Both great games. The worst part of 999 was being unable to make the text go faster. Thank God they fixed that issue in VLR. I'm looking forward to the third.

I liked these games because they were smart. Characters would start talking about something and I'd think to myself, "Oh, the devs are just referencing the Prisoner's Dilemma", and a lot of games might stop there. But then a character in the game would immediately say "Wait, isn't this the Prisoner's Dilemma?", and then talk about it in detail as it relates to their world, and go further with it and build on top of it. I felt like the devs must've been smart people, and by extension so were the characters.

The puzzles were never especially hard, and VLR especially was mostly a "figure out what you can touch" point-and-click adventure. But the story was fun, the characters were interesting, and even though it wasn't the kind of mystery that I think you could reasonably figure out or solve based on clues before the ending, I thought the resolution of each game was pretty clever and satisfying.

You really need to get all of the endings to understand these games at all. Cheat and look up how to unlock the endings if you need to.

And I'd be satisfied with a 2D game with no voice acting too. I liked the style of the first game.