System Played: Nintendo DS
Year Released: 2009
Year Reviewed: 2021
Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is a ‘visual novel’ incorporating adventure game-like puzzles, designed by Kotaro Uchikoshi at Chunsoft.
The story is something like an anime version of the Saw movies, with our protagonist, Junpei, waking up on a ship with no knowledge of how he got there, trapped in a room quickly filling up with seawater.
This is your induction into the “Nonary Game”, quickly running into 8 other individuals who all claim to have been similarly abducted and now find themselves with numbered bracelets on, apparently linked to a bomb inside of them which will explode if they don’t follow the rules of the game.
There’s some (overly?) complicated setup about everyone being assigned a number, and doors aboard the ship having numbers, and adding the numbers together determines who can and can’t go through certain doors… and so on.
The game is a split of visual novel (text you read, supported by visuals) and escape room-like puzzles which wouldn’t be out of place in an adventure game.
The puzzle rooms require use of the touchscreen to navigate the room and tap on assorted stuff.
The environment graphics are pre-rendered static images, so look alright, detailed enough at least for you to be able to make out individual elements to jab the stylus at. Moving around the room is done by pressing arrow icons, which jumps between fixed screens (Myst-like). It can be a bit disorientating, but there is also an overhead view of the room for reference.
As you click around cupboards and desk drawers and the like, you find clues and items which contribute toward solving whatever puzzle your captor has, for whatever reason, thought up. Typically, you win a key to exit the room and progress on.
I wasn’t terribly encouraged by the fact that I was stumped for a long while by the very first escape room in the game, which was more of a tutorial than anything!.
In the end, the solution wasn’t complicated, I was just missing one of the two items needed (leading to all sorts of over complicated guessing going on). The best tip for playing 999 I can give, is to be meticulous about searching every inch of a room if the solution to any puzzle isn’t obvious. Chances are you’re just missing a key item.
The game holds your hand through most of the puzzles, telling you what to do as you go, so you don’t really have to work anything out on your own. It’s typically more a process of navigating the room, finding the information and items needed by tapping everything/where.
There are a few exceptions, and a lot of the puzzles are number-based, often around the ‘digital root’ principle the game is obsessed with.
I struggled with the ‘magic square’ puzzle, where you need to arrange numbers 1 to 9 in a 3x3 grid and have all the directions add up to 15. I was getting nowhere with it and could have spent hours in trial and error. It came straight up when I googled it, so guess it is a well known mathematical thing you either know or you don’t. The final puzzle is a game of sudoku, which I’ve never really played, but did manage to solve myself. Aren’t I smart!
Fortunately, despite how the game presents itself, there are no timed elements or limitations on how long you have to solve the puzzle rooms, even the first one where you’re trapped in a room supposedly quickly filling with water. So you can’t “fail” for taking too long, which is probably a good thing, but maybe also takes away some jeopardy from proceedings.
Likewise the titular “Nine Hours” overall time limit placed on the Nonary Game is just there for story purposes, and doesn’t play out anything like real time.
Everything outside of the puzzle rooms is novel. You don’t move around or anything, just read the text and very occasionally make a choice or decision, which can alter the dialogue/story path.
From what I’d heard of 999 before playing it, the story was supposed to be “good”. I don’t think I’d go that far.
All the characters are anime caricatures, and the writing/plot wouldn’t be out of place in a manga. I found it “okay” at best.
After a few hours, the game came to an unsatisfying and not especially illuminating conclusion. At this point you’re told there are multiple endings (6), and if you want to see the “real” conclusion, well then you’re just going to have to play through it again, you can’t see it on the first run...
Well, this wasn’t great news.
I did take a punt on a second playthrough, despite not expecting it to be a good time investment.
The choices you made last time are highlighted, so you can make sure you pick different ones, and dialogue you’ve already read can be “fast-forwarded”, lessening the shittiness of forced replaying, a bit. You can’t skip any puzzles you already did though (but can hopefully remember the solution from last time).
In the second playthrough, you know certain things about certain characters, so can make choices with this foreknowledge to prevent certain outcomes. I’m not saying it's a good setup, as I always resent being forced to replay in order to progress.
It didn’t feel like a total rehash. The first ⅓ of it was pretty similar, but the rest was different puzzles and dialogue. I found it compelling enough to carry on, but I’m still not sure exactly why… it certainly did drag on, and the “real” ending was also just absolute tosh!
I will admit to enjoying it a little bit more on the second playthrough. By the end, I’d seen 13 of the 16 puzzles and the proper ending, with no intention of playing more.
Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors has very minimal animation, limited to things like doors opening. The character portraits are almost completely static apart from blinking a frame or two of “mouth moving” as new dialogue text is displayed. I understand this is par for “visual novel” games.
The music and SFX are similarly restrained, used to elevate the text, a bit.
As a visual novel, I didn’t find the story in Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors to be especially gripping, nor is there much of a payoff for soldiering through twice. The puzzles aren’t that smart or rewarding, and the combination of the two elements doesn’t equal more than a sum of its parts. A cult game, appealing to a certain audience perhaps.
