Zero Time Dilemma

Zero Time Dilemma is an adventure game consisting of multiple chapters, representing 90-minute periods; chapters consist of narrative sections and escape-the-room puzzle sections. The puzzles are mostly self-contained, and test the player's problem-solving skills and memory; among these are puzzles where the player has to decipher messages, and ones where they have to align the sides of a three-dimensional object correctly. After completing an Escape section, the player needs to take a stance in a moral decision; one such decision involves one character being locked into a chair with a gun next to it and another character inside an incinerator. To stop the incinerator, the player needs to choose to pull the trigger, which has a 50% possibility of firing a live bullet, killing the character in the chair. The way the decisions are made varies: some involve choosing between options, and some have the player input their own answer. == Plot ==

Setting and characters Zero Time Dilemma is set between the events of Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and ''Virtue's Last Reward''. The game follows nine characters who have been locked up in an underground nuclear bomb shelter and are forced to play a death game called the Decision Game, which is led by a masked person known as Zero. The shelter is divided into three wards, with three people placed in each section, making up three teams: C-Team, Q-Team, and D-Team. To get to the central elevator hall and escape, the characters need six passwords; one password is revealed each time one of them dies. The characters are all wearing watches that inject them with a drug every 90 minutes, inducing memory loss. Heavily involved in the game's lore is the many-worlds theory, where every decision made creates alternate universes where the opposite was chosen; these timelines make up the game's multiple routes. C-Team includes Carlos (Tomokazu Sugita/Andrew Bowen), a firefighter with a strong sense of justice; Akane (Miyuki Sawashiro/Rena Strober), a member of a secret society working for a peaceful future, and who pretends to be a "neat and clean, ideal Japanese woman"; and Junpei (Tatsuhisa Suzuki/Evan Smith), a childhood friend of Akane's, who has joined a detective agency to find her after she has not been heard from. Q-Team includes a naive amnesiac boy wearing a spherical helmet (Aki Toyosaki/Jonquill Goode); Eric (Akira Ishida/Keith Silverstein), an ice cream shop clerk who easily cracks under pressure; and Mira (Maaya Sakamoto/Rachael Kimsey), who does not show much emotion and is in a relationship with Eric. D-Team includes Diana (Mamiko Noto/Eden Riegel), a pacifist nurse who dislikes fighting; Phi (Chiaki Omagawa/Karen Strassman), an intelligent woman who participated in the Dcom (Dwelling for Experimental Cohabitation of Mars) experiment together with Akane and Sigma to save the world from the Radical-6 virus; and Sigma (Daisuke Ono/Matthew Mercer), a 67-year-old man in the body of a 22-year-old. Additionally, there is a dog named Gab who is able to pass through vents between the sections to deliver messages between the teams. Synopsis The nine participants of the Dcom experiment are kidnapped by a masked individual known as Zero, who makes them play a coin toss; if they win, they are set free with no memory of what happened, and if they lose they awake in a facility separated into three wards, with one team in each. After losing, they are forced to play the "Decision Game", and submit a vote for one of the teams; the one with the most votes gets executed. At this point, the story starts branching into different timelines depending on player choices. In one timeline, Phi is killed, and Diana and Sigma are trapped in the facility. They discover a transporter device, which they use to send copies of themselves to another timeline; their original selves remain, however, and the transporter takes ten months to recharge. They begin a relationship, and Diana later gives birth to fraternal twins, a boy and a girl whom they name Delta and Phi. Using the recharged transporter, they send the babies to the past, to keep them safe from Zero. In another timeline, Akane realizes that Carlos can send his consciousness between timelines in times of danger, which she calls "Spacetime Human Internal Fluctuating Transfer", or "shifting". Through the resonance from Carlos's ability, C-Team shifts between timelines to collect passwords, but Zero sends the boy in the helmet – revealed to be a humanoid robot named Sean – to attack them for violating the rules. Carlos flees by shifting to the timeline that the copies of Diana and Sigma had been transported to. Diana and Sigma reach a room with sleeping pods, where they find and wake up Eric and Sean, and find the dead bodies of the remaining participants. Armed with a shotgun, Eric demands to know who killed Mira; Carlos says that he must be innocent as he was in the C Ward, but Diana realizes that the wards are not separate: there is only one lounge, which changes its appearance using projection mapping. They realize that only one team is active at a time, while the rest are kept asleep in the pods. Sean reveals Zero's true identity: he is Delta, an elderly man thought to be unable to walk, deaf, blind and mute, who had been with Q-Team the entire time, but off-camera from the player's perspective. He admits that he killed Mira, who is revealed to be a serial killer called the Heart Ripper, and prevents the participants from escaping by using his esper abilities to make Eric shoot everyone but Diana. In the timeline leading to the events of ''Virtue's Last Reward'', Phi is infected with Radical-6, which has a 75% possibility of causing suicidal intention. Junpei and Akane learn that Zero caused a Radical-6 outbreak in the hopes that it would kill a religious fanatic who would cause the complete extinction of humanity; Radical-6 was seen as the lesser evil, as it would allow two billion people to survive. In the timeline where no teams were executed, the participants who are able to shift recall their memories from previous timelines. Delta says that he ran the Decision Game to ensure his and Phi's birth, and to cause epigenetic changes in Diana and Sigma, giving Phi the ability to shift and Delta the ability to read minds and briefly control others' bodies. The participants activate the "force quit box" in the lounge, starting the facility's self-destruct sequence. Akane realizes that the impending danger and the resonance of the gathered shifters would allow the participants to shift to the timeline where they won the coin toss and were freed. After shifting, they threaten to call the police on Delta, but he points out that he has not committed any crimes in the current timeline. He says that there will be no Radical-6 outbreak in this timeline, meaning that mankind will go extinct, but that the participants now are determined to change the future; he says that one of his goals was to get them into this frame of mind. He gives Carlos a handgun with the choice of killing Delta or letting him live, saying that the fate of humanity is on the line. The game ends with Carlos aiming the gun. In the epilogues, Carlos' sister recovers from an illness and also gains the ability to jump between timelines. Carlos has become a brother figure to Akane and Junpei, who are to be married, and the three of them vow to stop the religious extremist. Mira has turned herself in for her killings and married Eric, but Sean breaks her out of prison so that they can use the transporter to stop Mira from committing her murders in the past. The Phi of 1904 is speculated to have become a researcher who studied the transporter well into her 100s. == Development ==

, who intended it to be the last entry in the series.|alt=A 2016 photograph of Kotaro Uchikoshi. Zero Time Dilemma was developed by Chime, For the music, Uchikoshi wrote down directions about the mood and concept of the game, describing it as "sad and lonely, like a worn-out record", and "dark and visceral". Hosoe described the music as generally less melodic: because they could not make the music hit on cue like in film, they decided during the planning stage to include silence in the soundtrack, so Hosoe created atmospheric tracks to be used as background noise. Because the Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors characters Junpei and Akane and the ''Virtue's Last Reward characters Sigma and Phi appear in the game, Uchikoshi decided to have arrangements of songs from those two games included in the soundtrack. He also had the songs "Digital Root" and "Trepidation", which had been used in both previous games, be included, as he saw them as a sort of theme songs that tie the games together as a series, similarly to "The Imperial March" from the Star Wars'' films. Hosoe received a list of what songs were to be rearranged and how they were to be used within the game, and was asked to compose a total of 45 songs; he did however end up composing nearly 70 songs, ensuring that they had something that fit every situation in the game. For the ending theme, Hosoe incorporated several callbacks to songs from the previous games as "a sendoff for the series", leading into "Morphogenetic Sorrow". Two puzzle creators were enlisted with designing the escape-the-room scenarios; Uchikoshi described one of them as creating "orthodox" puzzles, and the other, Strider creator Kouichi Yotsui, as creating "unique and out-of-the-box" types of puzzles. He gave them a rough idea of what he wanted each puzzle to convey and how he wanted them to resolve. The puzzle designers would come up with a draft, which he would finalize together with them. Sean was originally meant to wear a cubic helmet, but Tomono presented a spherical design instead, which Uchikoshi described as "everything I didn't know I wanted". Mira was designed to continue the series tradition of having a "sexy femme fatale" character in each game: she was given an open track jacket and a bikini-like top to show off her cleavage, and a jiggle effect was added to her 3D model. Eric's design and 3D modelling went smoothly, with Chime saying that some faces are easier to model than others. Tomono wanted him to specifically have a Caucasian chin and brow, but noted that they had to be careful to not go too far with it, to avoid a too realistic look. Diana's design was difficult to recreate in 3D, with the initial model having "really chubby chipmunk cheeks", but was worked on until it matched the design. She was also difficult to animate, due to her long skirt. Phi was originally shorter and had bigger eyes, but after she was given glasses, it was decided that she should look more like a model to match the stylish look of her short hair and glasses. Parts of Sigma's design from ''Virtue's Last Reward'' were incorporated into his new one, in the form of embroidery on his polo shirt. == Promotion and release ==

