Game details Developer: Chime

Publisher: Aksys Games

Platform: Vita (reviewed), 3DS, Windows

Release Date: June 28, 2016

ESRB Rating: M for Mature

Price: $40 / £30

Links: Steam | Official website Chime: Aksys Games: Vita (reviewed), 3DS, WindowsJune 28, 2016M for Mature: $40 / £30

The Nonary Game is back for the third (and supposedly final) time, bringing the familiar structure and tropes of previous games 999 and Virtue's Last Reward. If you're not familiar with the Nonary Game — or the odd-sounding titles I just mentioned—prepare for some spoilers for Zero Time Dilemma’s predecessors in the Zero Escape franchise.

In fact, "spoilers" are integral to Zero Time Dilemma. As in the previous two games, the mystery is structured as a series of interlocking timelines: branching decision paths that can be accessed and then escaped through the convenient metaphysical explanation of psychological time travel. The plot of Zero Time Dilemma’s visual-novel-meets-adventure-game sees our nine heroes jumping from one untimely end to another—searching for out-of-order clues about why they are where they are.

This time, the "where" is a seemingly abandoned nuclear bunker. A cast of new and returning 20-somethings who are very good at puzzles have been locked inside by Zero, the Jigsaw-like tormentor whose identity changes between games.

Drowning in a sea of exposition

True to the Zero Escape games of yore, circumstance and Zero's rules split the nine characters into three teams, each of which seems to vaguely represent a different point in the franchise.

Akane and a much-changed Junpei return from 999; Phi and Sigma from VLR; and a trio of entirely new cast members makes up the third team. The game truly begins when Zero forces the three teams to vote for which of the others will die, kicking off six diverging timelines based on the vote results. The vast majority of these timelines lead to bad and bloody ends for whichever team you control.

If it sounds like I'm spending a lot of time on setup, trust me when I say that this is the short version. Zero Time Dilemma can be incredibly plodding, weighed down not just by its own hefty plot but by dense explanations of its psychic time travel powers. Like its predecessors, Zero Time Dilemma is a game in which phrases like "quantum superposition" and "the morphogenetic field" feature as common mechanics.























As in those previous games, however, Zero Time Dilemma does a stellar job of making its characters feel anchored within the sea of technobabble, thanks to everything from frank and natural discussions about everyday life to a lengthy section on how Back to the Future is actually a pretty dark movie. The Japanese writers and Aksys Games' localization team combine to make a grisly, charming, and often funny final product.

Mixing things up, for better and worse

Unlike many visual novels, there is actually something to do between exposition and the timeline-splitting decisions. I'm of course referring to the "escape" quarter of Zero Escape.

Each team is forced into absurd life-or-death puzzles, as usual for the series. Obstacles run the gamut from effortless sliding tile tricks to true brainteasers that will keep you locked up for a good while. Actually solving the puzzles is as satisfying as it's meant to be, and I found only one that felt like a cheap matter of trial and error. More than a few puzzles had me pulling out a pen and paper to track my progress.

Some players may have a much harder time with the puzzles, of course, depending on their familiarity with puzzles in general and the twisted logic of Zero Escape's designers. I've long maintained that there's no shame in forcing your way past these barriers to get to the many storyline twists and turns that form the meat of the game. That is to say: don't sweat using a guide on the small stuff.

The big stuff comes courtesy of the decisions you make after completing each puzzle. This time around, Zero has added a new wrinkle to the classic Nonary Game, rechristening it as “the Decision Game” in the process. Many of those post-puzzle decisions boil down to simply deciding who lives and who dies, but more of them have their own puzzle-like logic to figure out. For instance, you may have to decide which of several vials are filled with an antidote to the poison you've just been injected with.

Further rumpling the formula is my absolute least favorite addition to the Zero Escape formula: random chance. The developers have said that they want Zero Time Dilemma to reflect the unfairness of life. That idea comes through just fine in the plot, especially toward the game’s conclusion, where the ethics of our cast's particular form of time travel comes into question.

It's far less successful during the decision sections. That’s because truly completing Zero Time Dilemma means seeing every branching ending (or at least the vast majority of them), taking new insight and information from previous branches as you go. By making many branches entirely or partly random, though, the game forces you to slog through those branches a second time, simply hoping for a different random outcome to see the new conclusion.

This isn’t a huge waste of time, since as in Virtue's Last Reward, the game lets you automatically fast-forward past any dialogue you’ve already heard (thank goodness). It’s still more hassle than seems necessary for a completionist playthrough, though.

Zero Time Dilemma’s second big change is much more satisfying. As dramatic convention would have it, Zero drugs his participants to erase their memories between escape rooms this time around. Mechanically, this splits the game into "fragments" that players can work through in any order, meaning that players—as well as the cast—often have no idea when or in which timeline a specific segment takes place.

This setup has two major consequences. The first is a greater air of mystery. It’s not until the end of each fragment that anybody knows where a particular piece fits into the larger jigsaw puzzle. The second effect is that characters regularly repeat the same epiphanies. That might sound annoying, but in a tale as intricately woven as Zero Time Dilemma, it's nice to have important information driven home over and over.

Just good enough to make you replay the first two

With Zero Time Dilemma, the developers at Chime had the unenviable task of coming up with yet another final act plot twist that justifies not just the setting but also the new game mechanics. This is especially difficult in a story where most of the cast already sees time travel as no big deal.

Without giving anything away, I'll say the eventual twist isn’t my favorite late-game reveal of the franchise. Still, it ties together most—though certainly not all—of the threads left hanging by the first two games. The real problem is that, even compared to 999 and VLR, the late game surprise feels cheap. It’s as if the developers couldn't find a way to conclude things with their existing fiction and tacked on new rules at the last minute to wrap things up.

When compared to the previous two Zero Escape games, Zero Time Dilemma definitely rests at the bottom. Besides the comparatively weak conclusion and the annoying random number generators, the game has a "look and feel" that doesn't speak to me the way the first two games did. Gone is the delicate 2D art of 999 and the soft-edged 3D models in Virtue's Last Reward. Instead, Zero Time Dilemma uses rough, pseudo-cel shading that just looks plain bad in spots.

And while the interpersonal dialogue is still strong, it fails to hit the same highs as the second game in the series. It’s particularly noticeable that this newer, blander Zero had the admittedly tough task of following up a sadistic, hyperactive A.I. modeled after a bunny rabbit.

Zero Escape still gets merit points for doing something that’s not very common for games released in the West—and doing it incredibly well to boot. But the time since 999 hit the scene has also given us games like Danganronpa, a series that does many of the same things much more smoothly (albeit with a very different tone).

As a capstone to this chapter of Zero Escape (and perhaps the franchise’s last game) Zero Time Dilemma is far better than a serviceable finale. That doesn’t mean it hits the same crashing crescendos of sci-fi stupefaction that the series reached in the past.

The good

A gripping thriller with plenty of twists and turns left in the tank

Plenty of interesting characters you'll want to see succeed—and fail—in the game's twisting plot

Puzzles are well-designed and satisfying when they don't rely on chance

The bad

Compared to the last two games, Zero Time Dilemma is downright ugly at times

Our latest Zero isn't quite the villain his predecessor was—not even close, in fact

Randomized puzzles mean replaying certain sections more than you already have to

The ugly

Staying up till 5am, trying to unlock the next sequence, only to realize random chance was holding you back

Verdict: You absolutely want this if you liked the previous games, but newcomers should at least play Virtue's Last Reward first.