Zero Escape: The Nonary Games

25/09/26 - Finnished the first game included (999) and can say that as off right now this is my favourite puzzle game ever. The puzzles were cool, difficult but do-able, taught me a bunch of cool cyphers, and had an overall great, cohesive story. Cannot wait to play the other games. A tip for others going into this: click everything. Good luck!

I highly recommend this game because it quickly became one of my favorites. I feel that the setting of both 999 and VLR creates the perfect environment for puzzles. There is always an in-world reason to solve them, sometimes with a sense of urgency, although none of them are actually timed. There are a variety of puzzles to solve and a great majority of them really hit the mark. On top of the puzzles, the story is extremely compelling and is best experienced spoiler free. After finishing this game, I immediately bought the third Zero Escape game and played it too so that I could experience the whole story consecutively. I have since watched several playthroughs of the Zero Escape series, and I expect I will keep watching other people play it to relive the experience of playing this series for the first time again.

999: - The good Though I don't play VNs too often, the flowchart is great, and makes playing different routes very easy. While parts of the plot are easy to predict, the overall plot progression is fairly solid, if a little stupid at times. There's a great deal of unintentional comedy when a character breaks into an insane rant. I hate to recommend this, because "the bad" is so much longer than this, but spike chunsoft is just too good at making games that are really bad but still really fun. This is one of them. - The bad Honestly, not a fan of the puzzles. They have one of three problems: They're either too easy, give unrequited hints when you reenter them (not good in a game where clues are hidden around rooms) or they rely on hexadecimal (on certain routes it's not explained when used, and even when it is explained you're not given enough to actually solve the puzzle without the game spelling it out). If I knew how much this game would use it I would have just googled it beforehand. The insane rants either don't mean anything, or [spoiler] tie into the overarching mental field plot that sucks [/spoiler]. Character "tendencies" are fairly telegraphed.

IMHO one of the top 10 must play games before you expire. This should be a movie. No story like it! Zero Escape series even with its flaws across each individual game ... really leaves you thinking. Fantastic translation too, feels so native with great command of the english language to land puns, jokes, etc.

This has to be, by far, the most plot-twisty, plot-heavy, intense, intriguing, and headache-inducing visual novel I've ever played. I never played the originals, so this was my introduction to Zero Escape. Because of that, I won't compare these versions to the original releases. Also, it's REALLY important to play these games completely blind. Even small spoilers can seriously damage the experience. The first game is 999, and between the two, I think it has much better writing. Even though there's a bunch of pseudoscience involved and some characters pull off seemingly impossible feats, the mysteries surrounding both the main plot and the subplots feel much more grounded, which made the overall story much stronger for me. The main twist, which is also considerably more grounded than what happens in the second game, was executed MUCH better. Everything slowly comes together in a way that genuinely blew my mind. This is definitely a game I'll remember for years. The second game, Virtue's Last Reward, is also top-tier, but while I had almost nothing bad to say about 999, that's definitely not the case here. First: the 3D models are AWFUL. All of them. What the ♥♥♥♥ is Alice even …

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