999 is, as the title suggests, a game about nine persons who have nine hours to go through nine doors. This is basically a VN with occasional puzzle segments in which you're locked in a room and have to find a way out. The puzzles are not very difficult for the most part, but there were a few towards the end that combined aspects from the previous rooms to make more engaging puzzles that actually took me a while to figure out.

I think the main appeal of this game is the story, and it definitely delivers on that front. It takes a while though for things to get interesting, but it really picks up when you start to figure out why you're trapped on the ship, and how the characters are related to each other. Another interesting aspect is the branching story, where each choice you make has the chance to change the ending you get. It's ideal to play all of the bad endings before going for the true end, but only one of them is actually required.

The presentation is also pretty good, I really enjoyed the voice acting for all of the characters and it helped endear them to me a lot. Music is good, although most of the tracks are kind of forgettable I think it does its job to set the mood and atmosphere well enough.

I played this on Vita, which most people say its an inferior version because of the way the game uses both screens on the DS, but I had it switched to novel mode almost the entire time so I don't think I really lost anything. Either version seems good to me, but I definitely like how well it uses the DS's gimmick.

I am giving this game a 999/1000.

Uma das experiências mais imersivas que eu já tive com jogos. O estilo puzzle em uma história de mistério obviamente combina, e ajuda a te engajar em não só solucionar os enigmas de cada sala - que apesar de simples em maioria, são muito agradáveis de se resolver - mas sim do grande mistério que ronda o navio.

A narrativa é básica, porém muito interessante e utiliza dos recursos da mídia e do sistema muito inteligentemente para te inserir naquela história de forma natural.

Os personagens do jogo são o que mais chamam atenção e deixo aqui que são todos cativantes, nenhum deles é particularmente complexo ou possuí uma quantidade grande de camadas, mas todos são bem fáceis de se investir, o que causa a sensação forte de querer salvar a todos e te inspira a procurar a melhor conclusão para aquela história.

E sobre conclusões, esse jogo não pode ser jogado para um final só, cada final é parte da estrutura da narrativa e com isso intencionalmente você é direcionado a fazer com que o verdadeiro final seja o seu último, te colocando cada vez mais diretamente dentro do que acontece nessa embarcação.

The legendary 999. The game I heard the most about after starting Chunsoft games and this crazy man called Uchikoshi. I finally played it!

It's a visual novel with escape room puzzles. They are cool, but after a while, I started to get tired of them, unfortunately. Sometimes when I am really invested in a story, especially in visual novels, I kinda want to skip gameplay parts because usually nothing really moves the story forward until we return to our novel part. But I did every puzzle, and besides being easy, I now feel smarter :D

The story itself is pretty simple to be honest, and the characters are also very simple. Instead of developing as characters, they were made very charismatic, and pretty fast, you start to like them.

As you might be asking, this review doesn't show someone who liked the game a lot, so why the high rating? Just like the game, it's pretty simple: the game is so well-written. Everything has a connection to something. They took a topic and utilized it very well, no more no less (of course, we have to suspend our disbelief a little, it's still a work of fiction, after all.). There are so many hidden plot points in your face, so many subliminal messages in the puzzles, EVERYTHING has a meaning.

That is what makes 999 so good; it is pretty well-made, well-written, and well-executed. They really sit down and start writing with a burning pen. Definitely one of the best and an amazing start for the later Chunsoft games that I already like so much.

Say, Junpei... Have you ever heard of [Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors]? They say it's a game where you can solve puzzles... And they're actually really good... But not only that... The story is also supposed to be really good, too! It makes me wonder... What if the words I'm saying right now... Aren't even real? What if I'm not even a person... I could just be a [fake character] in a [pointless bit] at the beginning of a [Backloggd review for 999]! I'm not saying I believe that, of course... It's just something to think about.

I'm not as good at exposition dumping about pseudoscience as Kotaro Uchikoshi, but you get the point. Zero Escape's writing is easy to joke about, because it's very silly. The silliness, though, is targeted. It's crafted to serve a purpose, to build out a series of ideas that, over time, take shape as something with real meaning, and even beauty. You begin the game by chuckling over speeches about Ice-9 and glycerin. You end the game sobbing over a game of sudoku.

