Two men get arrested for committing a serious crime. Since they're accomplices, the police separate them for questioning, and keep them from communicating. A detective visits each criminal, and tells them the following:

see deal Zero Escape Virtue's Last Reward - PlayStation Vita $34.99 on Gamestop

"If neither of you spills the beans, you both get two years. If he clams up and you confess, you'll get one year and he'll do fifteen, but if you keep quiet and he gives it up, you'll do fifteen while he does one. So I bet you're thinking, 'Well, what if we both rat the other guy out?' Pretty simple, pal: You both get ten years."This is the prisoner's dilemma – and it's the foundation of Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward With a murderous twist.Two years ago, Aksys Games was shocked by the surprise success of a little under-the-radar DS release called 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors . They'd taken a risk in localizing it for America, as it fell into a genre that's almost non-existent in our region – the text adventure, or "visual novel." These games are basically like reading a book through your game system, containing many more words to scroll through than actual, interactive gameplay. Even combined with several "escape the room" puzzles, which actually are pretty popular on our side of the planet, it didn't sound like something that would appeal to Americans at all.But it did – because the story told within all that text was absolutely brilliant. 999 chronicled the journey of nine strangers who'd been kidnapped, thrown together in an abandoned cruise ship filled with puzzles and locked doors, and forced to play mind games both with and against one another in order to escape in less than nine hours – because, if they didn't, a series of bombs implanted in their bodies would explode, killing them all.With multiple endings to discover depending on which choices you made along the way, and a generous amount of gruesome violence no matter which path you chose, 999 was bold, original, and unforgettably intense for everyone who played it. And after several sold-out print runs of DS cartridges over these past two years, that number of players is much, much greater than Aksys could ever had guessed their little Japanese text adventure would reach.Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward is a direct sequel to 999. There was some confusion on that point back when this new game was announced to be in development, as some thought it might just be a "spiritual successor," or something like that. But, no. The events covered in that first game lead straight into the story told here, which leads me to my first recommendation – play 999 first. You don't absolutely have to, as VLR could stand on its own I suppose, but if you're looking to really experience this series, why wouldn't you start at the beginning? Nobody decides to get into a popular book series and goes to grab Book 2 off the shelf before reading the original. So if you've not yet played through 999 in its entirety – and reached its true ending – go ahead and stop reading now to attend to that. This review, and this new game, will be waiting when you get back – and you'll enjoy it so much more if you're experiencing it with the proper context.OK, that with that bit of business out of the way, let's move on. It was important to reflect on 999 in order to encourage new players to go back to it first, but also because that first game gives us the baseline by which we can judge the relative quality of this sequel. 999 was incredible, yes, but it wasn't perfect. It had some issues that I'd hoped any eventual sequel would address.And Virtue's Last Reward does just that.One complaint players had about 999 was that it featured strictly 2D artwork – that its characters were too stiff, locked into the same small set of expressions and emotional reactions. VLR improves the visuals drastically, as everything is now beautifully rendered in 3D, and while you will witness the same expressions and body movements from the cast several times over throughout this new story, critical moments in the narrative are given full-motion cut-scenes. It's a graphical presentation that pushes well beyond the limitations of the DS original.Another issue some people had with the first game was its huge volume of text, which became tedious to scroll through in long story sequences. That's the nature of this genre, of course. But VLR improves the design in this area too, by bringing full voice-acting into the mix. The character you control still speaks in bleeps and bloops, but everyone else in the game audibly utters every one of their sentences. (Well, when you're not in an escape sequence.) The voicework here is superb, too – among the best performances I've ever heard in any game, period. And you can even choose to use the original Japanese language track, too.Lastly, the issue that I happen to agree with more than the others – the tedium of retracing your steps. 