999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors - Nintendo DS Review

999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is a visual novel / adventure game that combines an interesting premise with solid puzzles that will keep you engaged for hours on end.

If you've never played a visual novel before you might have seen pictures of one on the internet. They usually have a big eyed, huge breasted anime girl with a large text box taking up the bottom half of the screen with her telling you about the depraved sexual acts you are about to perform. These games are made up of mostly text with small player decisions along the way that change the outcome of the story. The main focus being the plot and characters you interact with.

Like this but with much more item hunts and much less bukkake

999 is much like this but with point and click / "escape the room" scenarios in-between the dialogue. The story of 999 follows a group of nine characters that have been kidnapped and brought to an empty ship resembling the Titanic with the goal of solving puzzles to reach the final ninth door exit.

Each character is assigned a wrist band with a number from 1 to 9 and only certain combinations of numbers are allowed to enter certain doors. This is based on a digital root system where a numbers are added together until the last digit remains 3 + 5 + 8 = 16, 1 + 6 = 7. So a team equaling 7 can go through the appropriately marked door.

Behind these doors the player will find standard point and click adventure puzzles with the main goal of opening the exit. Items will be gathered and combined and are manipulated in 3D in the inventory screen to gather more information. The player will solve puzzles ranging from finding the correct key for a lock to math based number input devices. The puzzles are for the most part interesting with the common hurdles of point and click adventures present (pixel hunting, bizarre logic), but the real draw of the game is in the story.

While the characters themselves are mostly stereotypical (the huge strong man, the pigtailed lolita) the mystery around them and why they have been brought on this ship is always able to keep you interested. Without spoiling too much, the story involves such topics as Morphogenetic Fields (fields that connect all living things allowing transfer of information), Kurt Vonnegut and philosophical paradoxes like Locke's Socks.The story is surprisingly mature and is definitely not for younger audiences, not due to the graphic content (which there is) but the themes and ideas dealt with in the game.

The way the story is presented is also quite unique. Because of the requirements of entering the doors, it would be impossible to see everything on the first play-though. The player will ultimately fail during their first attempt to finish the game, usually resulting in death. But, after getting a "Game Over" screen you return to the beginning of the game to try a different path. With six possible endings in total (the final one being the "true" ending) players are allowed to try out different puzzle rooms and interact with different characters on each play-thorough. To speed up this process, text already read in previous games can be fast-forwarded though by holding right on the D-Pad.

While this is a better solution than having to sit through story parts you have already seen, it is still very slow considering the amount of text in this game. You'll be holding the right button for upwards of five minutes to skip dialogue and some rooms (especially the first one) will have to be played over and over again.

 

Despite this, finding out new aspects of the story and seeing parts unfold where you where previously absent is extremely entertaining. There is always some new twist or revelation and, this can't be stressed enough, without giving away anything, the entire multiple play-though mechanic is integrated amazingly with the gameplay and story.

BOTTOM LINE:

999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is an excellent adventure game with well thought out puzzles and one of the best stories presented on the Nintendo DS that will keep you up for hours on end to see its conclusion.

8.5/10