Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors
| Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors | |
|---|---|
North American first-print cover art, featuring the main characters
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| Developer(s) | Chunsoft |
| Publisher(s) |
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| Director(s) | Kotaro Uchikoshi |
| Designer(s) | Akihiro Kaneko |
| Programmer(s) | Yasushi Takashina |
| Artist(s) | Kinu Nishimura |
| Writer(s) | Kotaro Uchikoshi |
| Composer(s) | Shinji Hosoe |
| Series | Zero Escape |
| Platform(s) | Nintendo DS, iOS, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Microsoft Windows |
| Release | |
| Genre(s) | Visual novel, adventure |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
| Aggregate score | |
|---|---|
| Aggregator | Score |
| Metacritic | 82/100 |
| Review scores | |
| Publication | Score |
| Destructoid | 10/10 |
| Eurogamer | 7/10 |
| Famitsu | 36/40 |
| GameSpot | 8.5/10 |
| GamesRadar |   |
| IGN | 9/10 |
| Nintendo Life |   |
| Nintendo World Report | 9/10 |
| The Escapist |  |
| Wired | 8/10 |
| Awards | |
|---|---|
| Publication | Award |
| IGN | Best Story of 2010 |
| RPGFan | Best Graphic Adventure: Handheld (2010) |
| Destructoid | Editor's Choice Award |
Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is a visual novel adventure game developed by Chunsoft. The game is the first installment in the Zero Escape series, which also includes Virtue's Last Reward and Zero Time Dilemma. It was released in Japan in 2009 and in North America in 2010 for the Nintendo DS, with an iOS version following in 2013 in Japan and 2014 in the rest of the world. A high-definition remake was published in 2017 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation Vita, as part of the Zero Escape: The Nonary Games bundle, together with Virtue's Last Reward.
The story follows Junpei, a college student who is abducted along with eight other people and forced to play the "Nonary Game," which puts its participants in a life-or-death situation, to escape from a sinking cruise liner. The gameplay alternates between two types of sections: Escape sections, where the player completes puzzles in escape-the-room scenarios; and Novel sections, where the player reads the game's narrative and makes decisions that influence the story, making it branch into six different endings. The whole plot is not revealed in just one playthrough; the player has to reach the one "true" ending to get all the information.
Development of the game began after Uchikoshi joined Chunsoft to write a visual novel for them that could reach a wider audience; Uchikoshi suggested adding puzzle elements that are integrated with the game's story. The inspiration for the story was the question of where inspiration comes from; while researching it, Uchikoshi came across Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance hypothesis, which became the main theme of the game. The music was composed by Shinji Hosoe, while the characters were designed by Kinu Nishimura. The localization was handled by Aksys Games; they worked by the philosophy of keeping true to the spirit of the original Japanese version, opting for natural-sounding English rather than following the original's exact wording.
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