Zero Time Dilemma, also known as Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma, is an adventure video game developed by Chime, and published by Spike Chunsoft and Aksys Games. It is the third entry in the Zero Escape series, following Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (2009) and Virtue's Last Reward (2012). The game was released for Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation Vita, and Microsoft Windows in 2016, for PlayStation 4 in 2017, and for Xbox One in 2022.
The story is set between the previous two games, and follows nine people who are kidnapped by a masked person known as Zero. They are divided into three teams, and forced to play a death game called the "Decision Game". The player takes the roles of three of the characters, and plays through the chapters the story is made up of: these consist of animated cinematics, escape-the-room puzzles, and moral decisions for the player to make. The chapters represent 90-minute periods, and can be played out of order.
The game was directed and written by series creator Kotaro Uchikoshi, and features music by Shinji Hosoe and character designs by Rui Tomono. Uchikoshi had started planning the game's story in 2012, but the development was put on hiatus due to the commercial failure of the series in Japan. In 2015, development was announced to have resumed in response to high demand from the series' fan base. The game was positively received by critics.
Gameplay
Zero Time Dilemma is an adventure game consisting of multiple chapters, representing 90-minute periods; chapters consist of narrative sections and escape-the-room puzzle sections. The chapters, referred to as "fragments", are chosen through the Floating Fragment system, in which the player gets to choose a fragment to play based on an image and a vague description. The fragments can be played out of order; the characters lose their memory after each 90-minute period, and do not know where they are in the timeline. When the player completes a fragment, they are returned to the Floating Fragment screen, and the completed fragment is placed in a narrative flowchart, indicating where it takes place in the story.
Narrative sections are presented as three-dimensional animated cinematics, with camera movements and full voice acting in Japanese and English. The Escape sections, which include thirteen different rooms, involve the player searching the room for tools and clues through a point-and-click interface in a first-person perspective and solving puzzles. The puzzles are mostly self-contained, and test the player's problem-solving skills and memory; among these are puzzles where the player has to decipher messages, and ones where they have to align the sides of a three-dimensional object correctly.
After completing an Escape section, the player needs to take a stance in a moral decision; one such decision involves one character being locked into a chair with a gun next to it and another character inside an incinerator. To stop the incinerator, the player needs to choose to pull the trigger, which has a 50% possibility of firing a live bullet, killing the character in the chair. The way the decisions are made varies: some involve choosing between options, and some have the player input their own answer.
Plot Setting and characters Zero Time Dilemma is set between the events of Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Virtue's Last Reward. The game follows nine characters who have been locked up in an underground nuclear bomb shelter and are forced to play a death game called the Decision Game, which is led by a masked person known as Zero. The shelter is divided into three wards, with three people placed in each section, making up three teams: C-Team, Q-Team, and D-Team. To get to the central elevator hall and escape, the characters need six passwords; one password is revealed each time one of them dies. The characters are all wearing watches that inject them with a drug every 90 minutes, inducing memory loss. Heavily involved in the game's lore is the many-worlds theory, where every decision made creates alternate universes where the opposite was chosen; these timelines make up the game's multiple routes.
C-Team includes Carlos (Tomokazu Sugita/Andrew Bowen), a firefighter with a strong sense of justice; Akane (Miyuki Sawashiro/Rena Strober), a member of a secret society working for a peaceful future, and who pretends to be a "neat and clean, ideal Japanese woman"; and Junpei (Tatsuhisa Suzuki/Evan Smith), a childhood friend of Akane's, who has joined a detective agency to find her after she has not been heard from. Q-Team includes a naive amnesiac boy wearing a spherical helmet (Aki Toyosaki/Jonquill Goode); Eric (Akira Ishida/Keith Silverstein), an ice cream shop clerk who easily cracks under pressure; and Mira (Maaya Sakamoto/Rachael Kimsey), who does not show much emotion and is in a relationship with Eric. D-Team includes Diana (Mamiko Noto/Eden Riegel), a pacifist nurse who dislikes fighting; Phi (Chiaki Omagawa/Karen Strassman), an intelligent woman who participated in the Dcom (Dwelling for Experimental Cohabitation of Mars) experiment together with Akane and Sigma to save the world from the Radical-6 virus; and Sigma (Daisuke Ono/Matthew Mercer), a 67-year-old man in the body of a 22-year-old. Additionally, there is a dog named Gab who is able to pass through vents between the sections to deliver messages between the teams.
Synopsis The nine participants of the Dcom experiment are kidnapped by a masked individual known as Zero, who makes them play a coin toss; if they win, they are set free with no memory of what happened, and if they lose they awake in a facility separated into three wards, with one team in each. After losing, they are forced to play the "Decision Game", and submit a vote for one of the teams; the one with the most votes gets executed. At this point, the story starts branching into different timelines depending on player choices.
