PC User Reviews

I finished Zero Parades completely blind, without using guides or looking up the "best" choices. In my opinion, that's the best way to experience this **** greatest strength is the storytelling. The world is intriguing, the characters are well written, and the narrative builds tension without relying on constant action. The choices feel meaningful, often forcing you to live with uncertainty and accept the consequences instead of simply rewarding the "correct" answer. For me, Zero Parades was one of the most memorable narrative experiences I've had in recent years, and a game that deserves far more attention than it has received.

Zero Parades is a work of beauty with few parallels, and you should play it.I can only assume that most of the negative reviews out there are biased by their understanding of the studio’s situation (which is not as black and white as people on the Internet would have you believe) rather than evaluating the game on its own. The time ratings are equally distorted. It would be impossible to get through the game in 20 hours unless you just blasted through it without really experiencing it (clicking through the dialogues without letting the audio play or reading them closely). A 20-hour play through of this game is akin to pureeing a fine dining meal and swallowing it in one go, rather than actually chewing bites and tasting it. 35 hours for the main game is much more accurate. The writing and narrative design are impeccable. The characters have actual depth of character for you to explore. You know them, you care about them, you feel bad for things you may have to put them through. Your choices matter immensely and result in a high degree of reactivity and vastly different outcomes for the end game. And yet the plotting is so tight, and comes to a stressful climax with twists you won’t see coming, and possibly heartbreak. It will keep you engaged and wondering how things could play out differently throughout (unless and until you go back for another play through, which you’ll want to do as soon as you finish). You are roleplaying as an existing character, Hershel, who has dimensions that leave you able to play it out in various ways and still make sense, but, this player character isn’t a blank slate who the player can remake however they want. You have to reckon with Hershel’s prior existence in a tangible way, and your roleplaying is choosing to embrace one side or another (e.g. paranoia or professionalism). If you play this game to the end and don’t think it was a serious enough spy game, then that’s because YOU chose to play it that way. The skills are all great too. This game’s politics are much more subtle than Disco Elysium. It doesn’t spend a bunch of time talking AT you about them, but rather weaves them into the characters and narrative in smart and engaging ways. (Except for the Statehood skill, which is obvoiusly supposed to be a joke, SHOUTING direct translations from Mao and other propaganda lines constantly.)The art is rich and gorgeous. Zero Parades has a painterly style, but the specific style starkly contrasts to Disco Elysium. This game’s environment and character models are colorful and use spatter and streams of paint fluidly in a way that really suits the setting. And the character portraits contrast that color by being a bit more somber and realistic, but using poses and facial expressions to convey character. Despite what some commenters say, this game actually has great music. They probably aren’t playing with headphones (you should). There is ambient and atonal sound when you’re going about most of the world, which sounds a little bit like Fallout. When you get into particular scenes, chaotic jazz or moody electronic music starts to play that suits each one of those particular scenes. And the handful of music tracks with lyrics that can be played at pivotal moments make those moments really shine and will also be stuck in your head for weeks after (buy the soundtrack too!).

One Of The best games ever released since Disco Elysium by the ZAUM team. The most amazing sound scape and a anxiety inducing experience that most players have been craving for. leader- and ownership aside The Team Still Got "IT" and You're along for the ride. Disover the Truth, BE THE SHADOWS and Escape with your mind intact.

This game takes one step forward, but sadly two steps back. It has a better story than Disco Elysium, but that's about it. Overall great effort and surprisingly good game. If it came out first it would have been hailed as a masterpiece.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

After a controversial development phase, I sat down to play it with real hesitation. But what I found was a game even deeper than the first one: better written and clearly made with a huge amount of effort. The story is excellent again, the art design is excellent, and on top of that they added a big, full, exploration-driven map. Every corner is packed with different details. I loved it a lot. It easily deserves at least two playthroughs.

cZero Paredes exceeded expectations—great service, friendly staff, and excellent quality!

