999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors: An intricate mystery narrative

As a diehard fan of the Nintendo DS during its heyday (and well, I'm still a big fan of it now), I'd certainly heard of 999. It's not clear why I never played it around its original release in 2010. I even have a history of playing visual novels and point-and-click adventure-adjacent games like Ace Attorney and even stuff like Hotel Dusk. Having played the remaster now, I acknowledge I was definitely missing out, even though it's nice to play a version of the game with more modern amenities, including full voiceover for all dialogue in the game. I elected to play with Japanese voice acting in an effort to incorporate more Japanese immersion into my normal routine. It definitely made me look up a lot of words that kept reappearing—and it was always a joy to notice how many words I recognized already.

999 is a story with many branching pathways, though, and one excellent feature included with this version of the game is a detailed flowchart that affords the player the opportunity to quickly move to previously unlocked scenes to make different choices. This feature, combined with the ability to quickly zip through previously read dialogue, makes exploring each narrative path a breeze. I was shocked to read that the original version of the game had no such feature, meaning that if you wanted to see all the game had to offer, you had to play through the entire game again, over and over. If you happened to make a mistake and pick the wrong option? Well, I hope you saved recently, or you're playing it all over again.

Because of the flow chart in this game, I really didn't have to look that much up to unlock all the endings. Every time I reached a bad ending, I'd go back and make different choices to see how that affected the way things progressed. It felt much more organic than having to meticulously hit a number of flags to get the desired outcome. Incidentally, this is exactly what I had to do in Steins;Gate. Although I enjoyed that game, I would have infinitely preferred a flow chart system like this one.

999 is a bit like a less wacky Danganronpa. There're no trials here, but of course, there's a lot of intrigue, mystery, and vividly described violence. Instead of densely plotted group discussions, 999's primary conceit lay in its puzzles, which range from relatively simple to fiendishly complex. I'll be the first to admit I'm not the strongest puzzler out there. I was confounded at one point in the story that the game seemed to expect me to just know Morse code in order to proceed. Of course, I happened to miss that there was a handy guide hidden nearby, and was jumping to conclusions, but still. In another puzzle, I was tasked with completing a 3x3 grid in which all lines added up to 15. I spent about an hour on this before giving up in disgust. It's no fault of the game, mind you, but this puzzle made me feel pretty stupid. I eventually discovered what "magic squares" were and learned there were many ways you could solve such a puzzle.

There's probably nothing important in there.

Even so, many of the puzzles left me with a satisfying feeling after I'd conquered them. It often felt my ability to solve one of these puzzles had more to do with my level of patience at that time than any particular skill on my part. My skill for such a task is nonexistent, but my persistence can sometimes override that. Frequently, in the case of puzzles that require shifting or moving things in a pattern, my method of attack has very little to do with tactics and much more to do with brute forcing a solution until the pieces fall into place. I'm not great at keeping multiple steps ahead in my mind, so working through it is the best way for me to figure things out. The best example I can think of there is a puzzle in which you're required to maneuver boxes around each other so that they all occupy a specific position on the side of a room. Instead of thinking about how best these could be arranged, I simply kept moving them in different patterns, observing which paths took me less time. Eventually, I found the path that could be done in the allocated number of moves through sheer trial and error.

I can't help but compare the way I tackle these puzzles to Into the Breach, which features combat encounters that frequently feel like puzzles of their own. My first instinct in that game was to go through the motions so I could internalize the outcome of my actions. Frequently, I would move too far ahead and complete moves that couldn't be undone—for which the game features a handy Reset Turn feature. Unfortunately, that game only allows you to do this once per combat, which often wasn't enough for me.

I've often thought of puzzles as something that just isn't for me, or that I just don't like them at all. I don't think this is actually true. I think I do like puzzles, but it's helpful when the way to solve a puzzle caters to the way I think. If I can move within a puzzle and operate within it, experiment with possible solutions within the framework it provides—that gives me something to work with. If the puzzle wants me to plan out something, memorize it, visualize the steps ahead in my mind—then that's just not going to work for me. I'm going to feel frustrated and entirely unable to progress. In the case of 999, this isn't often what the game asks you to do. It generally gives you room to experiment, so I found I enjoyed most of the puzzles in the game, even when some of the answers seemed frustratingly out of reach.

