Stray Review

 

Silent protagonists are nothing new in video games but Stray certainly pushes that concept to an interesting place. 

Part platformer, part traditional adventure game, this cyberpunk world full of neon-soaked robots transforms into a giant jungle gym from your perspective which is just one foot off the ground. 

The concept of putting you in the paws of an average cat may be a silly one on the surface but Stray uses that furry vehicle to tell a genuinely compelling story with some entertaining action along the way. 

Not all of its ideas land on their feet but it was impossible to shake the fuzzy feeling it gave me right from the adorable opening minutes. 

To be perfectly clear you're not a magic cat in Stray, not a mutated sci-fi cat, not some kind of sentient super cat; just a normal cute cat. 

Albeit one that displays the sort of intelligent awareness we all like to pretend our own cats might have when we're not looking, the simplicity of that concept works wonderfully especially because the fact that you are a cat doesn't actually matter all that much to the artificial people you interact with or the things they ask you to do. 

The robotic denizens of this cyberpunk world generally talk to you like they would anybody else and the only way it's ever really relevant to the story or the action is when you can fit into tight spaces they can't. 

At the same time, Stray revels in the fact that it has made you a cat your feline form brings a lovely and lighthearted flavor to this otherwise dark world and there are moments all throughout that encourage you to set aside your responsibilities and simply play. 

Walls and carpets can be scratched at, legs can be lovingly rubbed against, objects can be heartlessly pushed off of ledges and there's a dedicated meow button that I rarely stopped pressing you can also find serene spots to curl up and take a nap, letting the camera pull out and giving you a moment to enjoy a nicely staged scene alongside one of the many impressive songs in Stray's excellent futuristic soundtrack. 

This is a wonderfully rich world, one I really enjoyed learning more about. While your cat's own story is a pretty simple tale of a lost adventurer trying to get home, the conflict you end up stumbling into is very well told. 

The beautifully designed city you have to make your way through is bleak without feeling pessimistic, full of history to learn and charming robot citizens to chat with despite the fairly dystopian situation around them. 

I talked to everyone I could whether they were relevant to the story or not and I loved seeing what their computer screen faces would display whenever I meowed nearby. 

Be that annoyance surprise or just a big hard “meow”. When you're not sleeping on a pillow, Stray generally puts you in one of two types of situations. 

You'll either be running through fairly linear levels full of amusing platforming challenges and some light puzzle solving or exploring one of its more open town areas where you'll talk to friendly robots and collect items to complete tasks for them. 

The former sections almost reminded me of something like a 3d version of 2016's Inside, with relatively simple obstacles being elevated by the exemplary atmosphere built around them. 

The latter sections on the other hand shift straight into a genre more keen to a point-and-click adventure game, except in this case, your pointer is a cat. 

In either case, moving around as a cat isn't always quite as fluid as I hoped it would be. 

It's fun to scamper up air conditioners, mounted to the sides of buildings or walk along railings but you don't actually have a dedicated jump button to do any of that with. 

Instead, you can press a button to hop to predetermined, interactable spots, automatically when prompted. 

That means the only difficulty associated with any of the platforming is lining up the right position to hop to the spot you want and you don't always move with the nimbleness of a cat once you do. 

Though that's partly the fault of the movement animations themselves which can be noticeably stiff at times. But the more linear sections are still quite enjoyable despite their straightforward ease. 

Kept interesting to the end of the five hours it took me to beat Stray, by constantly introducing fresh ideas and environments. 

There are exciting chase scenes as you run away from mutated creatures called Zerks, stealth sections that have you avoiding security drones and puzzles where you might have to lure the enemy ai to your advantage. Not all of these ideas are as successful as others. 

For example, the weakest of them gives you a weapon to kill the Zerks which quickly devolves those previously tense encounters into a pattern of killing a few and then running backwards while you recharge it over and over. 

But that said, these twists are all clever enough to nicely refresh the platforming throughout. 

Exploring the small towns between the more linear sections is a lot of fun from a four-legged perspective too. With each area sporting a surprisingly dense layout full of nooks and crannies to sniff around and a great use of vertical space. 

While the main quest will send you running across them on its own, there are also plenty of optional collectibles and quest lines that i enjoyed stumbling upon just as much. 

