This year’s Celebrating All Things Spooky contest included a prize where you could pick a game for me to review, and one of the winners asked me to review The Nonary Games.
The Nonary Games is a collection that contains Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Virtue’s Last Reward, the first two games in the Zero Escape series.
(Since I never specified in the rules that it couldn’t be a collection, I should count myself lucky it’s only two games.)
First up, therefore, was Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, which I’ll refer to as 999 from now on for simplicity’s sake.
I’m not sure why it took me so long to play 999. People first recommended the original DS release to me back when it first came out, especially since I enjoyed Ace Attorney so much. That might have been the problem – coming from an Ace Attorney recommendation, I wasn’t pleased with 999’s darker premise.
Whatever the reason was, something put it in my head that 999 wasn’t my sort of game, so I ignored the Zero Escape series for years until I finally bought the Vita version of The Nonary Games… and now that I’ve played it, I can say that yes, this is my sort of game!
Even more than Ace Attorney, I’d describe 999 as a visual novel/adventure game hybrid. The visual novel sections are long and complete with narration, while the gameplay sections put you in rooms where you need to search for clues, use items together, and solve puzzles to escape.
The puzzles are pretty good. They present a challenge without being overly complicated. Usually, if I got really stuck, it was because I’d misunderstood the goal of the puzzle.
Click for 999 spoilers
Such as the final puzzle, where I painstakingly experimented and described different combinations until I got all the hint square to say 9… only for nothing to happen, and hitting the hint button enough times got Junpei to suggest resetting the puzzle and then it turned out I just had to switch certain numbers and letters in order to spell “password” in the bottom row…..???
Apparently this puzzle was different in the original DS version.
There are only a couple things I disliked about the gameplay in 999. First, when you go back through to get other endings, you occasionally need to partially redo a few puzzle rooms if you didn’t make certain choices the first time. On the other hand, there’s a helpful flowchart that apparently wasn’t in the original version, and while it took me a long time (and several confused conversations with a friend) to figure out how the flowchart worked, it’s a feature that really helps make this sort of game less repetitive.
And second, this version has two modes you can view the game in: novel mode, where you get dialogue and narration, and adventure mode, where you just get dialogue.
…There’s a mode that just cuts out the narration.
…And since puzzle rooms are always set in adventure mode, sometimes it resumed the visual novel sections still in adventure mode, and by the time I realized, I had a lot of narration to scroll back through to catch up on.
Click for 999 spoilers
I’ve read that this was meant as a replacement for the DS’s two screens and their use in the twist at the end, since novel mode is from Akane’s point of view, but… since to me they were “the way I want to read” and “that annoying mode I occasionally get by mistake,” I think the impact was lost on me…?
Okay, so aside from the flowchart, there were a few things that made me regret not playing the original DS version.
But why are we spending so much time talking about the gameplay in a visual novel? The story is the real focus here.
999 has great storytelling. It’s a dark premise (though it had moments of humor), where the main character wakes up to find he’s been kidnapped along with eight other people and put on a ship that will sink in nine hours. The 9 of them therefore have 9 hours to go through numbered doors, solve puzzles to find their way through each area, and locate the “9” door that will let them escape.
The number 9 is pretty important here.
It also makes heavy use of digital roots, as each player has a number and the digital roots of their numbers are what let them go through numbered doors.
The story is intense and also very mysterious. My interest in knowing what was going on and what secrets these characters were hiding kept me invested in the story from the start. 999 also draws on a variety of real concepts, fictional ideas, urban legends, etc. for its overall backstory/universe. I’ve rarely played a game that so often had me turning to the Internet to say “Wait, is that a real thing?” as this one did.
Since it’s a blend, the concepts that aren’t real have support from the ones that are, which makes the game’s ideas feel a bit more “real,” in a way.
I played through every ending, and I enjoyed how each one added a little more context without giving everything away (and some moments had a stronger impact due to information I had from other endings).
While it kept up a great sense of mystery and gradual revelations, I felt like things faltered just a little bit when everything came together… it wasn’t quite as tight a conclusion as I hoped for, although it was definitely worth it due to the journey there.
Click for major 999 spoilers
Specifically, some of the time-based stuff felt a little off to me. This is yet another game that uses the bootstrap paradox, and while I generally think that works better than other time paradoxes (since it’s a stable time loop), I feel like it creates some problems here.
It also makes it way too easy for people to explain away anything with “it had to be this way in the future because Akane saw it was this way in the future.”
(Side note: why have I been playing so many games that use this paradox?)
I’m not against the use of the bootstrap paradox in this story, and Akane’s “fever” and disappearance in other endings is an interesting twist.
But what I don’t like is how Seven seems to genuinely remember Akane dying, and Snake doesn’t refute it. (Blind or not, he’d have noticed an extra person escaping with them.)
From the moment Seven explained Akane’s death, I assumed he and Santa never saw her body, but something else that “proved” she died. I fully expected that once she disabled the incinerator, we’d find out that she slipped out another door or was grabbed by Ace or something, surviving and yet leaving behind something that would make the others falsely assume she died.
So when she happily reunited with them and they all left together, I was a bit disgruntled.
Seven and Snake remember Akane dying. She can’t have really died nine years ago, because she’s Zero; it’s arguably possible if Santa is Zero, setting up the second Nonary Games and creating a future where she survives, but the game is clear that Akane is Zero.
It’s implied that Seven is in on the conspiracy with her and Snake just somehow missed the reunion, but I don’t like that and it doesn’t feel consistent. I saw someone say that Akane was able to rewrite Seven’s memories, but that feels like a cheaper explanation than the story deserves.
I don’t know. I just didn’t think this part of the ending worked.
So while I do have some criticisms, I really enjoyed my time with 999. It seems to have left a few loose ends, but it does have sequels, after all.
Now I’ll be moving on to the second half of The Nonary Games, Virtue’s Last Reward, and I hope to find just as intriguing of a story there. In the meantime, what are your thoughts on 999?
Since I’m playing in release order, the next game up in the God of War Saga was Chains of Olympus.