i love daisei

yaoi is awesome

Please note that my play time as of this review is not an accurate reflection of a typical play time as I recently replayed this VN.

The perfect summer vacation quickly turns sour for two best friends after they wake up trapped in a mysterious hotel room and are forced to participate in an experiment where they must complete a series of tasks in order to survive. If they play along, they’ll be able to escape in only 10 days, but the tasks require them to physically harm or sexually demean the other. Will they be able to escape the room with their friendship still intact?

Rating: Explicit
Length: Short (~8-10hours)
Warnings: Graphic violence/gore, dubious consent/rape, watersports, scat, and character death. (Scenes with blood/gore or scatological imagery can be fully censored and there are no sound effects. Imagery with urine, however, cannot be censored.)

Branching visual novel in ADV format. There are 6 endings in total.

Pros:
✨ Despite it's heavy emphasis on porn, Room No. 9 has a very engaging and well written plot. The situation the protagonists find themselves in is dark and depraved, and they both struggle intensely with it while also doing their best to keep each other's spirits up. They harbor guilt over the acts they must commit and they feel shame that they are growing numb to or even finding some appeal to the things they are doing as the experiment progresses. The realization that their friendship may forever be impacted or even damaged by this situation leaves them feeling sick and unsure of how far they are willing to go. The guilt Daisuke and Seiji hold effectively worms its way into the reader, and depending on your choices, they may do everything they can to get out of the situation or stomp out the guilt and see where that inevitably leads them.
✨ The artwork is stunning. Norizane-san's artwork is soft, yet vividly detailed and expressive. Each CG has dozens of variations (with a certain CG having over 400!) and the shading has a nice, almost watercolour-like feel to it. No matter if the scene is lighthearted, erotic, grotesque, or brutal, the artwork fits the mood perfectly.
✨ The voice actors both do a wonderful job. Seiji's VA in particular really steals the show, despite it being his very first BLVN. (Quite the first BLVN to start with lol)
✨ The settings!! Oh, there's SO many options to truly customize your experience to how you truly want it. Don't like the fact that the characters have body hair? There's a toggle to remove it! Do you think the sound effects during the H-scenes are more of a turn off? You can mute those! Do you hate that when you read faster than the voices and they keep talking when you click to the next line? You can turn that off! And there's so many more! They take great care in ensuring you have a good time playing.
✨ Pressing Esc will give you a decoy screen, so you can easily click away from the VN if someone walks in at an inconvenient time.
✨ There is an "easy mode" available in the settings. If you choose to enable it, when you are presented with a choice, it will indicate which endings the choices will lead you to. Please note that some choices are purely for aesthetic preferences in CGs and will have no impact on which ending you will get, so don't be alarmed if you don't see an indicator.


Cons:
✨ The music is a hit or miss and when it misses, it can miss HARD.
✨ There is much more of an emphasis on the sexual tasks than the violent tasks. Depending on your choices, you could very easily wind up on a path where you do almost exclusively sexual tasks, but there is no path where you do almost exclusively violent tasks.
✨ Steam overlay does not seem to work with this VN (?)

Overall rating: 9/10
Recommendation: Buy it. (But only if you can stomach the dark themes and more hardcore kinks of this particular VN.)