Decide 4 God

This game is amazing. An amazing video game, and a brilliant conclusion to the Abime story that started with Head AS Code and Birth ME Code. The time mechanic is one of the most brilliantly designed mechanics I've ever experienced that truly made me feel stressed over everything I did, in a good way. This game also manages to terrify in a way I've never seen any other game do, but that would be a spoiler. The characters, both new and old, are amazing and brilliantly written that bounce off each other very naturally, and the story is a wild ride that I'm glad I rode. If YOU is a fan of Ontological mysteries, or Zero Escape especially, then this game is definitely one YOU needs to check out.

I came in to this game a bit apprehensive, because while the previous games (Head AS Code and Birth ME Code) were overall good, I was skeptical of this game being able to answer all of the questions left hanging. SOMEHOW, it does, and it does so really well! I cannot recommend this game enough; to the point I would recommend Head AS Code and Birth ME Code purely so you can play Decide 4 God in its full context.

Let's start with the good. The art style and general polish has improved dramatically since the previous two installments. The writing has also taken a turn for the better. My main complaint about Head AS Code and Birth ME Code was the author's inability to distinguish how to use certain grammatical tenses. Miracle Moon has a strange inclination to use future and perfect tenses completely incorrectly (for example "I've left the Empty S over 7 years ago"). That has mostly been rectified here - whereas before, perhaps a good 10-20% of the lines had grammatical inconsistencies, that percentage has dropped to maybe 2%. It's still aggravating to see, but at least it's mostly fixed. Here's where Decide 4 God drops the ball: the escape rooms. In the previous two games, the escape rooms were visual novel style, where you click around on various hot spots, but ultimately there wasn't much puzzle solving. I think Miracle Moon took complaints too seriously and this time decided to go all out - but then implemented the cardinal sin of video game escape rooms - a time limit. Each action you take in an escape room takes one or more minutes to complete, other than walking around between scenes a…

If you enjoyed the Zero Escape series, you will enjoy the Abime series, no questions asked. It wears its influences on its sleeve, and offers fairly frequent tongue-in-cheek references to every entry in Zero Escape, the AI: Somnium games, Danganronpa, Umineko, STEINS;GATE and at least another half-dozen of the all-time greats. ABSOLUTELY DO play the first two in the Abime trilogy, though; the climax of both games will be revealed before you even hit your first ending in this one!

I have played 3 hours, completed one puzzle room successfully and failed every other one. I have also yet to complete the first route. 10/10.

A worthy conclusion to the series that manages to (in its usual convoluted way) wrap up the story. And this one really is convoluted, with the same characters having multiple aliases, the same alias referring to the different people at different points in time, masks, robot clones, mind transfer technology, universe resets and a whole lexicon’s worth of complicated sci-fi jargon. I played the previous entries only a couple years ago, looked up recaps to refresh my memory before playing this one and still at times got lost. As a fan of Zero Escape I love these kinds up plots, but this one admittedly could have been about 10% simpler. The character writing was great and the occasional clunkiness didn’t bother me, but I could have done with slightly less of the meme/pop culture references, especially since this one has a character who’s entire schtick is that they’re an idiot with internet brain rot who’s supposed to be annoying. Thankfully this character has the least screen time of the main cast. The puzzle rooms, similarly to the plot can get very convoluted at the times and I found myself frustrated at several points due to having to replay them over and over (it probably …