Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma
Fair · Narrative · 2016
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $19.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 20.4h
- Value
- $0.98/hr
- Reviews
- 82% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce GTX650 1GB or AMD HD 7700 1GB(DirectX 11 graphic card required), 4 GB of storage. Windows only.
Nine participants awaken, trapped in an underground facility. To escape, they must play a game with deadly consequences. Who will live, and who will die? The choice is yours. Let the Decision Game begin…
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
January 2025 is where it bottomed out, at $1.99. It has been discounted 64 times in the 10 years tracked here, typically at 60 percent off, with about 7 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 3 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 7 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 8 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 93 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 74 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Kindergarten ($4.99, scores 91) beats it on value, while it beats Stories Untold ($9.99, scores 49).
Steam's global achievement data puts 79 percent of players at this game's ending achievement. The median game this site can measure sits at 8. Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, none come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written January 2022 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 59 percent of the 251 reviews written there were positive, against 82 percent overall, and those are 5 percent of everything written about it.
Deck Verified, so no launch options and no controller remapping before it runs.
The drop-off
79% start to 79% finishPeople genuinely stick with this one. Steam global achievements
Players
21 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Well I'll waste zero time (dilemma) and get right into this. Since this game is the third in the zero escape series, and inextricably tied to the second, I will be comparing them often. In spite of the fact the second game does a good job at wrapping up most of the plot elements. Zero time dilemma does have big shoes to fill for trying to connect all the plot threads together. No major spoilers are in this review...
This is the worst entry in Zero Escape series... ...but it's still a very good game. And I can - among others - call it my favorite. I don't recommend playing it without finishing the first two games of the trilogy. First, you'll rob yourself of an unforgettable gaming experience. Second, you won't understand at least half of the characters' motivations and will get tired of untangling the twists and turns of their...
This game just plain sucks. The puzzles are nice (better than the second game), and there is a good twist in the middle, but that's it. The game itself is bad, and it gets worse when they just use characters we loved in other games, and mix them with people who are completly and unredeemably annoying (I'M LOOKING AT YOU, ERIC). You should play to end the series. But don't expect to like it.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma scores 61/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/311240/zero-escape-zero-time-dilemmaThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 13, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.