Comparing the sci-fi escape genre games
by
, 02-09-2017 at 05:51 AM (5807 Views)
Referring to Zero Escape, Root Double and Ever17, three games / series that share a quite similar premise and execute it in quite different ways. The shared premise being basically as follows: a group of characters finds themselves locked in a very dangerous situation cut off from the outside world, and if they don't get out fast they all die. The games are all set in the not too distant future, with science being a little more advanced than in our world. And finally, all the games have some very big plot twists.
999 Opening Movie
The one that most people have probably played is Zero Escape - the trilogy of 999, Virtue's Last Reward and Zero Time Dilemma. The basic idea in every entry is that nine people find themselves locked in a facility and they have to clear puzzles to advance, the person who locked them in being the titular 'Zero'. In 999 in particular, they have 9 hours to clear the game, or they all die, while the later games have different gimmicks to them.
The games actually feature gameplay in the form of 'escape the room' type puzzles you have to clear at several points. On top of that, there are also choices that affect how the story unfolds.
Root Double Opening Movie
Root Double has a nuclear meltdown happening in a massive research facility, with rescue workers, employees and civilians ending up locked inside when the building is locked down to prevent radiation leakage. With radiation levels continuously rising, medicine to give resistance against it being scarce and fires constantly breaking out everywhere, the cast really has to struggle to keep everyone alive and find a way out. On top of all that, the character you're playing as - apparently the captain of the rescue squad - suffers from amnesia and has to try and figure out what the hell is even going on as he goes along.
The game contains no puzzles but features the 'Senses Sympathy System' which is a system that lets you make choices by changing your affection towards and trust in certain characters, and your POV character will make his decisions based on those inputs. It's a bit more convoluted than just having regular choices, but it is kinda cool in its own way.
Ever17 Opening Movie
Ever17 takes place in an underwater theme park which is locked down in an emergency as the top floors ends up being flooded, with six people still trapped in the deeper levels. Communication lines are down and at the current rate the park will implode in on itself in five days' time.
The game is a standard visual novel with your only input being choices you make during reading.
Probably the most striking difference between these three is the overall atmosphere. Zero Escape is different from the others in that we have the name of the person who's openly admitting to be the instigator of the event, giving us an 'enemy' right off the bat, someone who might be sitting back and laughing as he watches the rats struggle to try to escape. On top of that, the idea that Zero might be one of the very people in the cast comes up rather early, building distrust. Virtue's Last Reward and Zero Time Dilemma are even more explicit about this as the games themselves are quite clearly constructed for people to doubt and betray one another.
By contrast, the incidents and Root Double are presented as accidents, so the characters are all cooperating to get out alive. There's not just the lack of a common enemy, but a lack of an enemy in general, and even if cast members do spend some time speculating on whether it really was an accident or not, the more pressing issue is always finding a way out.
Though speaking of atmosphere, Ever17 is so, so, SO much more lighthearted than the other ones. While the characters do make some attempts at bettering their situations, for most of the time they just dick around and hope for help to arrive before they die. There is very little sense of urgency because there is very little agency. The characters are just basically helpless, so what else is there to do than to make chicken sandwiches and play kick the can? As a result, the game actually feels more like a slice of life than life and death drama for the first 80% of the playtime of any single route.
Root Double on the other hand actually *is* a slice of life story for parts of it. While the primary story takes place during the nuclear accident itself, there is a whole route (Root Before) dedicated to the days before the incident, which consists mostly of the adolescent characters' school lives with things slowly going downhill.
As one might imagine, the dramatic parts of all these novels are infinitely more engaging than the slice of life bits, which in both Ever17 and Root Double have the unfortunate habit of getting somewhat boring at times. Especially in Ever17 where even if you play with "Skip text you've already read" you are going to have to read these scenes twice anyways because the game has two POV characters and the narration differs for both of them. The pacing can be seriously trying. 999 also has this problem to a degree since you cannot skip puzzles you've already completed once, but that's fixed in the later entries in the series and ultimately wasn't that big of a deal anyways.
However before I end up giving off too much of an impression that Ever17 is inferior to the other games I'll have to move on to twists and execution, which is where Ever17 completely blows its competition out of the water (no pun intended). Most of the twists in all of these series are relegated to their 'final routes', which you can only access by getting all/certain other endings. All games in the Zero Escape series have some really cool twists and some that will probably have you go wide-eyed quite a few times. Root Double is quite the same, having some truly memorable twists with great buildup towards them, leaving none of them feeling contrived, which is the case in Zero Escape sometimes, unfortunately.
