Steins;Gate 0

Steins;Gate 0 is a visual novel, where the player reads through the story in the form of passages of text and dialogue, accompanied by character sprites and background art. The story consists of multiple branches, which lead to different endings. As opposed to the original Steins;Gate's single route that runs from start to finish with multiple branch points throughout, Steins;Gate 0 features one branch point near the beginning of the game, where the story splits into two major story branches, which in turn branch again into the different endings; there are in total two main story paths, along with four side stories. The direction of the story is determined based on whether or not the player chooses to answer calls from the artificial intelligence Amadeus, which the player character Okabe Rintaro can communicate with through his cell phone.

In addition to Okabe, the player also takes the roles of other characters, mostly Amane Suzuha and Hiyajo Maho. The player can also use Okabe's phone to interact with his friends through the messaging app RINE: at some points, the game shows a notification indicating that Okabe has received a message, and the player can choose between different messages to send back – either text messages or stickers – temporarily locking the game into a conversation with the other character that changes depending on the player's reply. Unlike the Amadeus calls, the RINE messages do not affect the branching of the story.

Steins;Gate set in Akihabara, Tokyo. It follows several characters, including the university student Okabe "Okarin" Rintaro, who, together with his friends Shiina "Mayushii" Mayuri, the neuroscientist Makise Kurisu and the hacker Hashida "Daru" Itaru, accidentally have discovered time travel through the use of a microwave oven and a phone – the PhoneWave – which they used to send text messages and digitized memory data back in time. The latter, referred to as "time leaping", essentially creates a copy of memories from a person's mind and is intended to send this "knowledge/digitalized data" back in time and into the same user's mind, at an earlier point. This has drawn the attention of SERN (clearly referring to the real CERN), an organization that secretly researches time travel, who sent their team of "Rounders" to confiscate the time machine, including the journalist Kiryu Moeka, killing Mayuri in the process.

Within the setting, time does not consist only of alternative time lines. Each time line is different, and the "unit measure" that defines this difference is called divergence. The detector to measure this is called a divergence meter which was set to 0% when it was created . When it travels into another time line, it measures the divergence (difference) of this new time line from its original.

Steins;Gate 0 was developed by 5pb., and was planned by Chiyomaru Shikura and produced by Tatsuya Matsubara, and features character designs by Huke. The scenario was worked on by Naotaka Hayashi, Toru Yasumoto, Masaki Takimoto, and Tsukasa Tsuchiya, and makes use of the Epigraph Trilogy series of light novels and Steins;Gate audio dramas as a base for Vega and Altair route, which is the main route. It is however not a direct adaptation: it also features new scenarios, and the developers describe it as a "legitimate numbered sequel".

The music was composed by Takeshi Abo. His process for composing the music consisted of him reading the game's story, to get an as full as possible understanding of the setting and the character personalities. He considered his first impressions of the game's emotional flow and events to be very important: he would write them down together with the kind of music he would want to use for each scene, and keep them in mind when composing the music. He said that this approach, while taking longer than if he had just designated songs to various places in the game, made for higher quality music with a better relation to the game's worldview.

Steins;Gate 0 was well received by critics, and was the best-reviewed PlayStation Vita game of 2016 on Metacritic. Kotaku considered it among the best Japan-only video games of 2015; it was the runner-up for RPGFan's Best Adventure/Visual Novel of 2016 award, behind Firewatch, with the publication saying that it rivals the first Steins;Gate; and in 2020, Nintendo Life called it one of the best visual novels available on the Nintendo Switch. Critics called it a worthy follow-up to Steins;Gate, but thought that players should experience the original game or its anime adaptation beforehand.

Critics generally liked the story. Famitsu's reviewers particularly liked its atmosphere, and Dennis Carden of Destructoid thought the way it continues the story of Steins;Gate makes it nearly "mandatory" for people who liked the original Steins;Gate. RPGFan's Rob Rogan liked the overall story, calling it "exciting, somber, heart-wrenching, and thought-provoking", and said that it felt "artificially lengthened" through scenes that do not serve a clear purpose in the plot; Robert Fenner, also writing for the same website, said that Okabe's dilemma of wanting to speak to the Amadeus Kurisu but finding it painful is a good premise. Jordan Helm at Hardcore Gamer similarly noted that Okabe's conversations with Amadeus Kurisu were among the highlights of the game, and that character-focused scenes often felt like "padding". Carden enjoyed how the game, despite its generally darker tone than Steins;Gate's, still included moments of levity, saying that it made him "laugh just as much as it made [him] want to cry".