an interesting premise fails completely to make any part of this experience enjoyable at all. at some points it just makes zero fucking sense - the mystery is so poorly constructed that i was able to correctly guess the culprit through completely incorrect logic. not an unironic way to solve the mystery i suppose, considering the many moments where i yelled at my laptop out of frustration considering just how fucking stupid some of the reveals here really are. characters are completely underdeveloped as well, and depending on your choices the game can be extremely poorly paced - just overall a really not good - yet entertaining - time. whatever.

This may not be the best game on the DS, but is one of the best DS games. Although this game has been ported to traditional platforms, the DS is the only platform that has the game's complete soul.

The concept of the game is solid and on the tin: 9 people have 9 hours to make their way through 9 escape rooms, or die. The character writing has a small dusting of anime flavoring, but the translation is a wonderful example of fun localization. The DS version is voice-less, but later ports contain full voice acting in English and Japanese.

Only 3 rooms can be explored per play-through, and the game expects many runs to find its final puzzles in the true ending. Full and partial replays are easier tracked and accessed in the game's re-releases.

Ports of the game may feature "updated graphics," but I personally think they make the elements of the game less visually harmonious. The low pixel count of the DS helped unify the flat drawings with the pre-rendered 3D environments you explore and the 3D puzzle items you interact with. Seeing these low polygon models on more powerful consoles makes the game look dated in a way that's more easily glossed over in the now retro feel of the original platform.

Every puzzle is designed with the DS' touch screen in mind, a feeling that cannot be perfectly captured with cursor controls. Many puzzles involve inputting passwords, arranging keys, or examining objects for clues in a way that is inherently less engaging, and remove the light role-playing element of mimicking the frantic note-taking of the player character.

Most crucially, 999's true ending has a twist that will make or break the player's experience - and is built around the DS's two screens. Narratively, it is a bit of a genre jump, and makes little sense on paper. In practice, on the DS, a highly dramatic scene shows two sides of a conversation, with one perspective per screen. The impact comes from switching the player's focus from the internal thoughts of one character to another as the last words spoken aloud of the other remain on their screen. In later ports, this exchange is reduced to showing one screen at a time, sequentially, which is incredibly clunky and hard to follow by comparison.

There are other moments like this that show intense awareness on the developer's part on how people would be playing this game on the system it was released. One puzzle flips the screens' displays, forcing you to hold the system upside down to solve it. A harmless gimmick that is cute on a handheld, but obviously cut from the later versions.

In my rating system, an average game is 2 stars. I award Zero Escape: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, 3 stars on the Nintendo DS, a solid B rank game. The plot is engaging enough, but the experience of playing the game on the DS elevates the script and the types of puzzles contained. When I played it on the PS4, it felt like a 2 star game. Still fun, but if it were my only experience with the game, I'd be wondering why this game was remembered so fondly.

Protag: Ow, my ass hurts-

Character: That reminds me of this story where this scientist hit his ass on the edge of a table, but didn’t feel it. Then, months later, he died of ass pain. They call it Temporal Ass Pain or TAP

Protag: I’d TAP that-

Character: Say we took two asses, and we both slapped them really hard, there’d be a 56.000079% chance that one of them won’t feel it. That pain didn’t just get absorbed by the ass tissue, it’s being transported to the future. They call people who don’t feel Ass pain until later…TAPers…I wonder…if they could transport ass pain to someone else-

Zero: Ive injected Ass Poison into all of your left buttcheeks. You have exactly 2 hours to solve my Ass Slap puzzle.

Pela primeira vez na vida um adventure casa uma trama sensacional de VN com gameplay fantástico de escape the room, utilizando de uma mistura sensacional de elementos reais com fictícios e um enredo extremamente elaborado que considera todas as rotas.

Para acessar o True Ending é necessário realizar determinados eventos em uma ordem específica, o que fica aí como única coisa que não gostei, porque não é intuitivo e requer rejogar o jogo, ainda que pulando seções já lidas, não evitando o entediante processo de resolver novamente puzzles e passar por diálogos e cutscenes, ainda que de forma acelerada.

PS: A versão remasterizada "The Nonary Games" traz uma forma de saltar entre as rotas de forma visual, o que resolve o problema da repetição de caminhos já anteriormente explorados. Isso torna a experiência muito mais agradável, o capaz de subir a nota pra 5 estrelas. Mas essa nota fica para o "The Nonary Games" e não pra versão original, no DS.

Years ago, if someone had told me 999 was a name I’d be hearing again over the years, I’d have my doubts about it. The game seemed as niche as can be: It was a visual novel heavy on text and grim undertones that I only ever saw discussed in Japanese games circles. Yet, here we are, with The Nonary Games and Zero Time Dilemma available across a variety of platforms.

I’m unsure how I even came to buy 999. I remember trying it out and having a not so good first impression, then not looking at the game again. I must have seen it on a sale one day and, maybe thinking of giving it a second chance, I brought it home. It remained on my backlog until the day I was looking for a more slow-paced game to play. The day finally came, and gosh, am I ever glad I gave a game a second try.

9 Persons, 9 Hours, 9 Doors, or 999, for short, tells the story of nine people who are kidnapped and trapped on a ship. Their fate is to play the Nonary Game, a perverse and elaborate game that gives them nine hours to go around the ship gathering keys and finding numbered doors in search of an exit, all while their life is on the line.

