Zero Escape: The Nonary Games is a collection on Steam that contains ports of the first and second games of the Zero Escape series. This review of the first game, 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors which follows a group of 9 people who are trapped inside a sinking ship, and must work together, and solve puzzles to escape.
This is half a Visual Novel and half an Escape Room Puzzle Game. There are few choices you can make in the game, and every choice contributes to the endings. There are 6 endings, and you must finish some of them before unlocking the True Ending.
The story of 999 follows Junpie and the people he was trapped with. Each of them had numbered bracelets. They were told to seek a "Door that carries the Number 9" by a masked person named Zero.
The bracelets they're carrying can be used to open numbered doors via a system called "Digital Root" and these bracelets will kill them if they violated the rules of the game.
I'm not really a Puzzle Gamer. I enjoy games that have puzzles in them, but I prefer my puzzles to be on the easy side. I'm not sure if I can say many of the puzzles in this game are easy. My strategy is basically "click everywhere and on everything until something new comes up." And when it comes to puzzles that need a lot of thinking, I solve them by trial and error instead.
Other than the few times where I puzzle took me an hour to beat, I enjoyed most of the puzzles in this game. Though the final few puzzles in the True Ending route, I needed to look up their answers online.
What I love about this story is how the few choices you have can drastically change the fate of the group. Every route leads to a bad ending. Junpie and some of the others will die, and the game will send you hack to the beginning again. That is, except the final route...
What you learn from some routes explains what happens to other routes. The True Ending route is longer than all the other routes combined, and it uses the knowledge you gained from all the other routes to explain why Zero kidnapped these people, why them specifically, and what's the purpose of all this. The answer was satisfying.
Still, even by the end, not everything made sense. Something that was consistent in all other routes has become inconsistent because of the final reveal. I'm not sure if it's a plothole, or if it was left intentionally vague for the sequel to solve. Since the sequel shares characters, I assume that would be the case.
So, what do you think?
