999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is a Japanese visual novel and adventure video game developed by Chunsoft. It is the first installment in the Zero Escape series, and was released in Japan in December 2009 and in North America in November 2010 for the Nintendo DS. The story follows Junpei, a college student who is abducted along with eight other people and forced to play the "Nonary Game", which puts its participants in a life-or-death situation, to escape from a sinking cruise liner. The gameplay alternates between two types of sections: Escape sections, where the player completes puzzles in escape-the-room scenarios; and Novel sections, where the player reads the game's narrative and makes decisions that influence the story toward one of six different endings.
Development of the game began after Kotaro Uchikoshi joined Chunsoft to write a visual novel for them that could reach a wider audience; Uchikoshi suggested adding puzzle elements that are integrated with the game's story. The inspiration for the story was the question of where inspiration comes from; while researching it, Uchikoshi came across Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance hypothesis, which became the main focus of the game's science fiction elements. The music was composed by Shinji Hosoe, while the characters were designed by Kinu Nishimura. The localization was handled by Aksys Games; they worked by the philosophy of keeping true to the spirit of the original Japanese version, aiming for natural-sounding English rather than following the original's exact wording.
999 was positively received, with reviewers praising the story, writing and puzzles, but criticizing the game's tone and trial-and-error gameplay. While the Japanese release was a commercial failure, the game sold better than expected for the genre in the United States. Although 999 was developed as a stand-alone title, its unexpected critical success in North America prompted the continuation of the series.
The sequel, Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward, was released in 2012, which was followed by Zero Time Dilemma, released in 2016. An updated version of 999, with voice acting and higher resolution graphics, was released alongside a port of Virtue's Last Reward as part of the Zero Escape: The Nonary Games. This bundle was released for PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, and Microsoft Windows via Steam in March 2017, and for Xbox One in March 2022.
Gameplay
999 is an adventure game in which the player assumes the role of a college student named Junpei. The gameplay is divided into two types of sections: Novel and Escape. In the Novel sections, the player progresses through the branching storyline and converses with non-playable characters through visual novel segments. These sections require little interaction from the player as they are spent reading the text that appears on the screen, which represents either dialogue between the various characters or Junpei's thoughts. During Novel sections, the player will sometimes be presented with decision options that affect the course of the game, resulting in one of six endings. The whole plot is not revealed in just one playthrough; the player needs to reach the "true" ending to get all the information behind the mystery, which in turn requires another specific ending to be reached beforehand. Some endings contain hints to how to reach further endings.
Players must switch between these Novel and Escape sections to uncover the mystery. In between Novel sections are Escape sections, which occur when the player finds themselves in a room from which they need to find the means of escape. These are presented from a first-person perspective, with the player being able to move between different pre-determined positions in each room. To escape, the player is tasked with finding various items and solving puzzles, reminiscent of escape-the-room games. At some points, the player may need to combine objects with each other to create the necessary tool to complete a puzzle. The puzzles include various brain teasers, such as baccarat and magic squares. An in-game calculator is provided for math-related problems, and the player can ask characters for hints if they find an Escape room too difficult. All Escape sections are self-contained, with all items required to solve the puzzles being available within that section; items are not carried over between Escape sections. After finishing an Escape section, it becomes available to replay from the game's main menu.
Plot Characters and setting 999 features nine main characters, who are forced to participate in the Nonary Game by an unknown person code-named Zero. For the majority of the game, the characters adopt code names to protect their identities due to the stakes of the Nonary Game—most of their names are ultimately revealed over the course of the game, and for several their true identities are important to the plot. The player-controlled Junpei (Takahisa Suzuki/Evan Smith) is joined by June, a nervous girl and a childhood friend of Junpei whom he knows as Akane Kurashiki (Miyuki Sawashiro/Rena Strober); Lotus (Rie Tanaka/Valerie Arem), a self-serving woman with unknown skills; Seven (Kenta Miyake/Edward Bosco), a large and muscular man; Santa (Kisho Taniyama/Sean Chiplock), a fashionable punk with a negative attitude; Ace (Takaya Hashi/Richard Epcar), an older and wiser man; Snake (Takahiro Sakurai/Taliesin Jaffe), a blind man with a princely demeanor; Clover (Yukari Tamura/Wendee Lee), a girl prone to mood swings and Snake's younger sister; and the 9th Man (Nobuo Tobita/Cam Clarke), a fidgety individual.
