Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward

Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward is a visual novel combined with escape-room puzzles, the second entry in the Zero Escape series, in which nine characters trapped in a strange facility must solve logic rooms while also playing a psychological variant of the prisoner's dilemma in order to survive and escape. The story branches into dozens of endings connected via a flow-chart system that lets the player jump back to decision points at any time and unlock new paths based on information gathered in other branches, without having to replay the same passages from the beginning. The escape rooms themselves combine classic item-finding with logic mechanisms and combination locks, and their difficulty gradually increases in step with the deepening psychological pressure between the characters.

On 3DS the game uses the two screens to clearly display puzzles and text, and stereoscopic 3D lends the atmospheric environments a hint of tension, while the bottom touch screen is used to manipulate objects and interact with the environment of each room. The game's tone is dark, at times graphically violent and psychologically oppressive, with themes of betrayal, paranoia and moral dilemmas, placing it among the more mature titles on the platform.

Virtue's Last Reward was highly praised at release for its exceptionally clever script, unexpected twists, and elaborate branching story system, which still ranks among the best the visual novel genre has to offer. The game expanded the series' fanbase beyond Japan and cemented Zero Escape's reputation as one of the most intelligent narratives in the history of handheld games, which the trilogy's final entry followed up on a few years later.