Ultimately, though, the narrative is what kept me interested. It's a mystery story, after all, and I've always liked mysteries. It's what kept me going in Danganronpa even as my distaste for so many of those characters grew. Comparatively, I like the characters in 999 pretty well, even though I cringe a little at how sexualized Lotus's design is. You learn more about each character as you go, in bits and pieces. The decisions you make along the way determine who you get to know on that particular path. As each character is assigned a number and each door has a number as well, there's some pretty simple math—a digital root—that determines which group of 3 to 5 contestants in this game can go through a particular door. Get through the door in time and deactivate your bracelets or you'll get exploded, so says Zero, the game's mysterious antagonist. During the game's opening, you're given a brutal demonstration of the veracity of those words.

Verifying at the RED to unlock one of the game's doors.

As you solve puzzles and uncover little items and artifacts that allow you access to other parts of the ship you're on, you'll also have the opportunity to make various choices, both in terms of where you'll be going, but also in what you'll say to other characters. These choices are important because it determines what these characters will tell you. Once you've gathered certain crucial pieces of information, you'll be able to use that meta-knowledge in order to make informed decisions in other paths of the game. You know what's behind Door #1 now, so let's try Door #2 next time. Each of the paths you take fills in the story of what's happening to you and your fellow participants in the Nonary Game, as well as what led them there.

I really enjoyed the game and felt like I couldn't put it down for the entire time I was playing it. I didn't get all the answers I was looking for in the end and I also feel like there's a plothole or two there, but I'm scared to look up any more specific answers because I think future entries in this series connect pretty specifically to this one, much like Danganronpa. Maybe once I've played them all, I'll meditate on the connections between these stories and try to piece it all together. I'm looking forward to it!

Minimalistic tactics with depth in Into the Breach

The last time I discussed Into the Breach was in 2018 when I played the game on Nintendo Switch. I really enjoyed the game but didn't feel like I'd given it as much time as it deserved. After all, this is a strategy game involving mechs developed by the creators of FTL. Every piece of information there is a huge positive for me—even though my repeated failures to complete an FTL run continue to haunt me to this day. When I played the game then, I basically completed one 2-island run with one squad (I think it was the Rift Walkers, but it was possibly Rusting Hulks) and then called it a day. Despite how much I enjoyed it, I just moved on at that point.

Now that I have a Steam Deck, I've been impressed enough with it as a platform that I've really embraced treating it as my primary gaming device where possible. I've been revisiting old favorites and trying out new ones that I might have otherwise skipped because they didn't seem like the kind of games I wanted to play sitting at my desk. Truthfully, Into the Breach kind of works in both settings, but it serves to contextualize why  I ended up revisiting it in the first place. I bought it a second time because it was on sale, I've been spending a lot of time on Steam Deck anyway, and I always felt like I hadn't given it a fair shot in the first place. Oh, and it also has an Advanced Edition now with a lot of new content.

There is such elegance in this game's design that I really appreciate. There are insectile aliens invading Earth and essentially wrecking whole cities. In fact, it seems it may have already happened. Your role is to lead a squad of time travelers in an effort to change history. Each move the aliens make is projected, so with careful movements, you can prevent them from destroying buildings and wipe them out in the process. 

Even with projected enemy movements, some situations can be impossible to escape unscathed.

There is some leniency in accomplishing your objective, of course. Losing one building isn't going to result in defeat, but if you lose too many, your whole run is over. Losing all of your Power Grid ends your run. Each time a building is hit, you're going to lose 1 unit of Power Grid health, but many buildings incur a penalty of 2 units of health instead. Since the tougher enemies can hit multiple squares on the grid, you can sometimes lose half of your health in one shot if you're not careful. This is why displacement effects are often more important than sheer power. You'll frequently be in a position where moving an enemy out of the way is your best bet until you can whittle them down to low enough to be defeated.

What makes the game so interesting is the variety of different squads you can employ to combat the Vek and of course the variety of enemy types as well. Uncovering the different ways each squad of 3 synergizes together is always a fun tactical challenge. One example is the Blitzkrieg squad, which initially seems pretty tough to handle. It consists of the Lightning Mech, which has a primary attack that chains through enemies, allies, and buildings alike. Although this is theoretically quite powerful, it creates a lot of problems. There are many situations in which you could back yourself into a corner in which your only method of attack also ends up killing your allies. This is a big deal in Into the Breach since pilot deaths are permanent (at least for the rest of that run). Since pilots unlock a variety of skills as they level up, keeping them alive is an important benefit to your squad.

