2025-06-18
Zero Time Dilemma review
The final stretch.
Everyone knows that Uchikoshi loves nothing more than non-linear stories, and Zero Time Dilemma might be him taking it to its ultimate conclusion. It feels like Uchikoshi wrote the final part of the Zero Escape series, fed most of it through a woodchipper and then made you scavenge the plot in a random order from the remains. The game lasts for about 20 hours and you’ll spend at least the first ten hours absolutely clueless as to what is happening – and when.
Even though the previous Zero Escape games are definitely non-linear stories too, at least you had a sense of belonging in the story. Most of the game feels like such a mess that I was worried if they could even to sort everything out in a manner that makes sense. Thankfully the story starts to mesh together in the end, at least to a certain point. But before that meshing starts to happen, you really need to cling onto your love for Zero Escape to get through the drudgery and confusion. I was sure that I’d recommend against this game during the first half.
The drudgery is not helped at all by the graphics. Technically speaking, the level of the 3D graphics has taken a significant leap since Virtue’s Last Reward. And yet, despite the objective advancements, the end result is arguably worse. Animation quality is laughably poor, especially the lip syncing, which amounts to random lip movements completely divorced from the spoken lines. It’s even worse than the sockpuppet-like mouth flapping of Virtue’s Last Reward, since at least there was some connection between the audio and the animation. The low-poly VLR models doing a Sesame Street impression didn’t look nearly as awkward as the more realistic models of Zero Time Dilemma. I think there was also an instance where a character was supposed to look shocked or mortified during a life-and-death scenario, and it ended up looking like he was visibly bored.
And even though the 3D quality is higher than Virtue’s Last Reward, it’s still not that stellar. However janky The Somnium Files games might look, they’re still doing circles around Zero Time Dilemma. I would’ve liked to see a lot more work towards the models and the textures. Presumably the developers either had limited skillsets for 3D work, or they simply didn’t have the budget to spend the time. But what didn’t need as much work as it did was the character designs: returning characters don’t look at all like their previous selves despite there only being some months since we’ve seen them in 999 or VLR. Akane and Junpei can really only be identified by their names and voices, as their looks are completely different, making it much harder to treat them as the old characters. Sigma and Phi aren’t quite as bad but the differences still catch the eye.
The redesign of the old characters isn’t helped at all that quite a few of the returning characters don’t really even act like themselves in the story. This is even noted in the game, especially with Junpei, but we never really get great explanations for it. Sigma also acts out in a pretty weird way considering the life he’s lived thus far as detailed in Virtue’s Last Reward. I was sorta expecting there to be a plot twist about one of the returning characters being an impostor, but no, these are the real deals.
And the graphics aren’t even the only problem! The resolution selection in the launcher didn’t seem to work so I just set the resolution by rescaling the window and ended with the uncommon resolution of 1729 × 979. Probably should’ve just edited the configuration file directly. They’ve also landed on a worse control scheme than Virtue’s Last Reward, so I ended up using the mouse for way more things than I wanted. In VLR, I used the keyboard a lot more for camera control and for inventory usage. And considering the sheer amount of text inputs in the game, was it that much hard to implement keyboard typing? You really can tell that this is a console port.
On the core gameplay front, gone is the visual novel style storytelling. The story is instead told as (poorly-animated) cutscenes from a third-person perspective. While I understand the reasoning for it, since it ties into the storytelling with the revolving character focus, I do still much prefer the first-person perspectives of the prior instalments. It made you feel like a participant in the games and not a mere observer, robbed of all agency.
The escape room segments aren’t too dissimilar from the previous entries. I’d say that the difficulty level is somewhere between the straight-and-direct 999 escape segments and the more obtuse VLR escapes. You probably still want to have a notebook at hand like with Virtue’s Last Reward, as there’s quite a few things to remember. What was surprising was that there’s actually not that many escape segments. I got the achievement for solving everything with like a quarter of the game left.
Once you get to a point where the story starts coming together, it does start to feel like proper good old Zero Escape. To a point where I reconsidered my earlier opinion and felt like it was a game worth playing, even if was clearly a much weaker presentation than the earlier titles. And as per usual in the franchise, you also get some plot twists to open up the mystery. And when I got to the big plot twist, my faith started faltering again. It just felt like it was reaching a bit too much, a bit of an asspull. At this point I was once again starting to reconsider whether or not I actually liked this game.
Quite honestly, I’m still not sure. While the big twist wasn’t completely without any setup, the foreshadowing was extremely subtle. In the previous Zero Escape titles, I felt like Uchikoshi had thoroughly bamboozled me when I got an unexpected twist, and here my first reaction was that he’d cheated me. Even after scouring the Internet for all of the foreshadowing in the game, it still feels more unfair than the foreshadowing in Virtue’s Last Reward. I guess it is at least thematically fitting, as the game is about the inherent unfairness of life. Maybe this game is just as unfair.
There’s also things about the story that feel like jumping the shark. The Zero Escape world has always been pretty out there, with elements of sci-fi, pseudoscience and the supernatural all thrown in there. Still, it feels like Zero Time Dilemma takes it maybe a bit too far, with new and even wilder things coming out on a regular basis. I can’t be too mad about it, but I also can’t overlook it. They just seem like extremely crazy concepts that are mostly there as convenient plot devices.
Zero Time Dilemma – the first half of the story is a mess, the visual presentation feels like a bad student project, technical side has significant regressions from the prior games, the storytelling gameplay is less engaging, the big twist is potentially maddening, and some developments take it a bit too far. This doesn’t sound like a winning combination to me. And yet, I feel like I can at least somewhat recommend playing through it, despite its many flaws. This assuming that you are already invested into the Zero Escape world. Anyone else should run away screaming.
While some of the developments range from confusing to maddening, there’s still an interesting plot once it starts to come together. Uchikoshi at his worst is still Uchikoshi. Zero Time Dilemma also manages to do the thing that I was most expecting from it: shed some light on what questions remained from Virtue’s Last Reward. After I finished playing through the game, I asked myself if I regretted spending 20 hours on it, and the answer was “no”. Thankfully, as the final entry in the Zero Escape trilogy, it also doesn’t leave us players hanging for a continuation. Probably for the best, since who knows how hard Uchikoshi would need to stretch to continue the story and to pull twists on us again.