Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors

There is a reason I don’t read as many novels as I used to, because of potential of great story-telling in games and how they can deliver an unparalleled interactive multimedia experience which can’t be done in movies or books.  Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors on the DS delivered on every of that aspect, and much more, and would go down in history as the sleeper adventure hit of 2010. Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (999) no doubt contains one of the best written plots we’ve encountered this year (maybe even this decade) on a video game, even in such a great year, it manages to surpass  our personal favorites like Last Window, Gray Matter,  Trauma Center, and Tales of Monkey Island. 999 no doubts draws its inspiration from movies like Saw and Japanese drama/manga series Liar Game (if you haven’t seen/read that, you should drop everything you are doing right now and hunt it down), mix that with science fiction series like Fringe and X-files; 999 never feels like a cheap knock off, it is an original plot that delivers on its share of excitement, mysteries, and thrills literally every corner of the game.

Not unlike the beginning of cult horror movie Saw, 999 tells of the story of Junpei after his abduction by the mysterious gas-masked man called Zero and being thrust into the Nonary Game. The Nonary Game takes place in the Gigantic, a replica of the Titanic, or so some of the other contestants have suggested — as the title of the game indicates, the Nonary game has everything to do with the number nine — nine people has been captured, each of them has a wrist watch with the number 1-9  on it,  they have nine hours, there are nine doors to go through until they can escape until the ship sinks.  Nonary means the digit 9 in case you didn’t know that, you can look it up on Wikipedia; 999 constantly will throw terms at the player that the player may not know, for example: Morphogenetic Field, and we loved the game for that, for it feels like it is constantly educating us in addition to entertainment.

The Nonary Game is filled with twists and turns, each of the 9 abductees/contestants is hiding something. Some of them has obviously played the game before, one of them may even be Zero and he may not even be working alone. Each contestant wears a watch with a number (1-9) which acts as a detonator for a bomb which is inside their body, or so they are told. In the beginning the player will witness one of these bombs going off right away killing one of the contestants after his refusal to adhere to the rule — that they must combine the digital root of their designated number to deactivate each of the nine doors, and they must all go through it and find the device on the other side to deactivate their timer — or so they are told. As the player solves puzzles and goes through each door he learns more about those around him, and how nothing is what it seems, and if the player manages to get through the game and earn the true ending, he is rewarded with the mind boggling truth about the events behind the Nonary game.

999 is in every way a text adventure, even though it throws enough beautiful backdrops and character portraits at the player, the sheer amount of text is going to be daunting to a non-avid reader. But every line of the game is well written and well translated from its original Japanese text. The puzzles inside every numbered door is fun and challenging but never difficult enough to hinder progress.  Much like our old PS2 favorite Shadow of Destiny, 999 is structured in a way that the player must play the game multiple times to get the different endings to fully understand the story — there are 6 different endings and you have to at least play it twice the right way to get the true ending.

If we have to make complains about the game, it is how the text displays too slowly if you are a fast reader (like as if you were forced to play early Dragon Quest games and having to set dialogue speed at 3 out of 7), option to skip the text doesn’t appear until you have already beaten that part of the story and playing the game for a 2nd time. The second complain is the inability to skip puzzles — for someone who intends to play the game 6 times to get all the endings, he’s going to have to sit through a lot of puzzles he has already done before; a minor annoyance for such an excellently designed game, but it would have been perfect if the developer has foreseen that and taken steps to avoid wasting the player’s precious time.

There’s nothing more we can say to convey our love for Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, which no doubt wins the DS game of the year and the best story told in a game for us, just slightly surpassing the well polished Last Window. While its slow beginning and the sheer amount of text and the inability to fast scroll them may turn off some players who is looking for the visceral experience, don’t let the minor flaws get in the way of your witnessing one of the best written stories told in an adventure game. And not unlike Gray Matter, when you get to the end, you might have to take a few leaps of faith to accept the absurdity / mastery of the plot depending which end of the spectrum you are at, but if you lacked imagination, you have no business playing video games, go watch some crappy Hollywood movies instead. Merry Christmas everyone.

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