Kaname Date makes his return in No Sleep for Kaname Date, the third installment of the AI: The Somnium Files series. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files Review Overview
What is No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files?
No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files is the third entry—and a spin-off—of the AI: The Somnium Files series, following 2019’s original and the 2022 sequel, nirvanA Initiative. Developed and published by Spike Chunsoft, the game launches on July 25, 2025 for PC and the Nintendo Switch. It marks a return of Special Agent Kaname Date, with oversight from the series creator Kotaro Uchikoshi and new narrative direction by Kazuya Yamada.
Set just one day after the resolution of the "New Cyclops Serial Killings," No Sleep for Kaname Date begins when internet idol Iris Sagan (also known as A-Set) is abducted by what appears to be a UFO and thrown into an escape challenge. Meanwhile, Date and his AI-equipped prosthetic eye Aiba uncover a coffin-like device labeled "Psync me." As Date, players must track down Iris, unravel the game’s bizarre setup, and piece together the connection between the UFO, the device, and whatever forces are controlling the deadly game.
No Sleep for Kaname – From AI: The Somnium Files Date features:
⚫︎ Has Three Different Gameplay Modes: Investigation, Somnium, Escape
⚫︎ A More Streamlined Psync Mechanic
⚫︎ Time-Limited Dream Exploration
⚫︎ Multi-Perspective Puzzles
 Steam |
 Switch |
 Switch 2 |
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| Price | $39.99 (Digital) |
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No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Good Story With Even Better Characters Clever Puzzles and Escape Rooms Full Voice Acting From a Great English Cast |
Visuals on Switch can Look Rough Exposition Dumps Should Never be a Thing |
No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files Overall Score - 86/100
Even when the story starts tripping over its own tangled threads, it’s the characters, puzzles, and sheer weirdness that keep everything moving here in No Sleep for Kaname Date. The new escape room segments mix well with the returning Somnium dives, and the writing, though overstuffed at times, remains one of the game’s strengths. Some rough edges in the visuals and pacing crop up now and then, but it’s hard to mind too much when the game keeps finding creative ways to surprise you.
No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files Story - 8/10
No Sleep for Kaname Date's story goes to some wild places. It threads together conspiracies, grief, and detective work with the kind of confidence only a Somnium Files game can pull off. It leans hard into the absurd without losing sight of its emotional throughline, and Date remains a lovable idiot the whole way through. The pacing, though, buckles in spots, and it still suffers from exposition dumping, but it's a messy and memorable ride that you'll gladly experience from start to finish.
No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files Gameplay - 9/10
Between the Zero Escape-coded Third Eye Games and the classic Somnium dives, it’s satisfying how No Sleep for Kaname Date’s rhythm toys with your brain. Investigations have this balance between silly banter and meaningful clues, while the escape segments can get downright clever. I actually busted out a pen and paper for some puzzles, similar to my days with Zero Escape, which almost never happens these days. A few puzzles flirt with tedium, and not every interaction feels worth the click, but the variety and cleverness on offer at least rewards those who are curious enough to try and fail.
No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files Visuals - 7/10
Most scenes outside of the Somnium dives and escape rooms here look serviceable but unremarkable, with flat backdrops and stiff character animations that sometimes betrays the Switch’s limitations. Up close, you’ll notice jagged edges and muddy textures, even in docked mode on a Switch 2. Yet when the game shifts into its dreamscapes, the art team cuts loose with surreal color schemes and pulsing geometries that almost make you forgive the game’s prior hiccups. Its stylistic highs and character designs carry it through the rougher technical patches.
No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files Audio - 10/10
You might not rush to queue up the soundtrack on Spotify after the credits roll, but in the moment, every track lands right where it needs to. The music complements each scene; tense when it has to be, dreamy when the Somniums get weird, and just catchy enough to lodge in your brain without overstaying its welcome. More impressive, though, is the voice work. Almost every line is fully voiced, and the cast—Greg Chun, Erica Harlacher, Zach Aguilar, Jackie Lastra, and plenty more—brings consistent energy to even the most offbeat conversations.
No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files Value for Money - 9/10
Clocking in at nearly 30 hours on a first playthrough, and with achievements and collectibles still tempting me back, No Sleep for Kaname Date dares you to stay awake with it. It’s a dense game, long enough without being bloated. Even just poking around for missed jokes or interactions feels worthwhile. Do keep in mind, though, that replaying Somniums and escape rooms necessitates you still finishing them, which makes returning to them just to get an achievement feel almost mechanical.
