Virtue’s Last Reward, was released as a 3DS game in 2012. It was re-released in Zero Escape: The Game, bundled with the first entry. Unlike with the 999 ports, there aren’t any major changes that make the original superior. The collection version is widely accessible and pretty cheap. It’s regularly on sale on steam and VLR justifies the collection on its own.

Virtue’s Last Reward is a sequel to a perfect game, and my, what a sequel it is. *Swoons* 999 might be perfect, but that doesn’t mean it’s without flaws. Shut up no it doesn’t. Woah it sucked to do the same puzzle over and over again while hunting for endings? Well now you use an RNGenerated passcode to solve the escape rooms. Once you’ve finished the room, the code is permanently saved in your notes, including in subsequent runs and timelines. After a couple runs it’s exhausting to see the same scenes, even with a skip text feature? Well they’ve added a much-needed flowchart.

The escape rooms are more challenging than those in the original, which are way too easy. They’re the perfect difficulty now. It takes about 30-60 min to solve them now. The game’s narrative and structure are much more ambitious, with three main paths that each deviate from each other rather significantly. I don’t use the Action Button Method so I can’t give exact numbers, but I would estimate that VLR has at least twice as many words as 999. Look up the flowchart to see what I’m talking about. It’s pretty crazy. Recently, Zero Escape’s Kotaro Uchikoshi teamed up with Danganronpa’s Kazutaka Kodaka to write The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, which supposedly has one million different endings. I’m looking forward to seeing that flowchart when the game drops 85% on steam.

Uchikoshi has The Madness. My Madness is only about 17% as powerful as his, and I’m pretty powerful, mind you. Since I’m obsessed with this guy I went back to check out some of his other titles, Never 7: The End of Infinity and Ever 17: The Out of Infinity. I would recommend the latter but not the former. Many of the ideas we see here have been polished and reused in the Zero Escape series. It’s interesting to see The Madness grow from title to title. Never 7 is basically a normie science fiction story with some light meta elements. It reads like a college creative writing exercise in the execution of the concept. By the time we get to VLR he’s churning the most degenerate and dishonest twists that have me asking myself “How can someone come up with this?”

Spoilers ahead. Stop reading. Okay so he does a plot thing where he has a character change the 3D environment when the cast is out of the room. The participants in the Nonary Game enter the game from elevator boxes in a warehouse. The contestants take note of the order they all emerge, which becomes relevant when the body of an elderly woman is found, as the elevator shafts are moved and rearranged to obfuscate the details of the murder. This game is a Visual Novel, by the way, and not like Ace Attorney, where the player gets to investigate the environment. We’re just expected to notice the background in one room is different on our own.

There is also an insinuation where one of the characters might be an extremely realistic AI and robot. The obvious contender is K, who is, uh, a robot, and who seems to have no recollection of his past (recently activated?) But at some point, the PC, Sigma, injures his hand. Instead of bleeding the expected blood, he bleeds some white liquid. His arm is definitely synthetic. He must be the robot then. It only makes sense when you consider he also has no memories prior to the events of this game and he seems to have perfect recollection. But alas, no, it’s some other character, the kind and helpful character who seems to be one of the few legitimately trustworthy characters. She adheres to Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, making her a decent person, but otherwise she’s indistinguishable from an organic person. Okay so what’s the deal with Sigma’s white blood? He lost both his arms in an accident of course. He has robot arms. Obviously.

Published January 5th, 2026

Written by Maddie Gallant