The Blitzkrieg squad also features the Hook Mech, which can either grapple onto terrain or pull an enemy directly to it. On the surface, this synergizes perfectly with the Lightning Mech because it allows you to more easily position enemies right next to each other. However, the Hook Mech also has pulled the enemy directly next to itself, meaning it's setting itself up to be hit by the chain lightning as well. This is likely why the Hook Mech is Armored, a mechanic in which all damage is reduced by 1. The base damage on the Lightning Mech's attack is 2, so this helps it to take a few stray hits if necessary. Even so, it's not ideal to take damage in any circumstances if you can avoid it, so this still seems less than ideal. Luckily, the game affords you options to perfect that strategy. If you still want to use the Hook Mech to enable chains but also not take damage from chain lightning, you can have a pilot that can move after attacking pilot that particular mech. Alternatively, you can just make sure you upgrade it with plenty of health so it can take multiple hits.

The third mech in that squad is the Boulder Mech, which hurls boulders at enemies for decent damage. On top of that, it also pushes enemies to the left and right sides. You can use this to pop enemy Vek into the water, instantly drowning them, or just to move them out of the way of structures they'd otherwise destroy. You have to be careful, though, because you can also do things like inadvertently knock enemies into buildings, which depletes your precious Grid Power. A lot of the strategy in the game hinges on weighing the pros and cons of any particular action and whether or not what you're doing is going to back you into a corner. Another beautiful bit of synergy with the Boulder Mech is that the boulders themselves can enable a lightning chain. If you have a boulder in between some buildings or enemies, the lightning will continue. The boulder will be destroyed harmlessly but the damage will continue throughout the entire chain.

This one squad that I've just spent multiple paragraphs describing is just one squad in a roster of about 13 of them, all of which have a pile of interesting synergies. I haven't even talked about the strategy inherent to managing the protection of your buildings versus blocking the spawn of new Vek from the ground. That adds a whole new dynamic to boulders, which persist in the environment, or things like the bombling launched by the Bombermech, or the spiders birthed by the Arachnoid Mech. Suffice it to say that it's an incredibly cool game that I could probably write a whole book about. In the meantime, I'm really glad I spent more time with it this time around and will likely play it some more in the future.

First game finished in 2023: Cthulhu Saves Christmas

I did a Twitter thread chronicling all the games I finished in 2022 with the thought that it might replace these massive end-of-year lists that I've been doing for close to ten years now. What actually happened is that I compiled the whole Twitter thread and still did a huge entry on top of that. I think it really just came down to having a lot of extra thoughts I just didn't have a home for on Twitter. Maybe this year I can split the difference and just do little blog posts for each new game I finish. I don't actually intend these entries to be as long as some of my more traditional blog posts, but I would also really like to have the flexibility to write as much as I want on any given game.

Having said that, there's not actually a ton to say about Cthulhu Saves Christmas. It's a retro-style JRPG much in the vein of previous Zeboyd Games releases from the mid-2000s like Breath of Death VII and of course the original Cthulhu title, Cthulhu Saves the World. Like that title, CSC is filled with self-referential humor and extremely frequent breaking of the fourth wall. It would become grating if not for the fact that the game is only about eight hours long. It also brings back its predecessor's interesting random encounter mechanic. Random encounters are limited per area, meaning if you're having a hard time finding your way, you'll eventually just run out of encounters for that area and you can explore to your heart's content. On top of that, there's a gauge that fills to let you know when another encounter is coming. If you hit the Action button when an exclamation point appears, you can avoid encounters entirely. I generally think the random encounter mechanic isn't good, but I do like it when developers come up with creative ways to tackle its weaknesses. I actually prefer this design choice over something like Bravely Default which just gives you the option to turn off encounters entirely. This method gives you choice while still imbuing that choice with gameplay. On top of that, limiting encounters prevents subverting game balance by leveling up too much.

Unlike Cthulhu Saves the World, which plays very much like Dragon Quest, Cthulhu Saves Christmas has been essentially redesigned from the ground up to function more as a hybrid between that game and Zeboyd's 2017 title, Cosmic Star Heroine. Each of the game's four characters learns a pool of skills as the game progresses and you choose which of those abilities to set to up to four slots in combat. Like CSH, abilities go on cooldown when used and must be recharged if they are to be used again. On top of that, each character enters Hyper mode on a given turn, which unlocks various bonuses and effects for each skill. The strategy comes from making sure a certain skill is available for use on the Hyper turn to get the best effect. It's a good combat system, but I felt it worked not quite as well here compared to Cosmic Star Heroine because you'll generally be fighting many more encounters in each dungeon comparatively. I think I actually would have preferred something a little simpler to match the breezy tone of the game.

Either way, it's a very silly, cute little game that I don't regret playing at all. I played it because I fully plan to play a lot more lightweight games this year and this is only the start.