Unfinished Business: A blog-based Let’s Play of 999, part 2

I’m out on a work trip this week, and have two days of blogging to fill ahead of tiem (for a change). Lucky for me (maybe for you, too?), I have something substantial to share with you all for the occasion.

Unfinished Business is once again back from the dead, and with fitting timing seeing as this sidequest of a post series was created for the 10th anniversary of Damage Control, and here we are mere weeks after the 15th.

9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors, the first entry in what became the Zero Escape series of visual novels, is one of my favorite games of all time, but it took some work to get there. It was at times a quite frustrating and unrewarding experience. But by the time all was said and done, I considered it a masterpiece that could not have been achieved in any other medium.

I was late to the game (literally), playing it in 2014 as a random GameFly rental (do I name drop GameFly or KitKats more often? Quick, somebody go count). Geoff had played it already closer to when it came out and we came up with the idea that I would start a Google doc to capture my thoughts on the mystery as I played through the game repeatedly, finding my way to the true ending. If this sounds similar to some of the content in the #gaming_progress channel in the Discord, that’s because this process was the inspiration.

We never did end up adapting the tale for the blog, and it spent many years sitting around, forgotten. That all being said, I’m not confident that a Let’s Play translates well into written form, given that people who haven’t played/don’t remember the game will easily get lost with no context. But I’m willing to give this a try and should worst comes to worst, we just don’t do it again. If nothing else, this will be interesting as piece of Damage Control history.

As you might expect, this entire thing is unblocked SPOILERS. You have been warned.

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Fourth Playthrough

I now had a new goal to try to make a happy ending: Keep Clover out of Room 1. I think I can accomplish that by playing the game the same path, but choosing to explore Room 2 instead of 1 or 6. If I were to pick Door 2, there’s no way Clover, if not a member of the Door 2 group could enter either of the other doors (so no gun, either).

I picked Door 5 again, just in case that’s where the assailant got the knife (from the corpse of the Ninth Man) and to safeguard the 9 bracelet as I will the 0 bracelet.

But in the First Class Cabin, I was reminded of something I had forgotten about from my Second Playthrough: the locked safe in the closet. I was naive enough to think that the game would not let me leave without solving that puzzle (or that it was even a puzzle at all!), but leave I did. I never did find a combination for it, and the game never allowed access to the room again, even while searching for Snake.

So I had to unlock it here and now if I ever wanted to see the inside.

However, after rushing the main room puzzle, the game refused to let me out of the bedroom of the cabin, save to move on to the Casino. So if the combination wasn’t in the bedroom, I already blew it. This might be yet another unsolved mystery akin to who fixed the REDs in the hospital or the submarine or the person trapped in the coffin or the Bottom Deck library.

When we split up the second time, there didn’t seem to be any advantage in going through either door, so I went through Door 7 under the presumption that doing so would deny Ace access to the scalpel.

This section of the game went as expected, setting up the third-round choice between Doors 1, 2 and 6. While there was more than one party who could go through Door 2, I was willing to bet the group would be the same as my second playthrough because it was a video game, and it would allow the developer to reuse the assets (it might be impossible to go through any Door with a different combination of people, despite what appears to be an opportunity for choice).

…On the other hand, reused assets could include coming back to Ending 6 again.

Undaunted by the latter possibility, I forged ahead to Door 2. As before, Seven and Lotus came with me. It’s a fair cop, that path with them had some very important plot coupons. Ace, Santa and June went through Door 1, and the difference in the story relieved me somewhat, even though that means Ace could have the 0 bracelet, the ceramic knife, and the ax. But it seemed like I couldn’t get Ending 6 with this split. though with Clover left to herself she could go missing and create Ending 5 again.

So Seven, Lotus and I returned to the grand stairway after exploring Door 2 and find Ending 6. Fortunately, I saved when I anticipated this back at the branch, and reloaded. I decided to try Door 6 again, hoping that going through Doors 5 and 7 instead of 4 and 8 would make a difference there. It didn’t, still leading to Ending 6.

While I could have returned to my save point and gone through Door 1 again, I doubted that would reward me with anything but a return trip to Ending 3.