And then there's Ever17. You know how I talked before about how it has two POV characters? Well once you clear all the individual routes for each of them you get to move on to the final route - Coco route - which can be entered from either of the POV characters' sides. With mindblowing moment after mindblowing moment, all the pieces in the puzzle finally click into place. Nothing in the other two games quite compares to the craziness of this route and for it alone it's just a significantly more memorable experience for me overall.
I have to admit, going from Ever17 to 999 was underwhelming since not only were a lot of the twists easy to call in advance (same writer and stuff) but the execution was just so much more unmemorable. The same problem happened to a degree in Virtue's Last Reward and Zero Time Dilemma, but at least Root Double had some more good tricks up its sleeve.
Finally, there's still the matter of the cast. And surprisingly, this is where both Ever17 and Zero Escape kinda drop the ball for me, as none of the games actually have particularly memorable characters. They're fairly entertaining to follow along for the duration of the game, but that's about it. Ever17 is particularly bad about this, with only one or two characters being remotely noteworthy, and most being pretty damn forgettable, or even annoying.
Root Double on the other hand really shines in this regard. It actually spends a lot of time building its cast and putting them in conflict over their standpoints and experiences. My favorite scene in the whole novel was one point where the amnesiac protagonist looks in the mirror and is just completely overwhelmed by everything that's going on and is very close to losing it for a moment, and you can really feel that just from his pained expression. By the end of it I cared about most of the cast.
I would comment on music for these games, but they're all around the same level for me. Zero Escape has a great atmospheric soundtrack while Root Double has decent ambient tracks with very good standout tracks. Ever17's is less memorable, but it also manages to nail it when it really counts, so yeah. All of them are pretty good.
So in a nutshell, Zero Escape's strong point is in its atmosphere, Root Double's in its characters and Ever17's in its twists and execution of said twists. And while Zero Escape and Root Double both have fewer low points, which Ever17 does have in its pacing and characters, Ever17 does have the highest high points by far.
Here's the individual points in a list with some bonus comparisons, with games ranked from best to worst by category:
PLOT
#1 Ever17
#2 Root Double
#3 Zero Escape
ATMOSPHERE
#1 Zero Escape
#2 Root Double
#3 Ever17
CHARACTERS
#1 Root Double
#2 Zero Escape
#3 Ever17
PACING
#1 Zero Escape
#2 Root Double
#3 Ever17
MUSIC (differences are negligible tbh)
#1 Root Double
#2 Zero Escape
#3 Ever17
LENGTH (from longest to shortest)
#1 Zero Escape (entire series)
#2 Ever17
#3 Root Double
#4 Zero Escape (any individual game)
CLEVER USE OF THE MEDIUM
#1 Ever17
#2 Zero Escape
#3 Root Double
CONSISTENCY
#1 Root Double
#2 Zero Escape
#3 Ever17
OPENING MOVIE
#1 Ever17
#2 Zero Escape
#3 Root Double
MY PERSONAL OVERALL RANKING
#1 Ever17
#2 Root Double
#3 Virtue's Last Reward
#4 999
#5 Zero Time Dilemma
And that's about it. Do I recommend reading the others if you're a fan of one? Absolutely! The only problem with that is that Ever17 is pretty goddamn hard to get a hold of these days, since the official localization's long since out of stock and the game has become quite rare. Root Double is on Steam, Zero Escape is in the process of being ported to Steam and is otherwise playable on the (3)DS.
Finally, I'll just quickly mention three more games/series: Danganronpa, Umineko and Remember11. These three can be considered to be a similar kind of game as these three, though I opted not to include them in the core comparison since Danganronpa and Umineko are very different beyond the surface level similarities, and I haven't read Remember11 yet.
Danganronpa has a group of 15 students locked inside a closed circle. However in this one, they have to kill another student and get away with it in order to be freed. It creates quite a different kind of dynamic among the group.
Umineko has a group of 18 people stuck on an island due to a typhoon, and suddenly people start getting murdered by someone calling themselves the "Great Witch Beatrice" in groupings predicted by the epitaph underneath said witch's portrait. Allegedly the only way to stop the murders is to solve the riddle of this epitaph. It's quite similar in setup as ZE/E17/√W, but very soon becomes quite distinct from them. (It's also far better than any of them in every way btw )
As for Remember11, well you might be able to tell by the naming sense but it's in the same overarching series as Ever17, the "Infinity" series. Unlike Zero Escape the plots of the series entries are not intertwined, though the settings are and you might be able to understand one better by reading the others. I don't actually know the premise or plot of Remember11, I just know that it apparently has a really disappointing (lack of an) ending, but it absolutely amazing before that. I plan on reading it at some point in the future.
So, what do you think of these games, and how do they compare to one another in your eyes? Let me know.