ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies

A tremendously good game, full of heart and obvious passion oozing out of every pore. It's also a tremendously melancholic game about a deeply flawed, damaged individual, who is going to ♥♥♥♥ up and make bad choices with a very incomplete hand no matter what the player does. You can lean into that or veer away from it and try to spy your ass off, of course, the roleplaying credentials are on full display here, particularly in build variety and through dialogue. Lots of choices to be made, though the overall thrust of the narrative is, as is typical for most of these games, going to be pretty consistent no matter what you do. The devil is in the details, but there's still plenty of stuff you might miss or see depending on what you do. There's a few things that I really consider when gauging how much I actually love a game; how good is the writing? The story? How good is the music? How good is the overall atmosphere, which is really just a total subjective vibe check, but it's definitively one of those ineffable things that a game either has or lacks. This game has all four. The writing is deeply clever and uncompromisingly weird a lot of the time, filled with characters that feel real even as they act slightly like looney tunes. The music, often subtle, does a great job of grounding you in a scene, whether it's filling in the gaps as you run between objectives or ratcheting up the tension of a dramatic encounter. Atmosphere is subjective like I said, but I think it nails that too, with moody scene-setting all over the place, from the rain, to the world design of Quisach gorgeously selling the fiction of a city district on the frontline of a culture war. I love a good game I can brood a little in. The story is a stand-out for me, and especially the character of Hershel herself, who is just a delightful ♥♥♥♥-up and woman full of baggage and regrets, a lightning rod of sloppy decision-making mixed with uncanny capacity for tradecraft. Obviously one of the bigger roleplaying decisions will be which of those polarities you lean towards, being a messy human with past mistakes to fix, or a cold-blooded spy? I think the setting is excellent, and a great backdrop full of world building and lore to establish the stakes of a good spy narrative. As much as this game revels in the softer touches of characterization and making sure practically every NPC with a portrait has layers and nuances to them, it leverages all of that in service to a great spy thriller story in a believably messy fictional world that well-caters to the plot. It's full of intriguing bits of weird science-fiction too, which is something I appreciate in any setting that's just Earth with the serial numbers filed off. Here, those details are practically considered mundane a lot of the time, or the subject of commonly-held conspiracy theories that could very well be true. Great stuff. More than anything else, I think the writing is just deeply sincere and genuine and bittersweet. It's not afraid to be weird, to be believably crass, to let its characters really be characters with quirks and wants and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up desires. It's nice when something doesn't have that sheen of irony to it, even if it winks in that direction at times with more modern phrases. More on the gameplay side of things, I think the stress-as-currency is pretty brilliant; it'll be going up and down constantly as you play and messed up things keep happening to Hersh, but you'll be tempted to spend liberally to improve your odds on checks. It runs the risk of feeling slightly redundant if you're a save-scummer though, which, y'know. No judgement, I definitely did a few times. If you're committed to playing your hand as you get it, though, it'll probably feel a lot more tense and fraught as you balance your meters. Skills are good, and the conditioning thoughts are well-considered and add a lot of depth to your roleplaying, actually enabling specific builds to really exist. Clothes and tools help shore up your weaknesses, though you'll still often be confronted with checks that are made or broken more thanks to your choices than anything else. I approve. The voice work is by and large quite good. I've seen criticism of the main narrator, but I thought she was excellent and fittingly gritty-sounding for someone speaking out Hershel's constant stream of self-effacing thoughts. There's definitely a few instances of strange voice direction for some characters, but I think that's more just due to them not being native english speakers if I had to guess. If anything, it adds a somewhat charming oddness to those characters that worked for me. More glaringly annoying was voice acting frequently (not constantly, but common enough) not matching the actual written script, with entirely missing line-reads to simply being wrong in bits and pieces. Not a deal breaker, but noticeable. Basically, if it looks like the sort of game you'd enjoy, just take the plunge. It's worth it. Go in with an open mind for what it's offering, and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Especially, I think, if you're coming from Disco Elysium, which I can't really put off talking about anymore. There's plenty of reasons to be dubious about this if you are, and you know the whole sorry ZA/UM story. If you feel strongly enough about how that whole business went, then you have every reason to not want to give away your money to pad out the wallets of those who acted underhandedly and compromised the promise of a more lasting legacy that Disco might've had. Who basically seized a beloved IP from its creator. It genuinely sucks, and I hate to say it, but ZA/UM is a small enough developer that voting with your wallet is actually a viable strategy. I have to sorta admire Disco's fanbase for cultivating a community with strong convictions. Of course, one could argue that in doing so a lot of people lost their jobs who made a game I sincerely love, and they're the ones who suffer first. Is that a reason to let ♥♥♥♥♥♥ people hold your money and goodwill hostage? I'm not really sure. Times are tough, and I feel for the people who poured their hearts into this and got thanked with a final paystub. It sucks no matter which way you slice it. Whatever your conscience demands of you when dealing with this company, I think it's fair to say no company is entitled to your money, no matter how good the game is. But this is a game that is, in my calculus, worth buying. It's a game that I sincerely wish had been made exactly the same way, but by developers with a less checkered background, having made a past game almost exactly as good and as interested in exposing more gamers to political consciousness and all the ways that having a political consciousness doesn't make you much better than anyone else. Disco has better music, this has better systems. Disco has the wonderful companion Kim, this has loneliness as a plot selling point. I think Zero Parades is just as good as Disco Elysium and, for my money (though it might be recency bias) might even be better. Sad, sapphic spies just do the job for me better than drunk, washed-up cops. It's a shame that (most likely) a sequel will be made for neither of them, as both dearly deserve. Thanks for reading all that if you did. TL;DR: Great game, ♥♥♥♥♥♥ C-Suite ghouls. Pour a 40 out for the devs who lost their jobs making a fantastic follow-up to one of the greatest RPGs of all time. Probably my game of the year.

