Zero Time Dilemma’s animation is very different to that of its predecessors. While the chunky, cel-shaded style of the world is appealing at first, the animation is appalling. Zero Time Dilemma, on the other hand, is fully animated.

999 and VLR had very little 3D animation – 999 had 2D characters on 3D backgrounds, and VLR’s 3D characters had expressions and gestures to emphasise their lines, but this was well done and minimal. Zero Time Dilemma also differs from its predecessors in the way it looks. You’ll play the story out of order, reliving bits repeatedly to get a different outcome in order to unlock more chunks of story, and you’ll come out of that feeling disoriented, confused and bothered by the fragmented narrative. This is where Zero Time Dilemma differs, offering its story in small, non-linear chunks and asking you to piece it together. By that time, you had a good idea of the characters, the various rules of the game and, importantly, the entire linear story of that particular branch. In Virtue’s Last Reward, one entire playthrough of the story unfolded in full before you were even offered the chance to explore another branch of the flowchart. You’ll use these snippets of information to gain their trust, enter passwords and advance the plot in other ways, eventually gaining access to the True Ending, where (hopefully) everyone survives. Each death scene and game over, where you reach the end of a branch and get kicked back to the flowchart menu, reveals a little more about the characters. The point behind the flowchart is that you have to live through every outcome to get the right one. To top all that off, characters are forced to forget everything they’ve done every 90 minutes, making it quite confusing for everyone to figure out what happened. Shoot one person to save another, or don’t shoot and let them be killed. Press the button that might kill everyone – or don’t. These choices are more open in the third title – rather than returning to one choice repeatedly, you have multiple decisions to make. In Zero Escape: 999, the catalyst was a choice between two doors, each one progressing the story in some way in Zero Escape: VLR it was choosing whether to ally with or betray your fellow teammates in a mandatory, repeated vote.

Imagine this flowchart: at the top is the beginning of the story, which splits into two as you make some binary decision and continues to split as you make more further on in the story. All the Zero Escape games require constant use of a flowchart menu. But the unique thing about the Zero Escape series is its way of telling the story.

The crystal maze pc game