ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies

Нулевые парады преемник и подражатель дискоэлизиума, игра все так же выдает довольно интересный сюжет, стильный дизайн рисовки и лаконичную музыку. Сам по себе сюжетец нууу +- выше среднего, явно не сенсация, но и все же задает планку интригующего финала до самого конца.... который по итогу оказался слабеньким. Видно, что игра сделана человеком, это не ии слоп, столько различных взрослых тем, сатиры и высмеивания культа личности, идеологий и простой жизни, но эмоциональный отклик значительно слабее по сравнению с диско. Ведь гг здесь пустоват и не переживаешь за него так сильно. По навыкам явный даунгрейд; вместо 24, стало 15. . Эта игра выше среднего, но слабее предшественника почти во всем. А выборы на что то влияют? -Неа. В игре есть нововведения? - Едва ли. в общем сюжет 7.5/10 визуал, арты и тд 10/10 музыка 7/10. выходит 8 (Lfybk zdkzycrbq ujvbr b ltpthnbh )

The game is a Disco Elysium bootleg, in the best possible way.

'WANT TO TRADE?'

My thoughts on Zero Parades as a follow-up to Disco Elysium are very complicated. But as a game in its own right, is it worth your time? If you only want a binary answer, I would say "yes." It doesn't beat out Disco Elysium, but I was never expecting it to in the first place. It has a memorable setting, sympathetic characters, and it hit basically every beat that I was expecting a DE spiritual successor to hit. First of all, the thing that I think everyone can agree on, whether you love or hate the game: the mechanics were improved in every way. The game has a new "health" system, doing away with the health bars. In DE, you had 2 health bars, and depleting either one caused a game over. This was a frustrating system, and tying the health bars to specific skills made the importance of which skills to sink your points into feel lopsided, since having low endurance or volition meant you were always one and done if you didn't have a healing item. You could lose over 30 minutes of progress for taking a hit of damage. In Zero Parades, the health bars are replaced with stress meters. There's 3 different meters that start out empty, and fill up by you saying or thinking certain things. Each one is tied to a category of skills, and if you fill a meter up, you're forced to permanently take away a skill point from a skill in that category. It's a much more elegant way to make players be careful of their choices or know when to take breaks, and the penalty is inside the game instead of the real-world penalty of wasting your time. Another gameplay element I really like is the new way it approaches action scenes. When lots of action is happening, time will freeze and the player is made to pick one of multiple red checks to get through the situation. I like the way it handles action, and it allows for scenes to feel quick and climactic. DE did something similar in choice places, but it was more so it had time to narrate what was going on, not to make the scene more dynamic. I was worried a lot of the characters would feel like carbon copies of older DE characters, but surprisingly, I didn't get that feeling nearly as often as I thought I would. Yeah, sometimes a character in this game will seem familiar to another character from DE, but I could still see each character as their own thing, since none of them clung to that familiarity. The only character that felt "derivative" of another iteration was Hershel, the player character. It kind of feels like they didn't know what to do with the personality of another character in a game similar to DE, so they just resort to making Hershel say a lot of the same things Harry might say in the same situation. They did ok with making her their own thing, but she delves into so many "Harry-isms" so often that I have a hard time seeing her as a separate character. For every other character, they did an alright job at worst. A couple of them are real slam dunks, though. My personal favorites are Dr. Gonza and Kaleidoscope. A couple tiny nitpicks that don't deserve their own paragraph: the music is okay, but none of the tracks hit the same as a lot of DE's best work. Felt pretty generic at best. The voice acting also felt like a bit of a step down, even though some voice actors from DE also appear in this one. In the scenes where it feels like emotions should be running high and the characters' intensity should be at like an 8 or 9, it feels like literally everyone is always hovering around a 4, maybe rising up to a 6 at best. The only one who seems like they're dynamically changing emotions is the collective voice for the skills. The actual voice is an odd choice for a narrator, though. It's fine enough to listen to, but the accent made it a little difficult for me to understand her if I wasn't reading along, like if I was looking away from the screen for whatever reason. The voice acting and narration will occasionally not match up, as well. It happened in DE too, but moments like that in DE were very rare. It happens much more often in this game, enough to where I started getting a little annoyed. I guess my biggest complaint about Zero Parades, though, is that it doesn't have as much "soul" as Disco Elysium. I know that's not really a thing you can quantify, but I feel like anyone who's played through this game would agree, even if you like it. It feels like a game that wants to be Disco Elysium so bad, but it doesn't have as much to say. It goes through the motions, but it feels more like necessity and less like someone was behind the story with things and messages that they wanted to tell, trying desperately to get you to see them. That's not to say there weren't creatives behind this project, I'm sure everyone who developed it tried really hard. But Disco had so many perspectives, worldviews, and ideas presented to the player, and it really made me think and step back to reevaluate my own view on the world, and how I interact with it. I vividly remember lying in bed the night of completing DE, unable to get the final hours of the story out of my head. I just finished Zero Parades, and I'm not sure I'm even going to remember this game in the morning until I look back at Steam. At the end of the day, I liked it. It understands what it needs to do, and it gets really close to hitting the heights of DE at points, but it just doesn't measure up. Regardless, everything I needed in this game was there. The jokes weren't as snappy, but they were there. The prose was dryer, but it was there. The truly memorable characters were rarer among the cast, but they were there. So I guess you need to ask yourself if you would be able to play a Disco-like game made by a lot of the same people without comparing it to Disco all the time, because if it's not a quality of life contest, Disco runs away with it every time. If that sounds like it'll be you, even 10 hours in, I would tell you to just replay DE again. But by the second act, I think this game does start to find its footing and does its best to create original, memorable scenarios with the spy theme. If that intrigues you, I don't think you should stop yourself from opening your heart to something new. I don't regret it, personally.

