Zero Time Dilemma

Zero Time Dilemma, the third and final entry in the great adventure series Zero Escape, has a narrative structure as complex as those of previous games, although it introduces less interesting characters and ends with a couple of questionable twists that don’t survive retrospection.

The game begins when nine people wake up trapped in a cell and are approached by a mysterious individual – dressed as a plague doctor – who presents themselves simply as Zero. Zero informs the group that, if they want to live, they must participate in the so-called “Decision Game”, and he starts the first round by tossing a coin up in the air: if they can guess the result, they will be immediately released.

Zero Time Dilemma’s narrative follows the series’ pattern, being built around the mystery surrounding the villain’s identity and motivations – with the promise that they are one of the participants. Here, the Decision Game is reminiscent of the Saw movies, in the sense that it often involves one person being forced to hurt or kill another to survive.

However, unlike the entirety of the Saw franchise, writer and director Kotaru Uchikoshi is much more concerned with developing characters and themes than with rejoicing at moments of graphic violence. Most of the game, then, has the characters discussing their personal conflicts and dramas, which will end up being exploited and distorted by Zero in an attempt to break their minds.

The antagonist’s motto, repeated several times during the narrative (“Life is simply unfair, don’t you think”), reveals the pessimistic worldview that permeates the nature of the decisions they force others to make: when they tossed the coin up in the air, Zero left the group’s freedom to chance. There’s no morality, no skill, nothing but chance at play to ensure their survival, and if they had just guessed it right they would have been free of the horrors that followed.

Zero defends that human beings don’t have total control over their destiny and that, even if someone does everything right, they may still end up suffering from actions taken by others or simply due to bad luck. To illustrate the point, Zero tells the story of a jogger who one day decided to change her usual path thanks to a slug and ended up generating a chain of events that led to the death of six people. Zero’s message to the participants of the Decision Game is clear: suffering is often random and there’s not a reason for everything.

And the characters indeed suffer. There’s a scene in which one of them must choose between letting one person be incinerated alive or shooting another in the head – but with a Russian roulette at play that makes them have a 50% chance of getting out alive. This is one of the strongest scenes in Zero Time Dilemma because of the problems it raises: although shooting the person is the most “logical” action, as there’s a chance everybody lives, the character that has to make this decision starts questioning if reason should really be a predominant factor when dealing with a person’s life, especially given the feelings they have for both possible victims.

Zero, as a villain, speaks in numbers (“Six billion, two billion, six unjust deaths”), while the rest of the characters make sure to attach names to the corpses and suffer each loss personally. For Zero, the deaths are just the increase of a statistic, while for the main characters, those who die are people: they never reduce the loss of a life to something impersonal.

Usually, the consequences of their decisions follow a clear pattern, with acts of violence generating only violence. In Zero Time Dilemma, choices that somehow cause something bad to happen to a person – however logical they may appear– seem to always generate a chain of events that end only in tragedy. This is treated almost as the universe’s response to violence – a kind of unalterable law of the universe that’s in direct conflict with the villain’s main philosophy.

The most memorable scenes in the game, then, are about the few acts of affection and love that take place in the midst of so much grief and suffering. The moments of confession, when a character opens up about their secrets pains and misdeeds, showing themselves flawed and fragile, are also powerful when contrasted with the strength these characters usually must show when dealing with Zero’s violent game.

However, it’s only the returning characters that leave an impact, since the new ones are either bland or irritating. Eric, for instance, clearly assumes the role of the “annoying character” in the group, constantly provoking one of his colleagues unnecessarily, and often acting based on hatred. His “romantic partner” doesn’t fare much better, showing a systematic indifference to those around her, which, although explained narratively, makes the character equally unpleasant to follow. Meanwhile, the protagonist, Carlos, never evolves beyond his initial archetype of hero, with a simple background story that adds almost nothing to the overarching one.

However, the game’s main problem lies in its final twists. Without revealing anything important, it is enough to say that the revelation regarding the villain’s identity is a bit dishonest since for it to work some characters have to stop acting and talking as they should have just to hide important information from us, the players. In other words, it’s artificial. The fact that there are clues spread throughout the story doesn’t help the twist when there are also elements that make the revelation feel undeserved. Another problematic twist concerns one of the villain’s main motivations, as they’re acting on information they shouldn’t have, especially at that level of detail.

So, if it’s true that Zero Time Dilemma works much better with its themes and characters than the first Saw, knowing that players usually only care about the characters’ fate if they get to know them well, that movie, in turn, prepared its main twist much better, being able to make it surprising without having elements in the narrative that contradict it.

The big decisions the characters have to make in Zero Time Dilemma usually occur right after we solve a series of puzzles – this is an Escape Room game after all. From time to time, the characters are all injected with a drug that erases their memory and, every time they wake up, they need to figure out how to get out of the room they are locked in at the moment. These sections have their ups and downs: some puzzles are intelligent, requiring us to convert sequences of codes and then interpret them, but others are more obvious, like the one that literally points with an arrow to the cables that we must cut.

Nevertheless, one of Zero Time Dilemma’s greatest merits lies in how its narrative structure mirrors the characters’ disorientation caused by the drug: when they wake up, they don’t know anything about what has happened before and even how many times they were drugged and locked up together. We, in turn, have at our disposal the shuffled pieces of the story with no indication of when they occur in the timeline: we’re able to choose any of them to play in any order, which means we must assemble this bigger puzzle alongside the characters.

As for the game’s presentation, the soundtrack remains efficient, introducing a piano version of the great “Morphogenetic Sorrow” of previous games, which conveys a deeper sadness that perfectly fits the tragedy of the couple to whom it relates, along with a more impacting version of “Blue Bird Lamentation”, whose crescendo – the melody starts with a music box and gains instruments as it gets unbearably intense – is correctly employed in the game’s most tragic scenes. However, it’s nothing but symptomatic that these two songs refer to previous characters in the series and that no new character has a memorable theme: they don’t stand out in the story, after all.

The graphics, on the other hand, completely deviate from the style of the previous titles, abandoning their Visual Novel aesthetic. The game replaces the extensive reading sections with long cutscenes, adopting a more cinematic look, even if these scenes reveal the project’s low budget with their stiff, low-quality animations.

Thanks to its somewhat dishonest ending and uninteresting new characters, Zero Time Dilemma fails to reach the same level of excellence of its predecessors. It’s a serviceable ending to the trilogy, but only that.

December 11, 2024.