The game was directed and written by series creator Kotaro Uchikoshi, and features music by Shinji Hosoe and character designs by Rui Tomono.

Uchikoshi had started planning the game's story in 2012, but the development was put on hiatus due to the commercial failure of the series in Japan.

[3] Narrative sections are presented as three-dimensional animated cinematics, with camera movements and full voice acting in Japanese and English.

To stop the incinerator, the player needs to choose to pull the trigger, which has a 50% possibility of firing a live bullet, killing the character in the chair.

C-Team includes Carlos, a firefighter with a strong sense of justice; Akane, a member of a secret society working for a peaceful future, and who pretends to be a "neat and clean, ideal Japanese woman"; and Junpei, a childhood friend of Akane's, who has joined a detective agency to find her after she has not been heard from.

[12] The nine participants of the Dcom experiment are kidnapped by a masked individual known as Zero, who makes them play a coin toss; if they win, they are set free with no memory of what happened, and if they lose they awake in a facility separated into three wards, with one team in each.

They begin a relationship, and Diana later gives birth to fraternal twins, a boy and a girl whom they name Delta and Phi.

Through the resonance from Carlos's ability, C-Team shifts between timelines to collect passwords, but Zero sends the boy in the helmet – revealed to be a humanoid robot named Sean – to attack them for violating the rules.

Sean reveals Zero's true identity: he is Delta, an elderly man thought to be wheelchair-bound, deaf, blind and mute, who had been with Q-Team the entire time, but off-camera from the player's perspective.

He admits that he killed Mira, who is revealed to be a serial killer called the Heart Ripper, and prevents the participants from escaping by using his esper abilities to make Eric shoot everyone but Diana.

Akane realizes that the impending danger and the resonance of the gathered shifters would allow the participants to shift to the timeline where they won the coin toss and were freed.

He says that there will be no Radical-6 outbreak in this timeline, meaning that mankind will go extinct, but that the participants now are determined to change the future; he says that one of his goals was to get them into this frame of mind.

Zero Time Dilemma was developed by Chime,[13] and directed and written by Kotaro Uchikoshi,[14] with music composed by Shinji Hosoe.

[15] Uchikoshi first mentioned details of a third Zero Escape game in 2012,[16] stating that it would be the last entry in the series;[17] by 2013, he said that he had finished planning the story, but that development had not yet begun.

[19][20] Uchikoshi examined the possibility of financing the development through the use of crowdfunding on a website like Kickstarter, but felt that the idea would not be persuasive enough for it to meet the goal; he also sought out opportunities with executives and investors.

[21][22] When delivering the pitch for the game, Uchikoshi opened with a fan-made vocal rendition of the series theme song, "Morphogenetic Sorrow"; he considered this a major point in getting the project approved.

[26][27] For the music, Uchikoshi wrote down directions about the mood and concept of the game, describing it as "sad and lonely, like a worn-out record", and "dark and visceral".

For the ending theme, Hosoe incorporated several callbacks to songs from the previous games as "a sendoff for the series", leading into "Morphogenetic Sorrow".

[20] With Zero Time Dilemma, Uchikoshi intended to resolve all mysteries left from the previous game, as well as all introduced in the third,[30] while also attempting to make the story enjoyable for first-time players.

In addition to figuring out how to explain the mysteries while avoiding contradictions with Virtue's Last Reward, they added side stories to the narrative to give it "a little extra punch".

[33] He had always been fascinated by the concept of coincidences, and how actions done in the past lead up "where we are today", so he did a lot of research and reading on the topic to prepare writing the story.

[32] Uchikoshi said that this would make for a lower barrier of entry for people not necessarily interested in visual novels,[29] and that mass appeal is important to Spike Chunsoft, as just a Japanese audience is not enough for the production of adventure games.

[5] The non-linear and episodic nature of the game's chapters was done to appeal to more casual players and people new to the series, as they can uncover the story at their own pace without being "railroaded into doing one storyline from start to finish".

[36] Sean was originally meant to wear a cubic helmet, but Tomono presented a spherical design instead, which Uchikoshi described as "everything I didn't know I wanted".

Mira was designed to continue the series tradition of having a "sexy femme fatale" character in each game: she was given an open track jacket and a bikini-like top to show off her cleavage, and a jiggle effect was added to her 3D model.

[48] A PlayStation 4 version with improved lighting and shading was released in Japan on August 17, 2017 and in North America the following day.

[55] Japanese pre-ordered copies came bundled with the 48-page Zero Escape: Premium Booklet, which includes production material, illustrations by Tomono, summaries of the previous two Zero Escape games, and a prequel written by Uchikoshi;[56] a digital edition of the booklet was bundled with the Microsoft Windows release, together with a portion of the game's soundtrack.

[23] Zero Time Dilemma was well received by critics on all platforms,[58][59][60][61] and was the second-best reviewed PlayStation Vita game of 2016 on Metacritic, after Steins;Gate 0.

[71] Famitsu's four reviewers enjoyed the game's setup of three different teams and non-chronological plot progression, with the player getting a greater understanding of the story as they play; one of them said that learning what was going on in the fragments was "fantastic", and that they liked the emphasis on "interpersonal human drama".

[63] IGN praised the "inventive" puzzles, "stellar" storytelling, darker tone, decisions and consequences, "beautiful character moments", and "mind-bending plot".