Zero Time Dilemma

Zero Time Dilemma, the third and final entry in the thrilling 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 a retrospective analysis.

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 himself simply as Zero. Zero informs them that, if they want to live, they must participate in the so-called “Decision Game” and starts the first round by throwing 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 – with the promise that he is one of the participants – and their motivations to subject those people to the horrors of the Decision Game – which is reminiscent of the Saw movies, in the sense that it often involves one person being forced to hurt or kill another to be released.

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 he forces others to make. 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 not everything has a reason to be.

And the characters will suffer. There’s a scene, for example, 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 is the most “logical” action, the character that has to make the 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 dialogues heavily with the villain’s main philosophy.

The most memorable moments in the game main, therefore, are the few acts of affection and love that take place in the midst of so much suffering and grief. Some of the characters’ confessions are striking precisely due to the contrast between their nature and the terrible situation that pushed the characters to make them.

However, it’s only the returning characters that leave an impact, since the new ones generate only indifference and irritation. Eric, for instance, clearly assumes the role of the “annoying character”, provoking one of the members of the group 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. 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, of course, it is enough to say that the revelation regarding the villain’s identity is a bit dishonest since for it to work some characters had to stop acting and talking as they should have just to hide important information from the player. 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 unwarranted. Another problematic twist concerns one of the villain’s main motivations since he acts on information he shouldn’t have, especially at that level of detail.

If 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, the movie, in turn, prepares 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 usually occur right after the solution of 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 now. These sections have their ups and downs: some puzzles are intelligent, requiring the player 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 the player 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. The player, in turn, has at their disposal shuffled pieces of the story and no indication of when they occur in the timeline, being able to choose any of them to follow in any order – and so the player has to assemble this bigger puzzle alongside the characters.

As for the game’s presentation, the soundtrack remains efficient, introducing a piano version of Morphogenetic Sorrow, 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: after all, they don’t stand out in the story.

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 as its predecessors. It’s a serviceable ending, but only that.

May 13, 2020.

Review originally published in Portuguese on October 06, 2016.