AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative
Switch

AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative

(ESRB - Standard, Revision 000)

Jun 23, 2022
  • Puzzle
  • Adventure
  • Visual Novel
Developers:
  • Spike Chunsoft
Offline play
Yes
Download required
No*
(*) Download required: Minor content missing or a lot of bugs present with a patch recommended (more details bellow)
Comments:

Completed all routes and achieved all endings.
Game is completable without the patch on 1.0.0 but has some serious issues that need to be mentioned.

The frame-rate can be really bad at times. However it is mostly noticeable in cutscenes and in background animations. It is also noticeable in transitions between scenes.
The game also has an issue with some QTE, the QTEs with shooting sections will not play properly the first time around, and losing on them will force the player to redo the QTE sections. They will eventually work however and the player will be able to progress.
There is a puzzle system in the game that needs to be solved on a timer. All of the actions taken in this section require a sacrifice of some of that time. One game mechanic called "Timie" allows the player to reduce the time requirement by some amount. 1/3 timie reduces the time required for an action by one third. = 10 timie, reduces the time required to 10 seconds...

This critical game mechanic is BROKEN in nirvana initiative (but in favor of the player). If you have 2-3 timies in your inventory, toggling them back and forth, will automatically reduce and time requirement in the game to 1 second. This makes some (but not all) puzzle sections ridiculously easy to manipulate.

There were also two puzzles that were severely bugged(not in favour of the player). One bugged the characters movements making them jitter around the screen. The puzzle was finished by jittering around the screen until we ended up at the right place.

The second bug was in a stealth section where the AI was very sensitive to movements and moved significantly faster then they should. This section was solved my abusing the checkpoint system.

There are a variety of other visual bugs (screens fading to full white during loading, flickering, etc).

Load times get longer as you progress in the game, and can lead to sluggish controls on menus and dialogue screens, as it seems the game displays options before the ability to navigate them loads. This is especially noticeable when accessing the options screen/manual saving.

We had 1 crash, however there are reports of more frequent crashes that we didn't experience.

Voice Acting available in English and Japanese.

Tested by Community Report on Switch OLED