the consequences until you reached an ending . Although Zero Time Dilemma offered a multitude of choices for the player to make , they always occurred at the end of a fragment . After every decision , you jumped off to another scene with no relation to what you had just witnessed or done , so no matter what choice you made it didn ’ t seem to matter at all . The sense of tension and danger that pervaded the previous games was gone .
Even so , as I made my way through the fragments I believed that the story would eventually come together . The Zero Escape games had earned my trust , and I didn ’ t doubt that a satisfying resolution was possible , even if I couldn ’ t see one . But as the answers to the game ’ s central questions were revealed one by one , they didn ’ t feel interesting – not as clever solutions to puzzles , and not as insights into the characters I cared about . Sadly , the final betrayal of the game was , for me , its ending . The identity of Zero was revealed , but it was none of the game ’ s nine central characters . Instead , a tenth player , Delta , had been there the whole time , but had gone unnoticed as he pretended to be blind and deaf . The characters had known about him all along , but the game had hidden him with clever camera angles and ambiguous dialogue . This development broke what I think of as one of the most fundamental promises implicit in a mystery : that the culprit will be someone the audience already knows . It ensures that the mystery is solvable , but on a deeper level it ’ s the same promise that any story makes to its audience : that they will care about the resolution . The revelation of Delta as the mastermind didn ’ t tell me anything new about any of the characters I cared about , or anything meaningful about the horrible situation they had been through . It felt more like the game was showing off how clever it had been to hide Delta than like it had anything worthwhile to say .
The Zero Escape games show how , paradoxically , keeping its audience in the dark can both help a story succeed and cause it to fail . Withholding information simply for uncertainty ’ s sake can create a fun experience , but it takes more for it to remain interesting after the truth is revealed . In the end , for a mystery to be worthwhile , the solution must be too .