ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies

(++)

Great game.

At the time of writing this, I have just completed the main story for the first time, and ZA/UM have just laid off 34 staff members due to the poor commercial performance of this game. A sign of the times? An all-too-familiar sounding song in this industry? Or a company fallen victim to their own self-imposed *cultural blockade*? It's hard not to consider the drama surrounding the studio when it had some very big shoes to fill after Disco Elysium — a gigantic cultural milestone in storytelling. Lightning doesn't always strike twice, but sometimes what was captured in the bottle can still stain the page. Zero Parades tries to do what it can with its (now even smaller) remaining team. It doesn't try to tell you this is Disco Elysium 2, and it doesn't want to be. You and I will always want it to be, because of how that game made us feel, but sometimes you have to let things stand on their own merit and my god does Zero Parades give it a damn good shot. If you're looking for something to scratch that itch, then of course you should play this game. Just maybe wait for it to go on sale first. An absolutely gripping first half scratched all the itches I'd had since 2019. The systems feel more fleshed out, the characters and environments feel more alive, NPCs actually move around the city, there's weather, and even more parts of your psyche to manage and listen to. The map is bigger, and I was constantly getting lost navigating the city and its alleyways before I found out about fast travel fifteen hours in. The UI feels familiar enough and yet brand new at the same time. The mystery and atmosphere of the story kept me playing for ten-plus hours straight on my first sitting. But then things get a bit weird. The characters you interact with have a lot more to say, but not all of it is of any value. I think nearly every character in Disco Elysium had some string on the corkboard tracing back to the main story, but here, without a stoic sidekick to keep you grounded and in check, you're left scratching your head more and more about whether this person has vital information or whether you yourself are an unreliable narrator. As I type this, I wonder if that could be the whole point, given the character you play. In Disco Elysium, you're a cop LOOKING for answers about everything with no memory at all. In Zero Parades, you're a spy trying to HIDE the answers she already knows, burdened with too many of her own memories. You can waste hours of in-game time talking to a nobody about nothing and find yourself less informed than you were before. Is it thematic, in the sense of chasing a dead end? Possibly. Is it still fun? Sometimes. The world is a lot darker than its predecessor's. A lot less ha-ha funny moments and more bleak, wry undertones. Themes of addiction, torture, abuse, corruption, and mental illness are right at the front. Narratively, there were plenty of threads I pulled on, and plenty more I didn't. Still definitely enough for me to consider a second playthrough, seeing as I still have twenty-plus achievements to uncover. I think back now on loose ends I didn't follow up on and wonder what difference they might have made to my outcome. They recently added the ability to optimize your clothing based on stat modifiers, and it sped things up for me considerably. Mainly because you can find yourself changing outfits constantly just to pass a check that may or may not progress the story but most of the time it won't. I found the dice system frustrating at times. You could have max stats for a check with a +5 modifier and still roll snake eyes and fail, which happened a bit too often for me to consider it randomness. Failure in these systems usually adds to the narrative, and there's always something to be gained from losing, but on some occasions it felt unjust enough that I ashamedly, regrettably found myself reloading a save just to feel like the stats and skills I'd spent hours levelling up actually meant something. On the other hand, late game I found myself failing a lot of *important* checks but succeeding in the action anyway, which left me wondering if some events are just written in stone regardless. The ending was catastrophic, in both good and bad ways. I wasn't sure if I was over-prepared or completely out of my depth, or whether all the world-class espionage I'd performed throughout the game was worth anything at all. I wonder if, knowing what I know now, there's a second route through it all and if there is, I have no idea how I'd find it. Abrupt and a little confusing, it hasn't left the same mark on me that Disco did. I read in another user's review that it's fitting for the title — that there are zero parades — but when the credits rolled I felt maybe there could have been just a little more shine. I wasn't sure what the point of all my actions were for, but then again, I was just following orders right?

You are the only semi normal spy in a city full of trenchcoat wearing perverts. tldr: I enjoyed it but Id recommend it when on sale. Feels like it should be a episodic game as theres so much more happening around the game. Music: nice to listen to but not very present in the game which is unfortunate for a game that revolves so much around cultural warfare, pop stars and musicians. There are no musical highs like in DE. Bugs: theres still some minor bugs, sequence breaks, audio and ui desync here and there as of my playthrough. Rant: the whole game basically happens around a few buildings along a street corner so the game feels abit on the smaller side, the game feels abit looser with alot more npcs and loose threads leading to marginal information and dead ends. theres some world building out there but its mostly vague chessboard stuff between nations, all this goes back to my feeling that this rolls off more like a episodic game as youre just in a tiny corner doing your own thing. when you finish pulling at all the threads and head into the end game, you are pushed into a tunnel where you can choose variations of basically the same path against a still fairly vaguely defined antagonists and then the game just ends. theres really no unwinding or epilogue which kind of makes all the random busy work throughout the game just evaporate into a puff of smoke which is a slight let down. I think a 2nd playthrough would be more fun as you can just avoid all the unnecessary padding npcs and spend more time with the divergent options. ps. whats up with the creepy monkey and also there are multiple charcters who have legit psychic magic powers of the mind

This game scratches the CRPG itch I've been searching for ever since Disco Elysium. While the writing is doing too much at times, the gameplay mechanics have been refined, with the exertion mechanics and balancing your stats to constantly stay viable stays fun throughout the game, and stays reliably challenging, especially if you are exerting all the time. The narrative of the story is very intriguing, combining a spy thriller with ZA/UM's signature blend of humor and criticism, politically, socially, and otherwise. Without spoiling too much, the ending can play out in vastly different scenarios compared to Disco Elysium, which makes me all the more intrigued to play it over again. The art is very well done and my personal favorite part of the game, with the artist of the Thought Cabinet returning to do the art for your Journal missions, thought internalizations, and more. The character portraits portraying themselves through their body language makes them feel even more alive! I bought at launch but since then they have fixed a ton of bugs, added more VO, and especially with the new inventory sort system, removes the friction of digging through my inventory to buff a single skill. Overall, if you are a CRPG fan and loved Disco Elysium, you will definitely enjoy this one!

четко