It was released for the Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation Vita / PlayStation TV, and PC on Steam in June 2016. The 3DS and Vita versions are digital download only for Europeans, with the only exception being the New Zealand 3DS digital copy, because it does not exist. A port to the PlayStation 4 was released on August 18, 2017. The only known changes are the addition of a new lighting engine and a few re-done textures. All versions of the game feature English and Japanese dual audio.
The game's genre is a mix of psychological horror, mystery, suspense and thriller. There are still slight elements of humor and comedy to fill in the gaps when the atmosphere isn't so dark, although there is a lesser focus compared to the previous two entries to focus on the more emotional and serious aspects of the story. The story also contains major science-fiction elements, preventing it from being a realistic murder mystery. The gameplay is a mix of escape-the-room and puzzle.
The story primarily follows three people: a nurse named Diana, a firefighter named Carlos, and a boy with a spherical helmet named Q. The three protagonists abducted by Zero and are trapped in a facility along with six other participants and are divided into three teams. Diana is trapped alongside Sigma Klim and Phi (both from Virtue's Last Reward), Carlos is trapped alongside Junpei Tenmyouji and Akane Kurashiki (recurring characters in the series), and Q is trapped alongside Eric and Mira (two original characters). The nine are forced to participate in the Decision Game, a death game which involves killing at least 6 out of the 9 players, bracelets that inject them with a drug every 90 minutes which induces memory loss, exploring the facility and solving escape-the-room puzzles in order to survive and escape, and figuring out the truth behind the game and Zero's identity. The players must make difficult decisions that force them to choose between their freedom, their humanity and their morals.
Brother, a misanthrope who despises the human race and wants every single human on the planet to die, has decided that humanity has long overstayed its selfish, greedy existence on planet Earth. Brother has received a mission from "God": to purify humanity via its death and extinction and create a utopia in which every single human is a light-skinned blonde-haired blue-eyed man with the exact same name and face, and everyone has the same beliefs, thoughts, opinions and values with no sense of individuality, since differences lead to conflict, and subsequently hate, violence, discrimination, etc.
In order to kill every human on the planet, his organization of over a million followers, Free the Soul, have developed and prepared a suicide virus known as Radical-6 to be unleashed to the entire world at the end of 2028. This will determine the ultimate fate of humanity and all life on the planet.
On December 25, 2028, several people have been sent to the Mars Mission Test Site, also known as "Dcom", in Nevada to simulate a manned mission to Mars, and experiment if life is suitable there. The participants include:
However, six days into the project, on December 31st, eight of the participants wake up together in a celled room and find irremovable black bracelets on their wrists. It turns out that Dcom is secretly part of Free the Soul, and the participants were probably gassed with anesthetic while they were sleeping. As the Dcom participants are locked in cells, they find an amnesiac boy with a spherical helmet among them, but none of the participants recognize him.
A masked man dressed as a plague doctor, Zero, then appears. He tells them life is unfair, and says that all it takes is one snail for the world to be destroyed. He forces them to play a game - a game which will determine the lives of them, him, and the rest of humanity. He flips a coin with red on one side and blue on the other and hides it under his foot. He asks the players which colored side is facing up, but they will only be able to guess once. If they guess correctly, Zero will release them and set them free. However, if they guess incorrectly, they will be forced to play a game in which at least 6 of them will die.
Zero leaves the decision to Carlos, and tells him that he is a snail. Carlos can choose to agree with Mira that the coin is red or decide that Junpei is correct and it is blue. Regardless of which color Carlos picks, the first choice will be correct, leading to a timeline where everyone is released. The choice must be replayed again with the other color to start the Decision Game.
The teams are forced to play a series of miserable "decision games" involving life-or-death. In order to escape, they must collect 6 X-Passes to open the X-Door that blocks a central elevator hall. However, a password is only revealed when a person dies. They cannot escape without sacrificing six of their people.
In the beginning of the game, the participants of the game must decide which other team they want to kill. This is done by computers and a majority vote means that if a team has 2 votes from other teams, all three members are killed. Only the team leader can vote and they can only vote once. If a team refuses to vote, all three of them die.
