Jin Furue was murdered. Someone had cut the CEO in half and left one half of him in a TV studio. The other Jin did not appear until six years later and appears to have died just a few hours earlier. This is the puzzling setting of AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative, an outlandish animated visual novel that has a compelling murder mystery at its core.

It's hard not to think so, considering how blown away this sci-fi adventure is. For at least half of the game, your constant companion is a sultry artificial intelligence who lives inside a fake eyeball in the place where your left eye is supposed to be. With her help, you'll solve the mystery of the half-body serial murders while fending off conspiracy theories, creepy viral videos, and cultists who believe the world is just a simulation. Except when she's fighting faceless goons in a series of tremendous action scenes.

Like its predecessor, "The Nirvana Initiative" is a sprawling mystery that touches on multiple genres, mixing visual novel dialogue with the aforementioned action, plus interactive scenes of puzzle solving and investigation. Somehow, this general fusion and intrigue-filled sci-fi blend well together, and you'd be surprised if Frogwares' latest Sherlock Holmes title has a Pokémon mini-game.

Set in a near-future Tokyo, Somnium Files is a game in which a department of elite high-tech cops use the aforementioned ocular AI to unravel a puzzling mystery. But there's a silver lining to this shuddering disconnect: the AI fits into the eye cavity, allowing investigators to see things in X-ray and thermal images and walk around crime scenes recreated in VR.

In the first half of the game, you play as mentally unstable Special Agent Riyuki. After he fails to find the culprit, the story jumps forward six years and places you in the shoes of Mizuki, a high school student with psychic powers. Mizuki is assigned to the case after the left half of Jin's body mysteriously reappears.

Both investigators, thanks to the AI ball, are able to "signk" with the unconscious mind as well as see under the suspect's skin via x-ray fluoroscopy. They can quickly "wink psycho" when interrogating suspects and get a fleeting glimpse into their minds as the game allows. The star of the game, however, is the full-fledged psycho, which is performed by hooking both detective and subject up to a special machine back in the lab.

While the majority of the game unfolds like a traditional, dialogue-heavy visual novel or light adventure game where you examine scenes, Psycho is reminiscent of a JRPG dungeon. The characters are controlled from a third-person perspective and explore their environment in the subject's subconscious. For example, one character's dreams take the form of a twisted quiz show, while another is a fun and lively Pokémon parody. In effect, the game is much like the mental dungeon in Persona 5, but with a focus on puzzles, strict time limits, and the clock ticking with every action.

You are trying to unlock your mind in order to finally reveal the hidden truth and hopefully clues related to the murder case. But every action, even walking, consumes precious seconds. By stopping, you effectively pause time, giving you time to think and examine your options. By throwing this briefcase, slapping the subject, or putting a shoe in this box, you can open the next lock on your mind. You can either take your time and think it through, or you can waste time and have to start over from the previous checkpoint, but the default difficulty setting allows only three retries.

I enjoyed the tension during the signing, but there are ways around the time limit if it bothers you. You can tweak the difficulty level, or if you run out of time, you can reload from a manual save. I'm not sure if this is a good idea, because it's a clever way to ask the player to actually think about the puzzle, rather than just trying to reach the solution by trial and error, as I do in most adventure games.

While these mind-bending dungeons may be the heart of The Nirvana Initiative, it's the more low-key aspects that I like. With each new murder, and there are quite a few, you find yourself in a crime scene recreated in VR. This is where you can feel like a detective, getting up close and personal with the evidence (X-ray/thermal vision comes in handy) and having deductive talks with the AI in your eye sockets.

These scenes may be the best part of a traditional murder mystery. These are the moments when the partner develops a fanciful theory, a theory that the reader will no doubt be thinking about himself before the great detective quashes it with a raised eyebrow. Nirvana's VR crime scene is a place where such moments are recreated, with the player playing the sidekick and the AI playing the great detective.

However, while I enjoyed investigating the crime scenes, I was annoyed by their rather limited scope, small scale, and inflexibility in their conclusions. You are quizzed at the end about what you learned from each crime scene, basically what the AI suggested, and you are not allowed to move on or do anything else at all until you tell your AI companion the correct answer. I realize that this is a (mostly linear) visual novel and not a free-form detective game where you are allowed to draw wrong conclusions, but it is still a frustrating way to present a puzzle.

Not that I'm knocking the visual novel section, but these were the moments that slowly sucked me into the game and familiarized me with its outlandish cast. The Nirvana Initiative differs significantly from traditional murder mysteries in its treatment of suspects. After all, Poirot is an unwelcome outsider in whatever country house he is now investigating. Here, by contrast, you are part of the gang. Many of the suspects, if not all of them at the start of the game, will join you in the course of your investigation. Most of the time, the interviews do not feel like interrogations, but more like hanging out with friends and chatting about the case.

More like JRPG party members than suspects, these are impressive characters brought to life by a sharp script and excellent voice acting. About half of the cast is either annoying or creepy (at least the script admits as much), and one character's inexplicably cube-shaped head leaves me annoyed. Over time, however, I came to enjoy their company.

Maybe it's the Stockholm Syndrome, but I think it's due to the quality of the script in this film. That cube-headed guy annoyed me, but the subplot with his introverted son is brilliantly drawn.

Sometimes we forget that this is a murder mystery. It may be "watered down," to put it in a meaner way, but there are advantages to making us care about these suspects. This emotional subplot makes it more effective when the killer comes knocking again.

I said that the game is almost a one-way street because of the multiple endings that branch off from frequent detours during the science. The branching is not very numerous, but it is used in an engaging way and allows for certain subplots to be concluded without having to figure out the identity of the culprit.

In any other game, it would be a bad ending, but here it is oddly happy, giving the NPCs a satisfying ending at the expense of the overarching mystery. If you go back to the previous chapter to bypass the "real" path, the emotional conclusion may never happen. Sure, as a result you have solved the mystery of the "paralyzed serial murders," but at a great cost.

With diverging paths and two time periods, the game feels like a long shot. I eventually began to groan every time I heard the sirens go off. There are flimsy excuses provided for the subjects' refusal to share information, but this is a story that sometimes feels too long in the cul-de-sac. [But that didn't bother me too much in this game, which mixes genres brilliantly, indulging in conspiracy theories and dreamlike weirdness while still holding on to its central mystery. It's a philosophical science fiction story, but there are clear limits to future technology and ultimately rational explanations for impossible crimes. Above all, this is a game that respects the art of detective fiction and does it justice.