According to research, spoilers actually make people more likely to consume the thing being spoiled. If I can encourage just one person to play 999, my contribution to society will have been a net positive. It's legitimately incredible. Top whatever of all time. It has a cult following, but it should really be at least as popular as The World Ends With You. Anyway, spoilers ahead.
There are two versions of 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. It was initially released for the Nintendo DS in 2009. NA got our localization in 2010. It was rereleased in 2017 as part of a bundle with its sequel in Zero Escape: The Nonary Games. Straight up, the DS version is the one to play. It goes for about $100 CAD, so your best bet is to download a ROM. I'll help you set it up if you're confused <3 The character portraits in the original are gorgeous pixel art, while the 2017 demaster has these ugly chunky sprites. June, our anime gf, is much hotter as pixel art, and that's important for, uh, immersion. Jokes aside, every character looks better. But more importantly, the script was designed quite intentionally across both DS screens. In the demaster, they made an attempt to manage all the dialogue and narration to fit them on a single screen for a wide release, but they mangled the script. 999 has high-concept writing that requires two channels to properly distinguish the dialogue from narration. The English localization is great so it deserves to exist as its best iterations. The player can toggle between two versions of the script in the 2017 release, but both are worse than the original. I do like the voice acting in the 2017 version though. It's not amazing, but it's a nice addition.
This game was scientifically designed to appeal to me specifically. It has everything I love: a killing game scenario, overly convoluted science fiction mechanics, meta storytelling, plot twists contingent on mathematics, and a sickeningly sweet romance as an emotional core. Here I refer to a puppy-love reunion between two childhood friends (*scoffs weebly*) named Junpei and June, or, as they refer to each other in the English version, Jumpy and Kanny. They're so cute I want to puke. I hate how much I love this shit. I legit wrote erotic fan fiction about them. You'll never find it ahahahaha.
Akane Kurashiki, alias: June, is one of my favourite characters from ever. She's a bashful, gentle, somewhat naive girl, and the designated protectee in this life-and-death scenario. She's cute as a button and seems to enjoy rambling about urban legends and the occult. She is also the culprit behind the Nonary Game, and is responsible for abducting the entire cast and putting them in a maze learning experiment under threat of being blowed up. The scenario, as described, can only have a handful of survivors.
She thought, in her Machiavellian earnestness, that everyone would unite, rather than betray and murder each other to escape. If this sounds stupid, wait until you read the next sentence. Because June has the psychic ability to time travel her consciousness through her emotional connection with Junpei, she trapped him in this present-day scenario so he could solve the final puzzle and transmit the solution to her past self, where she was trapped in another Nonary Game.
Junpei, who also has psychic powers, must, in the present, project his own consciousness into parallel versions of himself, giving him answers to the various puzzles he encounters in different routes across different timelines. He is invariably killed in most scenarios.
To summarize: child Akane, in order to save herself, creates a bootstrap paradox killing game so she can run infinite parallel versions of her boyfriend into a meat grinder until one of them finds the solution to her current dilemma. Queen shit.