Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (2009)

First note that this is a visual novel + escape room type of game. I have read a lot of reviews complaining about the quantity of dialogue text from players who are not familiar with this genre. Complaining about reading dialogue in a visual novel game is equivalent to complaining about having to solve puzzles in an escape room game. If you don't enjoy that style of gameplay, then it's not the game's fault. It simply means you don't enjoy the genre.

999 is a fun game from both the visual novel and escape room perspectives. The story is suspenseful, with each playthrough slowly drip-feeding you more information, some of which give answers, many of which raise questions. The story is deeply rooted in pseudo-science and the supernatural, which is where it derives much of its natural suspense and intrigue. I played the game with English voices, which really brought the story to life for me. As a long-time anime watcher I expected the English dub to be awful, but it was surprisingly well-done. The voices contained emotions and the localizations accurately reflected how I would've expected real people to act if trapped in a death game on a sinking ship -- plenty of spirited swearing and dumb jokes flying in all directions.

The escape the room puzzles were alright. If I had to complain, I'd say that the first few rooms start out too easy while the last few rooms are too "difficult", requiring more math and brute-force trying all the combinations than piecing together clues. The rooms do serve as a good way to take a break from the heavy dialogue and further the story -- sometimes as you go through the escape rooms and find objects, other characters will make story-relevant comments on those objects, resulting in a more natural feel of progression.

Overall I loved this game more for the story than the gameplay. It was the story that made me binge this game for 2 days straight until I completed it and will make me binge its sequel as well. 10/10 would recommend if you enjoy visual novels, escape rooms, and supernatural drama.

This could be the most boring game I've ever attempted to play.

I loved the concept. After the intro it seemed like the game would be a series of escape rooms, which seemed really unique. And I guess this was the premise of the game, but between each of these escape puzzle sequences was so much drawn out, tedious dialogue. So much dialogue. The characters were annoying and way too chatty, the text meant to act as instruction was 10x longer than it needed to be. In some cases, I'd sit there tapping through each line of dialogue (which, by the way, is spelled out a letter at a time) for literally an hour without any actual gameplay occurring. i played for a few hours but after fidning out I was only halfway done, I quit.