999VLR: Day 1 (spoilers)

You wake up locked in a room.  Really, given the history of the game, this shouldn't surprise you.  You're immediately partnered with a girl named Phi, your name is Sigma.  Cute.  The proctor of the extremely Saw-like game is a projected bunny on a screen that talks, and calls itself an AI by the name of Zero Jr. (since Zero Sr. would be the gamemaster, and the one who created Zero Jr. to proctor the game.  Zero Jr. flat out tells us that its creator is masquerading as one of the nine players of this, the latest Nonary Game).  Going over rules and controls and "how did I get here" and "who are you" and "what is this watch on my wrist" takes seemingly forever, since you already know that you're not going to get any actually helpful answers, and let's just escape this tiny room already.  I guess that's just my recent re-play of the original 999 kicking in there.

Room is easily escaped, except now each room has a safe with two passcodes, one that opens and gives you the key to leave, and one that will open to give you a golden file of information.  Usually the second passcode is more difficult to find, and though I poked and poked at the room, I couldn't figure out how to get the second passcode and had to leave the room without it.  For now.  I assume I'll be coming back.

Outside, we find ourselves in a creepy warehouse, complete with creepy message written in blood (or red paint, they never actually said which) on the wall.  Zero Jr. has a projection screen on the wall where he explains more rules: the nine door right next to him is the only exit, only people with more than 9 bracelet points can go through, it will only open once, if you break rules, the bracelet injects you with poison and you die, etc etc.  It's really very complicated, I'll explain in more detail if necessary later.

The other people playing the game are:
Alice and Clover, both from the previous 999 game
Tenmyouji, an old man, and apparently his grandson Quark
Dio, some kind of circus ringleader
Luna, conservatively dressed typical meek girl
and K, requisite memory-erased large fellow, strangely completely encased in armor that he can't remove, and we cannot see his face.

Right off the bat the suspicion is high, not about the other players, but about the game.  Nan notices and complains that my character, Sigma, isn't voiced, while everyone else is.  He's aggravated, of course, because he's spectating, and only hears blocks of silence when my character is supposed to be talking.  It raises a flag, along with some comments by the other people in the game.  I think even my character is not who he thinks he is, or at least, does not appear or sound the way he thinks he does.  Sigma thinks he's a 20-something year old college guy who was kidnapped on Christmas day, 2028, but now that the doubt has been cast, it could be any year, and Sigma could be old by now.  This is reinforced a bit later when they find some cold-sleep chambers that could store bodies indefinitely.

The players are divided into color schemes and either pairs or solos, and compelled through something called 'chromatic doors' that correspond to colors.  Using real RGB here, so red-green-blue, and then magenta-cyan-yellow for mixes.  Regardless, it boils down to picking one of the three doors: magenta, cyan, or yellow.  For this playthrough I chose yellow. After escaping the subsequent room, all players return to the original tiny rooms to play the secondary game that Zero Jr. calls the Ambidex Game.  Basically it's Prisoner's Dilemma, where you choose to either Ally or Betray the player(s) you went through the colored door with.  Since Phi is part of my 'pair', we must vote as a unit and either receive or be docked points together. (+3 if betraying an ally, +2 both ally, 0 both betray, -2 get betrayed)  She launches into a long explanation of why game theory says you should always choose Betray, but I know game theory too, lady.  If your default is Betray, then sure, your points don't ever go down, but nobody's points ever go up, either.  Although zero bracelet points supposedly means death, no one's getting out of here if nobody ever chooses Ally.  So I over-ride her objections and choose Ally.  Of course our partner/opponent Alice chooses Betray, and we're down to 1 bracelet point (everyone started with 3).  Another round of this could kill us.  Phi is displeased.

Clover and K voted to betray Tenmyouji
Dio and Quark allied with Luna

All bracelet colors and pairings shuffled so we had new partners.  The next set of doors is down an elevator on Floor B, but we have quite a bit of time before they open, so everyone elects to do some thorough searching of all the available rooms, which are now unlocked.

999: Virtue's Last Reward, Start

I bet if I look back at my own review of 999: 9 Persons 9 Hours 9 Doors, it'll sound like I was lambasting it for victory being totally arbitrary.  But if you can get over that hurdle - if you can wrap your head around the fact that it's not even about victory (maybe it would help if you have unlimited time to put into the game), then the story is one of the most beautiful slow-blooming flowers you can have in this video game world of ours.

Aside: have we been reduced to low-grade story expectations?  Are we eating the equivalent of dog food, and telling ourselves it's okay because the graphics are nice and shooting people is fun?  If you're not satisfied with that, don't give up hope yet.  Dragging the story out of 999 (either one) is painfully slow, compared to other video games, but (cliche time) the difficulty makes you appreciate it all the more.  If you ARE satisfied with the story you're getting from other games, then 999 will be nothing but an endless whirlpool of punishment.  That's what I was getting at with my original post.  There's definitely a type of gamer who will have nothing but rage at the way the story unfolds over endless iterations over which you have no control.

