ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies

Imersivo, intrigante e te prende do inicio ao fim. Belos visuais e boa trilha sonora. roda bem, sem problemas tecnicos. Como critica: o jogo tem conteúdo demais: facções, personagens, arcos, historias. E boa parte disso o jogo espera que vc memorize ou volte a falar com determinados personagens sempre que se esquece. Ele carece demais de um ´´diario´´ em que tudo ficasse regsitrado pra facilitar a consulta.

20 minutes into Zero Parades and I have to lose a skill point because my anxiety is so high. It’s been a morning; my spy double PSEUDOPOD has been zeroed, unresponsive in a chair, listening to music that cannot be replayed. He’s also not wearing any pants. My handler has called to demand I get out of town on the first tram. I can’t tell who to trust. I’ve leaned into a paranoid intellectual archetype, built on too much media literacy of 1970s spy thrillers. I’ve been at this job way too long, seen all my colleagues disappear, and I’m starting to believe the man with a bag on his head on TV. This is how Zero Parades opens. It only gets weirder from here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y_iACJ4PnE An hour later, I’m standing in a market watching TV with two children who tell me all about their favourite television show. Sixty-Six Wolves, where lycanthropes emerge from the heart of a girl to fight the angels. I wonder about the future symbolism of this, as a woman who is clearly destined to fight the powers that be. To aid my proletarian struggle, I wrangle a cool sword off the kids. An hour after that, I’m impersonating the police, I’ve called an abduction hotline, and found out there’s a boar infestation in town. Which I’m clearly going to fight with my plastic sword. The point here is not absurdity, although it abounds in Zero Parades. It’s time. Time is important in Zero Parades. Like the spy that you are, it pays to observe the passing of time and the movements of its people. The world progresses around you as the day passes; when I went back to the bazaar in the evening, the children were gone, the television abandoned. It’s one of the most subtle and beautiful aspects of Zero Parades’ narrative design. As I was playing, it struck me how this progression through the day was so perfectly constructed; from the first examination of Pseudopod’s body which directs you to ask around the market, to finding the disc seller, to moving further into the city. The conversations you have along the way aren’t guaranteed; sure, you could come to these places by various paths. But these conversations built the world and my quests as I progressed: a young party vendor worried about her missing father; a market seller bothered by the man observing from on high; the children wanting to collect six wolf cups, in a heady portent to your six missing colleagues. In Zero Parades, you play Hershel Wilk, cryptonym CASCADE, a rogue Opera agent in the city of Portofiro, back in theatre for one last mission. Her catastrophic last mission saw her comrades dispersed by the fascist surveillance operators of the Weeping Eye, and this past haunts her throughout her choices in the game. You uncover the city’s secrets one by one, each significant chapter bookended by thrilling set-pieces where your choices – and your dice rolls – determine the outcome. While you can occasionally die, the fail-forward system means that the story won’t stumble to a halt at a failed dice roll. Although you’ll be surprised how your choices eventually play out. Even the most innocuous conversation can affect future events. CASCADE’s cryptonym is representative of what the player does; each choice has a positive or negative affect throughout the game. It cascades down over time. That little chat I had with the depressive audiophile in the market comes back to haunt me later as I try to engage in conversations about music. His misanthropic views bum my enthusiasm in the form of negative modifiers to my skill checks. Sometimes, exhausting dialogue trees is actually bad for you (and occasionally, your health). There’s a more nuanced take to this gamer FOMO where we’ve been trained to click every button, ask every question. In Zero Parades it’s best to remember that you are a spy – and as they say, discretion is the better part of valour. CRPGs have always been dialogue heavy, but Zero Parades overwhelms the senses. The rasping narrator’s voice crawls across the words, as if she’s scratching to get out of CASCADE’s psyche. It’s an active choice to be patient, to listen to the dialogue as one would an audiobook. It’s unapologetically dense at times, and sometimes apologetically too, but it rewards the intellectually curious gamer with musings on everything from art to economics. The best diatribes are delivered by the most absurd characters: the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas doppelganger Dr Gonza, the perpetually drunk agent of the free-state Oskar Metamoto, the ALL CAPS monkey. As in any game, the best NPCs have a carefully constructed identity; what makes them memorable is their originality, their absurdity, those little hooks that make them tick and sink their way into the player’s subconscious well after the game has finished. Which brings us to Hershel Wilk, Operant CASCADE herself. I considered it a flaw of the game that the main character didn’t have a perceived identity for the player to latch onto. There was no permission slip for outlandish behaviour, nor was there a nudge towards seriousness. CASCADE is as you make her. As I thought about this more, I was struck with an epiphany. Where does a middle-aged woman fit into any identity? She fits no story, we have no story to give her. She is a blank slate melding to whatever the situation calls for. CASCADE can be brutal, professional, cringeworthy, illuminated, cantankerous, deceptive or truthful. She can be purple-haired poetry in motion, a technoflexing uber-nerd, or a paper-bag wearing basketcase. She is haunted by her past, but how she is haunted is up to you. For this moment, she is everything and nothing, and she is a spy. Those expecting a straight spy story from Zero Parades might walk away bamboozled by the metaphysical aspects of this world. There’s few games where the plot revolves around techno-necromancy, a first year university reading of Francis Fukuyama, and a phone sex hotline that could bring down an economy. But metaphysical agents are nothing new; you only need to look back to G.K. Chesterton’s 1908 novel The Man Who Was Thursday to know they’ve always been there. If you’re willing to open your mind to the weirdness, Zero Parades is a deep meditation on the use of art as a tool of totalitarian soft-power. Sometimes creating art outside of this hegemony feels dangerous; as dangerous as sitting on the teetering ruins of a moon-missile silo. Zero Parades feels timely in a world where technology threatens the existence of truth. Where people are disenfranchised from economic systems and democratic institutions. Where art is getting harder to create, at a time where human-created art is more important than ever. But if you know how to wield it, art can also be used against the powers that be.