Zero Escape
Numbers, Colors, and Death
Welcome to the Warthog Report, the home for my fiction and non-fiction. This post is part of the regular feature ‘Let Me Talk To You About,’ where I ramble about creative works of any medium that I enjoy. You can adjust which segments you receive here. Today I’ll be talking about an entire trilogy of games.
Nine people awaken to find themselves trapped in an unknown location. The one responsible introduces themselves as Zero, and forces the others to play a game of life and death. This is the basic premise of each game in the Zero Escape trilogy: 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors, Virtue’s Last Reward, and Zero Time Dilemma.
While each title has some differences in how they play, generally they are broken up into segments focused on the story, either told visual novel style in the first two or through cutscenes in the third, and escape room sections. The escape sections are classic point and click type gameplay, looking around the room and finding items in order to solve puzzles, and tapping other random things for amusing dialogue.
The escape sections you do and in what order are variable however, because in each game you’ll make choices that determine the path of the narrative and which ending you’ll get. It’s also impossible to see the true ending of any of the games without first experiencing at least one other ending, so you need to explore the different branches of the story to discover the truth.
Despite each game being set within a death game, the tone of the series isn’t oppressively bleak. There are morbid and frightening scenes, but also amusing banter when the characters are solving puzzles.
Characters will also often stop to discuss interesting factoids or pieces of intriguing pseudoscience that usually turn out to be either thematically related or directly plot relevant. You will learn quite a few interesting things from the many tangents the cast like to go on, it’s a series that enjoys taking the time to contemplate things.
What I also like about the trilogy is how the story is done in a way that takes advantage of the medium, these are unarguably video game stories rather than stories told in a video game. Even porting 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors to a system other than the DS loses something vital to how the game was written, especially noticeable in the climax. Please try to play the DS version if you can.
The story of each game is somewhat stand alone, covering a different death game and set of characters, but naturally has the most impact if you play the prior titles. 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors is the most standalone since it wasn’t originally conceived of as a trilogy, and as the conclusion Zero Time Dilemma offers a clear resolved ending. Virtue’s Last Reward on the other hand was made to be the middle title of a trilogy, so it is the least stand alone in both assuming you’ve played the prior game and the ending setting up the next one.
Because of each title’s distinct qualities, I’d like to take the time to discuss each individually.
999
9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors follows the protagonist Junpei as he is forced to play the Nonary Game with eight others onboard a sinking replica of the Titanic. The objective is simple, find the door marked with a 9 in order to escape before 9 hours pass and the ship sinks.
However, which door someone can go through is determined by a bracelet they are forced to wear, each one marked with a different number from 1 to 9. Only three to five people may go through a door, and the numbers on their bracelets must sum to a digital root equal to the number on the door.
At different points in the game the characters are faced with multiple doors, and the player must choose which one Junpei (who has the five bracelet) goes through. Due to the digital root system each door gives you a different set of partners to puzzle with. And the choice of doors determine which ending you’ll get, with the true ending requiring at minimum two playthroughs to access.
A major pain point is having to replay the entire game from the beginning to try out different possibilities. You can skip repeat lines, but not the escape sections, so prepare to speedrun the first one. Counting the introductory tutorial escape, a typical playthrough consists of four escape sections. Later releases backported the flowchart feature from later games to let you jump directly to decision points, but it comes at the cost of key elements that only work on the DS. You have to pick between convenience and purity.
Another aspect of this is that you can miss some information that while not vital, does help flesh out the cast and add more context to everything. But it requires going down the path to an ending that isn’t needed to see the true one, adding another playthrough to your experience.
Being an intended standalone title, this is the most focused and small scale of the trilogy, the one with the clearest sense of identity and purpose. The codename of Zero for the mastermind has the most relevance here with the heavy emphasis on numbers. If you pay attention to the math and know some rules of digital roots you can deduce certain things about the plot based on that alone. There are also subtle clues for which options to pick or avoid to find the true ending you won’t properly recognize until after getting it.
Looking back on it as the start of a trilogy, it does a good job of establishing the core ideas and recurring elements that define its identity as a whole. One example of this is my favorite character, who I can’t properly get into discussing because it is impossible to do so without giving away key plot twists for multiple games.
VLR
In Virtue’s Last Reward the player character is a man named Sigma forced to play the Nonary Game: Ambidex Edition. Instead of the digital root system of the prior Nonary Game, it now revolves around the prisoner’s dilemma. After clearing each escape room, the characters are forced to play the AB game, where they vote ‘ally’ or ‘betray.’
Being the prisoner’s dilemma, mutual alliance has no downsides, mutual betrayal has no benefit, and betraying someone who allies is the biggest benefit to yourself while giving the betrayed nothing.
What the characters are voting for are points. Each character’s bracelet displays their number of points in the Nonary Game, if you reach nine points, you can escape and everyone else is trapped, if you hit zero points, you die. To even reach the point of voting, they must first clear an escape room with the people they will vote against, which adds to the issue of trust. Are they genuinely nice, or are they luring you into voting ally while they vote betray?
To further complicate things, this new Nonary Game uses a system that sorts three sets of two players into pairs who must enter the same door and vote as one, even when their points aren’t equal. After each voting round the assigned pairs are shuffled, but there will always be six paired braclets and three solo bracelets.