Good news, though.  The second 999, Virtue's Last Reward, allows you jump to any point unlocked in the story, at any time.  If you make a choice and reach a dead end, simply click open the flow chart and select the branch point where you made that choice, and make the other choice.  Simple as that.  No more restarting from the beginning if you don't want, and all parts you've seen or heard before can be fast-forwarded through with impunity.  That makes things faster and more sensible right off the bat.  Now that I can SEE the possibilities, though, it looks like there are no less than 24 (!) different endings to this game, and I still don't know which one I need to do first to unlock the others.  At least, when I do find the unlocking parts, I can head right to the end of the other branches and immediately keep pushing forward.  In addition, none of the escapes have to be performed twice, because you can always enter the final passcode to waltz straight out of a room, without going through any of the motions - all passcodes you've found are permanently saved in the archive files.

Also, story portions are voiced in English and Japanese.  That's valuable.

A third gold star is given for increasing the puzzle difficulty.  The last game had somewhat token escape rooms - find five pieces of paper in the room and put them together, voila.  This one has much more legit puzzles, and way less hand holding.  There's an easy mode, for those who aren't old veterans like myself, but I hear some endings can't be achieved if you use easy mode, so no way I'm touching that.

So, mechanics are all looking good.  Time to get into the story.  Rest of posts will have spoilers.

7 Days to Die: Evolved

Woah, slacked off on posts, and in that interim we evolved from cocoon husks at 7 days to die to fully armed bad-asses.  It was hard earned, don't let me cheapen it by skipping to the end of the story, here.  Days went by.  Servers were restarted.  We slowly carved out a hidden base inside the bowels of the earth, only to have it stunningly collapse on our heads along with the thousands of zombies that spawned directly above us.  We restarted and restarted into that vast wasteland, until, exactly like Edge of Tomorrow (a movie for those who don't understand the video game learning curve), we spawned naked into the wilderness, and within minutes had shelter, fire, weapons, and armor.  The characters haven't evolved, we, the players, have learned every aspect necessary to our survival by trial and error.  It feels good.  We feel competent.  Now we wish there was a story to actually uncover with our hard-won survival skills, but I don't think there is.  Maybe I will try and write one and lobby for it's inclusion, something as simple as finding scraps of journals or working radios at the far reaches of the map.

We'll try a random map, once time permits again, and will wait for the next evolution of the game.

7 Days to Die: Day 2

Ok, a VERY brief glance at a couple newbie guides to 7dtd assures us that what we want to be building first is a sleeping bag, so we can respawn in one place.  That seems like a great idea.  Now, I just need a bunch of cotton.   Good news is, you can just grab up cotton plants from where-ever they are growing - no harvesting or chopping or anything.  Bad news, cotton is pretty scarce in some of the locations.

After finding enough cotton and slowly assembling cloth fragments and then sleeping bags (and then subsequently losing all that hard work by picking up the sleeping bag and dying with it in my inventory while trying to move it to a new location), the new challenge is building a real shelter.  Because just crouching down at night and hoping to not attract the attention of running, glow-eyed zombies seems like a pretty bad apocalypse plan.

We finally figure out that the stone axes are sufficient for chopping down medium-sized trees to get those wood planks the game keeps hinting at, it just takes some significant chopping to get one down.  I assembled a rudimentary... square of wood frames, but they're see-through, and zombies still rush at me at night, and several things become apparent: 1) there's no hiding from zombies? 2) wood frames are super breakable by zombies, and 3) when there's nothing supporting a wood frame, the whole lot of it falls and breaks apart!  Sucks.  Time to do some more reading up and maybe restart the server.

7 Days to Die: Day 1

Day 1, as in, the first day that I played it.  In-game, actually I think three days went by.
In the spirit of the game, neither Xian nor I read any walk throughs or guides.  It's an apocalypse simulator, and let's hurl ourselves in there and just figure it out as the apocalypse intended.

So we're just mostly-naked husks wandering around ruins and wilderness.  We have no idea where the other person is, and have to sit around experimenting with the controls just to figure out how to move around, crouch, etc.  I loot everything that can be clicked on and find.... a bunch of junk, seemingly.  Well, the thing I searched was labeled "smelly garbage" so, not like I had high expectations.

Zombies appear at the peripheries of my vision-limit, shambling around aimlessly.  When I crouch, I can see that they apparently have no interest in me, currently.  That changes quickly when I come across an empty building.  I move from 'sensed' to 'hunted' and quickly abandon the building search plan to book it back to empty wilderness.  A sign nearby proclaims it's a campground.  What a great idea.  Except it's overrun by zombie dogs.  How awful, in retrospect.

Death respawns me randomly somewhere else on the map.  It's snowing here, but I don't know if I take extra damage or what.  I hike out of the snowy area to another area and immediately start taking phantom damage and die.  Xian posits that I was standing in a poisonous swamp or something similar, but I had no warning or visual cues that it was.