Some might have you tracking down the combination to a hidden safe in classic adventure game fashion, while another has you collecting sheet music for a musician bot to play back to you. 

There's a lot to find and some collectibles are hidden well enough that I didn't quite manage to uncover them all on my first playthrough. 

So there's definitely at least a bit more than 5 hours worth of stuff to do if you want to find every last secret. Assisting you with the less paw friendly tasks, is B12; an equally adorable floating robot companion who hangs out in your backpack. 

B12 accompanies your cat for most of the campaign and the relationship that forms between them is a nice cornerstone for the plot as a whole. 

This is as much B12 story as it is the cats, even more so honestly making your cat feel more like a furry avatar in someone else's tale a lot of the time. 

That's not necessarily a bad thing though and the writing for B12 and the rest of the robots you meet is more than good enough to make up for the limited conversational skills of your protagonist. 

B12 doesn't get all of the interactive glory either as I enjoyed when initially superfluous cat actions were occasionally repurposed into actual game mechanics. 

For example, you might need to get someone to open a door for you by scratching at it or wake someone up by knocking something off of a shelf above them. 

Later on the meow button I had been incessantly pressing with no consequences up until that point could suddenly alert a guard to my presence, which would have been dire if I hadn't been appropriately hiding in a cardboard box. 

Again none of these tricks were ever very complex or challenging but they were entertaining all the same. 

Stray is a delightful adventure in a dark but endearingly hopeful cyberpunk world and that's thanks in no small part to the fact that you're playing as an adorable cat the whole time. 

It's mix of simple platforming and puzzles with item hunting quests is balanced very well across the roughly five hour story. 

And though I wish my movement was a little bit more nimble during that time, I still loved hopping across rooftops and scampering through back alleys to find its well-hidden secrets. 

The new ideas it introduces along the way help keep things fresh even if not, all of those ideas work quite as well as others but whether I was scratching at a carpet or curling up into a ball and taking a cat nap, Stray does a great job of setting itself apart in a way that feels like more than just a novelty.

The Quarry Review

 

The best way to experience The Quarry is to go in as cold as possible and while it has a few issues with its script and it’s lack of interactivity, the first run-through is great and well worth your time. 

Like many of developer Supermassive's previous games, The Quarry is clearly made both by and for people who love horror movies. 

From the start it slowly builds tension and atmosphere and gets you invested by constantly asking you to make small decisions that will guide its teenage cast of potential murder victims. 

Now by the time the blood starts a flying, you'll always feel like you are on the verge of disaster and that makes it nearly impossible to put down. 

When you go back to replay it however, it's impossible to ignore just how non-interactive much of The Quarry actually is. 

As a spiritual sequel to Until Dawn, it's a better movie but a worse game. You follow the story of nine camp counselors who end up stuck in the woods overnight at the end of summer with nothing to do but throw one last party before they go back to their lives. 

Now there's something stalking them from the tree line because (of course there is) and your choices determine which if any of the Counselors will be able to survive the night. 

This setup layers three fairly textbook horror plots on top of each other as you progress but you can tell that Supermassive Games had a lot of fun figuring out how to connect them together. 

When you play, you may think you're in one type of horror movie but you're actually often in another. 

Now the title location of The Quarry, is a summer camp in upstate New York package quarry that's slowly falling apart. 

It's initially designed to look like the most postcard worthy version of itself backlit by warm sunlight and spread out across approximately a billion acres of natural splendor. 

It's a Hollywood version of The Perfect Summer experience with colorful cinematography that makes the whole camp look like somebody's cherished memory. 

Then the sun goes down, the woods get dangerously quiet, the rot gets more obvious and the nightmare starts. 

You play as each of the nine camp Counselors controlling one at a time at various points in the roughly 10 hour campaign you can influence how its events play out through exploration scenes, conversation choices, quick time events, stealth, simple combat and Mass Effect style interruptions where you have a short window in which to make a sudden move. 

There are a lot of accessibility options built into The Quarry that let you adjust the difficulty of all of these actions including a movie mode, that lets the story play out without any interactivity at all. 

Now while you'll see most of what there is to see in movie mode, you will miss a couple of major events, many optional ones and a lot of story context that can only come from taking direct control. 

Even without it, The Quarry's default settings make quick time events easy to pull off. 