The story is something like an anime version of the Saw movies, with our protagonist, Junpei, waking up on a ship with no knowledge of how he got there, trapped in a room quickly filling up with seawater.
This is your induction into the “Nonary Game”, quickly running into 8 other individuals who all claim to have been similarly abducted and now find themselves with numbered bracelets on, apparently linked to a bomb inside of them which will explode if they don’t follow the rules of the game.
There’s some (overly?) complicated setup about everyone being assigned a number, and doors aboard the ship having numbers, and adding the numbers together determines who can and can’t go through certain doors… and so on.
The game is a split of visual novel (text you read, supported by visuals) and escape room-like puzzles which wouldn’t be out of place in an adventure game.
The puzzle rooms require use of the touchscreen to navigate the room and tap on assorted stuff.
The environment graphics are pre-rendered static images, so look alright, detailed enough at least for you to be able to make out individual elements to jab the stylus at. Moving around the room is done by pressing arrow icons, which jumps between fixed screens (Myst-like). It can be a bit disorientating, but there is also an overhead view of the room for reference.
As you click around cupboards and desk drawers and the like, you find clues and items which contribute toward solving whatever puzzle your captor has, for whatever reason, thought up. Typically, you win a key to exit the room and progress on.
I wasn’t terribly encouraged by the fact that I was stumped for a long while by the very first escape room in the game, which was more of a tutorial than anything!.
In the end, the solution wasn’t complicated, I was just missing one of the two items needed (leading to all sorts of over complicated guessing going on). The best tip for playing 999 I can give, is to be meticulous about searching every inch of a room if the solution to any puzzle isn’t obvious. Chances are you’re just missing a key item.
The game holds your hand through most of the puzzles, telling you what to do as you go, so you don’t really have to work anything out on your own. It’s typically more a process of navigating the room, finding the information and items needed by tapping everything/where.
There are a few exceptions, and a lot of the puzzles are number-based, often around the ‘digital root’ principle the game is obsessed with.
I struggled with the ‘magic square’ puzzle, where you need to arrange numbers 1 to 9 in a 3x3 grid and have all the directions add up to 15. I was getting nowhere with it and could have spent hours in trial and error. It came straight up when I googled it, so guess it is a well known mathematical thing you either know or you don’t. The final puzzle is a game of sudoku, which I’ve never really played, but did manage to solve myself. Aren’t I smart!
Fortunately, despite how the game presents itself, there are no timed elements or limitations on how long you have to solve the puzzle rooms, even the first one where you’re trapped in a room supposedly quickly filling with water. So you can’t “fail” for taking too long, which is probably a good thing, but maybe also takes away some jeopardy from proceedings.
Likewise the titular “Nine Hours” overall time limit placed on the Nonary Game is just there for story purposes, and doesn’t play out anything like real time.
Everything outside of the puzzle rooms is novel. You don’t move around or anything, just read the text and very occasionally make a choice or decision, which can alter the dialogue/story path.
From what I’d heard of 999 before playing it, the story was supposed to be “good”. I don’t think I’d go that far.
All the characters are anime caricatures, and the writing/plot wouldn’t be out of place in a manga. I found it “okay” at best.
After a few hours, the game came to an unsatisfying and not especially illuminating conclusion. At this point you’re told there are multiple endings (6), and if you want to see the “real” conclusion, well then you’re just going to have to play through it again, you can’t see it on the first run...
Well, this wasn’t great news.
I did take a punt on a second playthrough, despite not expecting it to be a good time investment.
The choices you made last time are highlighted, so you can make sure you pick different ones, and dialogue you’ve already read can be “fast-forwarded”, lessening the shittiness of forced replaying, a bit. You can’t skip any puzzles you already did though (but can hopefully remember the solution from last time).
In the second playthrough, you know certain things about certain characters, so can make choices with this foreknowledge to prevent certain outcomes. I’m not saying it's a good setup, as I always resent being forced to replay in order to progress.
It didn’t feel like a total rehash. The first ⅓ of it was pretty similar, but the rest was different puzzles and dialogue. I found it compelling enough to carry on, but I’m still not sure exactly why… it certainly did drag on, and the “real” ending was also just absolute tosh!
I will admit to enjoying it a little bit more on the second playthrough. By the end, I’d seen 13 of the 16 puzzles and the proper ending, with no intention of playing more.
Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors has very minimal animation, limited to things like doors opening. The character portraits are almost completely static apart from blinking a frame or two of “mouth moving” as new dialogue text is displayed. I understand this is par for “visual novel” games.
The music and SFX are similarly restrained, used to elevate the text, a bit.
As a visual novel, I didn’t find the story in Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors to be especially gripping, nor is there much of a payoff for soldiering through twice. The puzzles aren’t that smart or rewarding, and the combination of the two elements doesn’t equal more than a sum of its parts. A cult game, appealing to a certain audience perhaps.
5/10
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