Pretty good I really liked it overall. If you like Disco Elysium I suggest this aswell. I do think it falls flat in the last 1/4 of the game.

I am on my 5th playthrough of this, and can thoroughly recommend. Mechanically, it builds on and improves Disco Elysium's skill, thought, and damage systems. Some elements at first seem simplified relative to DE, but this is a cunning disguise. Mitigating damage, allocating skills, and balancing the benefits of thoughts with their downsides is very engaging to me. In particular, the risk of "violating" certain thoughts by acting "out of character"—temporarily deactivating the thought and providing a debuff—gives the thought system much-needed depth. I love the setting, the characters and world, and the tension at the heart of the story between being a good person or friend, and being a good spy. Without wanting to give away too many specific details (as it is best enjoyed blind), this is a game all about navigating the space between these two completing drives. Do I help this character I like, knowing that doing so may result in potentially failing my mission? Who do I treat like pieces on the board, and who do I treat like comrades? When do I compromise my humanity, and when do I compromise my role as a Spy? And if all of the above doesn't yet grab you, I will just add that, to me, this it is also a game about being a cool danger-lesbian spy, and I enjoy that.

Great follow up to Disco Elysium. I didn't look at this earlier due to all the studio controversy, but after giving it a try, it's fantastic and eclectic and so different from all the modern slop that is currently being put out. Great storytelling, atmospheric locales, evocative artstyle. Yes, more of this please.

One of the best-written games I've ever played, up there with Planescape: Torment, Thronebreaker and its spiritual predecessor, Disco Elysium. Funny, wistful and provacative.

Firstly: Obviously this isn't going to be DE and anyone saying 'it's bad because it isn't' and anyone saying 'it's good despite not being DE' isn't engaging with this game fairly. We know that lightning can't be bottled again and you shouldn't want it to be. Chase a different dragon. It's a new story, enjoy it for what it is. With that out of the way, I would, ultimately, recommend this game, though it requires some polish. There are typos in some of the dialogue, there are some dialogue trees that feel like they could have a little bit more variety to the branching. While the conspiratorial options are sometimes funny, they feel forced in terms of providing a 'silly' playthrough a la DE. They shouldn't have tried imo for the same reason as the above. It's a different game and should be treated as such. However, I would provide this with probably a solid 8/10 Cons: The primary Voice Acting for the inner narration is one of the most grating awful voices I've ever heard. It makes you want to mute the game. Maybe that's just me. Unfortunately, like many games recently, the text does NOT always match the spoken lines which is just horrible from an accessibility standpoint, if nothing else. Pros: The game does treat espionage with the gravitas I think it deserves. It doesn't try to be overly cool like James Bond, it takes a frank look at the concept of being a counter-intelligence agent means. You have impossible tasks with no informational or material support and are expected to perform above and beyond. Your 'good' ending is one where you sell your friends for information, kill innocent civilians, and go home to debrief for your next mission with no accolades and ultimately die in obscurity. (seriously there's no achievement for getting the best ranking and I think that is a delicious rug pull and obvious in retrospect)

I wish I could give a neutral review here, but the game lost my interest and I am still trying to dissect why. The good: -The writing isn't not bad, or uninspired--it's clearly written by people with something new to say, not just wallowing in the aftermath of Disco Elysium. The commentary on soft power, culture, and propaganda is probably the strongest aspect of the game. -The side characters are bizarre and charismatic--I'll remember weirdos like the snooty music salesman or the popstar-cosplaying teens for a long while. -It's good at the spy atmosphere: lots of asking questions, feeling out people and situations, quiet paranoia, then dramatic action setpieces in a uniquely discolike way. I *felt* like a spy here, more than any other game I've played. I think the biggest killer is that I just couldn't connect to the player character. In this sort of psychological, writing-heavy RPG, that's a huge stumble. Cascade is very muted: a spy, constantly lying, with no companions to trust or be honest with, is a difficult character to roleplay. I know there *was* history, and I started to put together *facts*, but I never constructed an internal mindset for how Cascade *felt* about returning to the site of her greatest failure. The game puts a lot of effort into gesturing towards guilt, mental problems, feelings of inadequacy, but doesn't give you the situations to express your take on them. The overwhelming emotion I felt playing this game was a neutral-faced "Oh, that's neat." When I got captured and tortured and felt nothing, I had to shelve it.

its really just a hollow shell of we all know what game - dialogs are empty, protagonist is not interesting, story is not intriguing. After three terrible hours i just quit. They should call it 'zero jokes' - this game also lacks humour, whyyy?