The first PC adventure in the Zero Escape series Zero Time Dilemma, the third game in Chunsoft’s Zero Escape series, will launch on Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita June 28 before heading to Steam later this year, making it the first game in the visual novel series to hit PC. Publisher Aksys Games revealed the news during a press event at this year’s Game Developers Conference alongside a new trailer.
Aksys said it will announce a release date for the Steam launch later this year. Windows PC ports of the previous installments in the series, 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Virtue’s Last Reward, are not currently in the works, however.
As seen in the trailer —€” and previously detailed —€” the game will include a more cinematic mode of storytelling. As opposed to the text-driven scenes of the previous games, Zero Time Dilemma will have fully animated cutscenes.
That aside, Zero Time Dilemma features much of the gameplay that will be familiar to fans, as well as wrap up the existing storyline, according to Aksys. All of the secrets of the mysterious puzzle game will be revealed when it arrives worldwide — with Japanese and English audio options included — in June.
For a deeper look at the game, check out our screenshot gallery below. We also spoke with its director, Kotaro Uchikoshi, during Game Developers Conference 2016; keep an eye out for our interview later this week.

Vive and Rift launch title is about underwater exploration This new trailer for Vive and Rift launch title Time Machine takes viewers into an ancient underwater world of aquatic dinosaurs.
Players are on a scientific mission to go back in time and investigate long-extinct creatures in order to fend off a modern disaster. During a Game Developers Conference 2016 demo, players are asked to inspect the eye of an enormous predator, without being eaten.
Currently available on Steam Early Access for Oculus Rift DK2 for $19.99, the full game launches next month on Rift and Vive, with a PlayStation VR launch planned later this year.

It isn’t about you, and that’s OK
Cibele is a deeply personal game. The Star Maid Games-developed title tells the tale of Nina, a young woman who meets, falls in love with, and eventually sleeps with someone she meets on the internet. But while creator Nina Freeman expects players to see parts of themselves in this experience, she’s adamant about one thing: “Cibele is not about the player."
During a GDC panel called "How Game Mechanics Helped Players Embody 19-Year-Old Nina in Cibele," Freeman spoke about her goals to help players understand Nina as a character. She describes it as a theatrical experience in which players perform as Nina while they play, using her hands and eyes to exist in the game’s fictional online space.
"I wasn’t trying to tell the story of an entire relationship."
"It’s essential to Cibele that the player embody Nina, not control her," Freeman said. "The player always has a sense of self of course, but they hopefully suspend that sense of self when playing a video game as a character … The player will always project their own goals and motivations onto the character to a certain extent, but as a designer, it’s my job to remind the player of the goals and motivations of the character that they’re mean to perform as."
Cibele began as a prototype while Freeman was a student at NYU. After realizing original scope of the project was simply too large, Freeman eventually cut it down to a handful of key scenes and conversations.
"I asked myself what the player needed to know about these two characters in order to understand their relationship and why they meet up for sex," she said. "I whittled this larger relationship down to three key conversations between Nina and Ichi that illustrated why they wanted to meet up at all."
Each of these represented a different phase in the characters’ relationship.
"The first is the light flirting phase," Freeman said. "The second is whatever the conversational version of heavy petting is. And, finally, the last conversation is about their decision to meet up. I guess the second conversation is less heavy petting and more like that and also becoming emotionally close."
Although these scenes didn’t full encompass the breadth of the relationship, they did offer up an answer as to why the two would meet up at all.
"I wasn’t trying to tell the story of an entire relationship," she said. "I was trying to tell the story about a particular moment during a larger relationship."

What’s up with the pandas, though? Just when you think you know where you are, Anamorphine flips your expectations on their head.
The game was on display at GDC, and we played it on the Xbox One. Watch as a simple scene of a woman playing the cello turns into a surreal trip into another world, turns into … well, I won’t spoil it.
You might not glean it from this short demo, but Anamorphine is about a character with post-traumatic denial, and you are traveling through their emotional landscapes. Notice how the ground in this video heaves and swells, as if you were walking on the belly of an enormous beast. It’s beautiful, but disturbing at the same time.
It’s the first game from studio Artifact 5. The team plans to release the game in summer of 2016, for PC and Xbox One, and they’ve been testing scenes from the game on the Oculus Rift.

GDC’s annual awards show streams live tonight GDC’s dual annual awards shows — the Independent Game Festival Awards and Game Developers Choice Awards — will be held tonight, March 16, starting at 6:30 p.m. PT. The two ceremonies will recognize the best in independent games and the digital games industry during back-to-back presentations.
The IGF Awards kick off first, and will be hosted by Capy Games president Nathan Vella. For a full list of IGF Award nominees, check out this post.
The Game Developers Choice Awards, “the premier accolades for peer recognition in the digital games industry," will follow the IGF Awards, and will be hosted by Funomena co-founder Robin Hunicke. This year’s list of GDC Award nominees is lead by Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