Back to the drawing board. Literally: I decided to make a flowchart of my paths to the different endings. I’m starting with just the doors, but conversation choices and that damn bookmark might also make a difference. In my playthroughs, there is no instance of a missed key whenever another team explores an area.

What it came down to was the only choice that consistently produces an ending is which of the last three Numbered Doors you enter. No matter which Numbered Door you choose in the first two splits, Door 2 always leads to Ending 6, Door 6 always leads to Ending 5 and Door 1 (presumably) always leads to Ending 3.

So I must be missing something. I may have failed to produce Endings 1, 2 or 4 [before encountering the final set of doors].

The scenes in between escapes seem to be pretty static, with the only choices being to open a door or answer a question correctly or incorrectly. But there are other things of interest and conversational choices in the escape rooms, many of which I hadn’t tried both ways.

The First Class cabin has the mystery safe.

The Second Class cabins have the lucky bookmark conversation choice.

The Kitchen has conversation choices with June.

The Casino, Operating Room and Engine Room don’t seem to have anything extra.

The Laboratory offers a conversation choice with Lotus (and Clover, too, I think).

The Bridge offers a conversation choice with Ace, which I chose poorly and got knocked out by.

The Captain’s Quarters has the key to a library.

The Cargo Room has that golden revolver.

The Prison Cells are supposed to have a vent under a bed that can be taken elsewhere.

And the Torture Chamber has the Sun key, which is unique in that its the only key NOT required to open the exit to the room. I might want to redo Door 2 and see if the game lets me skip finding the Sun key, which might be the trigger for Ending 6 rather than opening Door 2.

Should I ever open Door 9 (which the escape mode collection tells me is the single-door 9, not the double-door 9), there’ll be two more puzzle rooms waiting for me. But it seems that neither ought to affect the ending I get for going through them.

I wonder again if saving Snake is actually a thing. On the off chance that the safe is openable, and it also just so happens to contain the missing pieces to the REDs, the chance to kill Snake will never come, and Clover will never go ax-crazy no matter what room she visits.

I also can’t remember (because I was writing backwards for a time) if after opening Door 3 first, the game allowed us to try going through Doors 7 and 8 before going to Door 2.

In any case, fiddling around with the Numbered Door order is no longer getting me anywhere. I think I’ll need to [look elsewhere] to find my way to new endings.

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Fifth Playthrough

I tried to go through this session by making conversational choices that advance the story.

There are several subjects I want to hear about in this playthrough: Olympic-class cruise liners, the connection the people might have to this ship, and the pharmaceutical company apparently involved in the whole affair. Other common threads, stories that seem to be told in one way or another, are those about the Morphogenic Field passing information, be it the telepathic mechanism or the crystallization of that chemical.

In any case, the more bolded words I encountered, the better.

I first took Door 5, and told June I was worried about her, and then also that the ship might be the Titanic in order to trigger the cutscene in which she talks about the Olympic. Then, I took the bookmark from Santa because it would trigger a conversational choice and tried a conversation option I hadn’t done in my first playthrough: Asking about stocks. This yielded what was supposed to be the games first reference to the pharmaceutical company apparently owning the ship and responsible for the kidnappings Seven was investigating, as told through Door 2.

I accidently left part of the dark bedroom unexplored; the bottle and the piece of furniture it was on. The candle goes out as soon as you grab the shower curtain on the bed, so I don’t know if I ever explored those in any of my other two trips through the room.

We moved from the 2nd Class cabins to the Kitchen.

Here another thought occurred to me. Unlike the 1st Class cabin through Door 4, this path’s ship’s map pickup is optional. I might have to try to skip it in the future.

I asked June to tell me about the story of Futility. After getting locked in the freezer, I let June talk about sublimation, which led to the story of how glycerin somehow told all its friends how to crystalize, another reference to the morphogenetic field. I had not selected being annoyed yet, and surprisingly, it yielded more talk about Vonnegut’s Ice-9.

At this point I realize sending people to the kitchen also gave them access to a newly-sharpened knife. Whoops.