All these deaths are reducing my maximum health?  Not really understood just yet.  We finally figure out that the green arrows on the compass are pointing at each other, and the blue backpacks are pointing at our corpse and dropped items, but respawning can happen in a vastly different area of the map, and it can take more than the cycle of the day to traverse the distance.  At night, the zombies really want to get you, and can now run.  There's no way to hide or survive.  Xian has fashioned a crude stone axe from some rocks and plant fibers, but it may be time to look around for some preliminary information.

Escape Rooms: General Advice

Advice for when you find yourself with nothing to do

• Go through the entire room and open/overturn everything (even if someone's already done it!)
• Big furniture?  Go ahead.  If they didn't want you to move it, they would have nailed it down
• Books: flip through every one - are there markings, notations, hidden slips of paper in the jackets, dog ears?  Is it a reference book that matches up to a code? 
• Paintings: Look behind, look inside (if nobody stops you), look at what's depicted on the painting
• Tables: Look in, on, under.  Open the drawers and then look on the underside of those drawers.  Which drawers cannot be opened?  What do they need in order to be opened? 
• Cupboards: Check in, check each shelf, check UNDER each shelf, check the very top if you can reach
• Carpets: Floor is fair game!  Peel it back where you can, look under
• Walls: look for writing, look behind objects, look low and high
• Ceilings: look up! Check the lighting, check for writing
• When doing any of the above, what am I looking for? 
• Anything that's out of place, has a handwritten clue on it, a code to decipher, anything.  If it can be picked up, take it to a place where you can consolidate all the clues

Advice for solving puzzles

• Some puzzles can be solved as they are, but a lot of them will need extra clues, and it's up to you to match the clues together, even if they're all over the room.  That's when consolidation and note taking will help.
• For example: one clue will read: "yellow house + white horse = ____".  That's not solvable as it is.  But somewhere else in the room, you can bet there's a yellow house with maybe a number written on it, you see where I'm going with this?  If a clue doesn't look solvable with the information you have at hand, you need to go out and get more.
• Ok, I have a ton of puzzles and a ton of "keys" that should go with puzzles.  How do I match them up? 
• There should be a clue in the flavor text - or at least some indicator somewhere!  Let's say you have a locked chest.  Is there anything written on the chest?  Is anything in that text emphasized, different colored, capitalized?  Maybe it's trying to give you a hint.  No words?  Maybe there's a lock that can only be unlocked with letters, or shapes, or directions.   Example: it's a directional lock, now you know what you're looking for.  A series of directional inputs.  Look through your "keys" (a pile of clues that aren't puzzles themselves).  Do any of them say something like "NEWS"?  That's a series of directional inputs!  Try it! 
• Most clues and puzzles won't be used twice.  That's not a guarantee!  But it's likely that you can set aside both the puzzles and the clues you've already used in a separate area from the ones that have yet to be used. 

Escape Rooms: Rule #2

Rule 2 is going to sound a lot like Rule 1, and that's fine - Rule 1 is super super important.

Escape rooms can get a little hectic, I should warn you if you've never been in one.  Creating a single room with enough puzzles to involve 12 people at once is going to involve several different things going on at once.  Add in counting down clocks and any other environment distractions (see: roaming zombie from last post) and you have a recipe for post-apocalyptic chaos.  So here's something you may forget in the babble of 12 voices all yelling questions and answers at each other at once:

RULE #2: COMMUNICATE EVERYTHING

It seems obvious in hindsight, and when you're looking forward to participating, you don't think to yourself, "I'm going to find the answers and then just keep my mouth shut."  But when many people are all talking urgently to one another, you might find yourself forgetting to contribute what you know, or not knowing who to communicate it to.  Here are several ideas to make sure all info is spread to all parties.

General Tip: Just Keep Talking
If your mouth isn't flapping, I'm going to go ahead and say you're probably playing this game wrong.  Sorry to all those strong-and-silent types, but silence isn't going to get anyone out of a locked room with 11 other people.  Don't got anything to say about the puzzle at hand?  Feel free to make commentary about the room at large, or ask if anyone's solved this bit or that bit, or announce you're going to search something else again.  Silence is tantamount to sabotage in a situation like this.

Example: My friends and I are running around the room grabbing items, opening drawers, solving puzzles, and whatnot.  We were solving a room where the majority of people were in my group, and one small group of strangers got stuck with us.  Most of those strangers didn't want to step outside their comfort zone and interrupt a group that chattering among themselves, but thank goodness one of them did.  She tapped me on the shoulder and said, "did you notice that the sign over there has some stuff on the back?"  And that was exactly what I needed.

Specific Tip: The Secretary
At least one person must be the focus of all this information - that's just the most efficient way to play it.  Two is fine.  If you really want, tell your information to every single person in the room one at a time, but it doesn't seem like the most efficient way.  In all of the escape room's I've played, they provide a clipboard and a scratch piece of paper, as well as a few pens.  Whoever has a clipboard has nominated themselves as the repository for all the information in the room.  If no one has picked up that clipboard, go ahead and nominate yourself (as long as your handwriting is legible to at least you). Note down everything you see or hear as neatly as possible, especially codes.  Long hints don't need to be written down verbatim, but it might be helpful to note down where they are, so you don't forget to look at them again.