I'm going to guess that most of you, like me, have never previously heard of the title 9 Persons, 9 Hours, 9 Doors. It's nominally a DS adventure game, and actually a choose-your-own-adventure book with some obligatory puzzles thrown in to interrupt the fun. It's also an extremely gripping, well-told mystery/suspense story, with an incredibly complicated story that not only takes surprising turns, but manages to stay surprisingly self-consistent, a rarity for stories in any genre.
You play as Junpei, a college student who awakens in a locked cell. His last, hazy memory is him getting gassed and kidnapped. Upon escaping from his cell, he finds eight other people who have stories similar to his own. The nine are then told by their kidnapper that the nine are going to play the Nonary Game, that they have only nine hours to escape a watery doom, and that breaking the rules will result in instant death...
What follows is a compelling story featuring plenty of mystery and betrayal, as the nine players jockey to survive a game whose rules often demand that some of them be sacrificed. The game has five distinct endings, most of which are helpful in figuring out what precisely is going on, and nearly all of which result in the majority of the players dying very violently.
The videogame can get surprisingly disturbing at times, too. The game is rated M in the U.S., but aside from a handful of still images depicting pools of blood, there is nothing graphic about it. Instead, the rating primarily comes from the disturbing descriptions of where the blood originates, as well as the rather tense atmosphere that pervades most of the game. Aside from a bit of cursing there's no one thing in the game that is objectionable for young children, but the way the story is told makes it disturbing enough to justify the rating.
The surprising thing about this game is that it hangs completely on its story, often with massive segments that are composed exclusively of dialogue and text (up to half an hour at times!), and yet the story, characters, and writing are all so good that you can't help but be disappointed when the talking ends and the gameplay begins. 999 is like that gripping book you stay up reading all night, because you just can't put it down. The writing in the beginning half-hour is a little too pedantic for my tastes, but after that, you're golden.
If you're the type of person who enjoys a well-told thriller, pick this game up immediately. Just don't be surprised if you have to look a while, since it's sold-out in most places at the moment. Just make sure not to spoil yourself by reading anything about this game's plot before you've played through it a few times!
