Review: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors

You wake up in a small room with one locked door as the only way out.  Scattered around the room are a few items that when pieced together along with some other clues and puzzles will help you open that door.  If that sounds familiar, then you have played an escape the room game before.  Usually, that's the extent of any plot these games have and they end with a "Congratulations" screen and that's it.

This game, on the other hand adds on a plot that seems like a plot from one of the Saw movies.  9 people have been captured, they have 9 hours to use the 9 doors to escape from a ship before it sinks.  If you've seen a Saw movie, you also know that at some point you will find out there is a link between all of the characters.

On top of these things, there are six different endings and to get the one happy ending, you have to unlock a specific one of the other endings and make certain choices along the way of the playthrough.  The downside of this is that you will have to play the opening section of the game and resolve puzzles 6 times.  But  to slightly compensate for that, they let you hold right on the Control Pad to quickly breeze through dialogue you've read before and it automatically stops when there is new dialog.

So even though it doesn't sound like there was anything really original in this, it was the first professional escape the room game I've played, the story was very interesting with plenty of twists and turns, and the puzzles were the perfect blend between cleverness and clarity.  You do have to really enjoy reading, though, since I'd say 80% of it is dialogue and 20% is actual gameplay...more interactive fiction than game, really.