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turned out to be responsible for most of one game’ s murders, the mastermind’ s motives turned out to be completely different than they had stated, and I was sometimes deceived about when and where the games took place or even who I was playing as. Always, though, the game managed to make all the things it had hidden feel important. Every secret contributed to the larger story the games were building. New pieces of information were new ways of looking at the characters I had come to care about, so that when the full story was revealed, their histories and choices felt more important than they ever had at the start.
The third and final game in the series, Zero Time Dilemma, is bursting with potential for exactly the kind of exciting uncertainty the series delivers so well. Every 90 minutes, the characters are knocked out with a drug that erases their memory, so they wake up unaware of what’ s going on. The game uses this disorienting premise to tell its story in nonlinear“ fragments”, which the player can play through in a variable order. In the first half of the game, the effect works.
The fragments dropped me into unknown situations each time, some confusing, some tense, some
downright disturbing. Perhaps the most memorable was one in which two characters on one team woke up alone in a pantry, wondering where their teammate was. I remember the mounting sense of unease I felt as they explored the room, finding what were surely fake human limbs, until they unlocked the door to the freezer, behind which sat his severed head. Creepy moments like these worked not just because of the suspense of an unfamiliar situation, but also because of the mystery they created. How had the characters ended up in these dreadful scenarios? What might they have done but forgotten, and why? For most of the game I was drawn along by these enigmas, trusting in the existence of a satisfactory solution.
Unfortunately, unlike its predecessors, Zero Time Dilemma failed to deliver on the promise of its mysteries. After a while, the fragments stopped feeling like interesting puzzles and started feeling like repetitive scenes. I became almost jaded to the fact that any character missing at the start of a given fragment would probably turn up dead midway though. The disjointed nature of the game worked against it here. In 999 and Virtue’ s Last Reward, your choices felt important because the game encouraged you to live with
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