Next comes when skipping the map (if possible) would come in handy: The team could have backtracked to the 1st Class cabin (and the safe therein) but choose not to after looking at the map and seeing the hallway leading to it would be backtracking to the grand staircase.

It could be possible the combination to the safe uses the numbers from the plate puzzle that otherwise only served as a primer on hexadecimal notation.

We rendezvous at the big hospital room, where Seven gets to talking about boats, for some reason calling the Britannic the Gigantic. Not sure why the game didn’t want to use the actual name of the actual hospital ship when it talked, accurately, at length of all other sorts of facts about the Olympic-class cruise liners. Did the White Star line only file for a trademark for the Britannic or something?

Of course, the Britannic also wasn’t in the Aegean Sea when it struck the mine that killed her. Nor did it run aground after. It straight-up sank. Perhaps that’s why the name Gigantic is used, out of difference for the fictionalized pieces of the story.

The hardware for the REDs is still gone, we still split up to check the hospital rooms and Snake still goes missing. I really wish I knew if I’m wasting my time thinking I might influence his outcome. I don’t think there’s any point in the choices I make searching for Snake, so I didn’t make more than I had to. He’s already dead behind Door 3. I did tell Santa I thought Snake fixed them. The only one I’ve yet to tell him now is Lotus.

The fun part of talking to Santa, of course, is when he says “the one you trust the most may end up stabbing you in the back” while June is standing right there next to him. If June ends up being the bad guy somehow, that would have been real beat-you-in-the-face style foreshadowing.

(June, of course, does not benefit the most from taking the 8 bracelet, unless she also had the 4. Not that she had a chance to do in Clover, who disappeared while June was with the group exploring Door 6. Besides, we already know the killer is [not one of them] from Ending 6, even though Ending 5 more-or-less tells us to play the game over with the understanding that the killer IS a certain one of them.)

So, doors. I know I’ll get more weird science plot coupons by taking Door 7. I also know I’ll have some conversation options I haven’t yet tried by taking Door 8. I suppose I’ll save here and try Door 8.

And Door 8 turned out to have no such options. I must have misremembered.

Knowing I could save scrum my way back through Door 7, I took the opportunity to take a second look through Door 1. It turns out that Ace gets the drop on me no matter which option I pick. And Door 1 consistently produced an Ax-crazy Clover. The clover bookmark did little to protect me from her.

It’s a predicament. Somebody has to go through Door 6 to find Door 9. And I presume that somebody has to go through Door 1 to find the extra keycard to the Bottom Deck library.

Simply put, if Snake dies, Clover can’t go into Door 1. And my clever way of avoiding that by taking Door 2 gives me the Submarine TPK ending. I think I’m back to my original idea of taking Door 2, and trying to miss getting the Sun key. Considering we’re supposed to take Door 9 and not the sub anyway, it seems entirely useless other than getting me a bad ending that also happens to have credits.

If this game doesn’t at least explain some of its mysteries in the other three ending paths, I’m going to hate it forever.

So, scrumming to Door 7, I was rewarded for my choice. When Seven started talking about EDT hydrate, Jumpei responded with the knowledge he gained from June about the glycine back through Door 5. If nothing else, I saw new dialog this time. But I like to think this means something.

Hrm, I need to get some mashed potatoes.

And now a dialog choice entirely novel! I can ask Seven if remembers anything in general, or ask specifically about Ice-9. It’s my Fifth (plus many fractions) playthrough, so I’m setting a new save scrum point here.

Asking about Ice-9 triggers a memory about a woman named Allice. (Hrm, didn’t we find her book filled with hieroglyphs and the key to the library behind Door 1? I think I just punched my ticket out of Ax crazy.) I had a good feeling.

Hey, more Titanic backstory! I’m finally realizing my goal of seeing as much bold text and backstory threads as possible.

Another payoff: Seven tells me about the discovery of what I believe to be the mummy June claimed to have cursed the Titanic into sinking. The mummy was then bought by the same person who Seven claimed in the hospital room also bought the Brit- er, Gigantic.

Seems legit. With me around, this job’s easy.

It’s a shame I’ll have to leave Seven behind to go through the Doors 9s, he’s doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. That or we’re going to get killed by All-ice or her curse without having to even bother picking groups to tackle Door 9. My, that sounds awfully likely now.