999 had six different endings you could reach, but, to reach them, you had to play through the game, from the very beginning, six different times. That meant all the puzzles you'd already solved were reset, so you had to go through the motions of finishing them over and over again even when you knew the solutions already. It damaged the flow of the story.No more. The developers at Chunsoft have expertly addressed this issue with the introduction of the appropriately-titled "FLOW" system, which lets you jump around back, forth and side-to-side throughout VLR's many different narrative strands whenever you like. You'll never have to play through the same puzzles twice, and in moments where you do run into text that you've already read before in another timeline, you can speed straight through it with a convenient "Skip" option.What's that? Oh yeah, the "another timeline" thing. Now we're really getting into the good stuff.That "FLOW system" is a convenience added to this design to address a fault of 999, yes, but Chunsoft didn't leave it at that – they actually wove your usage of the flowchart menu screen into the narrative of the game. I won't have any story spoilers here, but this is the point where some people might want to make their exit.Sticking around? OK. You know the "prisoner's dilemma" that we opened with? It's a classic conundrum. On the one hand, you and your partner in crime would both be better off if you absolutely knew you could trust each other – you'd both only get two years in jail, then you'd go free. On the other hand, if you did know for sure that the other guy was keeping quiet, why wouldn't you confess? You'd cut your prison sentence in half. The other guy would be screwed, but what do you care? You'd be out in the open air again after just a year.Then again, he might be thinking the same thing ...Virtue's Last Reward plays on the dynamics of the prisoner's dilemma throughout its story. In this game, nine strangers are once again kidnapped and once again forced to play a game of puzzle-solving in order to earn their freedom from a locked facility – just like 999. But unlike 999, the extra element of the Ambidex Game is introduced along the way. In it, your character is forced to decide whether to "ally" with or "betray" their partner, while the partner character is separated, out of communication range, and given the same choice. If you both pick "ally," you both gain two points – a total of nine points is needed to escape the facility, so it seems beneficial to play nice and make sure everyone moves up.But, if you pick "betray," you move up faster. A successful betrayal scores you three points – while your partner loses two. But screw them, right? They shouldn't have been stupid enough to pick "ally" in the first place.Of course, you could find yourself on the opposite side of that equation to – losing points when someone else betrays your trust.Oh, and if your points ever drop to zero, you die.Now, since I've already explained the FLOW system, you can probably guess that some of the tension is drained out of those critical decision moments. If you choose "ally" and someone betrays you, you can just pull up that flowchart, zip back in time to before the moment you made your decision, and make the opposite call instead. So the key to VLR's appeal isn't in the anxiety of having to make life or death choices – it's in the fact that those choices even exist.This is where the timelines come in. Every time you come to a critical moment of decision in this game, reality splits. Two timelines diverge – one in which you picked "ally," the other in which you chose "betray." Other decisions branch out the story even further, too, like moments when you have to pick which characters you want to join in exploring portions of the facility. And every time you make those judgment calls, new, parallel universes emerge in which you made the opposite choice instead.Then things start getting science-fiction freaky, as after you've played your way through a couple of different narrative paths and rewound back to earlier points to try different directions, your character begins to remember things. Things that he never did. Things that he never saw – only you saw them, hours earlier, when you were playing a different path. It's some otherworldly, Psycho-Mantis-reading-your-memory-card kind of stuff, and it leads into such a complex, mind-twisting and utterly satisfying overall story that I will now not dare say anything more about it.Some final notes before we close. The "escape the room" puzzles found here are just as engaging as they were in 999, and the activity of searching through locked rooms and solving brain-teasers helps break up what would otherwise be a constant string of monologue, dialogue and other exposition – items you uncover in escape sequences tie back to and reinforce the story, too, so nothing ever feels extraneous or unnecessary.The cast of characters here is a highlight as well. I've intentionally avoided discussing them so as to preserve your own experience in getting to know each one and unraveling their mysteries, but suffice it to say you'll be more than satisfied with how each player is developed over the course of the 30 hours you'll spend with them.Oh, yeah – 30 hours. Expect to invest at least that much time here, if not more, and plan for more than a couple sleepless nights.Lastly, some comparison between VLR's two versions. 999 was a DS exclusive, so there was no choice in how to experience it – Virtue's Last Reward, though, has shipped for both Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita. Content-wise, the games are identical. Neither one gets extra story chapters or anything like that. In presentation, though, there are some differences.The Vita version's visuals are superior, as the higher-resolution display on Sony's device gives extra clarity to both the game's environments and the text – and there's a lot of text. The 3DS edition supports its system's signature stereoscopic depth, but eye strain's going to be an issue with the long, continuous hours you'll put in with this one. Audio fidelity is also crisper on Vita, as the voice tracks on 3DS sound compressed in comparison.Nintendo's handheld does edge out Sony's in another key area, though – taking notes. The 3DS stylus and touch screen are much easier to use when writing down clues and important things you need to remember on the in-game Memo menu. Dragging your finger across Vita's screen to try to scribble even the simplest reminders to yourself is a chore. (A capacitive stylus, if you have one, may alleviate some of that frustration.)In the end, though, either edition is excellent and you can feel comfortable purchasing for your preferred portable.