Students and industry folks join forces in the name of romantic diversity “Are tentacles in games going to make people uncomfortable?"
A group of game design students, industry veterans and everyone in between had been sitting on the floor in the North Hall of the Moscone Center for nearly half an hour when Michelle Clough, a narrative designer and localization editor whose resume includes Death Note and Mass Effect 3, asked this question. They’d been talking about different sexual kinks, practices and relationships in gaming with total candor, addressing subjects like, well, tentacle porn — among myriad other sexual preferences and portrayals.
The impromptu roundtable assembled after being shut out of a packed Game Developers Conference 2016 panel hosted by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) on how to portray romance and sexuality in gaming. Clough served as co-moderator alongside writers Patrick Weekes and Sylvia Feketekuty of BioWare (both writers on the Dragon Age franchise), posing questions and fielding responses on subjects.
The moderators’ goal was to carve out ground rules for a possible special interest group that IGDA would sponsor to keep having these conversations. There’s a lot to talk about on the topic, they said — which the group proved to be true right away.
"Fuck men, more femmes"
Before discussing more fringe romantic relationships like the controversial tentacle-monster-meets-schoolgirl trope, students and designers had impassioned things to say about other brands of sexuality. These included Weekes, who discussed the impact that the pansexual Dragon Age: Inquisition character Iron Bull had on players and the writer himself.
"It raised some eyebrows in the studio," he said of including the beefy minotaur with a predilection for BDSM.
"There were a lot of developers outside of the studio who were not familiar with that lifestyle," Weekes explained, adding that some members of BioWare thought that the character’s taste for "consensual power exchange" might make people uncomfortable. But if anyone was uncomfortable, it was people at the studio, not the audience, Weekes said.
Based on the various requests made and debates had by participants of the provocative and fascinating discussion, this certainly seemed true. To the opening question of what gamers wanted to see more of in terms of how romance and sexuality are represented, a student shot her hand up in the air:
"I want to see femme-on-femme relationships," she answered. "Basically, ‘fuck men, more femmes’ — or don’t fuck men, more specifically."
Others said they’d like to see more relationships like that of Iron Bull’s or the bisexual Josephine, also from Inquisition, whose storyline Feketekuty designed. They also talked about diversity not just in sexual representations in games, but in the body types of these marginalized characters. Many expressed their desires to see queer characters of all shapes and sizes.
"some people are offended by women. Some people are offended by penises"
These discussions and suggestions were thoughtful and thought-provoking, but the moderators didn’t want to limit the conversation to the small group seated on the floor. The goal was to launch a special interest group dedicated to this subject. There, members could have these conversations in safe spaces with even more fans who have ideas of how games can continue to get more diverse in all manners, but especially in how they depict relationships.
The conversation had been powerful and refreshing up to the point that Clough asked how some might feel about a game including tentacle porn as a romantic option. But even the moderator recognized that there are some lifestyles that many just can’t get comfortable with — including herself.
To answer the question, though, the same student who called for more lesbians in games vouched for those who are interested in kinks on the fringe.
"Yes, some people are offended by schoolgirls and tentacles," she said. "But some people are offended by women. Some people are offended by penises."
Counterarguments like this were what made the discussion one of GDC’s hidden highlights. But although everyone there was comfortable talking about what some might consider taboo topics, the group conceded that the spectrum of kinks and sexual preferences doesn’t necessarily appeal to everyone. So how can games give people a heads-up about the relationships included within as they get more diverse — in order to reach out to fans of these kinks and warn those who are decidedly not interested?
how tagging content could help fans find the stories they’re looking for
Someone proposed a tagging system that could take cues from fan fiction sites like Archive of Our Own. These websites feature writing on a plethora of romantic relationships and characters, including stories based on characters from games.
These sites use tagging systems that detail the content readers will discover within. If a story features explicit content depicting two underage female leads in a sexual relationship, that will be noted appropriately. Games could include a similar system to benefit players, the group suggested.
Tagging content made sense to these fans of a wide array of sexual material — and, they said, they were likely not alone in thinking this. While the members of BioWare, whose games often let players have queer relationships as a standard option, didn’t have hard numbers on how many straight fans played as gay characters and vice versa, they said they’d heard from many people on how this content appeals to a broad set of players.
"Gay relationships don’t just appeal to gay people," Clough said. Talking openly about these relationships with wider groups of people — in safe, dedicated spaces — could only help make that more apparent.
While the floor of a busy convention center might not be what the group had in mind, it was certainly a great start.