In March 2015, Aksys Games launched the website 4infinity.co, which consisted of a countdown timer; It was released in Europe on September 8, with Rising Star Games assisting Aksys Games by distributing the retail copies. An Xbox One version was released on August 30, 2022. In North America, a limited edition that includes a wristwatch was released. Because the watches were damaged in transit, they were delayed and sent separately from the game. Japanese pre-ordered copies came bundled with the 48-page Zero Escape: Premium Booklet, which includes production material, illustrations by Tomono, summaries of the previous two Zero Escape games, and a prequel written by Uchikoshi; a digital edition of the booklet was bundled with the Microsoft Windows release, together with a portion of the game's soundtrack. Aksys plans to release the booklet separately from the game, and is also considering releasing other merchandise based on the game. According to Hosoe, his company, Supersweep, which published the soundtrack albums for the previous games, is considering publishing an album for Zero Time Dilemma too. == Reception ==

Zero Time Dilemma was well received by critics on all platforms, During its opening week in Japan, it sold 5,375 copies on the PlayStation Vita and 3,916 copies on the Nintendo 3DS, for a total of 9,291 copies sold. It was the third best selling digital PlayStation Vita game of June 2016 in Europe, despite being released three days before the end of the month. The Steam release had an estimated total of 38,000 players by July 2018. Famitsu four reviewers enjoyed the game's setup of three different teams and non-chronological plot progression, with the player getting a greater understanding of the story as they play; one of them said that learning what was going on in the fragments was "fantastic", and that they liked the emphasis on "interpersonal human drama". Another of them commented that the "light banter" dialogue is helpful in motivating the player. One of them said that the game would be enjoyable even for players who have not played previous entries in the series. The reviewers at Famitsu noted that the puzzle rooms were challenging and fun, but wished that the game had included a hint function for people who primarily play the game for the story; one of the reviewers also commented that the way the player uses items is difficult at some points. They appreciated how the puzzle rooms, unlike many other escape-the-room games, do not feel artificial. One reviewer at Famitsu liked how the game allows the player to skip past already viewed cutscenes, while another commented that the cutscenes are not perfectly lip-synched to the Japanese voice acting. Game Informer award for the best ending in an adventure game of 2016, and RPGFan's Reader's Choice award in the adventure games and visual novels category. It was a runner-up for Hardcore Gamer Best Story, Best Voice Acting and Best PlayStation Vita Game of 2016 awards, and was nominated for IGN's Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita games of the year awards. It was selected for two of RPGFan's Editors' Awards: Peter Triezenberg ranked it as the fifth best game of the year, while Robert Fenner selected it for his Most Disappointing category; and Mira was included on Destructoid's list of their favorite new video game characters of 2016. == Notes ==