Operation Backlog Completion 2025

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Zero Time Dilemma

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  3 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Oct 232020
 

Today’s game is another one that stretches the classification of “spooky” quite a bit, but I decided the story has enough horror for me to finally finish the Zero Escape trilogy this October by playing Zero Time Dilemma.

Zero Time Dilemma serves as both a sequel and prequel, since Virtue’s Last Reward ended on a cliffhanger relating to events from the past. At the time, that both annoyed me and left me eager to see how it would all work out in the third game.

Unlike its predecessors, Zero Time Dilemma isn’t exactly a visual novel. All of its scenes are cutscenes instead.

However, it’s structured in the same way, so it still feels somewhat like a visual novel.

Once again, nine people are trapped and forced to participate in a deadly game overseen by a mysterious person named Zero. This time it is the “Decision Game,” with a variety of different situations you’re put into and forced to make choices. They’re split into three groups, and you play as each team rather than sticking with one main protagonist.

The orderly flowchart from the previous game is gone, replaced by “fragments” that connect together into a larger flowchart.

At first, I didn’t like the fragment system at all. I made a choice with each team and expected that to lead to the outcome of that combination of choices, but instead I unlocked a whole bunch of different fragments in different timelines, and I didn’t like it.

But over time, it grew on me. It’s easy to turn on the game, pick a new fragment, and play through it. It also helps mimic the disorientation the characters feel due to losing their memories between fragments.

Like in Virtue’s Last Reward, certain fragments unlock pieces of information you need to progress in others. Sometimes this is information the player enters, while other times it simply unlocks new cutscenes because the characters themselves have more information.

A fragment typically involves an escape room sequence, with puzzles to solve, that then culminates in the choice you need to make for that fragment. These are fun, although some of them lack the urgency they had in the previous games. Their pacing is also a bit strange; I felt like a much smaller fraction of my time was spent in escape rooms and was surprised when I got a trophy for completing them all, since I still had a fair number of fragments I hadn’t seen yet.

Between that and the switch to cinematic cutscenes, I really felt like I spent most of Zero Time Dilemma watching it rather than playing it.

So now let’s talk about the story. I liked the tone a lot. Virtue’s Last Reward often felt to me like it was trying too hard to be funny, but Zero Time Dilemma had a much darker tone again (with a lot of horrible deaths in various branches based on your choices), which made it a fitting choice for October after all.

I enjoyed learning more about the characters over different fragments and seeing how various details start to come together. And in general, I enjoyed the plot. There are some great moments and a few really surprising twists that I didn’t see coming at all. The biggest twist even resolved a few things I’d thought were plot holes up until that point, which I appreciated.

Click for implied major Zero Time Dilemma spoilers
Mainly lines related to Q, like how characters would reference him in some scenes, but then see “him” in other scenes and seemingly not know who he is.

Yet it wasn’t quite the thrilling conclusion I expected after the Virtue’s Last Reward cliffhanger, and it’s hard to really explain why. Overall I enjoyed playing Zero Time Dilemma, but (even though there are several aspects I liked better than Virtue’s Last Reward), the story didn’t impact me quite as strongly as the first two Zero Escape games.

Virtue’s Last Reward: Slow Start to an Exciting Plot

 Reviews, Video games  7 Responses »  Tagged with: , , ,
Jan 212019
 

As I said when I reviewed Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, one of the winners of my Celebrating All Things Spooky contest picked the game review as their prize and chose The Nonary Games.

The second game in The Nonary Games is Virtue’s Last Reward.

My relationship with Virtue’s Last Reward was a strange one. I went into it expecting a similar experience to 999 and was immediately put off. 999 had me invested right away, with a clear threat of danger and an urgent need for the characters to escape.

When I started Virtue’s Last Reward, on the other hand, the danger felt less immediate, the goal seemed less focused, and I was forced to endure an AI character with one of the most annoying voices I’ve ever heard. (Really, I’ll take Teepo to Zero Jr.) The shift to 3D graphics was also jarring, and I felt both the controls and graphics were better in 999.

It took me about 35 hours to play Virtue’s Last Reward. For the first 20 hours, I saw it as a more complicated, less interesting take on 999 with an annoying cast of characters and a plot that had some interesting moments but was nothing special.

For the remaining 15 hours, I couldn’t put the game down.