No Sleep for Kaname Date Review: Zero Escape, Zero Sleep, Zero Regrets
He hasn’t slept. Not properly, anyway. Kaname Date, once again in cheap clothes and even cheaper jokes, is back on the case with a pair of baggy eyes that would make Aiba worry about her own ocular integrity. You’d think wrapping up the first game’s case would earn a man a nap, maybe even a porno mag or two, but the guy barely has time to blink before the next absurd incident crashes into his life, because of course someone gets abducted by a UFO and thrown into an escape room in space.
For those keeping track, No Sleep for Kaname Date is the third entry in the AI: The Somnium Files series, but it doesn’t follow the usual numeric progression. It instead slips between the events of the first game and nirvanA Initiative—a mid-quel, if you will. What’s especially notable here, though, is that Kotaro Uchikoshi isn’t writing and directing the game. For the first time, the AI Somnium series hands the reins over to Kazuya Yamada, a writer and director who previously worked on the series in a lesser capacity.
Uchikoshi still supervised the project, and it’s very obvious. From the offbeat humor to the surreal dreamscapes and obsessions with random in-game facts, it’s clear his fingerprints haven’t been fully wiped. There are even references—some overt, some less so—to the Zero Escape series that will probably have fans pointing their fingers at the screen like they’re a Leonardo DiCaprio meme.
I'll admit, I was skeptical at first. Uchikoshi's work has a very specific energy to it, and yet, the absurdity is still here. It's a little goofier, maybe, and slightly more meme-aware, like it knows exactly who its audience is, but it's still recognizably AI: The Somnium Files. Whether that's thanks to Yamada's own sensibilities or just the lingering influence of Uchikoshi is up for debate. Either way, the fact that we're even getting a third game in the series after the second didn't sell well feels like a fever dream, which, I guess, is fitting.
No Rest for the Weary
Date doesn’t even get 24 hours to rest before things get weird again. No Sleep for Kaname Date picks up just a day after the conclusion of the first game’s events, and true to its title, the man finds himself neck-deep in another mess before he can exhale. Iris Sagan gets kidnapped by a literal UFO and ends up trapped in an escape game called the Third Eye Game, hosted by the Reptilian Hostess Akemi. If that sentence made you do a double take, congratulations. You’re ready for the next 30 hours of this story.
Meanwhile, Date stumbles upon a medical pod in an abandoned warehouse, accompanied by a single directive: "Psync Me," with Psyncing being the act of diving into another person’s subconscious mind through a dreamscape called a Somnium, often to extract memories. It all spirals into something far bigger. People are missing. Others are being "killed"—quotation marks very much intentional. And it turns out, Iris isn’t the only person forced to play The Third Eye Game. And there might be aliens. Or maybe not. Or maybe yes. Ancient civilizations, conspiracy theories, doomsday predictions—
It’s a lot, and I haven’t even mentioned that Iris is doing all of those escape game puzzles wearing a scanty bunny outfit!
In typical AI fashion, the story zigzags across plot threads with reckless abandon. Red herrings pop up like weeds, and exposition gets dumped in long dialogue exchanges. If you’ve played the previous AI titles or anything from Zero Escape, you’ll know the deal. You’ll know to wait for the nonsense, to trust the nonsense, and eventually—hopefully—it all loops back into something that makes sense.
And I say that with affection. As someone who’s enjoyed Uchikoshi’s work over the years, I’m more than a little predisposed to enjoy the way No Sleep for Kaname Date feeds you puzzle pieces with a sprinkle of insanity. It’s satisfying, somewhat, to connect disparate bits of logic and myth and pseudo-science and realize what they were leading to. The trouble comes when it doesn’t click for you, or when the game chooses to unload several layers of plot in rapid succession. It can be overwhelming. That sense of discovery can get buried under the sheer volume of info it throws at you, and it won’t be hard for some players to feel like they’ve lost the thread.
That’s not to say that the narrative is sloppy. Far from it, really. It’s just unapologetically dense, often by design, and really, not for everyone. The twists do twists, and sometimes to satisfying effect. But there were also times I had to pause, walk away, re-read a log or two to get a grip on what just happened. And that’s fine for someone like me, who’s willing to roll with the absurdity of it all.
But I can already hear others dissecting the logic under a microscope, asking why X led to Y if Z was true six years ago. That’s fair. There are moments here where the game teeters on the edge of its own internal coherence, especially if you’re the type who expects everything to be airtight.
Cast is Full of Lovable Goofs
Even when the plot’s running off in ten directions at once, No Sleep for Kaname Date holds it together thanks to its characters. If you’ve played the first AI game, then you already know Date. He’s a detective with a decent heart, a decent aim, and absolutely no shame. The man remains a full-time investigator and part-time degenerate, somehow managing to pivot wholesome conversations to an off-color joke in the span of a sentence. At least, though, despite the game being written by a different writer, he’s still consistent. Sure, I still roll my eyes every time he cracks a pervy one-liner, but I usually do it with a laugh. Because beneath all the nonsense, he does care. About his friends, his cases, even the strangers he meets along the way. He just happens to care while making awkward comments about thighs and cleavage.