The first impression is truly bad, mainly because the protagonist, Junpei, is a complete dumbass. he’s one of those dull, “just a normal guy until […]” main characters who are meant to be projected upon and are completely unlikeable as characters. And unlikeable he is, as we spend a bunch of time stuck with him drooling over a female friend who’s also on the ship. Basically, he's male gaze given a name and dialogue box.

Unfortunately, male gaze is a big part of the game. Expect to see impossible boobs and immature jokes, as well as a teenager's idea of romance coming up a lot. There's a Q&A with the author online, and you can tell from that he's not even ashamed of it. Were I to judge the game from the first half an hour, I’d say it was going to be insufferable due to these issues.

Fortunately, however, once we get past the intro, we get less exposed to Junpei’s thoughts and more to the rest of the cast, all of which are much more interesting people than him. Also much more fascinating is the plot of the game, which immediately establishes how high the stakes are, and how horribly everyone will die if they fail the game.

The writing is fantastic. It feels truly novel-like, complete with a very descriptive narrator. This is especially important because of how the game is mostly made up of text and static images. It leaves much more to your imagination, greatly enhancing many of its scenes, especially the more sinister ones. This is an advantage intrinsic to books that visual novels can also make use of.

Unlike their paper counterparts, however, VNs can also make use of sound, and the sound design in 999 reinforces its writing very well. The sound of stepping on metal floors, threading on grimy floors, doors opening, the ship creaking… To say nothing of the excellent soundtrack, which not only appears during cutscenes, but is played during puzzle sections as well.

The gameplay sections in 999 take place in escape rooms. As the game goes on, you’ll be asked to choose doors to go through, and each time you do, Junpei and the characters that accompanied him get trapped into a room and have to find and combine various items to solve puzzles and exit the room.

I like how the difficulty of these sections sits in a nice, comfortable place. The game rewards thoroughness instead of jumping to crazy conclusions, so it’s unlikely you’ll end up in the same situations as in, say, Phoenix Wright, where a very specific item must be used on a specific person because that can incite a reaction you couldn’t possibly know about. In 999, so long as you’re a careful observer, the solution will always be in your grasp.

The escape rooms are half the fun of the game, and it’s great how, the way the endings are laid out, you’ll explore most of the rooms to get them all (only one is technically skippable). This proves to be a double-edged sword when it comes to the endings, however, since they’re mostly decided by your choice of doors.

Picking a door is essentially a blind choice, and even in hindsight it’s hard to figure out by yourself why the game ends in certain ways if you take certain paths. I was lucky to find the true ending path by accident, but a friend missed it by a room and was met with a seemingly inevitable fate, which frustrated him. To me, it was pretty logical why that happened, but I happened to know something he couldn’t have.

This is, of course, a moot point in The Nonary Games, which fixed this issue by having a flowchart and adding the ability to skip back and forth in the game. In the DS version, you kinda need a guide to make sure you don’t waste a bunch of time getting repeat endings.

Regardless of the version you play on, the twist that leads to the true ending, and the fact that you cannot get that ending on your first try, is some of the most amazing video game storytelling I’ve seen. 999 is the kind of narrative that you can only create in a videogame, nowhere else.

I might have my gripes with 999, but it stands that it was a fantastic experience, both story and gameplay-wise. The original DS version, which is what I played, might be hard to locate nowadays, but fortunately, the game is available on the Nonary Games collection, which I recommend picking up wholeheartedly. Always nice to see these games preserved somehow.

(Back to the Q&A with the author, it caught me by surprise how the author justified Lotus’s outfit with “she likes it” (Q8) and insisted her breasts are not implants, they’re “all natural” (Q70). Sheesh. Could he really not have made up a better excuse? The game establishes she’s out of a job, so why didn’t he say “she’s working part-time as a dancer” instead of digging an even bigger hole? The woman has two daughters to feed, has bills to pay, I would have bought it. And what’s so important about a character’s breasts being implants or not?

This juvenile attitude coming from an otherwise very capable writer is so emblematic of the boys’ club mentality pervasive in the gaming industry, it’s sickening.)

My first visual novel :) I really loved unraveling this mystery bit by bit. I really liked the puzzle rooms and always wanted to know how the story would continue. The game had a very cool setup, an exciting basic mystery and managed to keep me interested for the entire length of the game. I thought the amount of "anime bullshit" was just right. Sure, you have to accept some things as given, even if certain plot points don't make a lot of sense and the story gets very wild towards the end, but overall I found it much more believable than the later parts. Still a great little insider tip for me.

The extremely low level of difficulty prevents it from being a good puzzle game, but perhaps more importantly it contributes to the strange lack of tension and intensity that should be very present within the game's scenario, best illustrated by the final "challenge." Although in my opinion the story goes one plot twist too deep, it's still entertaining to watch it unfold, especially thanks to the game's clever subversion of Japanese character tropes. But the non-notable gameplay causes it to leave your brain soon after it's over, and I doubt I'll ever play through it again. There's also the massive missed opportunity of the game not keeping track of how long it took you to complete each puzzle- trying to beat your best time would probably upgrade redoing escapes from just tolerable to actually fun.