That's the thing about Kotaro Uchikoshi, the reason why he is my single favourite writer of video games. He doesn't just write deep characters and beautiful, thematically coherent narratives - he goes about it in a way that nobody else would ever even think to do. Nobody, nobody else is writing something like 999 but him. Nobody else is crafting a game in which the artificiality of player choice is expressed as an act of love. Nobody else is turning exposition into an inherent source of comfort and meaning. Nobody else is going to make you cry by asking you to physically flip over your Nintendo DS.

999 seems to often be recommended as some kind of entrypoint into visual novels and maybe point and click, as a mix of both, somewhat similar to Ace Attorney. Hell, it has ladder jokes so you can see the common points.

It’s also an escape game… game. You are locked in places and you’ve got to figure out where to go. The game alternates between these escape puzzles and story sections where the party will progress inside the boat, looking for an exit.


The atmosphere is spot-on

You are locked inside a big boat and it’s gonna sink. The environments are modelized in very basic 3D but this works in the game’s favour because the poor 3D models make everything feel cold, alien and eerie. Similarly, the sound design is really nice. The sounds of the interface also have that eerie feel and the soundtrack manages to convey tension throughout the game.

The story perfectly captivates the vibe of being locked inside a mysterious location which you get to know through your progress in the game and your multiple runs, revisiting locations as the game centres around a few spots. It will introduce future locations early on too so you can get used to it: see that door? It’s locked, but now you know there’s a mysterious door with a mysterious symbol on it.


The puzzles are satisfying but not exceptional

999 is a hybrid between two genres and I don’t think it excels at puzzles. However, they are decent and provide a good amount of fun. I think that a lot of the puzzles are too linear and the solution comes up way too naturally: you usually can only do one thing at the beginning and you’ll easily know what to do next, until the end of the puzzle. For example, you do not get to pick up a lot of items that you’ll use later, especially because of the game’s nature where every puzzle is isolated instead of being a whole

You don’t get to visit the ship yourself but through the story, this is a pretty heavy limit and I think it does not play in the game’s favour as I would actually have loved having the freedom to do so. Linearity aside, it’s just too easy to guess what to do and the characters also give a lot of hints. Honestly, I think most hints sounded silly because the puzzles are simple enough yet you have to read all these talks where the characters are trying to figure out the solution but where at the same time the writing is trying to hide the actual answer.


A story too constrained into a single ending:

A lot of visual novels have multiple paths you can take yet ultimately a single “true” one. 999 is no exception and it comes with the flaws of the genre. The alternative possibilities in this story do not offer much and the main use is to have the player experience multiple attempts at solving the story. This ends up quite repetitive because the information you acquire through the alternative routes is eventually used in the true ending and thus had to be explained again, in a clumsy and redundant manner mostly (although there is a neat gimmick about it too).

Another problem 999 has is that it somewhat lacks a story for a good portion of the game. Because of the way the plot is designed, there aren’t many secrets to be revealed or progress to be made that wouldn’t give away the entire plot. Thus, the plot is heavily concentrated into the true ending of the game. This route is actually quite long and took me about a third of my entire playtime of the game, compared to other ending branches which would be maybe 30 minutes long.

Because the story is so concentrated, the feeling of progress is lessened and the incentives to move forward are limited. There are only little details that matter in most routes and nothing big to retain from them. You do one route, reach a dead end with no explanation of why you failed and you just got to try another path. Thankfully, the PC port has a flowchart allowing you to go back to any point in the story instead of restarting everything, this makes it very convenient to play through the entire content and I am not convinced at all by those who criticise this system.

The reason why I believe the flowchart is essential is that there’s no impact to the choices you make and your progress is up to luck. Almost all of your choices are about which door to go through and you wouldn’t know what happen ahead of time. The other choices are choices that appear pretty inconsequential yet they are required to reach two of the endings. I thought they were really bad. At one point, a character asks a maths question and I had to answer wrong to unlock a certain path: there’s no way I would guess it without indications.