Furthermore, in 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors it was only speculation by the cast that Zero could be among them. Here it is stated outright by the AI administrator of the game, Zero III, that the true mastermind of the game, Zero Senior, is one of the participants. This naturally makes it harder for the cast to trust each other when the other person voting may be Zero Senior.
This leads to a large increase in the number of ways the story can branch, so to make it easy to keep track of, the game uses a flow chart system where you can freely jump to any section of the game you’ve played. You can explore different possibilities without needing to replay any escape sections.
To match this, the game now also regularly puts up roadblocks that will force you to use the flowchart system to try a different branch of the story before letting you progress further down that particular path. And the number of different endings you must reach to find the true ending has also increased, with a much greater number of complete dead ends as well. This greater number of endings means each character gets their time to be focused on, instead of only having critical information about themselves revealed in an optional dead end.
While tensions amongst the cast run much higher here compared to the previous entry, most of it is concentrated around the AB game, so the puzzle sections tend to be more humorous. In particular Sigma can get a touch irritating at times with his dirty mind and equally dirty humor during those segments. The overall tension of the game ends up a little lower than the persistent dread of 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors, but it still has moments of dead seriousness, especially on certain branches of the story.
Another tonal departure is how up front the fantastical elements of the setting are compared to the first game, going from a mostly grounded and realistic game to one run by a snarky AI, with other clearly science fiction elements soon appearing as well.
At first Virtue’s Last Reward seems to be mostly its own thing story wise aside from one returing character. Then it becomes clear the connections run much deeper and certain developments in the plot will be most impactful if you played the prior game. This is where it becomes clear the series going forward is direct sequels, not thematic similarities and a few references.
Due to being less linear than its predecessor there’s more room to come away with a different experience of the plot compared to others, since there are less scenes shared between all story branches. The ally and betray system especially can color your impression of a character depending on how you progress.
In terms of puzzles, Virtue’s Last Reward sets itself apart from both its precessor and successor by having the most standardized escape sections. The goal of every room is to uncover the code to unlock a safe with the keycards needed to play the AB game, and if you do a more obscure puzzle in the same room you get a different code for the safe that gives you some extra material to review about the game, nothing urgent, but something nice to try and get.
ZTD
Zero Time Dilemma closes out the trilogy with a huge shake up to the format of the first two. Instead of the Nonary Game, it now follows the Decision Game, with the cast of nine now split into three teams of three in different wards of the same building, unable to directly interact with each other. This time the way to escape is to open the X door, which requires six passwords to open, a password being revealed upon the death of each participant.
The risk of death for participants comes after they complete an escape room, where they are forced to make a decision that has life or death consequences for themselves or others. As a further complication, after a certain amount of time elapses the bracelet on each character injects them with a drug that knocks them out and erases their memory of what they just experienced.
Instead of following events in a linear order, the player picks out different fragments to play, covering periods where the characters are awake, and each of the three teams having their own fragments. This means you’re just as clueless as the characters about what point of the game they’re at, creating a near constant sense of uncertainty around who is still alive. If you encounter a fragment where a character is already dead, you know it must happen in one of the other fragments. And your only clue for the status of other teams is the amount of passwords revealed.
Each team has its own viewpoint character to play as. C team fragments have you play as Carlos, whose partners are Junpei and Akane from 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors. D team’s focus character is Diana, partnered with Sigma and Phi from Virtue’s Last Reward. Q team’s central character is an amnesiac child named Q, partnered with fellow new characters Eric and Mira.
In other words, the teams are themed around a different entry of the trilogy, with Q team representing Zero Time Dilemma itself. But while the team system helps give each set of three their own fleshed out dynamic, it is a little disappointing to have no room for them to interact with each other. There could have been interesting interactions between the casts of the prior two games and new characters, but they are sealed off from each other.
The other big change is abandoning the visual novel sections for cutscenes. This has the issue of the models and animations being where the game most shows its handheld system origins and limited budget due to just barely getting made in the first place. Personally it didn’t disrupt my immersion, but if you have a lower tolerance for this sort of clunkiness it could become an issue. And regardless the models and animations are far from praise worthy.
Being the least linear of the trilogy it’s the most variable in how you experience it. One part of the plot that others described as a boringly obvious twist didn’t even register as a twist to me due to being featured in one of the first fragments I played. What was obvious telegraphing to others became exposition and dramatic irony in my playthrough.
It’s also the most brutal of the trilogy. For all the clunk brought on by the shift to cutscenes, seeing the many possible deaths of the cast play out in real time rather than prose and static images does amplify the terror. The Nonary Games only had the threat of death, the Decision Game is explicitly about causing death.
On the whole I enjoyed the game and its storyline, but some plot twists felt more aimed at the player than the characters in the story. There has always been a meta element to the trilogy, but some twists felt like a step too far. There is also a surprising amount of inconsistency with Virtue’s Last Reward on the exact details Virtue’s Last Reward was clearly setting up to be expanded on in a sequel, or that set up simply not being explored or used.
Despite all of its imperfections, I do like where Zero Time Dilemma leaves the series. What 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors introduced and Virtue’s Last Reward expanded on, Zero Time Dilemma instead openly challenges.
Sum
This has gone on for longer than most issues of this feature due to discussing three games at once, but they do all form together in one larger narrative, talking about them separately wouldn’t feel right.
Zero Escape is not a perfectly cohesive trilogy, each game comes across as running by slightly different rules of how the setting works, but still fits as one overarching story. And that story is the sort I sometimes think about long after having played the games.