Mind = Blown

February is apparently going to be a month of erratic posting.

I skipped posting yesterday for two reasons: one, approaching midnight I realized I hadn't posted the DLD article. You can tell I was tired because I put the wrong date. Two, I finished 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors last night and now you get the offical review I started way back in this post.

9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors is a beautiful game. Not beautiful in the traditional sense - not oh look at the pretty graphics nd what a touching, meaningful story no - beautiful in the same way a finely made watch is beautiful. Each gear meshes with the other components so perfectly; to remove a single piece is to bring the entire mechanism to a halt, breaking it irrevocably. I haven't played a game ending so satifying since Braid.

999 is the story of nine strangers who awaken on a ship - they have nine hours to play "The Nonary Game," find the ninth door and get out before the boat sinks. The rules are very specific and set up in such a way that, if broken, a bomb will detonated by the bracelet on their wrist, said bomb having been placed inside their intestines. The group is forced to work together to escape and discover the mystery of why they were picked to play this twisted game.

At its core, 999 is a visual novel combined with an escape the room game and a dash of Choose Your Own Adventure. If you don't like those types of games, you probably won't like this one, much in the same way that I don't like FPS game, no matter how good they supposedly are. But for what it is, 999 is a perfect video game. It combines the very best of those two genres so if you're a fan of either you NEED this game.

One of the best things about it for me was the everything was justified - justified in the trope sense of the word I mean. That is to say, everything you did in the game had a reason for being done. I've often found the puzzles of Escape the Room games to be totally arbitrary - who put you in that room? Why? Why is it necessary to microwave the goldfish to get the key to unlock the safe to get the piece of paper to decode the bloody letters on the wall that will tell you where the key is hidden? If you captor is that big of a douche, why would there be a key to find at all for that matter? But I digress - the point is, there is none of that here. There is a concrete reason you have to solve puzzles to get out of here and the discovery of why is the plot. Even the use of multiple endings is justified! I've never even heard of anyone doing that! They aren't a gimmick to tack on more hours. There is a 100% valid reason that you HAVE to play through the game multiple times - the true ending would completely fall apart if you couldn't. That is fantastic.

Much of this is just icing on the cake for me. what kept me coming back was the plot. The writing is fantastically done and twisting out the mystery is the real fun. I hate to spoil anything, so forgive me if I ramble of become unclear XD Let me run through the various other things first:

Graphics - Solid. Mostly made of still pictures and characters while the rooms themselves are richly detailed. You won't get lost; each room has its own distinct flavor and personality and you'll always know where you are by them.

Music - It's hard to explain how much this contributes to the atmosphere, so I'll just leave this here. This is the song that plays when something bad happens. I've come to hate it as it makes my spine tense up like you wouldn't believe, but that's rather the point isn't it? I'd recommend trying out the other tunes on that account though, as many are quite good.

Puzzles - I said it before, but everything is justified. Some of the puzzles will appear strange and require some out of the box thinking, but they ARE solveable. There were only two or three I just could not figure out for myself, and most of those were math problems, something I'm bad at anyway. You will learn hexadecimal. You will use music scores. You will decipher codes. You will do quite a lot of things - there's a lot of variety to go around.

Characters - There is no voice acting in this game - all the cutscenes have to be read. Personally I feel that's an advantage as acting out a few key scenes would have ended up looking hammy to say the least and ruined the feel. Like the settings, you won't have any trouble differentiating one person from another (spoiler?). The process of getting to know the characters and how everyone is connected is one of the best parts of the game - I know it's a cliche, but by the end, you really do feel like you know most of them personally.

Writing - The writing better be fucking amazing if it's going to run over an hour in places; don't get me wrong - I'm sure everyone who knows me knows how much I like to read. But that's not really what I come to video games for, ya know? Luckily, the writing more than delivers. I'd might even go so far as to say it does its job too well in the gorier scenes in which nothing more than blood splatters are ever shown, but are described in loving, sickening detail. Between that and the tension building in both plot and music, I was often torn between wanting to put it down for a while and let my heart rate et back to a normal level and continuing on until dawn broke, eager to know what happened next (staying up 'til 5AM tended to win).

Plot - . . .

. . . . . .

Holy.

Fudge.

I'm sorry, but that's about all I can say without ruining it. Just... wow. I don't even -

The plot is amazing. It twists and turns and keeps you guessing and OMG the last puzzle was fucking brilliant you have no idea. It was SO- . . . .

I don't have the words for it. I really don't. The closest thing I can come up with is "satisfying," but that doesn't really get to the heart of it. It was a culmination of everything that I went through and learned on the five playthroughs I passed along. Somehow the experience of doing the same things over and over but with different choices along the way made the ending that much more powerful. It's been a while since I felt this effected over a video game. I honestly don't know how to explain it. Someone buy this game so I'll have someone else to talk about it with.