9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors for Nintendo DS Reviews by Gamers

I have two problems with this room-escapte game.

1.) This isn't so much a video game as it is a novel trying to pass itself off as a video game.

2.) If it were a well written novel, there wouldn't be a number one or two.

That about sums it up. The puzzles, once you finish slogging through 20 to 30 minutes of un-skippable dialogue and writing, are actually pretty good. I'm not sure if the writing itself was this terrible originally, or if the translators just didn't have that much mastery over the English language. But I could find better prose in my toilet.

All in all, if you like room escape games, you can find better ones for free on the internet.

This game is rated "mature," but doesn't seem to actually be for adults. The main problems? Poor writing, incessant repetition, and incredibly easy puzzles.

The rave review for this title are primarily based on praise for the interesting and creative story (which makes sense, since this game is quite literally 90% story and 10% interactive puzzles). I agree that the story, as a whole, is good. However, the writing itself is so poor and repetitive that anything redeeming about the story is lost. One would think that a "mature" game would be written at an adult reading level.

It isn't merely that it moves slowly -- concepts are repeated over and over (presumably so that you catch the "important" stuff), and it feels as though this was written for a 12-year-old. Particularly obnoxious examples of this is full repetition of unnecessarily detailed instructions every time you click on a puzzle (e.g. entering a combination - a full paragraph of explanation), detailed discussion of basic arithmetic, repetitive and excruciatingly descriptive details that do not add to the story, a character's internal dialogue that paraphrases the conversation that you just read, etc.

Further, the story is written with all of the sophistication of a high school creative writing assignment (which, I suppose, is suggested by the repetition). Not only is the sentence structure poor and distracting, there is close to no believable character development. As a person who cries at almost every movie, I had no empathy whatsoever for any of these characters. For a game that is primarily story-driven, this is damning. Story-driven games, one of my favorite genres, can be done well (see, e.g., Heavy Rain). This, however, is poorly executed.

As for the remaining 10%, it's fairly boring. To compare it to Myst is laughable. I'm fine with easy games, but when action is hours apart, it's a snooze. If the writing was better, it would have been tolerable. Alas, a good concept, marred in execution.