in this post olesia never shuts up.
Happy New Year!
I'm going to ramble for a little while about 999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors. If you've talked to me over AIM or on Plurk, you probably know I've been going gaga over this game.
So today I'm actually going to talk about it!
Our heroes and their frequently ridiculous fashions.
999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, in a shocking case of truth in advertising, is a story centering on nine persons who need to make their way through nine specific numbered doors in a span of nine hours. The player controls Junpei, the college kid in the flannel and vest, who in the start of the story wakes up to find himself in a locked and flooding cabin on a sinking ship. Escape occurs before drowning, and eventually Junpei meets the eight other title-referenced persons likewise trapped on the sinking ship.
The whole lot of them have been kidnapped by a mysterious figure called 【ZERO】, who is forcing them to play something called 【the Nonary Game】. The rules are relatively simple:
*each player in the Nonary Game gets a numbered bracelet, 1 through 9
*there are 9 numbered doors throughout the ship with special scanner locks
*only three to five people can pass through any given door at any given time, and their bracelet numbers have to have a digital root of whatever number is on that door. (e.g., 2+5+7=14, 1+4=5)
*to escape, players must pass through the door labeled 9.
Of course, there's some pretty serious consequences if you don't follow the rules: everyone you meet has a bomb in their stomach. If too few people cross a door, the bombs go off. If too many people cross a door, the bombs go off. The game only penalizes the given persons who break these rules, but... the results are messy. Very messy.
And while the game doesn't go out of its way to show you graphically the state of a given corpse (and there are many of them, mostly because you suck at life choices Junpei), this is where the narrative kicks in with all its glory. I never found the prose to be purple, but rather appropriate and atmospheric to what was going on, and descriptive enough to tug my emotions this way and that. I felt anxious when the characters were anxious, I laughed when they tried to relieve the stress with humor, and my jaw was pretty slack during at least two separate ending sequences in abject horror and dismay.
Which brings me back to game play: 999 is a combination visual novel / point-and-click escape-the-room style game, heavy emphasis on the novel aspect. This means a good chunk of the game play is devoted to reading the story prose between puzzles. Many of the puzzles are math-based (it is a game of numbers, after all), which thankfully makes them pretty intuitive to solve (even if they start busting out hexadecimal and other base-not-ten systems), while others involve MacGyvering a solution out of frozen pork or hoping like hell that the shark in the tank is really dead.
Throughout the game, you-as-Junpei must try to navigate through the various rooms of the ship in order to get as many people to the end of the game alive as you possibly can, and as the story goes on, try to figure out just what the hell Zero's motive is, why he's kidnapped these specific people, and most importantly why you. This is a game with multiple endings, and is designed that you have to get all of them for the complete story to make sense, so most of the plays-through will result in more questions being asked than answered, and getting you to really connect with all these various characters and want to keep all of them alive. The game will gut-punch you a lot. A lot. Because you're in control of where Junpei goes and thus how the story progresses, each room and story segment keeps you hanging for the next shoe to drop, because from hour one you're never really sure what's going to happen, or who's going to get killed, or why the music is suddenly getting sinisterly ominous and suddenly you're watching the credits roll for the third time and compulsively going back over all the choices you've made to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.
Which is a pretty neat game mechanic, actually! There's multiple plays-through, and after you get any certain ending, you can save that data - this means that you can fast-forward through dialog you've already read to save time (and also better highlight what information is new), and any previous choices you've made are greyed out so you can better remember where not to go, and who you have and haven't traveled with yet. Which is probably half the fun of the game, I think-since you're forced into each room with at least two other people, you get to spend a lot of time learning about the other characters (and then having them make really stupid stress-induced jokes, or drop plot hints that you don't realize are plot hints until playthrough 4).
All of the characters have their good moments and bad, and with the heavy mystery of the game and the slow revelations on how everyone is interconnected, as well as other plot-related elements, you wind up spending a lot of time both sympathizing with the characters and being suspicious as hell of all of them. Who's lying? Who's telling the truth? Who knows more than they're willing to say (other than everyone)? And why is it the moment you start really feeling for the character is when the game does horrible horrific things to them.
The music is great, the 'you done good' endings are satisfying and full of twists and everything coming together in an overall experience that is awesome. Just. Pure awesome. I realize with the horror and the reading it's not for everyone, but I really can't recommend this game enough - there's a reason 999 is getting top marks across the board on pretty much any reviewing or distributor's website.
It's difficult to find right now, from what I've heard, but I've likewise heard a new printing's being slated for this month - and if you get the game from the aksys website, I am pretty sure you will get a free watch. (And if you don't like the watch you can mail it to me :3 )
AND NOW OLESIA WILL TRY TO SHUT UP ABOUT THIS GAME
(THOUGH SINCE SHE'S PICKING UP A CHARACTER FROM IT, THIS WILL LIKELY NOT BE SUCCESSFUL.)
