforward as it sounds. I’m still wondering if the game is ever going to explain Iris coming back from the dead, beyond attributing it to a parallel world. And while the ShovelForge Psync was a bit typical, the fact that it ends with a branch in the narrative has me curious just how significant that choice might be.

Since I’m not done yet, I will throw out one theory (don’t tell me if I’m right), but I’m pretty sure the prisoner who escaped is going to turn out to be Iris’s “uncle” / father figure. It just makes total sense at this point. However, I’m not sure how some of this other stuff is going to play out with the armed gunmen, Naix, your boss’s apparent betrayal, and why Shoko was murdered in the first place. I just learned an important revelation about Iris, and I’m certainly curious enough to see it through to the end.

Alright, there you have it, I’m not typically this negative with Blood Pact impressions, but that’s just how I feel this time around. I totally welcome any of your thoughts about the game, questions you have about anything I might have left out, or just your reactions to the beginning of my playthrough in the video above. Interacting is part of the fun. So please write as much as you like in the comments below.