One Happy Team...

Completed Zero Time Dilemma.
One annoying bit is that the game gives you multiple 8-numbers long passwords, and it was driving me crazy that I tried all of them in the Quantum Computer room, and none worked. Turns out, one of the scripts is slightly buggy, and you need to do all the votings methodically over again, to get the cutscene you’ve missed initially.
The game goes on to break the 4th wall by saying that all that time you were controlling a supposedly blind, deaf and immobile old man, and for that reason all characters ignored you completely. Kind of Saw-like moment.
Must say, that the ending disappointed me a little. Not just because it ends in a cliffhanger despite it was known that that’s the last game in the trilogy. But because despite having the “all knowing villain”, Chessmaster, trope, it doesn’t tie up nicely. Very little explanation given why Eric is in the experiment, and everyone seems to forget that Mira is a sociopathic serial killer.
The rant about the snail changing the course of humanity (aka Butterfly Effect) is only half-meaninful. Yes, Akane is an orphan “because of a snail” and genius Sean died “because of a snail”, but I expected a bit more.
Comparing all three, I think that the puzzles are the best in Zero Time Dilemma, while Virtue Last Reward had slightly smoother mechanics. But the first game in the series, 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, is still the best for me story-wise.

Revelations continue. Sigma and Diana are Phi parents. They got trapped in the bunker in one of the timelines, and sent of “fax”. Of their twins to the past to save them. Phi has a brother, Delta. This also establishes an obvious paradox that Diana gets a brooch from the ashes of Phi that got trapped in the immolator, then gives it as a memento to her daughter, Phi, who will tell Diana later that she got it from her mother.
Zero is also the founder of Free the Soul, the terrorist cult from previous game. So Zero = Brother = Delta.
Another twist that I didn’t expect is there’s just one ward. From the beginning of the game teams are told there are three wards, and they can only communicate in one direction by sending messages. And that when they vote, they do it simultaneously, proved by their watches. In fact, their watches were with a 2 hour delay from each other.

Another interesting detail is that some decision results are indeed random. You have to repeat Russian Roulette multiple times to get both results. Common for RPGs, not so common for visual novellas and puzzle games.
At some point they introduce an alien machine that can teleport people to the past. The caveat is that it works like a fax. It creates a copy of you. But you also stay stuck in the place you tried to escape from. Reminds of the Soma game.
The midgame is slow. At first, you solve all those escape rooms and make decisions and have fun. But then the game forces you to take all the OTHER decisions. Some of them quite stupid, like deliberately losing at Monty Hall game. But you need to see all the deaths in order to progress.
But finally we get to what’s we’re all here for, the endgame mindfuck revelations. The game starts with a story about a boy that died waiting for a surgery, because his surgeon got into an accident. Turns out Q is that boy. Well, not exactly. Q is controlled by a quantum computer, and there are a lot of Q’s doing menial tasks like getting rid of the bodies, but Q was implanted with consciousness of that boy. He’s given a choice of creating a copy of himself in a virtual world living a happy life and continuing his life as a drone, or to completely erase himself. Again, resembles Soma a lot.

We have heroes from the first game, Junpei and Akane, heroes from the second game, Sigma and Phi, and 5 new (?) characters all playing 3 sided Prisoner Dilemma this time.

Playing this without at least the previous one sounds like a pretty painful idea to me. The time continuum got even more confusing, as it seems you can start solving the escape rooms in any order. The escape room mechanics and visuals are straight from the previous game. But the curscenes have improved enourmously, though.

In the previous game we had K wearing an iron mask with a lock. In this game we have Q, a kid, also wearing an iron mask, with a key code. Consider that in previous game there was a kid named Quark.

As a puzzle game, I’d say it even got worse. Easier, but also worse. There are a lot of puzzles where you need to fit pieces into a box, for example, something I rarely remember in the previous games.

Also the length of the puzzle rooms is widely different. Healing Room is very long, while some others finish before they barely begin.