I'm going to ramble for a little while about 999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors. If you've talked to me over AIM or on Plurk, you probably know I've been going gaga over this game.
So today I'm actually going to talk about it!
Our heroes and their frequently ridiculous fashions.
999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, in a shocking case of truth in advertising, is a story centering on nine persons who need to make their way through nine specific numbered doors in a span of nine hours. The player controls Junpei, the college kid in the flannel and vest, who in the start of the story wakes up to find himself in a locked and flooding cabin on a sinking ship. Escape occurs before drowning, and eventually Junpei meets the eight other title-referenced persons likewise trapped on the sinking ship.
The whole lot of them have been kidnapped by a mysterious figure called 【ZERO】, who is forcing them to play something called 【the Nonary Game】. The rules are relatively simple:
*each player in the Nonary Game gets a numbered bracelet, 1 through 9
*there are 9 numbered doors throughout the ship with special scanner locks
*only three to five people can pass through any given door at any given time, and their bracelet numbers have to have a digital root of whatever number is on that door. (e.g., 2+5+7=14, 1+4=5)
*to escape, players must pass through the door labeled 9.
Of course, there's some pretty serious consequences if you don't follow the rules: everyone you meet has a bomb in their stomach. If too few people cross a door, the bombs go off. If too many people cross a door, the bombs go off. The game only penalizes the given persons who break these rules, but... the results are messy. Very messy.
And while the game doesn't go out of its way to show you graphically the state of a given corpse (and there are many of them, mostly because you suck at life choices Junpei), this is where the narrative kicks in with all its glory. I never found the prose to be purple, but rather appropriate and atmospheric to what was going on, and descriptive enough to tug my emotions this way and that. I felt anxious when the characters were anxious, I laughed when they tried to relieve the stress with humor, and my jaw was pretty slack during at least two separate ending sequences in abject horror and dismay.
Which brings me back to game play: 999 is a combination visual novel / point-and-click escape-the-room style game, heavy emphasis on the novel aspect. This means a good chunk of the game play is devoted to reading the story prose between puzzles. Many of the puzzles are math-based (it is a game of numbers, after all), which thankfully makes them pretty intuitive to solve (even if they start busting out hexadecimal and other base-not-ten systems), while others involve MacGyvering a solution out of frozen pork or hoping like hell that the shark in the tank is really dead.
Throughout the game, you-as-Junpei must try to navigate through the various rooms of the ship in order to get as many people to the end of the game alive as you possibly can, and as the story goes on, try to figure out just what the hell Zero's motive is, why he's kidnapped these specific people, and most importantly why you. This is a game with multiple endings, and is designed that you have to get all of them for the complete story to make sense, so most of the plays-through will result in more questions being asked than answered, and getting you to really connect with all these various characters and want to keep all of them alive. The game will gut-punch you a lot. A lot. Because you're in control of where Junpei goes and thus how the story progresses, each room and story segment keeps you hanging for the next shoe to drop, because from hour one you're never really sure what's going to happen, or who's going to get killed, or why the music is suddenly getting sinisterly ominous and suddenly you're watching the credits roll for the third time and compulsively going back over all the choices you've made to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.
Which is a pretty neat game mechanic, actually! There's multiple plays-through, and after you get any certain ending, you can save that data - this means that you can fast-forward through dialog you've already read to save time (and also better highlight what information is new), and any previous choices you've made are greyed out so you can better remember where not to go, and who you have and haven't traveled with yet. Which is probably half the fun of the game, I think-since you're forced into each room with at least two other people, you get to spend a lot of time learning about the other characters (and then having them make really stupid stress-induced jokes, or drop plot hints that you don't realize are plot hints until playthrough 4).
All of the characters have their good moments and bad, and with the heavy mystery of the game and the slow revelations on how everyone is interconnected, as well as other plot-related elements, you wind up spending a lot of time both sympathizing with the characters and being suspicious as hell of all of them. Who's lying? Who's telling the truth? Who knows more than they're willing to say (other than everyone)? And why is it the moment you start really feeling for the character is when the game does horrible horrific things to them.
The music is great, the 'you done good' endings are satisfying and full of twists and everything coming together in an overall experience that is awesome. Just. Pure awesome. I realize with the horror and the reading it's not for everyone, but I really can't recommend this game enough - there's a reason 999 is getting top marks across the board on pretty much any reviewing or distributor's website.
It's difficult to find right now, from what I've heard, but I've likewise heard a new printing's being slated for this month - and if you get the game from the aksys website, I am pretty sure you will get a free watch. (And if you don't like the watch you can mail it to me :3 )
AND NOW OLESIA WILL TRY TO SHUT UP ABOUT THIS GAME
(THOUGH SINCE SHE'S PICKING UP A CHARACTER FROM IT, THIS WILL LIKELY NOT BE SUCCESSFUL.)