Just over two years ago, I purchased and played through Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and absolutely loved it. I devoured that game, several-hour chunks at a time, right in the middle of the holiday season. (I want to say I began the game on 12/22 and finished it on 12/26.) Anyway, I gushed and gushed over it for one obscenely long paragraph here on the blog, and yet when I went back and reread that post just now, I realized just how much more I could have gushed.
I'll spare everyone that endless specific praise this time around and just say, holy shit guys, play these games. (Oh yeah - this game is that game's sequel, which I guess isn't clear based on their titles alone.) Once again, I played through the entire game in four or five days. This time though, I did it during a work week, racking up something obscene like six hours a night. I went to bed at midnight, playing this, with every intention of stopping in an hour or so, and I'd stay awake and alert right through four in the morning. It wasn't my wisest recurring decision. Honestly though, you should be prepared to do something similar when you play these games. And again, you really need to play these games. I recommend a lot of things here on the blog, but this Zero Escape series has the distinction of being something that no one else has experienced that I just absolutely loved. The last series of posts like that, for me, were 2012's A Song of Ice and Fire offerings. At the time of this writing, Nine Hours is available on Amazon for $17. Not bad, for a game that went out of print a year ago!
At this point, this post is nothing but a hard sales pitch with very little description of what the game is - actually, to this point, none whatsoever. So I'll do my best to give a brief five-sentence description. Ready?
It's a visual novel - a "choose your own adventure" type of story on a video game platform - interspersed with "escape the room" point-and-click puzzles that stay thematically relevant to the overall story at hand. It's got a fully fleshed out ensemble of easily distinguishable characters, each with slightly different circumstantial motivations. The whole thing plays out over multiple parallel timelines that you can jump between, seeing which decisions and outcomes affect things for better and worse in which ways. The central mystery is supported by a bevy of smaller bits of intrigue that you tend to forget about until they surface, and the game seems to find the right balance of obvious twists, red herrings, and subverting expectations. The story itself is full of pseudo-science, urban legends, philosophy, and science fiction, allowing almost every puzzle in it to be poignant beyond the context of the game itself.
Does that work for you?
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