And one last confirmation: The clue to finding where All-ice is hidden leads directly to the bottom deck library, unlocked by the key found in an Egyptian book titled All-ice. Do I dare consider Door 1 to be a safe journey now?

DAMN STRAIGHT! I have a new option to give the bookmark to Clover before leaving the operating room. This is the way!

Another clue that might payoff later. Were Santa and Clover also among the 16 kidnapped kids along with Lotus’ children? With a few more pushes of the A button, the answer was yes. So now, Ace, Snake, the Ninth Man and Jumpei and June were the only ones so far not confirmed to be connected to the Gigantic. Though, let’s see. Jumpei and June are 21. They last saw each other in sixth grade. They would have been 11 then… 10 years ago. June could very well have been one of those children without Jumepi having even a clue something happened to her.

Time to move on to a certain new death at the the end of the line. And, perhaps, a certain old one, too, behind Door 3. …I’ve seen Snake die so many times now I’m becoming desensitized. I might make a codec joke next time I see this.

Now it’s time to pick from Doors 1, 2 and 6. If I pick Door 2, I can push the story toward the morphogenic field. If I pick Door 1, I can push the story toward All-Ice. If I pick Door 6, I probably can’t do anything new. I must confess I’m more curious as to the bookmark’s effect on Clover. I’ll go for Door 1.

And, having seen the cutscene in the operating room, Ace no longer gets the drop on me, and I can see a new cutscene with Clover actually talking. Except we’re not continuing that story. Now we’re trying to solve Snake’s murder. I soooooooo want to accuse Ace and Zero, but that might have to wait until we saw the 0 bracelet for ourselves.

On a side note, Ace is way more active with puzzle solving on the Bridge than he was in the Engine Room.

It looks like I’m finally getting my chance for the Ace + Zero murder theory! Clover’s talking about the body and the bracelet. I can only hope now that Jumpei is as smart as I am and actually mentions it.

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!! Snake’s alive! Snake is… alive!

Man. It really WAS a play-doh body. Does that mean it’s Snake in the Chapel coffin? Delivered to us right when we would need him?

But if Snake is alive, then Ace isn’t a killer or the Real Zero. I’m almost disappointed.

Still, no Ax Crazy ending now! Hip-Hip Hurrah!

The plot coupon pinata just keeps on giving with confirmation Santa was in the experiment 9 years ago, along with Snake. And Ace had something to say about suspended animation after hearing all about June and Seven’s All-Ice story.

Now, we can get together, free Snake from the coffin and then either slip out Doors 9 or check up on the possibility of All-Ice being the killer all along.

Which adds an interesting quandary. Who had the most to gain from taking a bracelet? Somebody who had none but wanted to leave. Despite having access to a submarine. But I guess frozen Egyptians aren’t handy with such technology. Perhaps I can lure her out by offering to play a children’s card game.

It’s just like Jumpei said when he first discovered Doors 9 after going through Door 6. The game was trying to get people to mistrust or turn against one another, when all of them could escape anyway. When I stopped trying to work against possible killers within my party, I got the bad endings. When I instead started playing in such a way as to help Clover, I’m on my way to possibly a good ending.

Whelp, we found what happened to the gold gun. Damn Santa.

Looks like the reason why “Memories of Escape” shows the smaller Door 9 is because Zero escapes through the big one, leaving it inaccessible.

Still, we know Snake’s alive, so the rest of us can still escape as soon as we find him. How convenient that Zero left me Clover for a heartfelt reunion.

But even if Snake really was dead, it’d be as simple as backtracking to the hospital and taking his bracelet.

But the game ended at examining the coffin. Dick move!

But it gave me a flash. Santa was Zero. Door 5. The Laboratory. The Engine Room. Ace with the gun.

That was Ending 2.

My God. Sorry! You didn’t quite do something right. No coffin for you! You can’t even check the Library for clues to open the coffin. I guess that means there weren’t any there.

To Be Concluded….

We’re going to give you a breather after this; the final part will be published on Sunday as Angela will not be streaming.