Video games are different. In some of them, for example shooters and action games, you can play to relax after work and throw out the accumulated stress. And there are deep intellectual games, during which the human brain works at the limit of its capabilities, trying to find answers to the questions posed to it. Such entertainments are especially pleasing to people thinking and those who appreciate a deep plot with a double or even a triple bottom. It is to this type of game is the Japanese series of psychological thriller puzzles Zero Escape, the third part of which, published for Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation Vita and PC, I would like to tell you today.
The Zero Escape series was created, I'm not afraid of this word, by the genius Japanese game designer Kotaro Uchikoshi. It was he who wrote the scripts of the famous series of visual novels Infinity ("visual novel" - a genre of video games, which is a text quest with illustrations and animations). In 2007, the designer joined the studio Chunsoft, in the walls of which he began working on a completely new series of games Zero Escape. The first game of the series was Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (2009) for the Nintendo DS pocket console.
According to the scenario of the game, nine strangers were trapped inside a huge ocean liner, all the exits from which were tightly sealed with thick sheets of metal. A mysterious man named Zero invited the audience to play the "Game of Nines" (Nonary Game). According to its rules, participants had to solve various puzzles and gradually move along the liner in search of door number 9, which leads to the coveted freedom. The search takes them only 9 hours. Hence the name of the game "Nine hours, nine people, nine doors". Complicated all this with the fact that each participant in his hand was wearing a steel bracelet with a dial on which the figure was displayed. In order to pass, for example, through the door marked with the number 5, the participants had to join the group in such a way that the digital root of the sum of all the digits on their bracelets coincided with the figure on the door. The digital root 2, 5, and 7 is 5 (2 + 5 + 7 = 14 = 1 + 4 = 5). If the numbers do not match, or the 9 hours left for rescue, bracelets are injected into the blood of their owners with a deadly poison.
The game alternated in itself elements of the visual novel, when the characters communicated among themselves, quarreled or united for the common good, as well as the gameplay of the genre "quest", which is very familiar to all of us. At certain points a group of heroes was trapped inside the next room, from which they had to find a way out. I think that many of our readers have encountered similar games. Remember even the sensational The Room for iOS, Android and Windows. There you also have to solve puzzles in order to get out of a closed room. But what can I say, these video games laid the foundation for so-called "quests in reality" - attractions, during which the company of friends is invited to get out of the complete puzzles of the enclosed space for real.
The game Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors received quite high ratings of leading game critics, and was also very warmly received by gamers around the world. Despite this, its sales were very modest. It is understandable, few people today appreciate games in which one should think a lot and read tons of text. Nevertheless, the talent of Kotaro Utikoshi glorified the Japanese screenwriter for the whole world and allowed him to continue the series. The second game, released in 2012 for Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita, was called Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward. She developed and supplemented the ideas laid down in the original, and also offered an even more multilayered and confusing scenario. The player could move freely between different variants of the development of events, as if gaining access to the "multiverse" with a huge number of possible outcomes of a given situation. The game Nonary Game was supplemented by voting, during which participants had to betray each other or to unite in order to accumulate the necessary number of points and leave the bunker where they were locked. The second part of the series again won the love of fans of an excellent story with shocking twists and brain-twisting puzzles.
Before I start playing the third game of the Zero Escape series, released at the end of June under the name Zero Time Dilemma, I strongly recommend that you go through the first two. If you do not have a Ninendo 3DS game console - it does not matter. Developers from Chunsoft are currently working hard to release the first two chapters of the series on the PC, so sooner or later you will have a wonderful opportunity to touch, without exaggeration, the beautiful. If you do not have the desire to wait for the release of previous games for a personal computer, you will have to puzzle about finding a Nintendo 3DS pocket console - believe me, this gadget is worth its money and will give you a lot of vivid impressions, as well as wonderful video games. You can play Zero Time Dilemma without any preliminary preparation, but in this case you risk a lot of things you do not understand, and also do not notice the numerous references to the two previous games of the series.
The events of Zero Time Dilemma unfold in the time interval between Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward. Nine participants in the scientific project, whose goal was the ground preparation of the mission for the colonization of Mars, come to life within a certain underground complex. They are divided into three teams of three people, each of which is given a name consisting of one single letter: C, Q and D. In the "C" team, the main character of the first game, Junpei, his friend Akane, and the fireman on named after Carlos. The "Q" team includes the hysterical seller of ice cream Eric, his sexy girlfriend of the World and a memory-losing boy named Q. The head of the child is wearing an opaque sphere, which can not be removed. In the team "D" was the main character of the second game - Sigma, his friend Fay and pacifist nurse Diana. The staff turned out to be rather heterodox and, whatever one may say, colorful. However, with the selection of characters from Kotaro Utikoshi has always been complete order.
