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turned out to be responsible for most of one game ’ s murders , the mastermind ’ s motives turned out to be completely different than they had stated , and I was sometimes deceived about when and where the games took place or even who I was playing as . Always , though , the game managed to make all the things it had hidden feel important . Every secret contributed to the larger story the games were building . New pieces of information were new ways of looking at the characters I had come to care about , so that when the full story was revealed , their histories and choices felt more important than they ever had at the start .
The third and final game in the series , Zero Time Dilemma , is bursting with potential for exactly the kind of exciting uncertainty the series delivers so well . Every 90 minutes , the characters are knocked out with a drug that erases their memory , so they wake up unaware of what ’ s going on . The game uses this disorienting premise to tell its story in nonlinear “ fragments ”, which the player can play through in a variable order . In the first half of the game , the effect works .
The fragments dropped me into unknown situations each time , some confusing , some tense , some
downright disturbing . Perhaps the most memorable was one in which two characters on one team woke up alone in a pantry , wondering where their teammate was . I remember the mounting sense of unease I felt as they explored the room , finding what were surely fake human limbs , until they unlocked the door to the freezer , behind which sat his severed head . Creepy moments like these worked not just because of the suspense of an unfamiliar situation , but also because of the mystery they created . How had the characters ended up in these dreadful scenarios ? What might they have done but forgotten , and why ? For most of the game I was drawn along by these enigmas , trusting in the existence of a satisfactory solution .
Unfortunately , unlike its predecessors , Zero Time Dilemma failed to deliver on the promise of its mysteries . After a while , the fragments stopped feeling like interesting puzzles and started feeling like repetitive scenes . I became almost jaded to the fact that any character missing at the start of a given fragment would probably turn up dead midway though . The disjointed nature of the game worked against it here . In 999 and Virtue ’ s Last Reward , your choices felt important because the game encouraged you to live with
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