Epic-sponsored GDC session compares virtual reality to film’s early days Game Developer Conference 2016 is in the grip of a virtual reality frenzy. Lines for speaking sessions this week snaked around the Moscone Center, with some talks relocated to much larger rooms.
You can see a few of the games being demonstrated in Polygon’s round-up. But what does this burst of developer enthusiasm mean for the fledgling form?
In “The Future of Virtual Reality: Luminary Panel Discussion" yesterday, hosted by Epic; execs from Lucasfilm, WEVR, Oculus and Baobab discussed some of the likely creative consequences of a technology that is only beginning to be understood.
"The beachhead of VR will be games," said Max Planck, technical founder of Oculus Story and a one-time Pixar technical director. "Gamers are willing to go through early adoption." He added that game-related design would have a profound effect on all kinds of VR-related entertainment experiences.
"It’s very quickly expanding to non-gaming experiences and audiences," added Neville Spiteri, CEO of WEVR. "We’re seeing game folks, video people and web people collaborating as well as musicians and writers. The response from the creative community has been amazing."
Rob Bredow, chief technical officer at LucasFilm said that he is looking to tell stories "that are best told, or can only be told, in this medium." He said that "we are still at a place where we can make things 50 times better. Ways of doing things better will be discovered even this year," he offered, adding that all creative people would benefit from those discoveries.
Eric Darnell, chief creative officer at Baobab as well as he director and screenwriter on the Madagascar movies, compared VR to the very early days of film, when film-makers often innovated by understanding and manipulating a new technology. "Artists got a hold of this new technology and found new ways to tell stories. In VR, we will see the same kind of progression."

“This has been a really weird year for me" "I never hoped to create anything that would be featured on the cover of the New York Times," said Amy Green, co-director and writer of That Dragon, Cancer.
"To get press like that, you have to do something innovative, truly groundbreaking and deep. And the truth is, we didn’t. My husband and I experienced the most common thing in the world: pain."
That Dragon, Cancer tells the story of a family — Green’s family — through a series of vignettes. It revolves around the illness of their real-life son Joel, who was diagnosed with cancer as a baby and died at the age of 5 in 2014. Green, in recounting her experience during GDC 2016’s Indie Soapbox panel, said she does not feel that the game accomplished something extraordinary. Instead, she said, it speaks to the power of video games as a medium.
"We didn’t do anything surprising," she said. "We took the hardest situation of our lives, our son’s terminal cancer diagnosis — the event that shook us to our core and threatened to destroy us altogether — and we tried to create something beautiful out of it."
To Green, the game would never have made headlines if people understood what video games could be.
"My husband and I experienced the most common thing in the world: pain"
"If writers really understood what was possible in a video game, we wouldn’t have to worry about a lack of diversity and voices in games," she said. "We wouldn’t have to worry that a non-technical person like me would be too intimidated by technical terms like player agency, because if great writers knew the potential of games, like you all know it, they would overcome any obstacle placed before them, technical or otherwise, to create in this medium.
"The fact that the world sees That Dragon, Cancer as novel just shows that outside of this room, outside of this conference of your peers, people still don’t understand the potential of video games."
Although Green resisted the idea of calling herself a game maker at first, defaulting to That Dragon, Cancer being " Ryan’s thing," she eventually embraced her presence in the space. It no longer mattered if she was a "technical" participant or not.
"I started to realize that my voice was essential to this medium … I had to carve a space for myself in this medium because the medium itself is compelling and innovative," Green said. "It takes the most common experience in the world and it makes it new and profoundly personal.
"My sweet, funny, cuddly son whose laughter had been silenced is still working his way into another person’s heart."

A heartfelt interactive story At the 2016 Game Developers Conference this week, Penrose Studios is showing Allumette, a virtual reality movie that looks like a cross between papercraft and claymation.
While the full film will run for approximately 20 minutes, the clip on display at GDC lasts less than five. In it, the viewer watches a grown woman and a child interact in a town floating in clouds. Part of it takes place in a small town and another part takes place inside an airship.
“It’s a story about the infinite bond between a mother and an orphan child, and it’s about the sacrifices that people have to make for the greater good, contrasted with the love that family members share for each other," says Penrose Studios CEO Eugene Chung.
Chung started Penrose after heading up Oculus Story Studio, and says the move came partially because he always wanted to build his own storytelling company, and partially because Facebook acquired Oculus.

"That changed the nature of the entire industry," he says. "And I stayed on for a while after the acquisition. […] But as I saw the industry grow, I think what I thought was going to take 10 years got condensed into one."
Similar to the projects from Oculus Story Studio, Allumette will react based on how players interact with it, though Penrose is keeping most of how that works under wraps for the time being. In the demo I watched at GDC, the viewer could only look around and poke their head through walls to see what was happening in certain rooms.
Penrose recently announced that it raised $8.5 million in seed funding, giving the team enough breathing room to create other upcoming projects beyond Allumette, though it hasn’t announced specifics on those. Chung says he formed the company to focus on storytelling in both virtual and augmented reality, and sees both as the team’s focus for the future.
Allumette will be a launch title for PlayStation VR, and it’s also headed to the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, though Penrose has yet to announce timing for those versions.

Grab the toothpaste just grab it already GRAB THE DAMN TOOTHPASTE Watch on YouTube | Subscribe to Polygon on YouTube
If QWOP and The Sims fused together to create a highly dysfunctional baby, it would look a lot like Manual Samuel.
During GDC, we got the chance to go hands-on with Perfectly Paranormal’s latest, in which players control a spoiled brat named Samuel. After getting hit by a truck and landing himself in hell, Samuel makes a deal with the devil: He can have his life back, but only if he can successfully survive 24 hours controlling every aspect of his body.
This means manually breathing, blinking, walking, peeing (man, this is especially hard) and … well, you get the picture. Check out the video above to see us attempt the hardest game of all: basic existence.