Have you ever heard of the morphogenetic field? : let's talk about 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors

Well, the morphogenetic field goes without saying, but have you ever heard of this super obscure DS title called Zero Escape? Jokes aside, there's certainly nothing I can say about this game that hasn't been said before, but it's not like I’ve actually ever read anything that was said about it, so who cares—

Anyways. Nine people are kidnapped by a mysterious masked figure and forced to do math puzzles play a death game in a sinking ship—the concept itself is pretty simple, but there's a lot more to this than initially meets the eye. It was interesting finally getting to know the characters I've seen on my dashboard dozens of times—especially a certain Akane Kurashiki who I had always been curious about. Suffice to say that I get it now. Boy do I get it now.

On my first run, as characters interrupted the puzzle-solving to talk about theory of reality and Titanic conspiracies and crystallization of molecules or what-have-you, I found myself remembering AI the Somnium Files a lot—which tracks since that's also by Uchikoshi (who I have to admit I know nothing about). The process of trial-and-error to get new endings on my subsequent runs reminded me of Otogirisou (I should try and finish that damn thing one of these days), which, as it turns out, was also a Chunsoft title—what can I say, ADVs like this are kind of a blind spot for me.

I tried playing the Xbox version several years ago and tapped out a few minutes in because the NVL/ADV toggle was ridiculously bad. I finally got around to emulating it on my dad's tablet, which made for the perfect experience. The use of the dual screens is simply masterful. Whenever I play something that uses the hardware like that it makes me wish we had a proper DS descendant in the market—not that it would make much difference for me, but it might make a difference for the world of video games. Or something.

I was a bit worried about not being able to do the puzzles since I struggled through a lot of the one Professor Layton game I played, but every escape had an ideal difficulty level for me. I never felt that it was mindlessly easy but it was also never like, frustratingly difficult.

Since you have to play the game multiple times I kind of wish you could skip the rooms you've already done, but it was actually pretty fast to redo them once I got used to it. I ended up playing the game 8 times because I got two of the endings twice as I was figuring out how things worked, and in the process I ended up memorizing the number inputs for some of the puzzles. The saddest part was somehow lucking in on the answer on the first time for a couple of the puzzles through what I can only assume was me tapping into the morphogenetic field itself and then actually having to do the math and figure out how it worked when I had to do them again…(ᵕ—ᴗ—)

Anyways, it's a really fun and clever game, and I enjoyed it way more than I expected to. Sometimes the popular thing everyone says is really good actually is really good, huh.