999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors NDS

999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is a thriller adventure game released for the NDS. The game was developed by Japanese studio Spike Chunsoft, and the main designer and scriptwriter was Kotaro Uchikoshi, a writer of such visual novels as Never 7: The End of Infinity, Ever 17: The Out of Infinity or 12Riven: The Psi-Climinal of Integral.

Plot

The game follows the story of a 21-year-old Japanese student named Junpei. He is intoxicated by a masked attacker and wakes up in a closed cabin. After breaking through the door, he discovers that he is onboard a luxury cruise ship with eight strangers. It soon turns out that all nine of them were kidnapped by a psychopath introducing himself as Zero who wants them to play a sadistic game. The participants have 9 hours to get to door number 9. They can't afford any delays - the ship is sinking slowly and everyone will die after the time limit has passed.

Mechanics

999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, released on NDS, is an adventure game combining two popular subgenres. The first of them is a visual novel - we passively follow the development of the story presented with two-dimensional images and text. From time to time, we can make decisions that significantly influence the further course of the plot. It should be noted that the game is very non-linear. Our choices can ultimately lead to one out of the six possible endings, but only one is "true", allowing players to discover the whole truth.

The second element are sections modeled on escape the room, one of the types of logical adventure games. These fragments are in full 3D, allowing us to freely explore the locations from a first-person perspective. During the story, the player visits various locked sections of the ship - by searching the environment for objects and solving puzzles, the player has to come up with a way to get outside.

Technical aspects

The visuals of 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors are maintained in the anime convention, and the character designs were done by the artist Kinu Nishimura, known mainly for his many works featured in Capcom games. The soundtrack was composed by Shinji Hosoe, the author of music for Folklore, Ridge Racer 7 and Tekken 6.

Last updated on 16 March 2012