Faisal Ghaffar 
Quick Overview
Jin Furue was murdered. Someone has slashed the CEO in half and dumped one half at a TV studio where a live quiz show is being recorded. Jin’s other half will not appear until six years later, despite appearing to have died just a few hours before. That’s the perplexing premise of AI: The Somnium Files – nirvanA Initiative, an outlandish anime visual novel with a persuasive murder mystery at its heart.
Game Setting
Nirvana Initiative, like its forerunner, is a spacious mystery that crosses multiple genres, combining visual novel dialogue with the above said action bits, as well as more engaging scenes of mystery and enquiry. It all works because it doesn’t take itself too seriously, this generic blending and the conspiratorial sci-fi. In the latest Frogwares Sherlock Holmes adventure, it you’ll be surprised by a Pokémon game; here, it’s entirely in character office.
The Somnium Files games are set in a near-future Tokyo and follow a team of elite, elevated law enforcement officers who use those above- mentioned eye AIs to help them overcome perplexing mysteries while their real eyeball is surgically harvested. But there is an upside to this harrowing act of mutilation: with the AI ensconced in their eye void, the agent can view things in X-Ray as well as thermal vision, and stroll around in cool VR recreations of crime scenes.
Players
For the first half of the game, you take on the role of the mentally unbalanced special agent Riyuki, for whom the mind unfolds as the case wears on him. After he fails to find the prime suspect, a narrative jump ahead six years to the shoes of Mizuki, a superpowered high-schooler who is assigned to the case after Jin’s left half mysteriously reappears.
Psync or pswim
While most of the game is a traditional, discussion visual novel—or a light dungeon crawler as you examine visuals- is more akin to JRPG dungeons. You’ll start exploring climates drawn from the subject’s unconscious level while controlling your character in the third person, with their inner core feelings and thoughts realizing themselves. One character’s dream, for example, takes the form of a distorted quiz show, and another is a fun-filled- filled Pokémon parody. In essence, they’re similar to Character 5’s mental dungeons, but with a concentrate on puzzles and a tight time limit that decreases with each action you take.
Interesting Parts
These imagination dungeons may be the game’s focal point, but the game’s favourite parts are more simple. After each new murder—and there are a lot of them—you’re deposited in a swishy VR recreation of the scene of a crime. It’s here that you feel rather like a proper detective, running up to the evidence and directly examining it (your X-Ray/thermal vision comes in handy) whilst also conversing speculations with the AI nestled in your eye-hole.
