the consequences until you reached an ending. Although Zero Time Dilemma offered a multitude of choices for the player to make, they always occurred at the end of a fragment. After every decision, you jumped off to another scene with no relation to what you had just witnessed or done, so no matter what choice you made it didn’ t seem to matter at all. The sense of tension and danger that pervaded the previous games was gone.
Even so, as I made my way through the fragments I believed that the story would eventually come together. The Zero Escape games had earned my trust, and I didn’ t doubt that a satisfying resolution was possible, even if I couldn’ t see one. But as the answers to the game’ s central questions were revealed one by one, they didn’ t feel interesting – not as clever solutions to puzzles, and not as insights into the characters I cared about. Sadly, the final betrayal of the game was, for me, its ending. The identity of Zero was revealed, but it was none of the game’ s nine central characters. Instead, a tenth player, Delta, had been there the whole time, but had gone unnoticed as he pretended to be blind and deaf. The characters had known about him all along, but the game had hidden him with clever camera angles and ambiguous dialogue. This development broke what I think of as one of the most fundamental promises implicit in a mystery: that the culprit will be someone the audience already knows. It ensures that the mystery is solvable, but on a deeper level it’ s the same promise that any story makes to its audience: that they will care about the resolution. The revelation of Delta as the mastermind didn’ t tell me anything new about any of the characters I cared about, or anything meaningful about the horrible situation they had been through. It felt more like the game was showing off how clever it had been to hide Delta than like it had anything worthwhile to say.
The Zero Escape games show how, paradoxically, keeping its audience in the dark can both help a story succeed and cause it to fail. Withholding information simply for uncertainty’ s sake can create a fun experience, but it takes more for it to remain interesting after the truth is revealed. In the end, for a mystery to be worthwhile, the solution must be too.