Zero Escape director's next game, AI: The Somnium Files, is out July

The director of the Zero Escape series, which are some of the best visual novels you can play, has a new game in the works called AI: The Somnium Files, and it'll arrive on PC on July 25, developer Spike Chunsoft has announced.

Director Kotaro Uchikoshi told Gematsu this week that the game will have less cutscenes than what we're used to from Zero Escape, and is made "mainly for adventure game fans", suggesting a focus on puzzles. You play detective Kaname Date, who is on the hunt for a serial killer in Tokyo after a women is found dead on a merry-go-round, her eye gouged out. You'll have a prime suspect straightaway: a girl found nearby with a bloody ice pick in her hand, but all is not as it seems.

It sounds utterly surreal. As well as real-world investigation, Date can enter people's dreams thanks to an artificial eye, hence why the trailer above shows a polar bear about to saw a woman in half. She'll also have an AI assistant called Aiba, and the cast includes a light novel author and a teen internet pop star.

The Steam page is live here, if you want to give it a look. Katharine's 90/100 review of Zero Escape: The Nonary Games is here, in case you want to know what all the fuss is about.

Thanks, RPS.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.