The main antagonist of the game again turns out to be a mysterious man named Zero, dressed in a long cloak and a mask of a plague doctor. He appears in front of the main characters at the very beginning of the game and invites them to make a fateful choice. You just need to guess the top side of the Zero coin. If the characters give the right answer - he will immediately release them all to freedom. And here we are waiting for the first surprise of the writer: if the player guesses the side of the coin, the villain really restrains the word given to them and releases his captives on all four sides, and the final titles begin to run on the screen. And it's five minutes after the start of Zero Time Dilemma! Do you know a lot of games that you can go through in such a short time? But, of course, this ending is just the tip of the iceberg, because in the game there are as many as seven different variants of the finale. Therefore, we return at the moment of tossing the coin and give the villain the wrong answer. That's where the adventure begins, whose sole purpose is survival.
This time we will have to play not in the "Game of Nines", but in the "Game of Solutions", where the player's choice will depend on who of the characters will survive, and who will forever remain lifeless in the underground complex. Zero put on the wrists of all the participants of the game metal bracelets, injecting into their bodies a powerful sleeping pills every half hour. A person after that does not just turn off, but also forgets what happened to him during the last one and a half hours. At each awakening, the C, Q and D team members, who are isolated from each other's three wings of the complex, are invited to get out of the locked room or make an important decision, the consequences of which can either save them or kill them.
Solutions are not always bipolar, and they can have up to four possible outcomes, which makes the game much more diverse than its predecessor. In addition, the decision-making process is now presented in several different forms. For example, at some point you will need to enter the name of the alleged killer or an important password in the text box. Alternatively, decide whether to press or not to press a button that is guaranteed to save the lives of your team members, but it will lead to the death of all the other participants. It should be borne in mind that at this very moment two other teams are looking exactly at the same button. Questions of trust emerge in the game all the time. And motivates the participants in the "Game of Decisions" to its most important rule - as soon as six out of nine people are dead, all survivors will immediately be released. The consequences of decisions are very unpredictable, as sometimes a randomizer is used: a revolver can be inserted into the revolver, and when it is repeated it may not be loaded. This mechanics introduces an element of surprise into the gameplay and makes it even more exciting.
The quest component is quite traditional for the series. The player sees a first-person room in front of him, he can look around, search for useful items and notes, interact with mechanisms and solve puzzles. In the inventory, you can combine several items into one, and also carefully examine the found objects. In a separate menu, recorded conversations of characters, so if you are distracted and missed important information, you can always pause and rewind the transcript. Another handy menu contains the texts of all the notes and documents you found. The puzzles, in my opinion, lose a bit in terms of complexity to the riddles of the two previous games, but they are still fascinating and diverse. They are very interesting to solve, and the joy of successful solving, as before, fully pays for the expended forces and nerves. If you get stuck during the passage - listen to what other members of your team are saying. Quite often they suggest different solutions to the problem, so do not give up on their help.
The Zero Escape series is famous for the fact that in it you can at any time change the decisions taken and unlock the alternative realities within which further developments develop. Something like the film "The Prophet" with Nicolas Cage, where the protagonist could foresee the consequences of various variants of his actions and choose the most profitable outcome from an infinite set of probabilities. The events of the game develop in such a way that the player sooner or later admits a fatal error and dies, or his decision leads to the death of other participants of the terrible experiment. Having gone through several options, you come to the only true solution, which allows you to save the maximum number of lives. Information received in all universes is stored in the so-called "morphogenic field" (the theory of "morphogenic resonance" belongs to the British parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake), where it can draw characters with the ability to move their consciousness between realities. This allows game developers to get up on the screen, which makes players come to full delight. For example, you need to open a door with a digital lock, look into the morphogenic field and find out that in one of the realities you have already found a person who knows the code, found out and remembered it.
In Zero Time Dilemma, the developers divided the story into separate fragments. All these scenes are divided into three groups according to the number of groups of participants in the game. Since after each scene the characters fall asleep, and their memories are erased, the fragments are scattered on the screen in an arbitrary order. At first, this leads to confusion: you wake up wondering where, it is unclear when, it is unclear why. But then you realize that the developers thereby wanted to give players a sense of confusion and disorientation, overwhelming the main characters. You can go through the fragments in any order. As you play, more and more pieces of history will be available to you, which will gradually begin to take shape in the overall picture of what is happening. Each fragment is represented in the form of an event tree with multiple branches. You can travel through these forks, opening up more and more variants of the development of events. It's interesting to watch not only the victories, but also the failures of the main characters, as these scenes can contain important information.
By the heat of passion, the amount of suspense, the atmosphere of hopelessness and the quality of setting bloody scenes, the game can easily compete with such famous films as "Saw" and "Cube". Personally, I'm very happy with the Zero Escape series because thanks to it you always discover something new and interesting for yourself. Here, physics, chemistry, psychology, history, mathematics, and linguistics are intertwined as harmoniously as possible, and to enhance the effect, all this is flavored with a fair amount of science fiction and drama. All this is so skilfully woven into a single canvas that you are simply amazed! On the way out, we have a tremendous psychological thriller, to the level of which many Hollywood screenwriters still grow and grow. To admit honestly, take some famous director to film this story - nothing would come of it. This can be implemented solely as a game and no more. And this makes Zero Escape one of the most outstanding series in the gaming industry.