In fact, there are several scenes where failing doesn't necessarily have a bad outcome which makes them more like snap decisions rather than mechanical challenges. 

The primary issue with The Quarry is that it's less of a game and more of a lightly interactive movie for most of its running time. 

Now you can go for surprisingly long stretches without having to make a meaningful choice or take direct control of a character. 

All you're asked to do is watch. In general one of the best parts of Until Dawn as well as the games in Supermassive's Dark Pictures Anthology was that it was at least as much of a mystery as it was a horror movie. 

During the adventure game style exploration scenes, you had the chance to try and find crucial details about what was happening by discovering clues reading files, solving puzzles and occasionally, falling into what was, with the benefit of hindsight, a really obvious trap. 

Now there isn't anywhere near as much of that in The Quarry. You do have the chance to unravel some of the weird history behind the cap and the area around it but it feels like a disappointing afterthought. 

Another issue is that you can't skip past cutscenes or dialogue that you've already seen on repeat playthroughs and Until Dawn, that was a mild headache. 

In The Quarry which is longer considerably less interactive, it's frustrating. There's a lot of fun and going back through it and deliberately making different decisions or even failing on purpose just to see what happens. 

There are plenty of surprises to find and it's a testament to how absorbing this setting and story can actually be, that you may go back for a second or third playthrough to find them. 

However, doing so would be a more entertaining process with a few important quality of life features that are missing. A better scene selector would be nice as well as a run button, a fast forward option or better labeled points of no return. 

As it is, any attempt to replay The Quarry involves actual hours of dead time, where all you can do is sit and watch it play itself out again. 

The Quarry is deliberately meant to have a lighter tone than Supermassive's other horror games in a way that its director compared to the scream movies which is made even clearer by the casting of David Arquette as Hackett's Quarry's weird head counselor. 

Now it's very self-aware right from the start with a cast of characters who have all seen at least one horror movie before and are acting accordingly. 

At the same time, The Quarry storyline feels like Supermassive's learned a lot from its past projects and is putting that experience to work here. 

It feels more confident with a more solid coherent plot structure. There are still plenty of twists but they're carefully calculated and a few can take you by surprise. Now the cast of motion captured actors are a particular highlight. 

A couple of them do still get relatively little to do and I'd hope to see more from Lance Henriksen's creepy backwoods hunter but most of the characters are genuinely likable and you're given plenty of time to get to know them. 

Ariel Winter, Siobhan Williams and Justice Smith as Abigail, Laura and Ryan respectively are all particular standouts and Brenda Song as Kaitlyn somehow manages to end up as the biggest badass in the cast. 

The characters in The Quarry don't actually act as if they're in a horror movie however, it goes further than that. 

Many of them are operating on a level of ironic detachment that occasionally verges on self-parity especially if you're on a run where the body count is still fairly low. 

You're running the sequences where characters are still talking earnestly about petty relationship drama despite being covered in someone else's blood. 

No scene is dramatic enough that it can't be derailed by a half joke and no amount of recent personal horror is enough to keep someone from landing the perfect sick burn. 

It doesn't come off as awareness of their medium as much as outright traumatic disassociation. Now in horror terms, if Supermassive games was aiming for scream it overshot and ended up with the cabin in the woods. 

The Quarry is worth playing at least once but when compared to Until Dawn, it's one step forward and one step back. 

It features a solid script performed by a great cast with a slow burn story that you can guide to a few different conclusions. 

Now it's not very interactive though and that makes replaying it as intended, a chore. It's still a fun experience particularly on your first time through it but Supermassive Games formula could use some quality of life improvements.

Elden Ring Review

 

In the 87 hours that took me to beat Elden Ring, I was put through an absolute ringer of emotion; a fair amount of sorrow for the hundreds of thousands of lost exp stolen by some of the toughest boss encounters and exhilaration from finally getting through that battle that I had been stuck on for an hour. 

But more than anything else, I was in near constant awe from the many absolutely jaw-dropping vistas by the sheer scope of an absolutely enormous world, by the frequently harrowing enemies and by the way in which Elden Ring nearly always found a way to reward my curiosity with either an interesting encounter, a valuable reward or something even greater. 

FromSoftware takes the ball that the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild got rolling and runs with it, creating a fascinating and dense open world about freedom and exploration above all else. 