Despite having everything against them, the devs managed not to f&%# this one up.... which goes to show that suits shall always win, be it in favor of the crowds or concealed behind the love-driven labrious work of the devs, that which, after a 30-ish hours run, has managed to place this game at the level of that which was done 7 years ago in Revachol, Le Caillou.

15 hours in the game - it has everything predecesor had. I played Disco Elysium 3 times and it was life changing for me. Zero parades has it all - interesting characters, political plot, atmospherics. Or maybe not all, one thing is unfortunately not that compelling - soundtrack. It fits the game but Disco's Sea Power is hard to beat.

Yes, the ZAUM situation is bad but this game can absolutely stand on its own. It almost reaches Disco levels, it even beats it in certain aspects. Lots of Disco devs, writers, artists worked on this aswell. Review bombers are disrespecting the work of hundereds of talented people.

Ignore the transparent review-bombing; this is one of the most compelling, thoughtful, and possibly important games of recent years. As someone who loved DE from the start, I could not have imagined the team at ZA/UM could twice capture lightning in a bottle, particularly in the shadow of the well-trodden controvesy. However, this game serves as a profound vindication of the many incredibly talented artists, writers, and developers who clearly have an authorial voice all their own. The writing is nothing short of sublime. Go back and play Disco in the wake of ZP, and I swear, you'll find yourself surprised at how much sharper, more thought provoking, and more entertaining the writing is in ZA/UM's second outing. More than that, however, it captures the single most important element **** CRPG - empathetic, emotionally-intelligent narrative design. The writers at ZA/UM should take a bow. Whatsmore, for a game set in a pseudo-1990s city state, the stories in Portifiro carry surprising relevance to the unique cultural moment in which the game was made. It's a setting where control has already been consolidated, where wars are won with soft power, and fought with targeted cultural detritus. While the world stands on the brink of being engulfed by techno-fascism, the left scrambles to mount a meagre defence, idealogically sincere and deeply flawed, slowly consuming itself from the inside out. This is not cheap satire, this is not The Boys, this is a considered, reflective elegy for a possible future we've already lost. If you're into CRPGs, political philosophy, or the unique complexity underpinning every element of human consciousness, you should play this game. If you're not, you must play this game.

Some of the most obvious review bombing I've ever witnessed, this game is close to a masterpiece. The bitterness is seeping through my screen. Just keep that in mind when you see all the 0 ratings. Try the game for yourself.

. I was really looking forward to this game. I watched the trailer, hoping for a deep exploration of the world, the plot, every character, every NPC. And... I got none of that. It's so disappointing. The world isn't fully fleshed out. The lore is presented so cluttered that even trying to piece together all the information, you get almost nothing. And sometimes, even many moments don't add up. How is that possible? In places, I even REALLY felt like the lore was written by an AI. The characters are either empty shells or lazily developed. The presentation is terrible. I only liked the visual style (it can't compare to DE, of course, but it's also good). The only thing this game did for me was to disgust me and make me want to never play it again. Sad.

A sad affair that deserves zero parades. Chiefly a desperate corporate attempt to mechanically recapture the lightning in a bottle that was Disco Elysium, a mostly functional skeleton with none of the soul nor talent of its spiritual predecessor. A creative zombie if not a corpse outright, with scarcely any serious attempt at creating a real identity of its own, because that would stray from the imagined winning formula. The secret sauce was never the mechanics, the so blindingly specific scope of a broken city or messed up investigator (spy, journalist, detective, whatever), or even the voices in your head speaking to you. That was always but an excuse to showcase a rich world and characters, carefully developed over years. Not rushed to fill in the bones unwisely thought to be the magic. Next time, ZA/UM, if there even is a next time, try to do something of your own instead. Risk failure innovating. It's more respectable than soulless imitation of a purged team.

Beautiful game which surpasses its mediocre predecessor at every turn. Truly a modern marvel within gaming.

All around bad, hard to enjoy it when the narrator gives me a headache every few minutes, people are trying to talk this game up whilst being vague about what makes it good, because nothing does.

A mere shadow of it's copy, a sad desolate attempt at making art after stealing it.