One of the most impres­sive things about my num­ber nine game of the year is that it almost did­n’t hap­pen at all. One of my per­son­al favorite visu­al nov­el series, the Zero Escape series to be exact, left at a bit of a cliffhang­er at the end of its sec­ond entry. Fran­ti­cal­ly won­der­ing when I would get to know the con­clu­sion, I searched only to find that they may not have the fund­ing to release the finale. Thank­ful­ly, with a com­bined effort from Aksys Games and Spike Chun­soft, Zero Time Dilem­ma was released this year and it was fan­tas­tic. Dou­bling down on the nar­ra­tive hooks that made Virtue’s Last Reward so inter­est­ing, this game had me hooked from start to finish.

zerobendilemma

Tak­ing the con­cept of escape rooms and insert­ing it as the playable por­tion of the game has­n’t always worked for this series, but they real­ly man­aged to dial it in with Zero Time Dilem­ma. None of the puz­zles were insult­ing­ly easy, but they nev­er got me stuck in a par­tic­u­lar room too long. As usu­al, get­ting to know the char­ac­ters intro­duced by this game was fun and final­ly being able to wrap up the sto­ry in a more con­crete man­ner made the whole thing feel it was worth the jour­ney. I can proud­ly say that I nev­er had to look up any solu­tions online for Zero Time Dilem­ma and I’m proud to give it the num­ber nine spot in my list of the best games for 2016.

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