While also somehow managing to seamlessly weave a full-on Dark Souls game into the middle of it, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that Elden Ring ended up as one of the most unforgettable gaming experiences I've ever had. 

To set the stage, all you know from the outset is that you play as a tarnish of no renown, blessed by grace and are compelled to make the journey to the lands between and become an Elden Lord. 

What that actually means, how one might go about doing that and what the deal is with that giant glowing golden tree, are all things that you have to discover for yourself. 

Like other FromSoftware games, the grand story is hard to fully digest on the first playthrough but it's a story that I nonetheless enjoyed trying to piece together for myself. 

It ended up being the organic side stories that kept me most enthralled rather than the grand overarching plot that credits Game of Throne’s George R.R. Martin as its scenario writer. 

FromSoftware smartly doesn't change much in its approach to these from the Souls games, Bloodborne or Sekiro. You'll just naturally meet characters as you explore and discover the world and become involved in their problems. 

There are no exclamation point markers on the map, no waypoints to guide you to them and these characters don't always flag you down or initially want or need anything from you. 

They're just people with their own agendas and goals, whose stories are impacted based on your own actions or inactions. 

That was actually kind of refreshing in an open world as vast as this one and it was always exciting to see a familiar face pop up again later as I was eager to learn about what brought them to this new part of the world and how their journey had progressed. 

The trade-off of course is that without any markers quest log or journal, it becomes very easy to forget about certain plot threads and accidentally leave them unresolved by the end. 

That's a bummer and I've already felt regret about missing out on stories that some of my colleagues have had but for me it was worth it because even after 87 hours, I never once felt the open world fatigue that usually sets in when my brain gets overloaded by a map, absolutely full of unresolved side quest markers. 

Besides any missed quests give me extra incentive to continue onto new game plus. Freedom is the word that every aspect of Elden Ring's design connects back to. 

From the moment you set foot in Limgrave, the first of many interconnected regions of the lands between, you are completely free to go wherever you want and sure, that's far from a new concept in an open world game but the way it's handled here is truly extraordinary. 

If you wanted to you could be an explorer and spend hours upon hours in just Limgrave, delving into every mini dungeon, fighting every boss, discovering every NPC and leveling yourself up to better prepare for what's next. 

Alternatively, you could follow the light of grace, guiding you toward the main path and the first major dungeon or you could find a hidden path to a new region that's meant for higher levels and completely bypass the first major dungeon entirely. 

Maybe even steal yourself a cool weapon early while you're there. Again, this is not unprecedented but a few things set Elden Ring apart from games like Skyrim that provide a similar openness. 

For one Elden Ring doesn't scale enemy levels to your own at all so jumping into a later region means you're always dealing with stronger enemies, making the risk-reward prospect of doing so very real. 

But perhaps more notably the way its different areas are connected makes finding these new ones more than a simple matter of choosing a direction and heading towards it. 

Limgrave is designed very specifically with a main path in mind that takes you through Stormveil Castle and finding a way around that feels like you've truly discovered a hidden passage or alternate route, which is a super cool feeling not present in most open world games I've explored. 

You also have more freedom in how you approach combat than any previous FromSoftware game, thanks to a bunch of familiar new systems that are used in interesting ways here. 

You can crouch walk and use stealth to avoid detection or more easily sneak up for a backstab, you can fight on horseback, you can craft items on the fly, you can summon a huge variety of creatures to fight for you and most substantially, you can equip ashes of war to your weapons and completely change their affinity and skill. 

The most important element of Elder Ring's philosophy though is the freedom to just walk away and do something else when you hit a wall. 

Elden Ring is hard which is to be expected from a FromSoftware game but its difficulty surprised me even as a veteran of the Souls like genre. 

I hit multiple points even all the way up to the moment I reached the very last boss, where I had unlocked paths to several bosses and simply could not make headway on any of them. 

But even though i hit dead ends on those paths, there was always somewhere else I can go, a region I hadn't thoroughly explored, an NPC quest that I had set aside for later, a light of grace indicator that I had not yet followed. 

There was never a point in Elden Ring where I was at a complete loss of what to do and every time I explored those other regions and followed those alternate paths, I would find new gear and items level up my stats or learn new spells or skills that would eventually give me the extra edge I needed to power through a boss that had given me problems. 

