Now I should mention that Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma is the first Spike Chunsoft title I have ever played and so with that statement let it be known. I am doing this blind and really enjoying myself so let’s jump right into the review now, shall we?
Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma is a decision game, a game of choice each with its own consequences and the player faces that quite often. Taking a page from the multiverse theory of multiple realities in which every outcome has actually happened whether good or bad.
That being said I have played the game for a good while now and I have seen a lot of the results it is brutal, each with its own unique story and continuation. Which ultimately affects the overall gameplay giving me the player a very unique experience. It is further enhanced also by letting the player go back and redo certain scenarios over again until you have more favorable outcomes.
But let’s talk a bit more about the game itself, the game is launching on the Nintendo 3DS, the Sony PSVita, as well as Windows through Steam and we were playing the Steam version. Although a bit buggy I suspect in the future that those issues will be fixed. You can have anti-aliasing support and a few extra graphic settings to make the game run more favorably on your system. But ultimately my experience with that was not so great as no matter what option I choose the game lagged and stuttered and it ran very poorly. This is also notable in our videos as you watch and the character’s lips are all out of sync as well.
another issue I found was a small audio bug where the game would not save your options from BGM, SFX, and character voices. You could lower the volume to these but unless these settings are changed while you were actually playing and had free use of the options menu during game-play your settings would not be saved.
Now the characters all seem one-sided in their personalities and for me, that seems to be a bit of a disappointment. You got one guy who is always angry, one guy who is always calm, one girl who is super shy, and one girl who is super calm but with a steer demeanor, I could go on but I’d rather not. The characters don’t really have any unique traits that make me want to like them more apart from their visual appeal and none of them stand out to me in my head mentally.
But, that does work overall with the premise of the game. Where the only means to escape the place you are being held is to kill off up to six other characters to get passwords to open up a sealed door which will lead to your escape. You don’t feel tied to any character or try to save them because of how bland they are and you become more okay with their one-sided character traits to the point where you actually get a jolly out of killing them off.
A lot of the issues I’ve run into in Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma are minute and small problems but are easily overlooked as the gameplay of the game standouts a lot and has a lot of branching paths from which the player can choose different means of surviving in games to the death and the choice of being able to experience all of the outcomes is really amazing. 
The music also really helps set the tone of the game as well as when things boil down to decision time where the player has to choose the outcome that they will live with and not know the results until after it happens. The worst part of that though the intense problem-solving you got to do at times where in the end the player could ultimately face death even after doing everything they possibly can to stay alive.
In conclusion, the game offers a unique and varying experience and is definitely one of the more unique titles we have had the privilege of playing. I can only really say I hope you pick up a copy upon its release as it is really good despite the few flaws that I mentioned.
You will enjoy putting all the one-sided characters to death and not regret doing it not even a tiny bit.
An autistic gamer with opinions on games who also enjoys making dumb videos on the internet!