Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors 2009

Is it still worth playing?

Chunsoft's 2009 visual novel and escape the room game for the Nintendo DS, in which nine people abducted onto a sealed cruise ship are forced to play the Nonary Game. You play Junpei, a college student, and the goal is to find the door marked 9 within nine hours, before the ship sinks. Each participant wears a bracelet with a digit, and the group works in separate teams. Novel sections have you read the story, talk to characters and sometimes make decisions that change the plot. They alternate with escape sections, where you view rooms in first person, find and combine items and solve puzzles. Doors use locks based on digital roots, so only groups whose bracelet digits add up to the matching root can pass. Doors that open only for the right combination of people make each puzzle also a decision about who goes where, so replaying it still pays off.