It isn't just the promise of making my numbers go up that called me to turn over every stone on the map. The lands between is positively brimming with riches, intrigue and danger at every turn. 

Much of what Elden Ring’s open world does well can be traced directly back to things that made Breath of The Wild stand out from the many open world games that came before it. 

It's that same feeling of starting out in a world with little explicit guidance, finding something that piques your curiosity on your own, doing whatever it takes to get there and then being rewarded for that curiosity. 

The big difference is that in Breath of The Wild I could usually predict what's gonna happen when I get to that orange glowy thing off in the distance. I'll do a puzzle, unearth a shrine, do another puzzle and probably get a cool temporary weapon in spirit orb. 

That's not to take anything away from Breath of The Wild; it was awesome, but that pattern became somewhat routine by the end. In Elden Ring by contrast, very rarely did my predictions ever come true. 

I'd head to a lake and all of a sudden get ambushed by a dragon. Follow a river expecting to collect some minor crafting materials, only to find a dungeon filled with enemies and traps. 

Enter a cave and get jumped by little goblin men or take a seemingly unimposing elevator and find that just keeps going down further and further and further until, well, you'll have to get there yourself to find out. 

Best of all, each of these little excursions reward your curiosity with something worthwhile. 

That could be a new weapon, a new ash of war, a valuable consumable, a new creature for you to summon, a new spell or a new NPC to talk to there are so many valuable rewards available that I never felt disappointed by my prize regardless of the amount of effort it took. 

But the thing that's most impressive about Elden Ring is that in between all of this brilliant open world design, there are a handful of legacy dungeons that still deliver those wide linear levels that Soul’s fans have come to expect. 

These are gigantic castles, forts, manners, underground labyrinths and more that are packed with secret areas, challenging bosses and multiple paths that are linked by one-way shortcut doors. 

If they were all strung together without being tied to an open world, they could probably exist on their own as Dark Souls 4. Bottom line, Elden Ring’s open world exploration is a new benchmark. 

It's constantly exciting, rewarding and full of moments that made me go “Holyshit” in a host of different ways. 

As far as combat goes Elden Ring is certainly closest to Dark Souls 3 when compared to other games and FromSoftware's library of action RPGs, characterized by weighty attacks, careful stamina management and a bit of a slower pace in games like Bloodborne and Sekiro. 

The two big new additions are the ability to use a guard counter by blocking an attack with your shield and then immediately pressing the strong attack button to follow up with the crushing strike that can leave weaker enemies in a crumpled state, and a jump attack that gives melee wielders a new type of heavy attack that can also be used to stun enemies and leave them open for a critical hit. 

They're both great additions that offer melee classes fun new tools but for the most part, FromSoftware has certainly adopted a “if it ain't broke, don't fix an approach”. 

What really makes the combat and Elden Ring so good though, is its enemy design and variety. 

Not only are a fair number of them horrifying, but some of these baddies are absolutely vicious, coming at you with wild swings and combos that seemingly go on forever and can hit from 10 feet away. 

Others are more methodical and hide behind their shields to wait for the right opportunity to either parry you or catch you while you're winding up. 

Others still are weak but can be huge threats when they ambush you with a grab that kills you in one hit. 

Many are designed to punish those who just mash the dodge roll button without care which makes Elden Ring a very hard game but it's a good style of difficulty, one that's less about fast reaction speeds and twitch reflexes though those certainly help and more about learning adapting and finding the planted weaknesses in enemy attack patterns. 

Deciphering those tells and acting upon each moment of opportunity, is a large part of why these games are so much fun. And then there are the bosses. 

I don't want to spoil them but there are a handful that are some of the most visually and mechanically impressive from software has ever crafted. 

It is no exaggeration to say that Elden Ring is FromSoftware's largest and most ambitious game yet and that ambition has more than paid off. 

Even after 87 hours of blood sweat and tears that included some of the most challenging fights I've ever fought and innumerable surprises, there are still bosses I left on the table. 

Secrets that I've yet to uncover, side quests i missed out on, tons of weapons spells and skills I've never used and this is all on top of PvP and cooperative play that I've barely been able to scratch the surface of. 

Throughout it all while the fundamentals of combat haven't changed much from what we've seen before, the enormous variety of viciously designed enemies and the brutal but surmountable bosses have brought its battles to a new level. 

