999 without Michael Buerk

"Nine Persons, Nine Hours, Nine Doors" (commonly abbreviated as 999, a possibly unintentional reflection of the British emergency telephone number) is a game that I had meant to look at for ages, but I'd completely forgotten about it until my sister gave it to me as a birthday present out of nowhere. I'd known that it was a game about escaping a strange environment, but nothing more than that.

I was surprised when I first started it up because I had assumed it was a survival horror game, but instead it's about half visual novel and half Myst-style puzzle solving. You take the role of Junpei, one of nine people who wake up on a sinking ship and are directed by an unknown captor to enter the numbered doors around the environment, behind which lie puzzles that they have to complete to earn keys to progress. Throughout the journey the party have to split up according to numerical rules, which if broken will detonate a small bomb somewhere in the player's bowel and produce a very messy explosion.

The puzzles are of the Crystal Maze type, where items have to be gathered and then used to do something like assemble a mannequin, complete a picture on the wall or work out the code to uncover the key needed to progress. Many of them are quite clever, but I get the feeling that they could have been handled better throughout the game - they're very inconsistent in how much explanation you're given. Sometimes you're meant to work out what to do given nine numbered pins, a square of holes and the letter F - but much more frequently, interesting-seeming puzzle opportunities will be solved automatically, or you'll be railroaded more than necessary. A keypad, for example, won't become active to enter a code until you're at the stage of a puzzle where you have the solution in your hand. And often the characters will spend so much time blathering about potential uses for a new item that you've picked up - for example, a frozen bit of meat with a note in it ("Do you think we should heat it up?") that you're robbed of any moment of intuition that you might have had upon discovering it.

This extends into the novel sections - I'm not sure if this is a conscious stylistic choice, but coming at it from an objective standpoint, it has to be said that the narration isn't very well written. Even outside the puzzles, it spends a long time saying the same things in different ways and never uses five words when it's possible to use five hundred - a genuine example on approaching an operating room is "There was a sign above the door in front of them - [Operating Room]. This told them that the room beyond was an [operating room], or so the sign said." Its uncomfortable way of lingering does turn into a strangely appropriate effect when you find something particularly frightening or gruesome and it describes it in far more detail than it needs to, but on the whole the story could have benefitted immensely from an editor - especially one carrying a huge novelty pair of scissors.

The other odd thing it does is regularly throw things out that will cause you to stop, blink and re-read out of nowhere during periods of serious exposition. Whether it's an Airplane-style description of a room like "The platform extended around the room and ended in stairs that descended to the floor. Its proper name was probably a catwalk, but that wasn't important right now", describing a misfitting valve handle as "like throwing a hot dog down a corridor", or suddenly having someone quote the World's Worst Catchphrase (which, for those who don't know, is "Excuuuuse me, princess" from the Zelda cartoon) - it jars you out of the atmosphere that it's spent an overly long time setting up. It is possible - though admittedly unlikely - that Hatoful Boyfriend isn't actually all that strange by comparison and this is just what Japanese visual novels are like.

The story seems intriguing, though, extending beyond the boundaries of the ship and talking about scientific conspiracy theories on Ice-9 and the crystallization of glycerin (they make sense in context) - they're pretty well balanced to sound just believable enough that you have to Google them just to make sure they weren't actually real. I, unfortunately, did not get to see the conclusions to any of the things that had been brought up because my game was abruptly ended when I was stabbed in the back with a large knife. I've now been invited to retry for a more satisfactory ending - and with the new ability to skip the dialogue, the game will last only about one hour instead of nine.