Clearly, my expectations for Zero Escape were not high enough.

I don't like calling games such as this or Ace Attorney "visual novels" because they're not novels. They're narrative puzzle games. There is absolutely a "game" in finding and acting on the contradictions of an an Ace Attorney game, Zero Escape is much the same, with elaborate puzzle sections that vary wildly between "absolute babycore" and "actual math homework." I don't like math. My time in the education system poisoned me against it so viciously that I quickly get fed up with even basic addition. Even still, I'll be damned if 999 didn't at least KIND OF get me to care about the numbers. I played on the DS rather than the remastered Steam version I also own, and I would recommend that others do the same. You don't need the voice acting, you don't really need an art upgrade, and most importantly and interestingly, you don't need the Quality of Life.

999 is, and you'll have to excuse the micro-spoiler inherent in this sentence, a game that is meant to be played more than once. It is however, like most puzzle games, somewhat difficult to replay. Puzzles are seldom fun to solve twice, and 999 involves solving a whole bunch of puzzles a whole bunch of times. For the most part, these puzzles can be blasted through with little resistance after you've solved them once, though I'd be lying if I said that the repetition didn't have its annoyances. Mercifully, even on the DS, the game features an adequate fast-forward feature and is short enough that repeat runs are nothing to be upset over. More to the point, 999 is structured in such a way that it is almost impossible for the player to not experience something new, substantial, and interesting on each run. This might be the thing about 999 that impressed me the most.

The other contender is the clockwork nature of its writing. Even though I can find logical or logistical wrinkles in its plot if I try, 999 is so excellent at threading its themes into neat little loops and layering its twists on top of each other that to focus on such lingering curiosities would be pedantic in the extreme. 999 knows exactly what it wants to be and how to keep you interested from start to finish. It unfolds itself in a truly well considered way that expertly delivers on dread and intrigue. The impenetrability of a mystery is always subjective, but for the vast majority of players, 999 will regularly throw well-timed curveballs that are properly foreshadowed without giving too much away. The clever will catch some twists well ahead of their reveals or occasionally have their suspicions vindicated, but no one is likely to get ahead of each and every one.

If there's a particular reason I'm not ready to christen 999 as a member of the five-star hall of fame besides the necessary repetition, it's the actual puzzles. As I said, some of them are Weenie Hut Junior material, and most of the rest are just doing actual math, though for someone less allergic than myself, that math probably qualifies as toddler stuff too. In itself, that's fine. It's merely the chosen accessibility level. It's mostly two things that raise my eyebrow: the total chaos of the difficulty curve among those puzzles, and the fact that in many parts of the game the actual difficulty often feels like it comes from pixel hunting and navigating the environment, rather than anything else. I got legitimately stuck on the very first puzzle because I couldn't tell that the thing I needed to interact with was a separate object, and the camera angle cut it off in such a way that I didn't think it was meant to be in my actionable field of view. This kind of stuff fades away quickly as the player learns how the game operates, but I can't help feeling that there's some clumsy design in play in some of these escape sections, and that it bears mentioning.

When all is said and done though, 999 will be sticking with me for quite some time, and as a Saw-Disrespecting Math Hater, I'm very glad that I didn't write it off.