Even with all the threads I didn't manage to toggle on my first playthrough, of which I'm sure there will be several, what I was treated to can easily be held among the best open world games I've ever played. 

Like the Legend of Zelda Breath of The Wild before it, Elden Ring is one that we'll be looking back to as a game that moved the genre forward.

AI The Somnium Files - Nirvana Review

 

Have you ever seen or heard something so strange that you just couldn’t keep your mind off of it? 

These mysteries drive our own curiosity, coaxing us to further explore and understand the world around us. 

And yet there are mysteries that blend the fabric of reality with that of fiction, posing esoteric and philosophical questions that present ideas that were never considered before. 

This has always been at the heart of Kotaro Uchikoshi’s work, and with AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative, he’s not only managed to find the right balance of intellectual challenge and philosophical quandary, but also adds some much needed flavor that elevates the entire experience. 

This is my review of AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative, a serial killer murder mystery, presented in a hybrid-visual novel style that features point-and-click adventure gameplay mixed with science fiction elements, developed and published by Spike Chunsoft. 

A grisly set of murders, dubbed by the police as the Half Body Killings, is at the heart of the mysteries in nirvanA Initiative. Years ago, the right half of a body was found under mysterious circumstances. 

And after lengthy and detailed investigation by the police, its other half was never found; until it reappeared at present time, when it not only show no signs of decay, but there was also reason to believe that the victim had been alive until just recently. 

Utilizing the knowledge and tools at your disposal, it’s up to you to uncover the reasons why this is all happening, all the while uncovering a mystery that spans two different time periods. 

The biggest hook of AI: The Somnium Files is your ability to psync with people, jump into their subconscious and explore their dreams. 

It’s through these Somnium sequences where you get to uncover hidden motives and agendas that you weren’t privy to before. 

But alas, each dive into the subconscious only lasts for six minutes, which is where the gamey aspect of these games come in. 

I mentioned in my review of the first game that this time limit serves as a mercy rule that forces you to reconsider all the steps you’ve made up until that point. 

However, what ended up happening was that players would abuse this system, ultimately turning what should be an intellectual challenge into a trial and error scenario. 

Another way of putting it is that many of us spent much of our time exploring and testing out the rules of these made-up dreamscapes, which, unfortunately, wastes a ton of the time that’s been given to you. 

This had the side effect of making these Somnium sequences tedious, with fans admitting that this was the weakest aspect of the previous game. 

Taking into consideration the feedback following its release, Uchikoshi and his team implemented some clever ways to minimize this tedium that helps cater nirvanA Initiative to a wider variety of players than before. 

The six minute time limit is still present, though you can now choose two additional difficulty settings that not only slows down time even more, but also allows you to retry from each checkpoint ad infinitum. 

I’ve always felt that Uchikoshi’s original desire to add tension to these Somnium sequences worked against the familiar gameplay that we’re all used to, so the fact that he acquiesced, to the point of giving us unlimited retries, tells me that his priorities shifted greatly. 

Apart from a much more forgiving Somnium experience, nirvanA Initiative also rewards players with keys that serve as riddles that, in theory, will help us make more sense of the rules of the current dreamscape. 

These keys are in the form of mad-lib style statements, with each blank being filled in by interacting and exploring the Somnium. 

This not only encouraged me to check anything and everything out despite my limited time, but also made the notion of having to redo everything I just did a bit less tedious. 

And if these keys aren’t enough, there are opportunities where you can continuously expand upon a hint to a point where it’ll bring you as close to the solution as possible without outright revealing it to you. 

Though as with most puzzles, your mileage will vary with this one. 

All told, having the option to collect keys, select more generous retry and time limits, and being able to interact with escalating hint systems, provide much needed structure and assistance while exploring unpredictable Somnium dreamscapes. 

That being said, these quality of life features are just some of the many additions to AI: The Somnium Files that further expands the scope of its gameplay. 

One of my favorite additions has to be the new VR sequences, where crime scenes are digitally recreated to help you discover details that weren’t immediately apparent. 

These VR sequences remind me much of Uchikoshi’s puzzles from Zero Escape in that it further encourages us to explore every nook and cranny of the digital space that just wasn’t possible with the time limits of Somnium, satisfying our craving to pore over every detail, as we further unravel the game’s mysteries. 