The events of the game occur within a cruise ship, though all of the external doors and windows have been sealed, and many of the internal doors are locked. The game's nine characters learn that they have been kidnapped and brought to the ship to play the Nonary Game, with the challenge to find the door marked with a "9" within nine hours before the ship sinks. To do this, they are forced to work in separate teams to make their way through the ship and solve puzzles to find this door. This is set in part by special locks on numbered doors that are based on digital roots; each player has a bracelet with a different digit on it, and only groups of three to five with the total of their bracelet's number with the same digital root as marked on the door can pass through.
Story Junpei escapes a flooding cabin after waking up, wearing a bracelet displaying the number "5". He encounters the eight other passengers. Zero announces over a loudspeaker that all nine are participants in the Nonary Game, explains the rules, and states each carry an explosive in their stomach that will go off if they try to bypass the digital root door locks. Trying to escape on his own, the 9th man threatens Clover, and is able to coerce Ace and her to scan their bracelets on Door 5's keypad. It is then revealed that it is not only necessary for all of the entrants to scan their bracelets at the entrance, but everyone who scanned must also authenticate within the rooms behind the Doors as well—lest the bombs of everyone who entered explode. Fearing what harm might come to them, the group adopts code names and splits up to explore the ship. Over the course of the story, Snake and an unknown man are found dead. The player has the option to select which group that Junpei travels with, which affects the story; several choices lead to Junpei and the cast's death at the hands of either Ace or Clover. Through various choices, Junpei learns of a previous Nonary Game, played nine years earlier, and the connections of the other characters through that, as well as studies about morphic resonance and stories of the Egyptian priestess Alice, who is frozen in ice-nine.
In one ending, Clover is found dead. Junpei learns that the dead man was not Snake and that the first Nonary Game was run by Cradle Pharmaceutical, of which Ace is the CEO. Zero was a participant of this game, and had set up the second Nonary Game as revenge towards Ace. The surviving players confront Ace and deduce he killed every person found dead in order to both cover his identity and obtain their bracelets. Ace holds Lotus hostage and escapes. As they find Snake and the door with the 9, Akane becomes weak. Santa watches over her while the others enter the door, leading to an incinerator where Ace and Lotus are. Learning of his sister's murder, Snake tackles Ace, and the others pull Junpei out of the incinerator before it activates, consuming Snake and Ace. Junpei returns to Akane, finding her nearly dead. Zero claims over the loudspeakers that he has lost. Junpei investigates a nearby room, and returns to find Akane and Santa have disappeared, after which he is knocked out by a gas grenade. After the player views this ending, they can then access the "true" ending.
In the true ending, Junpei learns that the previous Nonary Game consisted of nine pairs of kidnapped siblings separated onto the ocean-bound Gigantic and in a mock-up in Building Q in a Nevada desert. The game was designed to explore morphic fields; the research anticipated that the stress of the game would activate the fields between siblings, allowing solutions solved by one to be sent via these fields to their counterpart at the other location. This research was to help Ace cure his prosopagnosia. This Nonary Game went awry: Akane and her brother Santa were placed at the same location instead of being separated, and Seven discovered the kidnappings and rescued the children from the ship. Ace grabbed Akane before she could escape, forced her into the incinerator room, and started the incinerator while leaving a puzzle for her escape. Unable to solve the puzzle, Akane was apparently burnt to death while the other children, including Snake and Lotus's daughters, escaped with Seven.
After rescuing Snake, Junpei and the others reach the incinerator; Akane disappears and Santa escapes while taking Ace hostage, trapping the others inside. It is then revealed that the portion of the game's narrative portrayed on the bottom screen of the Nintendo DS, which only shows narration and interacts with puzzles, is presented from a 12-year-old Akane's point of view during the first Nonary Game. Through morphic fields, she connected to Junpei in the future, witnessing several possible endings and directing Junpei to help him survive. Junpei then faces the same puzzle Akane did, and relays the solution back to Akane in the past, allowing her to escape with Seven and the other children. Junpei realizes that Akane was Zero and, with assistance from Santa, had recreated the game and all the events she had witnessed in order to ensure her survival and avoid a temporal paradox. As Junpei and the others escape, they discover that the game had taken place in Building Q the entire time; Akane and Santa have fled, leaving behind a car with Ace restrained in the trunk. In the game's epilogue, they drive away hoping to catch up with them and pick up a hitchhiker in Egyptian robes (later revealed to be Alice from Virtue's Last Reward).
Development