In terms of graphics, the game has made an impressive leap forward. In Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, we saw static 2D scenery and sprites of characters on their background. In Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward, we got three-dimensional backgrounds and three-dimensional characters, which absolutely lacked animation. Zero Time Dilemma uses a completely new graphics engine. The camera ceased to be static, and now it moves freely within the scene, giving out cinematic foreshortenings and turning the game into a kind of television production. Characters have become more detailed and rendered using cell shading technology, although the animation in the game still looks very clumsy. The facial expressions of some characters (especially Eric) sometimes led me to frank horror. Part of the intermediate frames in the cut scenes was replaced with static pictures, for example, the ceiling, because they did not have enough money, or time. The development team was extremely limited in resources, so it regularly faced a budget shortage. Nevertheless, what they have turned out does not look as bad as it could be.
In the game version for the Nintendo 3DS pocket console, there are a number of technical problems. Every now and then, subsidence of the frame rate is noticeable, and if there are more than two characters in the scene at the same time, the game starts to slow down wildly. Quite a weak iron simply can not cope with highly detailed 3D models, and this despite the fact that the resolution of textures is far from perfect. Even stereoscopic 3D mode in this game you will not be able to activate at all desire - the developers simply did not include it in the kit. In the versions for the PlayStation Vita and PC, the listed problems are absent (3D there, of course, also does not). Another significant drawback of the 3DS-version of the game is the low resolution of the console's top screen. In some moments, the player must click on some indecently tiny switch, which even a complete stylus to get quite difficult. Such a "pixel-hanging" is infrequent, nevertheless, it is. The developers tried to partially solve the problem by highlighting some small objects with the help of glitter, but still did not take into account several places where the player will rather uncomfortably interact with the mechanisms.
The game can boast of a wonderful musical accompaniment, which perfectly emphasizes the atmosphere of what is happening, whether it is a tense moment or the conversation of characters in a calm atmosphere. I was pleased with the presence of Japanese voice acting, which can be turned on instead of the hideous American dubbing. The situation with a terrible English-speaking track is not saved even by the presence in the cast of the legendary Troy Baker, whose voice is spoken by the character of Sigma. Let me remind you that Baker at one time voiced the main characters of games such as Bioshock Infinite and The Last of Us. However, as soon as you turn off the Japanese sound, the situation is instantly corrected. Japanese actors work out their bread in full and do not give the slightest reason to quarrel with the quality of their work.
The situation with the price of the game Zero Time Dilemma is the following. The version for Nintendo 3DS will cost you 2994 rubles, if you are the owner of PlayStation Vita, you can buy the game for 2599 rubles. But the most lucky in this situation for those who prefer not to play on the road, and on a personal computer - the price of the game in the Steam store is a democratic 699 rubles. In fact, no matter how much this game is worth, I would buy it without thinking. Pass Zero Time Dilemma in less than 15-20 hours does not work out with all the desire, with every minute spent in the game, many times itself will pay for itself. Ни одна игра на моей памяти не уважает интеллект игрока настолько, как это делает детище гениального Котаро Утикоси.
Плюсы:
- Взрослый, глубокий и местами трогательный сюжет, полный непредсказуемых поворотов.
- 13 комнат, наполненных хитроумными механизмами и сложными головоломками.
- Вы вновь встретитесь с полюбившимися персонажами и познакомитесь с новыми.
- Смена графического движка пошла на пользу кинематографичности повествования.
- Игра содержит в себе семь разных концовок, каждую из которых стоит увидеть.
- Качественное музыкальное сопровождение и наличие японской звуковой дорожки.
- Лучшее воплощение концепции «мультивселенной» в истории игровой индустрии.
- Великолепное завершение трилогии, расставляющее все точки над i.
Минусы:
- Nintendo 3DS с трудом справляется с новым графическим движком.
- Не всегда комфортная фрагментарная структура повествования.
- Кривая анимация и ужасная мимика некоторых персонажей.
- Неприятные ситуации, связанные с пиксель-хантингом.
- Отсутствие в игре стереоскопического 3D.
- Отвратительная англоязычная озвучка.
- Слишком долгие и частые загрузки.
Великолепное завершение трилогии психологических триллеров Zero Escape подарит вам огромное количество самых разных эмоций. Вы будете хмуриться и смеяться, удивляться и злиться, переживать за судьбу главных героев и хвататься за голову, если они поведут себя неадекватно. Уровень сопереживания персонажам Zero Time Dilemma невероятно высок. Как разработчикам удалось добиться подобного эффекта при столь мизерном бюджете – сказать сложно. Однако в одном я уверен: в мире не существует другой, настолько умной, глубоко проработанной, увлекательной серии адвенчур. Лишь пройдя все три игры в вашей голове, наконец, сложится полная картина происходящего, и вы будете сидеть с выпученными глазами, в очередной раз глядя на ползущие по экрану финальные титры, и кивать головой, признавая гениальность японского сценариста. Ставлю игре 8,5 баллов из 10 , несмотря на наличие у неё серьёзных технических недостатков.
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