Aksys Games and Uchikoshi Kotaro announced Zero Escape 3 at Anime Expo 2015. Further details about the game were revealed during the Aksys panel by Uchikoshi and the development team.
As fans are well aware, the Zero Escape series almost ended at the cliffhanger ending of the second game, Virtue’s Last Reward due to insufficient funding. That Zero Escape 3 is being rescued from its indefinite hiatus is largely due to the support of the fans.
Because of this, Uchikoshi promises that:
As a story [Zero Escape] will definitely end at Volume 3
I intend to answer every mystery left during VLR and the mysteries in ZE3 would be solved as well. This game will not end in a cliffhanger.
Zero Escape 3 will take place in a testing facility on Mars, focusing on a group of people living there to test out the logistics of sustained living on Mars for the purposes of establishing a colony there.
Key art from Zero Escape 3 featuring two characters that will appear in the game.
Zero Escape 3 will also feature a dog, which one member of the development team is especially excited about.
Uchikoshi explained that the two preceding games, 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward were written to be games that would make the player re-think the obvious.
So for Zero Escape 3 I’m going to go into this even more and I’m going to have you as a player question philosophies, and what justice is, and what your value is. It’s going to be a game in which you re-evaluate a lot of these themes
According to Kodaka Kazutaka, scenario writer for the Danganronpa series, appeared on the Aksys panel and promised that the ending of Zero Escape 3 is the most ‘out of this world’ ending for the series thus far.
Collectively Uchikoshi has written about 50% of Zero Escape 3’s scenario thus far. The game will be released sometime in Summer 2016 for the 3DS and PS Vita.