和极乐迪斯科比是有过之而无不及的神作，中文翻译的一坨：stroke翻译成中暑，祝汉化组以后夏天必stroke

Un buen juego para aficionados a la lectura, quizás digan por ahí que no llega a la altura de su predecesor, Disco Elysium, que fue una bomba, es cierto. En esta segunda parte, con un equipo renovado, plantean cosas más serias, como los problemas mentales de toda una sociedad, y quizás dejan de lado esos tintes eskizos del anterior juego, pero tampoco se queda corto. 10/10

我喜欢所有对话即支线，支线即主线的游戏。 还有就是，剪影姐我不跑了，快来电我！！(在双座酒吧可以提前见面的bug什么时候修，，，很影响体验

Liking this more than I thought I might. Story good, but a bit less weird than Disco. Similar enough. I don't remember Disco having as many helper systems: maps, reminders of various quests, unsolved ability challenges. Very nice!

The game has some good set pieces and gameplay improvements for the genre. While text-heavy, the depth can easily be seen as a strength. The narrator can be a burden, but you get used to her overacting, overall the VA is very good and the game has great characters and a very strong protagonist. It is great title on its own, even if not as good as its predecessor.

TL;DR: I enjoyed it quite a bit. It has some flaws but it's still a very good game. It's difficult to separate it from Disco Elysium and I think that hurts it a bit. The marketing keeps mentioning Disco though so I guess it's fair for me to mention it too. It didn't quite give me the same sort of post-game melancholy (the feeling that comes after pieces of art that really touch me) like Disco but plenty was there. It's still one of the most impactful games I've played. Positives: - Engaging story - Interesting, varied characters - Wonderful visual art - Very well voiced - Sound design - World building - The gameplay felt a bit more polished than Disco in general - Failing checks is still often quite funny rather than frustrating. - Consumables feel more necessary. In Disco I felt like it was quite easy to abstain and that didn't quite seem to fit the character. Here though after difficult situations, I felt (how I suppose the character feels) that it was almost necessary to drown one's ailments in booze, coffee, cigarettes and when the going got even rougher, harder drugs. Mixed: - Some aspects of Hershel felt a bit too Harry-like. On one hand, it does recreate that fun feeling of chaos from Disco to some extent but on the other it does feel a bit like a bootleg at times. Negatives: - Continuity has some flaws. There were times when I could talk about things I haven't discovered yet and sometimes things I've already discovered could only be talked about like I haven't. - I feel like most characters speak like poets. Often perfectly, poetically expressive. This fits some but not nearly all characters. It ended up taking me out of it a bit due to seeing more of the writers there rather than the characters. I'd also have expected a meathead Hershel seeing the world less poetically than an intellectual one. - Not sure if this is a coincidence but both of my playthroughs finished basically the same with different characters despite taking quite different choices throughout, passing/failing different checks. I'd have expected a bit more variation.