AI: The Somnium Files - Nirvana Initiative Out Today On Xbox, And It's Getting Great Reviews

Worth pointing out that for us Brits its still only available for pre-order and it's available here for a couple of weeks I think.
I loved the first one immensely, a great story and the time puzzle mechanic was a lot lot less frustrating than I thought it would be. Quality series by a quality writing team.

Ended up buying it, will play a bit this weekend. Loved the first game and played it on Switch when it came out.

Bought the sequel on Xbox to do my part of showing there is a crowd of people with Xbox as their primary console that do want to play Japanese games.

Still got the first game on my switch but never got round to playing it, I did however play the demo before my purchase and I liked what I played so maybe once I'm doin with some of my longer games il give it a go.

@SplooshDmg @mousieone Curse you two for getting me into this series! I was finally going to get rid of backlog, but noooo now I'm adding to it!

Won't be buying at full price launch, though. I haven't even finished the first on GP (or come near to finishing it) and have too much in the queue. And if it's not on GP (or on the new stream from your own library feature) so I can stream it on my phone I might end up getting the sequel on Switch instead.

I'm also glad the marketing material for this game contains a massive spoiler for the first because I got to the end of the blue route last night and I'd have been so mad at the game I wouldn't have played it again....

Played the first one on switch , hope this will come to game pass since the first is on it .

The first one was great...was/is on gamepass. @NEStalgia im in the same boat where @SplooshDmg got me into the game.

@SplooshDmg It'd be cool if it ended up on game pass before I ended up buying it. IDK though, took like 3 years for the first one. Danganronpa was like 4 years after I bought it, so, it's surely not speedy!

I’m so excited. My collectors edition is going to take a bit to get to me but huzzah! This is like one of my favorite games of all time

@NEStalgia well supposedly this game isn’t a spoiler for that first one. So it could take place in the Mizuki Route line and leave the actual story line in tact. I mean there are 5 endings.

Also part of the game takes place in the past.

@mousieone hmmm... Then I might still be too mad at it to play more. . Blue sucked, and suddenly unexpectedly sucked and also made no sense yet in it's suckage...

Going to do peach then red (yellow isn't available yet.)

@NEStalgia by blue do you mean purplish? Does it involve “aliens”?

@mousieone Yep. The story and character development is great...the end was rather sudden.

@NEStalgia yeah it will explain that later. Much later. Mizuki and Ota’s route come before then and.

@mousieone one problem imo is that supposedly theres no right or wrong route order and yet it seems like there kind of is. But you don't know what exit you're picking. Like balloons or scrap paper.... Neither choice is more obvious so I picked balloons.

@NEStalgia Well @SplooshDmg explains it best but Iris’s story should feel abrupt. I did Mizuki first but I wouldn’t say you have to but because I did Iris abrupt ending didn’t angry me as much because that one has a resolution that’s happier. However, all the route are simply choices like maybe you didn’t check on someone, maybe you didn’t pick up on something, maybe you missed rock. There is no valid route though in the sense you can choose Iris ending as the ending etc the game is meant to show you how one choice effects a bunch of others.

@jcboyer515 no. There was no half corpses in the first game. The OG game offers you a bunch of optional endings and these endings are not linear nor connected. The “true ending” doesn’t even have to be the ending you accepted it’s just the one that ties all the mysteries together. But you can choose any ending including the one where Date basically says screw this and leaves.

Also this game takes place in two time periods the new one The new guy is in the past.

@mousieone @SplooshDmg I'm sure it all makes sense when you're done the game, but I do feel like the way the narrative plotting is handled is kind of a mistake because the only way you even know that there are routes, multiple endings, that you need to reset to a different route, etc is to find out about it online. I didn't know there was an Iris route or Mizuki route, etc until I read about it (and right now the purple and red routes are the only routes, that allegedly all stems from balloon vs torn up picture, and if you pick balloon you go on the crazy route with an abrupt ending.) It's not really handled within the context of the story that there's routes. It makes sense AFTER you know it, but nothing kind of informs you about it. I didn't even know there was a branch I'd hit or that a map existed until I read about it online. Even if it eventually is covered in the story why that works like that, and I assume it is, it kind of needed to be better integrated, I think, to make decisions in the story. If I hadn't read it online, I would have gotten to the end of that route, and only then seen that there was a map and wondered what on earth was happening, even though the map was there the whole time.

Especially after how abrupt that end is. I mean, yeah the whole route is odd, and seems to jump chaotically between tangents....and I do assume there's a story reason there too eventually revealed, but that end came from nowhere. It was going one way, and with nothing connecting it (at least as far as you can narratively know on that route) just suddenly stops there.) It's like watching Lord of the Rings, Pip and Merry get drunk, and suddenly the Tower of Orthanc explodes. Fin.

To me it's the same "mistake" as Nier Automata where there's no way to know that if you play the game 3 times from New Game it's actually a different chapter that is partly the same and partly not. Nothing tells you that happens unless you read it on the internet. I have a grudge against game designs that depend on reading the internet to figure out the basic game structure

@NEStalgia um the first branching path actually says what causes the two different routes. It actually shows you on the puzzle guide that there are two different solutions to the second mental lock….

I mean I get that you don’t put it together that’s it’s two different branching paths but it at least guides that they are two different answers.

But going into to VNs I expect multiple routes ^^;;

Games like Nier unless it’s Nier and only now I don’t though. Nier is a unique and weird. Like the new ending to Replicant is a secret. And I’d you forget the name of the save file …

@mousieone I remember that guide, but what I thought it was saying is that there are multiple possible solutions to the problem - not that there are multiple results depending on how you solve the problem, but that you can get to the same result via different solutions.

Maybe if it had a tutorial that was more straight forward for the concept than "cage with balloon vs cage with paper" where it's a total coin toss choice... I "get" it, but I do hope the sequel is more logical in it's illogical high concepts

LOL yeah Neir/Taro in general is weird. In some good was and some bad ways. But I think AI is kind of only one step down that ladder

@SplooshDmg Yeah AFTER I got the map after completing the route, I'd have figured it out. But it seems like something you really are better off knowing well before then. I get branching paths, but branching the path based on an arbitrary puzzle solution was not an obvious one to know until told

And....Taro.....he definitely is a unique creature.

@NEStalgia Uchikoshi's stories tend to unravel across multiple different routes on a flowchart, building one narrative rope out of multiple strands that can be unlocked in a semi-non-linear fashion. If you play the Zero Escape games, which he also wrote (and which are also on Game Pass via the Nonary Games collection), they're structured in a similar way.

Iris' route is actually pretty ingenious when you realize what's going on.

I do believe the game actually tells you to go back and investigate different possibilities in the somniums after you hit your first ending, which is probably how you're supposed to know to interact with the flowchart.

@SplooshDmg grrr...I hate stories with open ended conclusions. What have you got me into??

I also absolutely can't stand almost anything Kojima has done since mgs3.... 4 is ok but pretentious. Everything after .... Can't stand him

@Ralizah yeah I haven't yet played zero escape. Almost did like a dozen times on Vita and 3ds and then somehow just didn't... Idk why.

Though I'm familiar with the flowchart design from Detroit (never got myself to finish that awkward ham fisted need.) so it's not alien to me. But, I still feel like the way they introduce it, especially with the iris trajectory, is confusing and not the best implementation.

@NEStalgia Iris’s ending only seems weird until you unlock everything around you. But one of things it does do is get you to realize something else is out there. Her route is so abrupt and doesn’t resolve anything on purpose. Now you want to go back and see what else is going on because it doesn’t make sense.

Ota’s and Mizuki’s routes have better resolutions but they also have major bombshells dropped at the end. Iris doesn’t really need that.

@SplooshDmg what’s an eyeball or two among friends? 😘

@SplooshDmg because video game design reasons, that's why . Like trying to make a cohesive story for Zelda when there simply isn't one. Or trying to pretend souls has a story at all when the devs just throw in cool sounding stuff for giggles.

@SplooshDmg Suuuure it is..... Why tell a narrative with well written backstory when you can randomly scrawl "cool stuff" on item descriptions while fans try to figure out what it all means with conspiracy diagrams for years on the Internet.

Guaranteed the creators are laughing their year ends off that people think they have this deep backstory

@SplooshDmg Yeah, I've always argued that from games mostly use difficulty as an excuse to hide the utter lack of anything meaningful in their games besides pretty backgrounds.

Now I can't comment on elden ring yet so I'm going entirely on their other games. But if the "story" is buried in item descriptions and nobody can still agree on what the story actually is, mostly making it up with their own imaginations, sorry, the storytelling is just plain horrible

TES lore is supplementary to the actual narrative of the games and quests. From has no narrative or quests it's just the supplementary lore and nothing else.

On the contrary though I love mystery. From isn't mystery. It's just just plain disconnected gibberish. Any sense made of it is made in your head and isn't the same between any two players. That's not narrative, it's fanfic

Bank to ai...I do have to say iris somnium is brilliant and pure gaming joy