That aside, I did actually enjoy the story and I think they were some very touching moments.


Pseudoscience and fun facts, I say no:

One last thing I strongly dislike about this game is how pedantic it can get. To explain this, I will try to make up a situation that didn’t happen in the game but in a way that would happen in the game:

The group finds a nuclear bomb with a timer counting down. They panic but one character manages to keep their calm and starts explaining, “this is a nuclear bomb, do you know how nuclear science has allowed us to make a nuclear bomb? It was discovered by…”. After a lengthy explanation of how nuclear bombs work, another character will reveal their expertise in this science and start adding some precisions, “hey, this is actually a 1 megaton bomb, the radius of explosion would be around 10 km. If this exploded, we’re all dead!”. After this, we finally get to see the characters do something and how it’s gonna matter in the plot.

Quite a lot of the time, the story is interrupted by this kind of needless jargon you would hear from a high schooler trying to tell you cool science facts, if not pseudoscience. Yeah, the game also has a lot of pseudoscience and because of the way it was introduced I really wasn’t convinced. Not only is the introduction improper but the fact that all of the characters turn into some weirdos with random fun fact encyclopaedias in their head is just absurd to me.


Overall I did enjoy the game and appreciated it. It’s not the VN nor puzzle game I liked the most but I still think it has its merits.

LORE DUMP
LORE DUMP
LORE DUMP
LORE DUMP
LORE DUMP
LORE DUMP
LORE DUMP WHEN WE'RE IN INCREDIBLE DANGER AND NEED TO MOVE
(The twist and how it ties into everything is pretty cool though)

“Yeah I, I hit the bottom. Hit the bottom and escape. Escape.” - Radiohead, (Weird Fishes / Arpeggi, In Rainbows)


Escape, the end, the goal. We all want to escape. We want to escape bad circumstances, we want to escape our past, or maybe we want to escape our fate, escape death. Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors [also known as 999] is about escape. The gameplay, and the narrative are focused on escaping. And despite how focused the game is on escaping, I found myself wanting to do the opposite by the time the final credits wrapped up and the game ended.

999, for those unfamiliar, is a puzzle escape game release originally for the Nintendo DS, and rereleased on various consoles and PC in the years following its original release. The game’s protagonist is a young man by the name of Junpei. Who is kidnapped by a mysterious person known as Zero. From then Junpei awakes upon a cruise liner and is thrusted into the deadly Nonary Game alongside 8 other individuals. All Junpei and the 8 persons are tasked with finding a door with a 9 on it in 9 hours, or else the cruise will sink.

From this point forward your character has to make it through various numbered doors containing puzzle rooms akin to those you’d find on those dingy and grimy iPad escape room games. With each door and character combination you’ll find new information that provides a wider image to what exactly is going on in 999. After entering any combination of doors you’ll find yourself at one of the 6 endings, each with their own significance upon the story of the game.

One of my favorites parts of this game is how each room combination recontextualizes the story and characters for you. With each individual playthrough you’ll find yourself rethinking what what you know and what you learned. You’ll also find yourself rethinking each character, their motives, their words, and their actions. It’s a masterpiece in storytelling by letting the player in on enough information to build suspense, confusion, and excitement. All of it builds up with an absolutely hard-hitting and thought provoking ending which absolutely flips the story on its head and fills in most narrative holes quite perfectly, there’s still stuff I’m realizing about the games story even as I write this. It is one of the most well written insane plots I’ve ever seen in a video game.

It’s not perfect though, there’s one particular big plot thread that had a majorly underwhelming conclusion, I don’t think it’ll be quite a problem the next time I play this game (because I will 100% replay this), but it still slightly irritates me. That being said, a game this narratively dense can’t be perfect in every way, and the overall story is one that doesn’t let you down in the slightest.

I almost forgot to add, but if you look like June dm me. That is all.

I give this game a GIVE ME A P, GIVE ME AN I, GIVE ME A P, GIVE ME AN E. WHAT DOES THAT SPELL?!/10