999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors - Nintendo DS Game Review

For the last few nights i have been delightfully surprised and astonished with an unexpected Nintendo DS title, 999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors. This game has shocked me and impressed me in so many way's, delivering one of the most immersive and enriching gaming experiences of 2010.

999 i what you would call a "Text Adventure" or "Visual Novel" translated for the western market and given an M-rating (for mature content) which is a rarity for a DS game considering the majority of DS games are for a younger audience, with a family friendly atmosphere. But more than anything the game is just one big mindf*** that will drive your brain to the brink of insanity, before delivering you with the most satisfying experience you will ever find on a hand-held system.

The 999 experience begins with our hero Junpei, an average collage-aged kid, waking up in a haze of cloudy memory in a place he's never seen before. As he begins to regain his senses, he begins to realise the grim situation he is faced with, he's been kidnapped. Already the players interest has been captured with this gripping opening and from here thing's just get better and better. He soon realises that he's not only been kidnapped, but kidnapped and left somewhere in the middle of the ocean on a ship. He soon meets up with eight other victims and together they discover the truth, they've been gathered together by a madman to play through a sick twisted human experiment called "The Nonary Game". At this point, even so early in the story i could tell this was something special, something we don't often see in gaming any more and it made me want to unravel this mystery.

It's a game of life and death, death being the far more frequent one of the two. The victims striggle to work together, following the rules that the kidnapper, "Zero", has laid out for them. Thing's get bloody very fast, as the various personality's clash and the self-preservation of each individual begins to show.

To make thing's worse, as the name suggests there is only 9 hours to complete their task before the ship they're on will sink, killing them all. If you thought that was bad, each victim has a bomb inside their body which will explode if any rules are broken, so you begin to wonder just how Junpei and the other eight victims will be able to escape. This all adds to the mystery and helps to create a thrilling storyline which is just as engaging and exiting as any game you will play this year.

That gripping premise is really just the beginning of your journey through this visual novel. After 999 set's itself up you then begin to take control of the path the narrative takes. You will make the decisions that effect the storyline along the way and ultimately determine the outcome of your story. You will make critical decisions such as, which of the eight fellow victims Junpei will team up with, which of Zero's deadly numbered doors to enter, and even seemingly unimportant casual responses to questions in dialogue with other characters. So the game is very heavily based on your own decisions which will give each player their own individual experience.

But this is where 999 really starts to grip you in and make this a truly addicting game. Nearly every decision you make is critical to the outcome and while other games may give you certain options like Mass Effect 2 for example, they don't allow you to have as much impact on the entire story as 999 does. Whether you live or die over the course of your nine-hour playthrough, everything could hinge on the most innocent of decisions made around hours 3, or 5, or 7. The doors you select and conversation options you choose can open up entirely new paths for your story to unwind. It's truly amazing to play this game because there are countless possibility's which will always amaze and shock you no matter how many times you play through the game. 999 has six possible endings to achieve and you'll be so engrossed in the mythology, conspiracy theories and the intricate way's in which characters backgrounds are interwoven with one another that you won't be able to let go of your DS for day's.

The majority of your experience with 999 will be spent with other characters in dialogue, as the term "visual novel" suggests. But in-between these sections of dialogue are the actual gameplay portions of the game, Puzzle solving to escape the various traps set up throughout the ship by Zero.

If you've ever played "escape the room" Puzzlers then you'll have a good idea of what to expect here. Junpei will find himself locked in a series of rooms containing challenging puzzles and riddles. Always paired with different teams of characters from the pool of victims, Junpei must solve the puzzles and riddles in each area before he can move on to the next set of tough challenges that stand in his way. This plays out by taking the DS stylus in hand and cycling through each scene, touching items on screen and picking up some items to use as keys and tools. This helps to immerse the player into the story, making it not only a visual experience but also one in which the player can really interact with.

It all works wonderfully well together. Puzzle-solving and exploration has been seen on the DS before, but the tension and terror surrounding the storyline and characters in even the most simplistic of tasks in 999 is absolutely unmatchable by any other game on the market, it has set a new standard for visual novels in the future. If you mess up in 999 you will really feel it, the sense of reward and loss is so strong that it can have you thinking about every decision for long periods of time before actually deciding what to do.

The game is intended to be failed once or twice, forcing the player to use whatever they have learned from their mistakes the first few times around to help guide them through the game, choosing different paths on subsequent runs. The game activates a fast-forward feature which allows you to skip through dialogue you may have already read once or twice, that rarely happens though, and grey's out decisions you have previously selected just in case you can't remember what you choose on other playthrough's.

You would think that by the third playthrough thing's would be less of a mystery, but it's on your third or fourth playthrough when thing's really begin to confuse and twist your mind. No matter what path you choose, however you approach the game, the game will manage to inspire you with an utterly unbelievably brilliant story which comes together in spectacular fashion and is truly a modern-day masterpiece.

I am beginning to make 999 sound like the perfect game and it's really hard not to, but there are some minor faults, nothing big enough to put you off buying this fantastic game, something i strongly encourage you to do if you are a DS owner.

Firstly, there are portions of the game where characters will joke with each other and make snappy comments which is all fine, but when you have 9 hours to live it really takes away a bit of the urgency that each character should be portraying. Some conversations can take up to 15 minutes long which, in the circumstances, is ridiculous considering they have 9 hours before their body explodes leaving them as the ships new paint coat. Also as there is no countdown metre it really doesn't matter how long you take to read dialogue and complete puzzles, if there was a metre it would have forced the [player to rush and in some cases make silly mistakes due to the fact that they are under pressure, something which would really happen in a situation like this. The final thing i didn't really like is how much detail the game uses to explain puzzles and certain areas, it can seem a little too friendly in some areas but all of this is just a small mark on an otherwise outstanding game.

Overall 999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors is the best game i have ever played on the DS. The twisted, thrilling, frantic, pressurising storyline and plot here is absolutely outstanding. The game is perfect in almost every way, the few minor negative details i touched on are not worth thinking about when considering whether or not to buy this game. This is definitely one of the top 5 best games of the 2010 year.

999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors is the best Nintendo DS game of all time 10/10