999 had few weaknesses. It was an intricately written story with strong thematic cohesion and great emotional payoffs, hampered only by a slight lack of QoL, a touch of pixel hunting BS, and some rather shallow puzzle design. While it doesn't quite manage to eradicate the pixel hunting (I still ran into at least three puzzles that stumped me for tens of minutes solely because I couldn't tell something in the room was supposed to be a separate, interactable object) it absolutely succeeds in attacking its other two targets.

If the puzzles in 999 are Kindergarten Babytime, VLR's puzzles are High School Physics. They're hard. I find this important and interesting for a number of reasons. Puzzles in video games, far more than any obstacle, are prone to feeling like bullshit. It is extremely easy to design a puzzle that sucks in a way that will absolutely infuriate the player or make them quit on the spot. Most puzzle games avoid such pitfalls by establishing very clear and consistent rules, and then making a hundred or so puzzles within that set of clearly defined rules. Sokoban, for example. Portal. Baba Is You. Even Ace Attorney. You know the type. Zero Escape is not doing this. Zero Escape is making escape rooms with unique themes and very few limits. In 999, this generally means collecting all of the things, and then using them in the only obvious possible way. If you instead had to use them in absurd ways, that would be in line with the traditional point-and-clicks like Monkey Island, but that style of puzzle design has never exactly risen above "questionable."

In VLR, each puzzle chamber is absolutely its own thing, with its own bespoke minigames, and gathering all of the information in a room will still leave you wondering how to use that information correctly. Wisely, the escape rooms contain multiple "chains" of puzzles, so the player only has to figure out one of them to start making some progress.

I am math intolerant. I have yet to convince my doctors that this is a real, bodily condition, but the fact remains that when asked to crunch numbers, my brain often decides to just shut down and wait for death instead. This renders me largely incompetent in the face of many of VLR's puzzles, but even in my despair, I was able to find my way through just about all of them without seeking help. Generally, when I looked something up, it was because I understood what to do but had lost all patience with actually making it happen and wanted to save myself the frustration. In every instance where I just could not figure something out and pixel hunting WASN'T to blame, I was just having a hard time interpreting the clues. While the game is hard, there are few if any cases where it requires a leap in logic that I would consider "unfair." This is VLR's most impressive quality. VLR is filled with Actually Good puzzles, and those are hard to make. They didn't make one good puzzle with a hundred variations, they made fifteen rooms with multiple good puzzles apiece.

The greatest puzzle of a Zero Escape game though, is of course the over-arching narrative meta-puzzle. Like in 999, players of VLR will explore the story repeatedly along multiple branching paths, looking for answers that will lead them toward the grand finale. Tragically in VLR, that finale isn't so grand. In fact I'd hesitate to call it a finale at all. VLR ends on one of the most jarring anti-climaxes I've ever seen, but it sure is a hell of a ride getting there. VLR always, always, ALWAYS has another twist, and almost all of them are wonderfully done. As in 999, no matter where in the decision tree a player decides to go first, they will learn something deeply interesting, and even more than in 999, the player is "supposed" to go everywhere. VLR, unlike the original and frankly correct version of 999, has a flowchart. The flowchart is good. I am a proud ally to all flowcharts in video games, and VLR's is no different. The game has been designed around the flowchart, and it has been designed well. This is all that I have to say about the flowchart at this time.

Unfortunately, in addition to being visually uglier than 999, the writing in VLR is sloppier too. I obviously will not be providing spoilers as examples, but this is something I must acknowledge. There are logic holes, bizarre characterization choices, the aforementioned extreme anti-climax, and story beats that just do not feel like they're handled in the best possible way. This does not however, diminish the heights that VLR reaches, with a non-linear narrative that is ALSO somehow excellently paced in addition to it's impressive puzzle repertoire. This prompts me to declare that VLR is at least as good as 999 and also that is possibly the most impressive puzzle game I have ever played, even despite its roughness.