Spike Chunsoft Hints at AI: The Somnium Releases Sequel News Featuring Hidden Bats Website

Spike Chunsoft is the king of the countdown website. Overnight, the developer launched a brand new teaser website that’s making fans’ tongues waggle.

This new site is called Hidden Bats and has 9 stacked CRT TVs, the middle one lets you play a rather bizarre video called Bats489 which is an unlisted video on the Hidden Bats YouTube channel. Try watching this before you’ve had your morning coffee!

So, for those of you eagerly awaiting AI: The Somnium Files – nirvanA Initiative, you might have noticed a few things. These weird images might look weird out of context, but many of the graphics and images from the video above are actually included in the game’s announcement trailer as well. Additionally, the teaser site that led to the sequel’s announcement features nine eyes. We expect nine to be a key number in this follow-up.

Besides this bizarre website, there is also an “official” one Hidden Bats Twitter account, with a single tweet simply saying “48:00:00” and linking to another website called the Sunaiki Foundation. And from this site, which presumably represents an in-game company, there’s a lot to shine about.

There are a number of posts on the What’s New page, including one from April 1 announcing the appointment of a new company president, Kagura Iwato. Other posts discover the president’s disappearance just days later and set up a corporate task force to search for him.

Then the top post from May 6 shows two other missing persons with photos – Aine Ichirai, a high school student, and Binato Tohara, a university student. Both students live in Saitama Prefecture.

The “About” page is a typical company information page that describes in simple terms what the company does, when it was founded and where it is based. Interestingly, while the company is based in Tokyo, it has an office in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Clicking the Patrons button will take you back to the countdown.

This isn’t the first time Spike Chunsoft has used sophisticated means to promote its games or stir up chatter among fans, as the company did something unusual for the original AI: The Somnium Files. It opened a Lemniscate YouTube channel – Lemniscate is an in-game media office and talent agency. Many of the videos on this channel feature Iris (A-Set) in a vlog series that takes place in four different storylines. In some of them, Iris does a “Let’s Play” while in others she directly discusses the “Cyclops Case,” the main case in the first game.

Thank you Greatsong1 for sending me the tips on how to start this website! We’ll be keeping an eye on it over the weekend to see what other juicy details we can glean from it.

Share your theories with us in the comments below!