I pirated and played the game out of curiosity. Tbh, I regretted starting it after the first few hours, but I have a particular problem which doesn’t allow me to quit games/stories, easily.
Let me just summarise by saying, “don’t bother”.
ZA/UM should be ashamed for what they’ve done, but that’s not really how capital works, I guess. The game is a shallow attempt to cash in on DE’s success, but lacks any of the depth, creativity, charm, etc.
Esoteric Ebb was far more enjoyable, for me. But I don’t think it’s a fair comparison because EE was actually trying to be its own game.
I would find it less offensive if it didnt try to ape DE’s style and tone so much
If we’re being serious, the political portions of Ebb are the worst parts. The game is stronger when it moves away from being a Disco clone and takes on a bit of that Planescape: Torment energy. That said, there are parts of Ebb that some people will probably enjoy more than DE just due to personal preference.
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone outside of a few Redditors say Zero Parades is actually better than DE. It’s just gonna feel somewhat worse than its predecessor at all times. They don’t even give you a partner. Even if you pirate it, I don’t think it’d be a very enjoyable experience.
Yeah the political parts of ebb did fall a bit flat for me but going the whole game telling everyone im apolitical was very funny. For me my life is more Ragn than Harry so it had a stronger impact on me that way. Also I just really liked the characters and world and my capitalist orc wife who casts testicular torsion on me daily
The zizek gnome is a pretty fun marxist look at the fantasy parts of the world
zizek
Marxist
???
They don’t even give you a partner.
They 200000000% do. Her name is Melita and she sucks. I like her, and I like that she sucks. She is withholding and manipulative and she lies to you all the time and she string your character along, and it all kind of works for a broken character.
But it is alsp the only time a game has given me a grade and I have felt a game lacked the authority to judge me.
The consesus on ZA/UM in their current iteration is they’re owned by the pieces of shit who stole the company and IP from the creators so pirate it if you want to play
Well yeah but I wanna know what the game is like
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.
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.
I suppose the South Park style edgy nihilism was the only possible lib response to a game like Disco Elysium.
Ebb is better.
Hot take but I liked Ebb more than Disco. The game really meant something to me. I’m apolitical btw
I have such contempt for this game and the people behind it that I wouldn’t even want to pirate it.
you do you
Edit: Tried to explain something about the story but it requires so many spoiler tags it became unreadabke
You could just have a blanket spoiler tag for the whole thing, or at least the main body. I’m interested in what you have to say about it and probably won’t play it anyway.
Okay. So. I wanted to talk about the game’s use of reincorporation and tying stuff together. I’ve seen the game gets some criticism for bringing stuff up and then dropping it, and while that does happen, the game actually does tie a lot of things together that seem to go nowhere if you don’t explore, it’s just that in the end they don’t change anything. It’s all lore rather than story.
In the game there are two decisions that matter for your “final ranking” (Yes, the RPG scores you).
spoiler
They are who you picked for the final mission and whether you did the prisoner exchange. Well. Also whether you gave the disc to bagman but that’s just the bad end.
So you can dive deeper into some of these elements and find answers to a lot of stuff that seemingly kinda gets dropped, but you don’t get anything except answers you can’t use for anything except maybe giving you a bonus to some dice roll later out of it.
I’m gonna give an example here. This is an incredibly long example and you can honestly just skip it, it’s just to illustrate the point that so much of the side questing you’re doing is essentially just finding pages for increasingly unnecessary wookiepedia pages. And everything from now on is spoilers.
spoiler
The red disc. When you begin the adventure you are shown that things have already gone sideways. Your spy partner is laying comatose in his chair, you don’t have any intel, you don’t even know your mission. One of the semi-optional hints to figuring out what the heck went down is the fact that he was listening to a blank red disc. Now whether you decide to explore it or not you’re probably going to discover that this disc is a single from an L-pop musician (The fascists empire is called La Luz and they’re a paeudo Spanish speaking crossover of Britain and Japan that prepares domains for invasion by way of J-pop/L-pop and flooding their culture with cheap plastic toys and children’s media) called You, But From A Dream. You’re also basically forced to find out that this disc is recorded in a format that erases itself after being played, hence why it is blank, and was tempered with to weaponise it in some way.
That is as much as you are going to learn without doing a bunch of side quests. Some of which actually require really lucky rolls or really heavy investment into some pretty esoteric skills. It is also all that matters. You can dig deeper but it doesnt change anything, you can’t base any decisions on what you further learn, and you can only tell a single person half the story.and it doesn’t change what they do.
