Zero Time Dilemma

If you want the cheap thrills of an escape room survival horror but with strong character arcs and incredibly complex and heady narrative threads to unravel, look no further than Zero Time Dilemma. The third game in director Kotaro Uchikoshi’s Zero Escape trilogy is occasionally funny, often bizarre, and always hard to put down. It’s everything you could want from a visual novel and more. (It’s also extremely affordable on Steam, along with the whole trilogy).

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but nine desperate people are locked in a nuclear bunker and tormented by a masked game master named Zero. Some must die so the others can live. There are riddles to solve, logic puzzles to blow up, and multiple timelines, all of which is made manageable thanks to the chaos being broken into discrete chapters. The result is kind of like a series of deadly crosswords dramatized and punctuated with fascinating nuggets of philosophizing and sci-fi babble. Life is unfair, but Zero Time Dilemma makes figuring out why super rewarding.