A big problem with zero parades is that the game keeps telling you stuff and that stuff isn’t true. Not just in the sense of an unreliable narrator, lying characters and characters just being wrong (Altough all of those happen all the time too), but in the sense that it says thing happened and are happening that objectively are not. It can be little things. Like, the game tells you at two points that your character is obsessed with the in universe equivalent of Hong Kong Kung Fu movies, bad dubbing and all. At one point in one of those two scenes it even goes out of its way to say that your character is so obsessed with them that they are how you relate to things you don’t understand. And those two scenes are the only times the idea of Martial Arts movies even come up… like that doesn’t matter (Bigger examples are spoilers) but why do it?

It also suffers from the game hammering you over and over and over again with the idea that nothing matters, no one really believes anything, and all the conflicts are just kind of meh. Everyone is disaffected and will tell you that they’re disillusioned and if you care you’re the silly one, half the time you try and do something and it turns out whether you fail or not that they knew who you were and were just doing a joke before letting you in/doing what you wanted anyway, because they don’t really oppose you in a way that matters because they don’t care and you’re not supposed to either.

Also none of the skills are interesting and statehood is just one long joke about soviet communism.