There are a few reasons for this dramatic shift. First, I had to stop comparing it to 999. Even though Virtue’s Last Reward is its sequel, they have significant differences. 999 managed to feel like a grounded story despite its subject matter, while Virtue’s Last Reward is straight-up science fiction.

Second, the story just has a slower build-up. Things start off relatively calm, but once the plot gets going, it really gets going.

Third, I just had the bad luck to start with a route that annoyed me instead of intriguing me. And the branch that caught my attention the quickest, I got to last. With a few different choices, it might not have taken me so long to get invested in it.

Click for Virtue's Last Reward spoilers
I started out on Phi’s path, so it wasn’t too long before I encountered her betraying me for a choice I hadn’t made yet. Then when I went back and chose betray, she picked ally.

Since this was so early in the game for me, I reacted with, “Oh, it’s going to be one of these games” and found it to be an annoying trap, instead of knowing these situations are unusual and tie into the game’s overall plot.

Meanwhile, the middle branch discusses the events of 999, which got my attention right away, but that was the last branch I started.

(I still do find the characters more annoying than 999’s cast, though, and I’m not sure what happened to Clover’s personality.)

Virtue’s Last Reward also has an unusual story structure in that certain parts are locked until you find information in other routes. Unlike in 999, this didn’t require repeating sections, and you never even had to repeat any puzzles, due to the way the game is structured.

Bouncing between routes without actually getting any endings probably influenced my view at first as well, but once I started moving forward and seeing character endings, the plot really picked up.

While it started out slow, soon it started in with plot revelations, new mysteries, and some pretty crazy twists. The only thing I disliked about the end was that it ends on a cliffhanger.

Click for major Virtue's Last Reward spoilers
Now that I’ve taken some time to think about it, I know the cliffhanger is because the Mars mission test site is itself will be a “game” with puzzles like the Nonary Game, and therefore it will be the focus of the third game.

But in the moment, I was all excited to see Sigma learn what happened at the test site and resolve the plot, only to be greeted with credits and an epilogue.

The gameplay was good, the same mix of visual novel + escape rooms as in the previous game, with puzzles that were good for the most part. At first, I disliked how every room ended with you finding one required safe password and one optional safe password, but I got used to it by the end.

Virtue’s Last Reward might be very different from its predecessor, but once I got deeper into the plot, I was really happy I played it. It might not be perfect (most of its humor fell flat for me, especially that annoying rabbit), but it got pretty interesting. And I’ll be honest… the cliffhanger left me anxious to get Zero Time Dilemma.

That concludes my playthrough of The Nonary Games. Have you played Virtue’s Last Reward? What did you think of it, and how do you feel it compares to 999?

I Finally Played Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors

 Reviews, Video games  14 Responses »  Tagged with: , , ,
Nov 212018
 

This year’s Celebrating All Things Spooky contest included a prize where you could pick a game for me to review, and one of the winners asked me to review The Nonary Games.

The Nonary Games is a collection that contains Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Virtue’s Last Reward, the first two games in the Zero Escape series.

(Since I never specified in the rules that it couldn’t be a collection, I should count myself lucky it’s only two games.)

First up, therefore, was Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, which I’ll refer to as 999 from now on for simplicity’s sake.

I’m not sure why it took me so long to play 999. People first recommended the original DS release to me back when it first came out, especially since I enjoyed Ace Attorney so much. That might have been the problem – coming from an Ace Attorney recommendation, I wasn’t pleased with 999’s darker premise.

Whatever the reason was, something put it in my head that 999 wasn’t my sort of game, so I ignored the Zero Escape series for years until I finally bought the Vita version of The Nonary Games… and now that I’ve played it, I can say that yes, this is my sort of game!

Even more than Ace Attorney, I’d describe 999 as a visual novel/adventure game hybrid. The visual novel sections are long and complete with narration, while the gameplay sections put you in rooms where you need to search for clues, use items together, and solve puzzles to escape.

The puzzles are pretty good. They present a challenge without being overly complicated. Usually, if I got really stuck, it was because I’d misunderstood the goal of the puzzle.

Click for 999 spoilers
Such as the final puzzle, where I painstakingly experimented and described different combinations until I got all the hint square to say 9… only for nothing to happen, and hitting the hint button enough times got Junpei to suggest resetting the puzzle and then it turned out I just had to switch certain numbers and letters in order to spell “password” in the bottom row…..???

Apparently this puzzle was different in the original DS version.

