Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma

Zero Time Dilemma is an adventure game consisting of multiple chapters, representing 90-minute periods; chapters consist of narrative sections and escape-the-room puzzle sections. The chapters, referred to as "fragments", are chosen through the Floating Fragment system, in which the player gets to choose a fragment to play based on an image and a vague description. The fragments can be played out of order; the characters lose their memory after each 90-minute period, and do not know where they are in the timeline. When the player completes a fragment, they are returned to the Floating Fragment screen, and the completed fragment is placed in a narrative flowchart, indicating where it takes place in the story.

Narrative sections are presented as three-dimensional animated cinematics, with camera movements and full voice acting in Japanese and English. The Escape sections, which include thirteen different rooms, involve the player searching the room for tools and clues through a point-and-click interface in a first-person perspective and solving puzzles. The puzzles are mostly self-contained, and test the player's problem-solving skills and memory; among these are puzzles where the player has to decipher messages, and ones where they have to align the sides of a three-dimensional object correctly.

Zero Time Dilemma is set between the events of Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Virtue's Last Reward, taking place one year after the former. The game follows nine characters who have been locked up in an underground nuclear bomb shelter and are forced to play a death game called the Decision Game, which is led by a masked person known as Zero. The shelter is divided into three wards, with three people placed in each section, making up three teams: C-Team, Q-Team, and D-Team. To get to the central elevator hall and escape, the characters need six passwords; one password is revealed each time one of them dies.

The characters are all wearing watches that inject them with a drug every 90 minutes, inducing memory loss. Heavily involved in the game's lore is the many-worlds theory, where every decision made creates alternate universes where the opposite was chosen; these timelines make up the game's multiple routes.

Zero Time Dilemma was developed by Chime, and directed and written by Kotaro Uchikoshi, with music composed by Shinji Hosoe. Uchikoshi first mentioned details of a third Zero Escape game in 2012, stating that it would be the last entry in the series; by 2013, he said that he had finished planning the story, but that development had not yet begun. In February 2014, the project was put on hold indefinitely in response to the series' poor commercial reception in Japan.

Uchikoshi examined the possibility of financing the development through the use of crowdfunding on a website like Kickstarter, but felt that the idea would not be persuasive enough for it to meet the goal; he also sought out opportunities with executives and investors. The series' fandom created Operation Bluebird, an online campaign to raise awareness of the series and support the game's development, in response to its hiatus. When delivering the pitch for the game, Uchikoshi opened with a fan-made vocal rendition of the series theme song, "Morphogenetic Sorrow"; he considered this a major point in getting the project approved. At the 2015 Anime Expo in July, Aksys Games announced that development of the third game had been resumed, citing the high demand and awareness for the game as key factors for its reevaluation.

Zero Time Dilemma was well received by critics on all platforms, and was the second-best reviewed PlayStation Vita game of 2016 on Metacritic, after Steins;Gate 0. During its opening week in Japan, it sold 5,375 copies on the PlayStation Vita and 3,916 copies on the Nintendo 3DS, for a total of 9,291 copies sold. It was the third best selling digital PlayStation Vita game of June 2016 in Europe, despite being released three days before the end of the month. The Steam release had an estimated total of 38,000 players by July 2018.

Famitsu's four reviewers enjoyed the game's setup of three different teams and non-chronological plot progression, with the player getting a greater understanding of the story as they play; one of them said that learning what was going on in the fragments was "fantastic", and that they liked the emphasis on "interpersonal human drama". Another of them commented that the "light banter" dialogue is helpful in motivating the player. One of them said that the game would be enjoyable even for players who have not played previous entries in the series.