Helping keep Date in check is Aiba, his AI partner who lives in his left eye socket. Their dynamic remains one of the best things about the game. Aiba may be an AI, but she’s anything but robotic. She’s witty, patient (somehow), and more than capable of matching Date’s nonsense beat for beat. She also has her own quirks, but it’s her dry retorts and exasperation that sell their chemistry.
Iris, meanwhile, returns in a major way, and while she still leans heavily into her usual conspiratorial obsessions, you can’t say she doesn’t commit to the bit. Her optimism can border on exhausting, especially when she starts rambling about ancient civilizations, but she brings a needed levity to the group. And even though she’s stuck in an escape game somewhere for much of the story (again, in a bunny suit, because of course), she still gets moments of agency and heart that help balance her out.
Some familiar faces show up again, but often in more limited roles, which is understandable. Mizuki and Ota have their appearances, but they mostly give way to the new characters, like Hina Tsukuyono. If you remember Pewter from the first game—the guy who managed the Psyncing equipment—Hina takes over his role at ABIS HQ. But she also has a weird affinity for escape games, which puts her in a perfect spot to comment on Iris’ predicament. She even tosses out casual references to the Zero Escape series, which, as a longtime fan, got a solid grin out of me.
Zero Escape, How I've Missed You
Speaking of escape games, No Sleep for Kaname Date introduces a new gameplay element that feels like a direct nod to Zero Escape fans. I mean, the game even flashes a "SEEK THE WAY OUT" banner at the start of each one, just like the Zero Escape series did. Subtle, it is not.
The Third Eye Game sequences put you in the shoes of Iris or another character as you work through a string of themed escape rooms. The name’s a cheeky pun—Third Eye, Third AI, Third AI game, you get it—but the puzzles themselves are earnest. These take place in 3D spaces, with puzzles that often hinge on interpreting symbols, combining items, or thinking outside the binary. You’re often told to "Find the Third Path" beyond the two obvious choices, but in practice, that "third path" is really just a single linear route
There’s a timer involved during these parts, but the game isn’t cruel about it. Whenever you interact with something, the clock pauses and gives you time to think through your next move without the pressure of having your logic circuits fried by a countdown.
Still, I definitely lingered a little too long in a few of these puzzles, to the point where the characters themselves started offering me hints. Some of those nudges were welcome; others felt like they were unnecessary. Either way, I never felt like I had to look anything up. Everything’s solvable with some patience and a bit of lateral thinking, though I’ll admit I broke out a pen and paper more than once to scribble out some notes. Call it nostalgia, I guess, for the DS days.
On standard difficulty, the challenge sits at a comfortable level. The later escape rooms do ramp up in complexity, but nothing ever crossed the line into outright unfairness. With that being said, if you want more of a challenge, you can flip over to hard mode. Doing so strips away all the hints entirely.
Inception if it were Anime
One of the more clever throughlines in No Sleep for Kaname Date is how it integrates its puzzle design across its different gameplay layers. The escape room segments may get the spotlight, but their logic doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Some elements of those puzzles often show up in both the real-world investigations and the Somnium dives.
The real-world investigations serve as the game’s downtime, relatively speaking, anyway. Here, you as Date are free to explore locations, interview characters, and poke at everything in sight. These parts play out like a visual novel, where you select conversation topics from menus and interact with the environment using a cursor. The writing and worldbuilding carry much of the weight, but the player’s curiosity is rewarded more often than not. You never know if clicking on a vending machine will give you an important clue or just trigger Date saying something completely unhinged. And yes, without spoiling anything, I’ll just say that repeatedly clicking on a TV is a very bad idea. Or a very good one. Depends on your perspective.
However, not every bit of interaction here hits. About 50% of what you click on actually pushes the story forward, 25% is Date and Aiba getting distracted by their intrusive thoughts, and the other 25% is, well, a chair being labeled a "chair." It’s fun to click on every single thing here, but I guess not everything has to have a voiced dialogue from voice actors Greg Chun and Erica Harlacher.
That sense of surrealism kicks into high gear during the Somnium sequences. These dreamworld dives return from the previous games, and they’re still some of the most mechanically unique segments. You’re tasked with navigating a character’s subconscious space, one built on metaphors, memories, fears, and occasionally absolute nonsense. The goal in each Somnium is to unlock a series of Mental Locks by completing specific objectives, with each interaction and movement costing in-game time. You’ve got six minutes total per dive, and it’s easy to burn through that if you’re not paying attention.
