999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors

 

Chunsoft, or I guess Spike Chunsoft as they are now known, are a developer I really like.  They've been around since the 80s but I was really made aware of them in the mid 2010s when I got my hands on a very cheap copy of Kamaitachi no Yoru for the Super Nintendo.  Kamaitachi isn't really a "game" per se, it's more of a choose your own adventure novel slammed into a SNES cartridge.  There is a game element to it, the process of combing through the story to deduce who did the murder that takes place at the start of the game but gameplay consists entirely of reading through long passages of text with very little actual input from the player.  It sounds boring as fuck when I write it like that but Chunsoft are quite adept at weaving a decent mystery and so the game is carried by strong writing and some clever twists and turns.

Fast forward from the Super Nintendo to 2009 and Chunsoft are still at it with the first entry in what is now known as the Zero Escape series, 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors.  No longer just a sound novel, 999 has graduated into a full on visual novel with character art and even, if you're playing the PC re-release like I was, voice acting.  The original version didn't have the VA so its a little closer to its roots in that regard, I suppose and the VA in both English and Japanese is sort of crap so maybe the DS is the way to go.

The gameplay is pretty simple with it consisting mainly of reading the story and making choices at various key moments.  Unlike something like Kamaitachi though, 999 splits its talky, novelly sections up with point and click adventure segments where you poke around a room and solve puzzles.  The puzzles are mostly pretty easy and getting stuck usually means that you've missed some clickable aspect of the environments you're in but they are a welcome addition either way.

They story is sort of hard to talk about in a review like this because the story is all there really is to this game.  If I go into any detail with it and spoil it then there's no real reason for you to go play it and I DO want you to go play this game, it's good.  To summarize in a not quite accurate way, the game follows 9 people who have been kidnapped onto a sinking ship and have 9 hours to get out or else die in a watery grave.  Doesn't sound too complicated until you factor in that each victim has a numbered bracelet which, through some simple math, allows them to access the numbered doors in the ship which block their escape routes.  The other problem with those bracelets is that they will send a signal to the bomb in their gut if they fuck up and kill them.  So think of it kind of like anime Saw.  That doesn't quite do it justice because writer Kotaro Uchikoshi was fucking ON something (good connotation) when he wrote this game but it's an easy comparison to make.

My one problem, and I will put a spoiler for one of the endings here so stop reading and fuck off to play 999 if you haven't already, is that mistakes in this game feel undeserved and bullshit.  For example, I stumbled into one of the endings where everyone gets murdered at the end but the choices that you make in 999 don't give any indication as to that being the path that you're on.  In Kamaitachi, when I got one of the many bad endings for that game it felt like my fault.  A bad decision somewhere down the line, a misunderstating of the facts.  But in 999 pretty much all the choices you make are "pick a door".  Imagine some guy comes up to you in the street and says "pick a card", so you choose one at random and then he shoots your dog.  You had no way to know that the card you picked was the dog murder card, you'd be pissed.

Thankfully the game doesn't twist and turn quite as much as other Chunsoft games and you can use a flowchart to jump to any previously viewed point in the story to make the other choice so I guess 999 actually ends up being more book-like than the SNES games despite the point and click editions.

Either way, it's a good game, worth playing and it's got a decent steam version that comes bundled with the sequel that, at time of writing, I have never got around to playing.  I'd probably suggest the DS version over the PC version just because I have fond memories of curling up in bed with my DS, a hot beverage and a good mystery but there's nothing overtly wrong with the port so just get comfy in your gaming chair if need be.