Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward Review

Adventure games are making something of a resurgence lately, thanks in part to the new input methods appearing on consoles and handhelds. Interest in adventure games has also been driven by a number of somewhat less traditional entries in the genre, such as the heavily text-and-image-driven visual-novel-style adventure games from Japan. In 2010, Aksys Games released Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors for the DS, a horror-themed adventure game mixing visual-novel-type storytelling scenes and character interaction with puzzle-laden rooms that you needed to escape. The warm reception of that game has now yielded a sequel in Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward--and it's just as enthralling as its predecessor.

Sadly, Dio can't magically produce puzzle solutions from his hat.

Virtue's Last Reward begins with the protagonist, a college student named Sigma, waking up in an elevator next to a strange woman who seems to know more about him than she's letting on. A strange rabbit creature appears on a monitor near them, telling them that they must figure out how to escape the car before it falls. Once they do, they find themselves in an abandoned warehouse with seven other abducted individuals. The creature appears again, telling them that they must all play the Ambidex game to escape their industrial prison. The Ambidex game involves puzzles, traps, and important decisions to either trust or betray your fellow players.

The penalty for losing or failing to comply is death, or possibly an even worse fate. The game is divided into two distinct sections. As Sigma, you team up with groups of your fellow captives and explore various rooms in this mysterious facility. These rooms are the escape portion of the game: you investigate a room for items, clues, and puzzles to solve, piecing things together until you are finally able to unlock a safe containing an item to allow you to exit.

The sinister digital watches of Nine Hours are back!

The story- and dialogue-heavy portions of the game are the novel portions, which appear in between the escape sections and elaborate on the various mysteries the game presents. The game's use of the term "novel" to refer to these sections is apt: there's a massive amount of text in Virtue's Last Reward, but because the writing is superb and the voice-over work for the supporting cast (available in both English and Japanese) is excellent, the hours upon hours of dialogue you page through are a pleasure to experience.

The quality of storytelling is a key factor in an adventure game, and Virtue's Last Reward passes that test with flying colors. The game's plot immediately grabs you and rarely lets go, expertly going from a creepy horror premise to an interpersonal character drama to mind-blowing sci-fi concepts. The promise of unraveling the many mysteries--Why are we here? Who are these other people? What purpose do the Ambidex game and the room puzzles serve? What is this facility?--keeps you engaged, and the many new mysteries that appear throughout give you even more reasons to keep playing for hours on end as solutions dangle tantalizingly in front of you, just beyond the reach of the next puzzle.