4/5 ★ – CartridgeDust's review of AI: The Somnium Files.

The Zero Escape trilogy is a five-outta-five affair for me, and it hurts a little to place a new Uchikoshi title anywhere beneath that. This game has all the wild, bonkers shit I crave from Uchikoshi's work and it even surpasses Zero Escape in certain ways, but it's weighed down, too, by a handful of pretty major issues. Cheesy jokes made for delightful zest in the Zero Escape games, but in AI they take up much more of the plate. Despite the game's brutal and disturbing plot, it winds up being a vastly sunnier and more playful experience than Zero Escape. The finale sequence, in particular, is telling; [SPOILER] rather than an ambiguous hitchhiking Cleopatra or an unresolved coin toss, we get 8 1/2's carnival sequence by way of net idol J-Pop. It's a perfect ending, in that it fully embraces the game's abundant and sloppy love for its cast of oddballs. [/SPOILER] However, the cheesy jokes start to... grate. (Oh fuck, it's contagious) A little bit of horny humor is part of the Uchikoshi deal, but this game is utterly fucking relentless in steering e v e r y t h i n g towards outrageously dirty jokes. When it works, it's funny enough. But over time, it becomes distracting, even annoying. And there are a few times when the jokes drift from horny and goofy to leering and objectifying, and that's a real shame. Receptionist, I'm looking at you. The game is vastly smarter than I suspect people will give it credit for. The dream sequence puzzles have been criticized for being arbitrary and surreal, which, uh... which means they're dream-like, y'all. And those dream sequences are loaded with fascinating touches. The dreams are sometimes brazen with their symbolism, other times quiet and nuanced, and often hilarious and truly bizarre. They do not "interrupt" the story; they are often the game's fullest and most effective embrace of the ludic form. AI does pare down the labyrinthine structure of, say, Zero Time Dilemma; the story branches, but there are far fewer interlocking overlaps. I encountered only two "locks" during my playthrough, and the implementation of both felt a little arbitrary. But if the scaffolding is simpler, the story built upon them is still wonderfully dense and delightfully twisty with lots and lots of pathos and warmth intermingled with the viscera and the bisected polar bears. Not many games are this gutsy and creative and damn it, that counts. Teacups that are flying...