My mind is still unraveling.

It's been three days since I started playing. Three days that stretched into three nights. Late nights, staying up well into the A.M. hours. It wasn't a choice. It wasn't a decision, ahead of time, to play like that. But as my mind began to become more and more intertwined into the world I'd begun exploring, it seemed impossible to stop. I couldn't stop. I was playing 999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors.

This is the game that you might have heard described as a text adventure, or a visual novel, translated for our American market and given an M-for-Mature content rating -- a rarity on DS. And though it is all those things, those things fail to describe what you'll truly find in this box: One complete and total mindf***.

999 opens with our hero Junpei, an average college-aged kid, waking up in a haze of cloudy memory in a place he's never seen before. As he gets his bearings, he quickly discovers the grim situation he's in -- he's been kidnapped. Kidnapped, and taken to a ship adrift somewhere in the ocean. He soon meets up with eight other victims and they all discover, together, that they've been gathered together by a madman to play through a sick and twisted human experiment called "the Nonary Game."

It's a game of life and death -- and death is far more frequent. The victims struggle to work together, trying to follow the strict rules that the kidnapper, "Zero," has laid out for them. Things get bloody quickly, though, as personalities clash and everyone's individual self-preservation instinct comes up against each of the others.

To make matters worse, the players only have nine hours to complete the game before the ship they're in is sunk, killing them all. And, to make matters even worse than that, each one of the victims has a bomb placed in their bodies that will explode if they try to break any rules.

So, safe to say, Junpei's had better days.

That gripping premise is just the beginning in 999, though, as after the game's storyline sets itself up you then begin to take control of the path the narrative will thereafter follow. Like one of those old "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, you'll be presented with decision options along the way -- which of the other players you, as Junpei, will team up with. Which of Zero's deadly numbered doors you'll choose to enter. And even seemingly unimportant casual responses to questions in dialogue with other characters.

But that's where 999 really starts to get you -- nearly every single thing you do and say is critical. Whether you live or die over the course of an entire nine-hour playthrough could very well hinge on the most innocent of selections you make somewhere around hour 3, or 5, or 7. Picking the right doors and choosing the right conversation options can access entire new paths of possibility going forward. 999 has six different endings to achieve, and you'll be so engrossed in the mythology, conspiracy theories and the intricate ways in which the characters' backgrounds are interwoven with one another that you won't be able to put your DS down for days.


And that's only part of the experience. The majority of your time with 999 is spent in dialogue and interaction with other characters, as the "visual novel" term suggests. But in-between those interactions is the actual gameplay of the game -- puzzle-solving to escape the traps and obstacles Zero's set up throughout the giant ship.

If you've ever played "escape the room" puzzlers before then you've got a good sense of what you'll be doing here -- Junpei finds himself locked into a series of rooms filled with riddles, always paired with different teams of characters drawn from the pool of eight other victims, and you, as he, must explore each environment and solve every puzzle in order to move on to the next set of challenges. This plays out by taking the DS stylus in hand and cycling through each scene, touching objects on the screen to interact with them and picking up some items to use as keys and tools.

It works wonderfully well. Puzzle-solving and exploration of this sort has been seen before here on DS, but the tension that's built and the terror that surrounds these characters as they're attempting to accomplish even the simplest of tasks gives the entire experience a palpable urgency. If you screw up, you feel it, and you really start to freak out that these people you're trying to help are going to end up dead. And, worse, that's a real possibility -- you'll almost certainly choose a path that gets somebody killed your first time through.