In the latest issue of Weekly Famitsu magazine, Chunsoft announced their next few releases, both of them in the sound-novel adventure genre that they're best known for in the country.
First up, the veteran developer is producing PSP and PlayStation 3 ports of 428: In the Blocked City Shibuya, a Wii title that caused a stir when Famitsu awarded it a perfect review score out of nowhere last year. The original Wii game was published by Sega, but these new ports will be released in Japan by Chunsoft's new publishing partner Spike, as both companies are now part of Japanese umbrella joint venture Games Arena. Expect to see the ports in Japanese stores by this September.

After 428 comes out this fall, a brand new Chunsoft adventure will hit the Nintendo DS, also courtesy of Spike. Called 9 Hours, 9 People, 9 Doors, the game has quite a staff behind it -- character designs are being handled by Kinu Nishimura, who's done tons of work on the Street Fighter series, and Kotaro Uchikoshi (writer of Ever17: The Out of Infinity) is handling director and screenplay duties.

999's plot is remarkably complex for a DS adventure. You play Ryohei, a normal college student who wakes up one day in a locked room with the number "5" painted on the wall in bright red. It turns out a Saw-type tormentor has kidnapped him, and now he's being made to play the "Nonary Game" with eight other victims. They are all assigned numbers from 1 to 9, and they must find and open nine doors and solve the puzzles inside; any group that can open door number nine and crack the mystery within is set free.

To complicate matters, the numerical doors can only be opened by groups of three to five people, and the digital root of their assigned numbers must match the number on the door -- forcing the cast to work and compete with each other at the same time for any chance at survival.

Interesting stuff -- and Japanese people (and probably nobody else, sadly) will get to try it out this winter.