The Nonary Games is a escape puzzle themed visual novel series that focuses on random people trying to escape the enviroment they are in before time runs out and they all die and find out the mystery why they were kidnapped and how they got there in the first place.
The stories are a mix of psychological horror and science fiction, with a lot of complex philosophical concepts to its storytelling which was pretty interesting.
The game is also notorious for its multiple timeline plots and so things will get more and more confusing as time goes and its really not the most easiest story to follow especially when as things go by that’s when you’ll see the more really outlandish elements in the story that just further complicates things than really it does make it enjoyable.
So if anything it should have stuck to being closely grounded instead of having these random supernatural and time altering events in it.
The atmosphere is very tense and obviously really dark as anything and anyone can die at any moment.
You can choose which route to go but be careful as it can lead to a bad ending and depending on which room you enter you have to solve a puzzle to try to figure a way out of there.
The characters themselves were pretty much tropey as tropey can get and so was the dialogue too at times and if anything the humor just didn’t really fit in with the super serious nature of the game.
Uchoski stated that it was really the result of executives from Spike Chunsoft wishing to have that similar to how Danganronpa at the time was viewed to be way too dark when it initially so really it was the result of executive meddeling which was what led the games to have a really out of place wacky tone to it.
Not helping either was despite the pacing like the game literally says it in the name they have 9 hours to survive, conversations can drag on longer than they should have been while they are in a life and death situation.
The game has a flow chart in it unlike the original ds that helps you keep track on your progress with routes in the story in other to complete them all to get the true ending so its not going to be as tedious as it was originally said to be on the ds.
The music was pretty good too.
The artstyle was pretty good and so was its fully animated characters too and the graphics were ok kind of aged badly though.
The character designs from the first game they were fine but with vlr, character designs like Clover I'm no prude to character designs that are meant to be attractive, but they just came across as the type you see on Lonelyfans than anything attractive.
The puzzles were pretty interesting for the most part and you’ll have to go back and forth a lot and choose the right objects enter right passcodes and move around objects to find a way to get out of the area you are in and quickly too.
Some of them can be tedious and just more longer than it really should have to solve them on the otherhand.
The games have a hint feature where it can give you ideas what to do next and a calculator which is saved for the math problems in the game and it’s the first time in years I've ever used math for something lol.
The game has novel and adventure mode which is for players who prefer the original ds visual novel story telling or something that’s more real time as is.
The voice acting was ok too.
It has all of the dlc from previously released content which is pretty good.
Overall this was a pretty good visual novel series.
It gets 4 out of 5 stars.
There is plans to make another game in the series along with another danganronpa game according the too-kyo game team which is where uchoski and kodaka work at these days.
This series really is for like super hardcore fans of danganronpa and really complex science fiction too.