ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies

Неплохо

The wrong people made the right game

有一个好故事，但文本很预制。中期冗长无趣的意识形态和背景故事塞爆全文，痛苦的跑图任务更是折磨之折磨，而且这对话真的不有趣啊就像不会跳舞的人硬跳。但看到最后人会原谅一切。其实disco好看的地方也不是堆积如山的政治戏吧。

pretty good so far

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.

I hope this is not the end of history.

Very artsy, great writing, heavily appeals to fans of disco elysium

Довольно таки успешная попытка воссоздать шедевр в жанре "интерактивная визуальная новелла" без оригинальных авторов. С радостью ждем игр от других команд. Плюсы игры + Приятный визуал, новые механики, критические ситуации + Интересные персонажи (доктор Гонзо, рабочий Ренотел, обезьяна и др.) + Улучшенная сюжетная фабула (пока еще не дошел до финала). Напоминаю про ДЭ и сюжетный рояль в кустах на другом острове. [spoiler] Там криптоид охмурил ревнующего деда-комуниста и он подстрелил наемника во время секса с любовницей. Этой смертью воспользовались протестующие и инсценировали повешенье. И вы по итогу 3\4 игры занимаетесь абсолютно бесполезным расследованием, так как локация откуда произошел выстрел вам недоступна по сюжету. [/spoiler] Минусы игры - Сырость игры, аудио глюки, 3D модели не совпадают с 2D картинкой - Все так же тонна текста, за которой не всегда легко уловить суть - Раздутый хронометраж, надо было резать сюжет до 20 часов П.С. - В прошлой игре был напарник, было приятнее исследовать мир, он реагировал - За раз всю игру не охватить, сказываются проверки и специализация персонажа Игра в процессе прохождения