There are only a couple things I disliked about the gameplay in 999. First, when you go back through to get other endings, you occasionally need to partially redo a few puzzle rooms if you didn’t make certain choices the first time. On the other hand, there’s a helpful flowchart that apparently wasn’t in the original version, and while it took me a long time (and several confused conversations with a friend) to figure out how the flowchart worked, it’s a feature that really helps make this sort of game less repetitive.

And second, this version has two modes you can view the game in: novel mode, where you get dialogue and narration, and adventure mode, where you just get dialogue.

…There’s a mode that just cuts out the narration.

…And since puzzle rooms are always set in adventure mode, sometimes it resumed the visual novel sections still in adventure mode, and by the time I realized, I had a lot of narration to scroll back through to catch up on.

Click for 999 spoilers
I’ve read that this was meant as a replacement for the DS’s two screens and their use in the twist at the end, since novel mode is from Akane’s point of view, but… since to me they were “the way I want to read” and “that annoying mode I occasionally get by mistake,” I think the impact was lost on me…?

Okay, so aside from the flowchart, there were a few things that made me regret not playing the original DS version.

But why are we spending so much time talking about the gameplay in a visual novel? The story is the real focus here.

999 has great storytelling. It’s a dark premise (though it had moments of humor), where the main character wakes up to find he’s been kidnapped along with eight other people and put on a ship that will sink in nine hours. The 9 of them therefore have 9 hours to go through numbered doors, solve puzzles to find their way through each area, and locate the “9” door that will let them escape.

The number 9 is pretty important here.

It also makes heavy use of digital roots, as each player has a number and the digital roots of their numbers are what let them go through numbered doors.

The story is intense and also very mysterious. My interest in knowing what was going on and what secrets these characters were hiding kept me invested in the story from the start. 999 also draws on a variety of real concepts, fictional ideas, urban legends, etc. for its overall backstory/universe. I’ve rarely played a game that so often had me turning to the Internet to say “Wait, is that a real thing?” as this one did.

Since it’s a blend, the concepts that aren’t real have support from the ones that are, which makes the game’s ideas feel a bit more “real,” in a way.

I played through every ending, and I enjoyed how each one added a little more context without giving everything away (and some moments had a stronger impact due to information I had from other endings).

While it kept up a great sense of mystery and gradual revelations, I felt like things faltered just a little bit when everything came together… it wasn’t quite as tight a conclusion as I hoped for, although it was definitely worth it due to the journey there.

Click for major 999 spoilers
Specifically, some of the time-based stuff felt a little off to me. This is yet another game that uses the bootstrap paradox, and while I generally think that works better than other time paradoxes (since it’s a stable time loop), I feel like it creates some problems here.

It also makes it way too easy for people to explain away anything with “it had to be this way in the future because Akane saw it was this way in the future.”

(Side note: why have I been playing so many games that use this paradox?)

I’m not against the use of the bootstrap paradox in this story, and Akane’s “fever” and disappearance in other endings is an interesting twist.

But what I don’t like is how Seven seems to genuinely remember Akane dying, and Snake doesn’t refute it. (Blind or not, he’d have noticed an extra person escaping with them.)

From the moment Seven explained Akane’s death, I assumed he and Santa never saw her body, but something else that “proved” she died. I fully expected that once she disabled the incinerator, we’d find out that she slipped out another door or was grabbed by Ace or something, surviving and yet leaving behind something that would make the others falsely assume she died.

So when she happily reunited with them and they all left together, I was a bit disgruntled.

Seven and Snake remember Akane dying. She can’t have really died nine years ago, because she’s Zero; it’s arguably possible if Santa is Zero, setting up the second Nonary Games and creating a future where she survives, but the game is clear that Akane is Zero.

It’s implied that Seven is in on the conspiracy with her and Snake just somehow missed the reunion, but I don’t like that and it doesn’t feel consistent. I saw someone say that Akane was able to rewrite Seven’s memories, but that feels like a cheaper explanation than the story deserves.

I don’t know. I just didn’t think this part of the ending worked.

So while I do have some criticisms, I really enjoyed my time with 999. It seems to have left a few loose ends, but it does have sequels, after all.

Now I’ll be moving on to the second half of The Nonary Games, Virtue’s Last Reward, and I hope to find just as intriguing of a story there. In the meantime, what are your thoughts on 999?