In what I can only think of as a nod to Danganronpa, you will often be asked to recreate a series of events by answering some questions about said crime scene and solving puzzles. 

This creates a distinct demarcation between exploration sequences and puzzle gameplay, making it quite clear when the former ends and the latter begins. 

And much like the Somnium you explore, these timeline recreations also have their own escalating hint systems. Outside of VR and Somnium psyncing, you’ll also be asked to interrogate and ask eyewitnesses questions on occasion. 

This is where another new gameplay addition, Wink Psyncing, comes in. 

Unlike the deep-dives you can perform with Somnium Psyncing, Wink Psyncing allows you a momentary glimpse into the mind of your target, giving you a small peek into their psyche as you converse and ask questions.  

This is a fairly unobtrusive process, and I encourage everyone to use it whenever possible, as you may encounter situations where you’ll just miss any and all opportunities to use it. 

Taking all of these new quality of life features and gameplay implementations into consideration, AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative finally has some solid gameplay foundations that back its ambitious concepts and ideas. 

By reducing the tedium of its Somniums and expanding on its investigative gameplay, you’ll feel more like a futuristic detective than its previous outing. 

And with the kind of mysteries begging you to unravel them, you’ll feel more immersed into this world than ever before. 

Which leads me to the ultimate question many newcomers ask when encountering new series to play: Can you play AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative without ever playing the previous game? The answer to this is a big ol’ hearty, “Absolutely yes!”. 

The reason for my enthusiastic response isn’t meant to dismiss the previous game, of course. By playing the first game, you’ll get some added context to some of the characters in nirvanA Initiative that it simply doesn’t have the time to properly go over.

That being said, many of these same characters are changed individuals after the events of the previous game, with new goals, relationships, and connections. 

In what is quite possibly one of the most considerate acts that any developer has done for its audience, AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative slightly alters its narrative context depending on your relationship, or lack thereof, with the previous game. 

The game spends a good chunk of time at the beginning to assure you that both games are totally unrelated, followed by a prompt asking if you’ve played the previous game. 

If you indicate that you have, you will be quizzed to make sure that you’ve done so, though failing to answer this question will merely give you additional reassurance that prior knowledge isn’t needed here. 

If you do pass this simple question, you’ll find that your experience of the story will contain added context that relates some of your experience in nirvanA Initiative to that of the events of the previous game. 

One other way to think about this is that it’s an additive incentive; a bonus, if you will, for players who have been around since the very beginning, which doesn’t diminish the mystery in any way for folks who choose to play nirvanA Initiative first.

When we remove these prior game references, you’re left with a perplexing mystery that doesn’t waste any time getting established. 

You’ll question the boundaries of reality and fiction, as Uchikoshi has done many times in the past, while struggling to find out how all of these puzzle pieces fit together. 

You’ll be introduced to concepts like Nonuples and the Philadelphia Experiment, which harkens back to games where he’d introduce foreign yet very real real-world concepts that’ll open up many more questions than there are answers. 

And yet, at some point during your investigations, pieces will start to interlock and take shape, begging you to replay sections with this added clarity, all the while enveloping you in a mystery that is worthy of Uchikoshi’s best work. 

This feeling of plunging into an abyss of uncertainty, ambiguity, and the blurring of the lines between fact and fiction, is something long-time Uchikoshi fans are quite familiar with, particularly, in his more famous Zero Escape trilogy. 

And with the added consideration given to folks who’ll experience AI: The Somnium Files for the first time, this ensures that more people will find much to love in the mysteries that nirvanA Initiative is hiding deep within itself. 

While the original AI: The Somnium Files served as a good first attempt at this unique style of narrative storytelling, nirvanA Initiative is the exclamation point that makes the case for the series’ continued expansion. 

It is a self-aware sequel that not only acknowledges and builds upon the foundations of its first outing, but also manages to address more nuanced concerns, even paying special attention to newcomers to the series. 

The intriguing murder setup might’ve been the thing that hooked you into playing the game, but its more streamlined detective gameplay, coupled with a mystery that will have you reeling back during its reveal, will have you wanting to discover more. 

That’s the moment when you realize that nirvanA Initiative’s got you invested for the rest of the ride, which makes it easy for me to proclaim it as one of the must play games of the year.