When 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors released in 2010 for the Nintendo DS, it quickly became one of my favorite games. Part visual novel and part puzzle game, the Kotaro Uchikoshi directed title featured nine characters trapped on a ship, where they had to participate in a Saw-type game in order to survive. I adored both halves of the game, and the narrative’s multiple twists had me hooked. While the story was awesome, there were some really rough edges on the gameplay side that really limited its appeal.
First off, in order to see the game’s true ending, players had to play through the same puzzles multiple times, and re-read dialogue they had already seen before. This monotony was troublesome on its own, but when paired with the slowest text speed imaginable, it became insufferable for some. 999 was its own worst enemy, as all of its problems were brought on by sloppy design choices. All of these issues were fixed in its sequel, Virtue’s Last Reward, as a flow chart was added to remove players having to play the same sequences repeatedly, and players no longer had to wait for text to crawl across the screen at a snail’s pace. It was a massive improvement at the time, and now 999 is getting these improvements in a collection of both titles called Zero Escape: The Nonary Games.
999’s artwork still looks great.
999: Remastered
The big draw of The Nonary Games is that 999 is finally getting the updated version it always neede...