As a series about time travel and hopping between lots of alternate realities, Zero Escape sure knows how to mess with players’ heads. Its developers, Spike Chunsoft, know a thing or two about that in real life, too. Instead of releasing part one and part two of this superb visual novel series before the third and final installment came to PC in 2016, they went and did it all backwards, releasing Zero Time Dilemma first. Only then did the previous games come out as a double-bill in Zero Escape: The Nonary Games, nine months later.
That’s narrative tomfoolery of the highest order, if you ask me, and it probably means there are several people out there who played them all out-of-order. Which is a shame, as Zero Time Dilemma is all about big story payouts for those who have been following the series from the beginning. And golly is it good.
