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.)