One of the first odd things you learn is that You, But From a Dream is sort of a cover of an old Superbloc (The stand in for the Soviet Union/Eastern Bloc/Warsaw Pact/Whatever communist thing they wanna tell us is bad now) pop song called Superbloc, Baby. You learn this through interacting with literal ghosts. A concept that does not come up before or after. But this song is really old, sp old that the girl who wrote You, But From a Dream hasn’t heard it. So you do some more digging and find out that during the in game equivalent of the Challenger explosion (Something that happened a generation ago, decades before You, But From a Dream was wtitten but after Superbloc, Baby was), which turns out was a cover for an experiment to figure out the source of human consciousness, the humans aboard the vessel went into a trance as they were dying and began singing You, But From a Dream perfectly. Turns out human consciousness is actually a result of having lost connection to some alien entity that is trying to re-establish contact with us through a pop song that is being beamed at us. Also potentially that the song wasnt tempered with. The pop song in the specific format used on the disc was just the first time someone got the song right enough that it actually broadcast the signal correctly (This is only implied rather than stated), and the song wants to be played preferably in space, which the fascists were trying to arrange because they were being manipulated by the alien signal or something. Also hey their ideology of the fadcist counrry revolv8ng around the creation of the ideal post-human being created through imprinting ideology on people through mass culture and mind control seems oddly exactly like what’s being done here. Huh. I wonder if-
And NONE OF THAT MATTERS. None of it. You can’t do anything with it. It tells you its probably a bad idea to hand tbe pop star over to the fascists, and it tells us that handing the mind wipe disc over to the Alex Jones stand in with a broadcasting station is a bad idea, but you already knew that, because ita a mind wiping disc and he wants to play it on air
The only thing learning this does is allow you to be spooky during a single conversation with another spy, where you get to predict what’s going to be said in an archived video. But it doesn’t change what he does, or what you do.
You chain together like five separate side things and it just isnt anything.
Same with so many other missions. Your reward is some XP and a lore dump, and that lore just sits there ready to be written down in a wiki and used for nothing else.
I could do similar explanations of other seemingly important story bits becoming “lore” but this is already long enough. Just know that this is a pattern that repeats over and over again.
Edit: And it kind of ties into the game’s theme that caring is for dorks. We are shown two characters who genuinely care about these kind of discoveries, and one is a conspiracy theorist who literally smells. Every other person only care about the background insofar as it affects them and even then not really, and they are basically shown to be correct for doing so.
I see, that’s pretty strange. I mean, I guess I have some familiarity with and even sympathy for learn things = gain xp, but if it’s something that critical to the events of the game it’s really weird that it’s doesn’t actually give you more agency. Isn’t that sort of the whole point of spies, gaining information that can be leveraged in various ways? But it seems like the game isn’t inclined to let you do that.
I guess I haven’t really taken apart DE well enough to draw a hard line, but I think it has at least a slightly stronger inclination toward things mattering.
Thanks for writing all that out.
Complete aside, I think you meant “tampered with,” which I normally wouldn’t bother someone with but you said “temper” both times and rather than “tamper.”
You know what, youre right. I did write tempered with. I don’t really have any explanation for that. I know its spelled tampered, tempered would be like a blacksmithing or cooking thing.
I see, that’s pretty strange. I mean, I guess I have some familiarity with and even sympathy for learn things = gain xp, but if it’s something that critical to the events of the game it’s really weird that it’s doesn’t actually give you more agency. Isn’t that sort of the whole point of spies, gaining information that can be leveraged in various ways? But it seems like the game isn’t inclined to let you do that.
But its not really critical, because the game doesnt let it be critical. That specific point of leveraging things you know being a key point of spying is interesting because you rarely actually get to do that, and most times when you explicitly try to do it the game brushes you off. Like there’s a point where you can figure out the actual identity of another spy, and if you try and get leverage by greeting her with her real name she just goes “Oh hi. Cool that you found out my name, anyway I don’t actually care about our spy conflict. Wanna go back to disaster lesbianism?” (Also the disaster lesbianism is kind of an act, but you both know its kind of an act so you go along with it so its kinda real. Which is part of why its a disaster)
And I DO want to go back to the disaster lesbianism, damn it, but also what the hey
