Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma

Great, 9 new characters to second guess during all the game

I just had to get more of the Zero Escape-series after Virtue's Last Reward and since there was no release for the original game I had to go for the sequel. And they went full 3D so the gore is amplified as well as more explicit than the other game. The music is the same and still creeps me out and beckons my interest in the mystery. Pretty much the same premise, 9 people trapped in an underground facility with bracelets on their wrists. The difference being that they are already assigned teams, Carlos, Akane and Junpei in C-team, Q, Mira and Eric in Q-team and Diane, Phi and Sigma in D-team. They have signed up for some Travel to Mars-excercice and after 5 days being locked up by someone wearing a plaugemask offering them a coin toss option. Guess right and they are free to go or get it wrong and play the Decision games with Zero II. I guess red and... wins the coin toss. Everyones put to sleep and let out and credits roll. That was easy.

Of course to really get it you have to explore all possibilities so lose that coin toss. The three teams are relocated to separate wards and after 90 minutes put to sleep by the bracelets as well as administrated a drug that erase their memory. Meaning you don't play the game linear as before, but jumps between fragments that appears if everything leading up to them are fulfilled. You all remember the first decision game since you are forced to vote for the two other teams and the team that gets two votes are executed. In the last minute you find that the dog from the training centre can go between wards and carries a container that you can send messages with so C-team who gets it first sends out instructions how to spread the votes. Your first choice is to follow the instructions or chose the other team more or less betraying them. And then you are put to sleep and depending on the decision of your current group and the other groups you get 4 separate outcomes. One of the three teams gets executed or the plan works and you are taken to a decontamination chamber where you again have to decide to either press a button that forces the other teams being showered with some acid that turns them to sludge that disappears in the drains. If no one presses it you end up with a [Force Quit Box] where you need passwords you can't access in that timeline so it's time to jump around.

So who are all these people? Carlos is a firefighter that entered the program to get $ 500 000 to cure his sister. Akane is the old woman from the last game that infiltrated the program with Phi and Sigma to stop the outbreak of Radical-6. A younger Junpei from the last game had tracked down Akane and followed her into the program. Diane is a nurse that tried to escape her abusive ex-husband and Mira and Eric are a couple... with problems one might say. Eric is prone to snapping and be very abusive which probably has to do with his abusive alcoholic father that entered some depression after his wife died and Mira... is a serial killer that rips peoples heart outs while they are still beating. And Q is some child with a huge helmet over his head he can't get off. And this is the simple story elements. In actuality Diane is the person Sigma modelled Luna from the last game after and is pretty much his lover. In this game it's also revealed that Sigma and Diane is Phi's parents that sent her back in time through an alien teleporter that was discovered in Germany in 1888. I see they went and threw away all of Knox commandments when doing this game. And she apparently have a twin brother named Delta. Phi is also patient Zero in the Radical-6 outbreak in the timeline following Virtue's Last Reward, but how that works I don't know since she must have been cured or maybe they didn't give her the disease like with everyone else since she was already infected and the reason she volunteered?  Akane is psychotic and bash Carlos to death at one point for killing Junpei in an AB-game. And Junpei doesn't get it better as he is carved up in different pieces and his head is put on a display in a freezer. And the boy Q is a robot without any head behind the helmet that Zero put there and get's the most tearjerking endings in the game, the first when he stays behind with the chained up dog Gab since he couldn't leave him in the shelter and then when he sends his conscious into a virtual reality where he gets to play out the life of the real boy he was modelled after, Sean who died from some incurable disease. And he gets to live in a happy family, go to school and have friends... oh boy, how can I feel so much for a robot AI within a game?

So you might be thinking, who's the mastermind behind this? Obviously it's Delta, but he is not 20 years old like Phi since both travelled through time to the year 1908, but Phi was teleported to 2008 after that so Delta is 124 years old. And he can read peoples minds and for a short while take control of a persons body. He calls it mind hacking. Apparently he was with Q-team all the time if I guess right, but he sits in a wheelchair and is supposed to be both deaf and blind. His reason is to force them to jump between alternative histories so he assure his and Phi's birth with their powers (Phi's being able to SHIFT timelines) and then making them all regain their memories and take the place of those winning the coin toss in order to fight for a better future since the Radical-6 plan was to stop a religious cultist engaging in a nuclear war killing all 8 billion people by leaving 2 billion people alive after the virus take care of the others. I assume they hint that yet another game where you have to take care of that person. Also Alice and Clover tried to get back to their time and K apparently shifted back in time and changed conscious with someone, but we don't know who. Now I really want to play the first game and I wonder if there will be a forth one.

So story is all over the place, but there is some problems with how the game plays. They made it worse. In the last game I could have the notes on the top screen so I didn't have to switch back and forth when writing passwords or such, but now I gotta switch. That annoys me to no end. Same with files so I can read the instructions while trying out a puzzle. Now I must read the files, jump out and open the notes and write them in. It's almost forcing me to pick up pen and paper like in the olden days. The big downside I gotta say. Otherwise a fun game.