Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is a thriller adventure visual novel adventure produced by Chunsoft. Funnily enough, it’s been exactly nine years, nine months, and nine days since the release of the game in December of 2009.
999 is the first game in the Zero Escape series. It’s an escape-the-room visual novel about nine people who are forced to take part in what's known as the Nonary Game held by a mysterious person that goes by Zero.
You play as Junpei, who wakes up on a ship wearing a bracelet with the number five on it. He eventually escapes where he comes across eight other passengers. Everyone finds out that they’ve all been kidnapped and brought on a ship. Zero tells them all the game rules and explains that each person has an explosive in their stomach. If they try and leave, the device will go off. The end goal is to find a door marked with a "9" within nine hours before the ship sinks. Suspicious, all of the characters go by code names to protect their identities and split off into other groups. The player gets to choose what group to travel with which affects the game’s choices.
The game has six different endings. Five of them are bad endings and only one is the “true” end. The iOS version has one extra ending, bringing the total to seven. The ending you get depends on which door you pick throughout the game. Overall, there are a couple of other decisions you can make to get certain endings.
999 released an updated version with English and Japanese voice acting, and higher resolution graphics along with Virtue's Last Reward in the Zero Escape: The Nonary Games bundle. The game describes itself as a mix of interesting theories, pseudoscience, and a journey to find out who is hiding behind the name Zero as well as why everyone was kidnapped. 999 is still highly rated receiving a very positive score on Steam.
The game is available to play on PC, iOS, Nintendo DS, PS4, and PlayStation Vita.