Carlos devises a plan to spread the votes, and then uses an old dog named Gab to send information on the plan to the other participants. The three team leaders can decide to go along with the plan or pick a different team.
D-Team awakens in the facility's trash disposal room, and discover Phi locked in an incinerator. Sigma is restrained, and Zero forces Diana to play Russian roulette with her friends' lives on the line. If she pulls the trigger on a revolver pointed at Sigma's head, Phi is released; the revolver is loaded with three live cartridges and three blanks. If Diana refuses to shoot, Phi is incinerated. If the revolver contains a bullet, it leads to a game over.
In the timeline where Diana refuses to shoot, Phi is killed in the incinerator. Diana and Sigma are put to sleep after the active period, and when they next wake, they have no memory of what happened in the trash disposal room.
Diana and Sigma awake in the transporter room and discover an alien device called a transporter capable of copying matter and sending it through the space-time continuum. Diana and Sigma send duplicates of themselves to an alternate timeline, and then spend the rest of their lives in the facility. They give birth to fraternal twins, who they name Delta and Phi. Diana and Sigma use the transporter to send duplicates of their children to the past where they will live healthy lives, and then presumably die when the facility's food runs out.
C-Team awakens in the power room, and Carlos and Junpei are forced to participate in a prisoner's dilemma with their lives on the line. Carlos lives through both a timeline where he chooses to cooperate, but Junpei betrays and kills him, and a timeline where he chooses to betray, killing the cooperative Junpei and resulting in an enraged Akane beating him to death with a fire extinguisher. Carlos returns to the decision and learns from Akane that, when under threat of imminent death, he can jump between alternate timelines. Akane jury-rigs a bomb to kill them all and uses the danger to jump to the timeline where Diana shoots Sigma with a live cartridge, and then completes suicide in despair.
There, Carlos and Junpei allow a booby trap to kill them so that Akane can learn their passwords. The three of them then jump to a timeline where they survived this booby trap and attempt to use the passwords, but they are set at the moment of death and therefore worthless. A robot resembling Q attacks them, and Carlos promises to save them and jumps to another timeline.
If C-Team is executed in the vote, Q-Team awakens in the facility's biolab. Zero explains that they may have been infected with a disease called Fanatic Bio R, and that the only cure is an injection of Radical-6, which is antagonistic to FBR. Q-Team can either inject the virus or refuse.
D-Team awakens in the manufacturing room and discovers a bomb; they decide to use it to blow open an alternate escape route. Zero punishes them for their rule violation by placing the anesthetized Q-Team near the bomb, where they will almost certainly be blown up and killed. If Diana chooses to allow the bomb to detonate anyway, Sigma stays behind to try to disarm it, but to no avail; the bomb explodes, kills Eric and Q instantly, blows off Sigma's arms and right eye, and mortally wounds Mira. Mira injects Phi with the Radical-6 out of spite before dying, and Diana defies Sigma and Phi and takes them to the surface, causing a Radical-6 pandemic. This timeline leads to the events of Virtue's Last Reward.
Left behind and trapped in the facility, Q directly confronts Zero in the Quantum Computer Dome, who reveals that Q is a quantum artificial intelligence named Sean. Sean is capable of jumping between timelines like the group's human psychics and explains that the computer contains memory from multiple histories.
If D-Team is executed in the vote, Carlos and Akane awaken in the facility's pantry and discover Junpei's dismembered corpse. An altercation ensues where Akane accuses Carlos of murdering him. Carlos can either agree with the accusation and complete suicide, or kill Akane in self-defense.
In the timeline where he kills Akane, Q and Eric awaken in the facility's pod room. Eric obtains a shotgun crucial to solving that room's puzzles, and the two discover Mira has been strangled to death. A crazed Eric accuses Q of killing her at gunpoint, but if Q does not name a potential killer, he ultimately calms down.
The Diana and Sigma who were sent through the transporter in the Q-Team timeline arrive in this timeline; they discover a passage between wards D and Q and regroup with Q and Eric. They are then joined by the Carlos from the Q-Team timeline, who is inhabiting the D-Team timeline's Carlos' body. The group discovers that the entire facility consists of a single ward and that Zero has staggered the awakening times so that no two groups are active at the same time.
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