My 100 Video Game Challenge (2024) #31: 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors

Played on: PlayStation 4

It's been an incredibly chaotic and busy Summer on my end, which is why I haven't posted one of these write-ups since June. Fortunately, I have been keeping up with my video game experiences when I can, thoroughly trouncing my early record from last year's attempt at a 100 video game challenge. That effort continues with an old favourite game that I played through and completed with Sarah; 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors.

Originally released exclusively for Nintendo DS in 2009 (2010 for us in North America), 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is a visual novel/escape room game developed by Japanese developer, Chunsoft, now Spike Chunsoft, as the first installment of what would later be known as the 'Zero Escape' series. I discovered this game by chance within an American GameStop back in my early 20's, picking it up on a whim so that I had something to play on my handheld while my family drove to and from Chicago on a family trip in 2011. After playing through 999's initial DS build, and powering through the whole thing before the family vehicle had even returned home, I quickly declared it one of my all-time favourite DS games; A sinister, enthralling and shocking mystery-thriller with a fantastic escape room hook, well before real-life escape rooms had become a mainstream sensation like they are now!

999 has since been remade and refined with a modern HD build on PS4, PS Vita, PC, and most recently, Xbox One, where it's also paired with its successor title, Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward in a duology called 'Zero Escape: The Nonary Games'. I'm very happy that this debut Zero Escape experience has been liberated from its former DS exclusivity as well, because a 999 remake for modern platforms, especially one that includes its sequel at no extra cost, is a fantastic way for new players to discover this criminally underrated series of games. Unfortunately for me, I may have done a bit too good of a job hooking Sarah on Zero Escape too, as she's still in possession of my copy of Zero Escape: The Nonary Games many months later, happily playing through Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward as I type this!

In any case, 999 takes place in 2027, the near future, and puts players in the role of protagonist, Junpei, or, 'Jumpy', as he's sometimes called by his childhood friend and fellow prisoner, Akane. Waking up on a mysterious abandoned cruise ship, Junpei joins the aforementioned Akane, along with seven other strangers, to play a 'Nonary Game' under the watchful eye of Zero, a mysterious assailant in a gas mask. After Zero explains to the prisoners that the ship they're on will sink in exactly nine hours, Junpei and the others must use their numbered bracelets to break into teams and explore the ship's numbered doors, each of which leads into an escape room full of puzzles to solve in order to open a path ahead. Their goal is to locate a door with the number 9 painted on it, a promised exit from their imprisonment for any survivors. After all, if the rules of the game are broken, a bomb in the offending player's guts will be detonated, dispatching them in grisly fashion!

Why are Junpei and co. forced to play this mysterious game? What's the connection between the players, if any? Why are they on a cruise ship? Why are they solving escape room puzzles? These are among the many mysteries surrounding 999's enigmatic narrative, and just about all of them eventually give way to some truly unexpected answers. 999's superb storytelling and characterization are easily, and unsurprisingly, the star of the show here, though its clever escape room challenges also make for solid icing on the cake, giving this game, and this series, a strong hook that separates it from other visual novels and mystery games.

Your decisions carry significant weight in 999 as well. Making the wrong decision could lead to tragic outcomes that leave Junpei and his fellow players dead, resulting in one of several 'bad' endings that obscure a true path forward in the narrative, eventually leading to the 'true ending', once you've effectively put the mystery together and made the right decisions. This does admittedly mean that you'll need to play and replay several dialogue sections and escape room sequences more than once (you can at least rapidly skip through text you've already read by holding the Square Button during story scenes), but even then, Junpei will sometimes recall information from other playthroughs during alternate story paths, altering the narrative further when you revisit certain sequences. How is this possible? Believe it or not, it's more than a gameplay device! The story has its own explanation as well!

It's tough to adequately do 999 justice with just a few paragraphs of text. This is a game that benefits greatly from players knowing little to nothing about its characters and twists, and I don't want to spoil a single one of them. Even on repeat playthroughs, 999 is so incredibly well-written that it never seems to get dull, at least not for me. Sure, some of the repeat playing can be tedious for impatient players at times, but even that is nicely woven into the overall mystery, and eventually justified with a truly subversive and satisfying payoff, once you make it to the True Ending. The experience really pops on modern HD consoles to boot, with new voice acting and animations really boosting the impressive hand-drawn art from 999's original DS build. Admittedly, there are a couple of spoiler-y gameplay moments that are built around the DS hardware, which don't totally translate to current consoles and PC, but even considering that, 999 delivers a very polished HD update that will better help the game stand the test of time.

I wish I could say more about it, but for want of preserving its many surprises, I'll simply conclude by saying that I love 999 just as much now as I did back in the early 2010's, as did Sarah after she found her own way to its True Ending. There's nothing else quite like this game, and its mysteries and surprises are as compelling as ever in 2024, 15 years after its initial DS release in Japan. Fans of mysteries, escape rooms and Japanese thrillers in particular should thus consider 999 required playing!

IF I HAD TO SCORE IT: 9/10