The TIMIE system returns here. This gives you various modifiers based on the objects you interact with. For example, using a TIMIE might reduce or multiply the amount of time a future action takes, depending on how you spend it. This mechanic is still as clever it was in the previous entries, as it adds a resource-management aspect to the game.
Some Somnium sequences take a while to wrap your head around, especially if you’re trying to brute force them instead of thinking about the emotional or symbolic logic behind a character’s dream. That said, failure usually just resets the puzzle, so the stakes aren’t sky-high.
What Looks Good, What Doesn’t
Many of the game’s segments, though, looked pretty mediocre. I played No Sleep for Kaname Date on a Nintendo Switch 2, but for clarity, the code we received from Spike Chunsoft was for the original Switch version. The game runs smoothly enough, which is nice, but that’s also partially because there just isn’t much happening on screen for most of the experience. Outside of the Somnium dives and the occasional escape room quirks, most scenes involve static backdrops, minimal animation, and characters standing around having conversations. That’s not inherently a problem, as it’s a visual novel, after all, but it does mean the game isn’t exactly pushing the hardware to its limits.
Character models still look jagged, and that’s noticeable even when the console is docked. You get some nice close-ups during story beats and motion captured scenes, but a lot of the in-between animations are still stiff. Lip syncing can feel off, gestures repeat themselves, and some of the movement transitions have that abrupt visual novel jank where a character goes from idle to full pose without much in-between. It’s serviceable, but don’t come in expecting anything that looks modern outside of the Somnium and escape room levels and the actual character art.
The environments, especially during real-world investigations, are flat and relatively uninteresting, with muted lighting and little to actually interact with visually. It works well enough for letting the story and characters take the focus, but there were times I wished for something with a little more punch. Even just a splash more texture would’ve helped. It’s not ugly, just plain.
Things do improve during the Somnium sequences, though. These dreamscapes give the artists more room to play, and when the game leans into its surreal side, the color palette and designs start to pop. You’ll get some nice-looking compositions of areas you visited prior, and although they suffer from the same technical limitations (muddy textures, occasional aliasing), the style does a lot of heavy lifting.
No Sleep for Kaname Date does enough visually to sell you on its characters and tone. The character designs remain strong, with expressive portraits and outfits that make even the minor NPCs stand out. It’s not Donkey Kong Bananza levels of visual punch, but it’s good enough for what it’s going for.
Is No Sleep for Kaname Date Worth It?
Don’t Sleep on Kaname Date!
No Sleep for Kaname Date might not look like a massive game on paper, but it’s deceptively packed. My first run clocked in at just under 30 hours, and even then, it felt like I wanted to go back to relive some moments. There are hidden collectibles tucked into investigations for the eagle-eyed to find, in-game achievements tied to oddly specific actions, bonus unlockables, and even things that might be best discovered on your own. More than once, I caught myself jumping back to the flowchart to try the options I previously didn’t go for or spotting that one collectible I swore wasn’t there before (it was, actually).
All of these come in at $40 digitally. In a time when most games are climbing toward $70, No Sleep for Kaname Date is generous enough. Between the aforementioned and the sheer amount of voiced content, there’s a good chunk of value here. It’s a fairly linear experience when compared to its predecessors, but what’s here is enjoyable.
However, not everything holds up perfectly on repeat runs. Once you’ve solved a Somnium or escape room, going through them again can feel a little mechanical. The pacing also dips here and there, particularly during longer real-world segments, where you’re mostly clicking through dialogue, but that’s a minor quibble in the larger scheme of things.
Nevertheless, No Sleep for Kaname Date had me joining the titular character in his insomniac run. The game’s title may be about Date not getting any rest, but given how often I’ve found myself up at 2:00 A.M., thinking up theories and just trying to finish that one escape room near the end of the game, I’m not faring much better.
| Steam |
Switch |
Switch 2 |
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| Price | $39.99 (Digital) |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files FAQ
Is No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files a Sequel or a Prequel?
Both. Despite being the third game in the series, No Sleep for Kaname Date is a sequel to the first game, AI: The Somnium Files, and a prequel to AI: nirvanA Initiative.
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No Sleep for Kaname Date Product Information
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| Title | NO SLEEP FOR KANAME DATE – FROM AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES |
|---|---|
| Release Date | July 25, 2025 |
| Developer | Spike Chunsoft |
| Publisher | Spike Chunsoft |
| Supported Platforms | PC (via Steam) Nintendo Switch 2 Nintendo Switch |
| Genre | Visual Novel, Puzzle, Adventure |
| Number of Players | Single-Player (1) |
| ESRB Rating | ESRB M 17+ |
| Official Website | No Sleep for Kaname Date Website |
