1422: Zero Bossu

Can’t remember if I’ve mentioned Virtue’s Last Reward or its predecessor Nine Persons, Nine Hours, Nine Doors or Some Other Combination Thereof (aka 999) on these pages to date, so I thought now might be a good time to talk about them, with particular (and spoiler-free) regard to the latter.

The two games, collectively known as Zero Escape, are a combination of visual novel and room escape adventure games. The former you’ve heard me talk about extensively on these very pages; the latter is a peculiarly Japanese offshoot of the adventure game genre in which you’re regularly thrown into self-contained puzzles in which you must escape from a room, and everything you need in order to do so is in the room with you.

You actually spend the vast majority of your time in both 999 and Virtue’s Last Reward reading non-interactive visual novel segments rather than solving puzzles, but that doesn’t make the room escape sequences any less satisfying. In fact, given that the room escape sequences in Virtue’s Last Reward in particular are pretty damn challenging, they’re incredibly satisfying to successfully solve.

The puzzles strike that perfect balance between bewildering and making you feel smart, you see. At no point will you be thrown into a situation where the answer is so obtuse you’ll never work it out without an FAQ at your side, but at the same time, those initial moments as you wander around the room, looking at everything and hoping to find some clues, are magical in how daunting they feel.

How on Earth am I going to get out of here? you’ll think. What am I even supposed to do?

Fortunately, those feelings rarely last all that long; after a little careful and methodical investigation, you’ll generally uncover one or more “big tasks” that you’ll need to complete in order to solve the room, and your job then becomes prioritising these tasks into an appropriate order, figuring out how to complete them and then, well, completing them.

There’s a good mix of puzzle types in there, too, though not as much diversity as Level-5’s Professor Layton series. For my money, though, I think I prefer Zero Escape’s approach because there’s at least some attempt to integrate the puzzles into the game’s narrative and setting; that said, I’m basing my entire opinion of Professor Layton on the first game in the series, so that may be something that improves in the future — I do own all of them so I fully intend to find out.

Anyway, I digress; Virtue’s Last Reward’s puzzles in particular are enormously satisfying because they make you feel clever. It’s pretty rare you’ll find a puzzle in which the solution is just blind trial and error until something good happens — though I still hate slidey-block puzles — instead, for the most part, puzzles are reliant on a keen sense of observation, and a willingness to trawl through the various documents in the in-game archives to figure out various pieces of information’s relevance to the situation at hand.

Virtue’s Last Reward goes one little extra step beyond this, though; you can solve the room and get out without too much difficulty in most cases, but all rooms have more than one solution, one of which opens the exit and the other of which unlocks supplementary reading material in the in-game archives. It can be just as challenging — if not more so — to figure out what the conditions for unlocking this bonus content are as it can be to just escape the room successfully. And the supplementary material is always worth a read, too; while much of it is revealed in the game, it often delves deeper into the real-life concepts and experiments explored through the narrative, such as the “Chinese Room” experiment and all manner of other things.

Despite reaching the “end” of a number of narrative paths in Virtue’s Last Reward, I’m yet to actually get a definitive “ending”. I’ve had two bad endings, a narrative path which I need to go back to when I have more information, an ending that “locked” itself until I figured something out in one of the other narrative paths, and I’m currently working on another branch. All in all, there are supposedly 24 different conclusions, including “bad ends”, and you’re damn right I’m going to see every one of them.

In fact, let’s go work on that right now. Bye-bye.