In one timeline, Phi is killed, and Diana and Sigma are trapped in the facility. They discover a transporter device, which they use to send copies of themselves to another timeline; their original selves remain, however, and the transporter takes ten months to recharge. They begin a relationship, and Diana later gives birth to fraternal twins, a boy and a girl whom they name Delta and Phi. Using the recharged transporter, they send the babies to the past, to keep them safe from Zero. In another timeline, Akane realizes that Carlos can send his consciousness between timelines in times of danger, which she calls "Spacetime Human Internal Fluctuating Transfer", or "shifting". Through the resonance from Carlos's ability, C-Team shifts between timelines to collect passwords, but Zero sends the boy in the helmet – revealed to be a humanoid robot named Sean – to attack them for violating the rules.
Carlos flees by shifting to the timeline that the copies of Diana and Sigma had been transported to. Diana and Sigma reach a room with sleeping pods, where they find and wake up Eric and Sean, and find the dead bodies of the remaining participants. Armed with a shotgun, Eric demands to know who killed Mira; Carlos says that he must be innocent as he was in the C Ward, but Diana realizes that the wards are not separate: there is only one lounge, which changes its appearance using projection mapping. They realize that only one team is active at a time, while the rest are kept asleep in the pods. Sean reveals Zero's true identity: he is Delta, an elderly man thought to be unable to walk, deaf, blind and mute, who had been with Q-Team the entire time, but off-camera from the player's perspective. He admits that he killed Mira, who is revealed to be a serial killer called the Heart Ripper, and prevents the participants from escaping by using his esper abilities to make Eric shoot everyone but Diana.
In the timeline leading to the events of Virtue's Last Reward, Phi is infected with Radical-6, which has a 75% possibility of causing suicidal intention. Junpei and Akane learn that Zero caused a Radical-6 outbreak in the hopes that it would kill a religious fanatic who would cause the complete extinction of humanity; Radical-6 was seen as the lesser evil, as it would allow two billion people to survive. In the timeline where no teams were executed, the participants who are able to shift recall their memories from previous timelines. Delta says that he ran the Decision Game to ensure his and Phi's birth, and to cause epigenetic changes in Diana and Sigma, giving Phi the ability to shift and Delta the ability to read minds and briefly control others' bodies.
The participants activate the "force quit box" in the lounge, starting the facility's self-destruct sequence. Akane realizes that the impending danger and the resonance of the gathered shifters would allow the participants to shift to the timeline where they won the coin toss and were freed. After shifting, they threaten to call the police on Delta, but he points out that he has not committed any crimes in the current timeline. He says that there will be no Radical-6 outbreak in this timeline, meaning that mankind will go extinct, but that the participants now are determined to change the future; he says that one of his goals was to get them into this frame of mind. He gives Carlos a handgun with the choice of killing Delta or letting him live, saying that the fate of humanity is on the line. The game ends with Carlos aiming the gun.
In the epilogues, Carlos' sister recovers from an illness and also gains the ability to jump between timelines. Carlos has become a brother figure to Akane and Junpei, who are to be married, and the three of them vow to stop the religious extremist. Mira has turned herself in for her killings and married Eric, but Sean breaks her out of prison so that they can use the transporter to stop Mira from committing her murders in the past. The Phi of 1904 is speculated to have become a researcher who studied the transporter well into her 100s.
Development
Zero Time Dilemma was developed by Chime, and directed and written by Kotaro Uchikoshi, with music composed by Shinji Hosoe. Uchikoshi first mentioned details of a third Zero Escape game in 2012, stating that it would be the last entry in the series; by 2013, he said that he had finished planning the story, but that development had not yet begun. In February 2014, the project was put on hold indefinitely in response to the series' poor commercial reception in Japan.
Uchikoshi examined the possibility of financing the development through the use of crowdfunding on a website like Kickstarter, but felt that the idea would not be persuasive enough for it to meet the goal; he also sought out opportunities with executives and investors. The series' fandom created Operation Bluebird, an online campaign to raise awareness of the series and support the game's development, in response to its hiatus. When delivering the pitch for the game, Uchikoshi opened with a fan-made vocal rendition of the series theme song, "Morphogenetic Sorrow"; he considered this a major point in getting the project approved. At the 2015 Anime Expo in July, Aksys Games announced that development of the third game had been resumed, citing the high demand and awareness for the game as key factors for its reevaluation. By March 2016, development was 80% finished. The porting of the game to Microsoft Windows was handled by Chime, with consultation from Abstraction Games, who had previously worked on Microsoft Windows ports for the Danganronpa series.