As I said when I reviewed Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, one of the winners of my Celebrating All Things Spooky contest picked the game review as their prize and chose The Nonary Games.
The second game in The Nonary Games is Virtue’s Last Reward.
My relationship with Virtue’s Last Reward was a strange one. I went into it expecting a similar experience to 999 and was immediately put off. 999 had me invested right away, with a clear threat of danger and an urgent need for the characters to escape.
When I started Virtue’s Last Reward, on the other hand, the danger felt less immediate, the goal seemed less focused, and I was forced to endure an AI character with one of the most annoying voices I’ve ever heard. (Really, I’ll take Teepo to Zero Jr.) The shift to 3D graphics was also jarring, and I felt both the controls and graphics were better in 999.
It took me about 35 hours to play Virtue’s Last Reward. For the first 20 hours, I saw it as a more complicated, less interesting take on 999 with an annoying cast of characters and a plot that had some interesting moments but was nothing special.
For the remaining 15 hours, I couldn’t put the game down.
There are a few reasons for this dramatic shift. First, I had to stop comparing it to 999. Even though Virtue’s Last Reward is its sequel, they have significant differences. 999 managed to feel like a grounded story despite its subject matter, while Virtue’s Last Reward is straight-up science fiction.
Second, the story just has a slower build-up. Things start off relatively calm, but once the plot gets going, it really gets going.
Third, I just had the bad luck to start with a route that annoyed me instead of intriguing me. And the branch that caught my attention the quickest, I got to last. With a few different choices, it might not have taken me so long to get invested in it.
Click for Virtue's Last Reward spoilers
I started out on Phi’s path, so it wasn’t too long before I encountered her betraying me for a choice I hadn’t made yet. Then when I went back and chose betray, she picked ally.
Since this was so early in the game for me, I reacted with, “Oh, it’s going to be one of these games” and found it to be an annoying trap, instead of knowing these situations are unusual and tie into the game’s overall plot.
Meanwhile, the middle branch discusses the events of 999, which got my attention right away, but that was the last branch I started.
(I still do find the characters more annoying than 999’s cast, though, and I’m not sure what happened to Clover’s personality.)
Virtue’s Last Reward also has an unusual story structure in that certain parts are locked until you find information in other routes. Unlike in 999, this didn’t require repeating sections, and you never even had to repeat any puzzles, due to the way the game is structured.
Bouncing between routes without actually getting any endings probably influenced my view at first as well, but once I started moving forward and seeing character endings, the plot really picked up.
While it started out slow, soon it started in with plot revelations, new mysteries, and some pretty crazy twists. The only thing I disliked about the end was that it ends on a cliffhanger.
Click for major Virtue's Last Reward spoilers
Now that I’ve taken some time to think about it, I know the cliffhanger is because the Mars mission test site is itself will be a “game” with puzzles like the Nonary Game, and therefore it will be the focus of the third game.
But in the moment, I was all excited to see Sigma learn what happened at the test site and resolve the plot, only to be greeted with credits and an epilogue.
The gameplay was good, the same mix of visual novel + escape rooms as in the previous game, with puzzles that were good for the most part. At first, I disliked how every room ended with you finding one required safe password and one optional safe password, but I got used to it by the end.
Virtue’s Last Reward might be very different from its predecessor, but once I got deeper into the plot, I was really happy I played it. It might not be perfect (most of its humor fell flat for me, especially that annoying rabbit), but it got pretty interesting. And I’ll be honest… the cliffhanger left me anxious to get Zero Time Dilemma.
That concludes my playthrough of The Nonary Games. Have you played Virtue’s Last Reward? What did you think of it, and how do you feel it compares to 999?
