petpasta

Report 15: Big Boys Time III: The Hornium Files

    AI: The Somnium Files

    AI: The Somnium Files

    9/10
    37 hours playtime

    This one technically never got in my backlog, because I bought it on day one and played it since then.
    It’s a new Uchikoshi game and it shows. It uses pretty much all of his usual tropes, but still manages to be entertaining even if you know the creator well.
    It takes its time building up and can be a little slow at times, but once you get used to the pacing, it comes off as a really comfy game. It’s chockfull of intentionally dumb puns and sexual innuendo jokes, and it can be either heaven or hell for you depending on the way your sense of humour works. Thankfully, it hit the sweet spot for me. Most of the humour takes place while randomly clicking on different things during the investigations, do if you don’t like it, you can pretty much skip it, but if you like that kind of humor, I really advice you to take your time and click through all the stuff, multiple times sometimes.
    As always, Uchikoshi succeeds at creating a cast full of memorable/likeable characters and a couple or two of incredibly touching moments. Not to spoil anything, PSYNCIN’ IN THE SUSTaiN was easily the best of those, even if it had little to do with the actual story.
    Goddamnit, I loved Date and Aibo way too much.
    Besides the VN/clicking on stuff part, there’s also puzzle segments that are fairly interesting, although the way these puzzles work, you can’t really make them challenging without making them annoying/boring, which happened to the two of those. It’s basically still trial-and-error-based, and it’s not a fun kind of challenging, to be honest.
    There were a few of weird/nonsensical plot points, but I was expecting that and I’m not too harsh on the game for it.
    I sure wish it was less buggy - as far as I know, it works fine on Win10, but it sure works like ass on my Win7. I’ve had to save and reload during multiple softlocks during the game, shut it down when it softlocked during some transitions, and yeah, by the way, the game crashed because it couldn’t play the final cutscene. As in, 3 minutes before you go to the main menu, finishing the game. Sure spoils the impression a bit.
    Thankfully, Spike Chunsoft released a beta for Win7 users, the code is Windows7Beta. AFAIK, the softlocks are still there, but at least the ending works fine now.
    Overall, it’s a great game. Thankfully, Uchikoshi didn’t turn out to be a complete one trick pony (I mean, let’s be fair, he uses pretty much the same plot devices over and over) and did a nice job with it. I can definitely recommend this one, if you don’t mind some really random humor from time to time.

Backlog progress status: AI wish AI BOT less games

12%
3%
8%
75%
2%
Minamimoto

As a big fan of Zero Escape I was really looking forward to AI but was terribly disappointed. I haven’t seen much from this one yet but it’s humour really turned me off. So after your review I guess it won’t get better? :/ I was kinda hoping that I just have to be patient enough but if the whole game lives from it’s humour, I guess I wait for another game from Uchikoshi then…
Still, how’s the story compared to the ZE games? I need to know >w<

petpasta

As I stated, you can skip some of the jokes by not indulging into clicking on stuff too often, but that sounds like “just don’t experience half of the game lol”. Yeah, it is full of really silly puns/jokes, and most of them are unavoidable, since you’ll be playing the guessing game with its puzzles anyway (Somnium puzzles operate on dream logic), which triggers humorous lines most of the time.There is actually a reason for that plotwise, even if it doesn’t change much. It’s not like it’s a full-on comedy game either, since the story is pretty dark at times and Uchikoshi just tried to tone it down/balance it out with occasional jokes.
Right, the story… is your typical Uchikoshi. Mysteries, encryption memes, branching plot with flowchart, he’s ticking almost all the usual boxes. The plot isn’t convoluted as it might seem at first, it’s actually turns out to be pretty simple… I mean, by Uchikoshi standarts.
I loved the game and the characters, it was a fun ride either way.