Gameplay consists of exploring the ship, repairing it in hopes of escaping, and speaking with Kaizen-85, an AI with whom the player can converse at length..

The game takes place in this timeline's 2012, where the player's character is selected by International Transport Spacelines (ITS) to be part of a mission to Jupiter's moon Europa from Earth.

En route, the ship suffers a catastrophic failure, and the player-character appears to be the only member of its crew to escape into a lifepod.

Kaizen-85 instructs the player-character to destroy the Nautilus's "Singularity Drive", the engine that powers the ship, as it claims this will enable it to return them both back to Earth.

[5] The player must gather clues to discover what happened on the ship and eventually finds out that the Captain of the Nautilus, Anele Johnson, murdered Nandi, one of the crew members, so as not to allow Kaizen to destroy the Singularity Drive.

When the player recovers the code to the bridge terminal and enters it, they can find Anele Johnson's body in one of the seats, who was presumably killed after merging with the Nautilus mainframe.

The game takes place on the Nautilus, a luxury tourist ship owned by the ITS corporation (International Transport Spacelines).

Event[0] began as part of a graduate student project at the National School of Video Game and Interactive Media in France (Enjmin) in 2013.

Corno attributed this unexpected ending to be the result of a bug the team had not caught this point, but was pleased that it existed as the emergent gameplay made the artificial intelligence they created feel "more human".

[9] Several reviewers have also noted the similarities between Event[0]'s Kaizen AI and HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey.