ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies

Great game and a solid follow-up to Disco Elysium.

Very fun and engaging, had a great time with it!

For me this is better than Disco Elysium. Rolls and all that felt more meaningful at least on first playthough, taking this as whole a little step closer to RPG aspect rather than Point and Click game.

Отличная игра. Конечно, это не Диско, но в некоторых аспектах вполне на ее уровне, а это уже немало.

Increíble muchos espías y mucho espías

it's a good time. An early hurdle to clear is readjusting to what a spy narrative can be, with the opening hours of Zero Parades (at least in my run) repeatedly demonstrating a less-than buttoned up approach to blending in with your environment. many many opportunities to ask "as the spy here, what's my line?" to any old citizen meandering the streets, which coupled with the reminiscing about the original fall from grace made for a super discordant pairing between the spy related media I've experienced and this. Playing it a bit more though, it made me wonder why I'm OK with Naked Snake talking at length with his controller about Godzilla (1954) but not down with a fleshier, in-her-feelings CASCADE experiencing friction with the human automaton/exceptionally skilled expectation of spycraft that you'd see in a Tom Clancy or James Bond. If a game can make me re-evaluate how I approach something, imo the floor for the game is Pretty Good. We're once again treated to a superbly written game. The individual characters are sharp, I wanted to see their conversations exhausted to see more of their world and their worldviews. The unique quality of this studio's authorship is, in my mind, the ability to make the text of the game feel in sync with the game's world. Like when you're getting at the crux of a character in the dialogue, you get to appreciate the confluence required to arrive at what you read. The world they come from, their beliefs, the history both grand and personal that shapes them, desires and motivations, the present moment that shapes it all: imo these all manage to be delightfully expressed and centered. The thoughts' writing here helps enable the portraits of these characters, as refracted through CASCADE's eyes. It feels fairly singular, at least in games, to get dialogue and description that feels "of a place" even though that place is something I'm experiencing for the first time. One barb that stuck in my brain the entire time, what feels like a bit of a missed opportunity, is how both this game echoes Disco's approach to catching the player up to speed in the early hours. Disco has you as a man on a blinding bender, forgetting damn near everything, so it is a more natural course of action to start quizzing those around you: "what am i doing here exactly?". ZP starts on a similar note, showing up on the job (at least knowing you're a spy) but not knowing the details. Reiterating this particular narrative crutch felt off: as a fallen cop, you are in the world but also of it. Harrier DuBois is preternaturally gifted with sensing the winds and then feeling the city about him. He is meant to be there, these are his streets, his people, his history. Herschel is an inflitrator. She is in this world, but not of it. Her time there is meant to be transient, this history is not her own. It felt a bit discordant to tackle scene setting in a similar way, between the rhyming of Entanglement and Shivers writing and how early hours descriptive dialogue played out. idk the exact change I'm hoping for, maybe space for Herschel to develop either a more personal attachment to Portofiro outside of her assets (compromising her work further) or time spent on the tension of fashioning a fiction that lets you belong. QOL changes to traversal are great (being able to teleport to diff map parts when outside), narration was super strong throughout, using coffee and drugs felt like a fine way to navigate the mental state system, Thoughts are still pretty cool and I like how it feels like stat padding, mechanically still perfectly serviceable for a game based on choices and dice rolls. I wish there were more opportunities to use the "Split Second Decision Making" mechanic, which is basically a condensed set of skill checks that were fun every time they came up. Only gripes I have are minor: I felt like I was able to pursue parallel solutions pretty easily to tasks (which led to a lot of skill points unspent for hours), outfit optimizing was tedious to do + I felt like there were a lot more clothing items here, some early days' bugs to navigate (Journal getting blanked out, music dropping out which got sorted at some point, dupe items, extra copper in my inventory why didn't she take it all when I sold it!!). Yeah it's a good one.

拙劣的模仿