Oh no, are the scabs being thrown under the bus just like the original team? Who could've possibly seen this coming?!

When it’s not trying too hard to retrace Disco Elysium’s signature, Zero Parades excels as a complicated story of a perpetual fuck-up desperately searching for redemption.

how is this not retracing disco elysium

The material base for a sequel has eroded. ZA/UM has betrayed mankind and themselves. The historic opportunity for Disco Elysium 2 has passed. It will not come back anymore. However hard I try, whatever I do.

It's so funny that the oligarch who kicked out Kurvitz and Co out has probably made way, way less money than if he had just not tried that stupid three card monte shit and let them make DE2.

Especially when the company didn't even control the IP! Did you think awful word of mouth around a brand new IP was a winning formula?

Neo ZA/UM are bums beyond belief

It’s notable that the boycotts may have likely no small part in contributing to this sales performance. Also interesting in the sense that most gaming-related boycotts are typically just hot air with no real consequential impact. This amounted to something, which is quite noteworthy.

A bit of a shame, admittedly, in spite of my negative impressions about the game. Having played Esoteric Ebb, which personally just ultimately made me want to close and play Baldur’s Gate 3 instead (similarly alike to Zero Parades in the sense that its soc-dem writers did not appreciate the political dimensions of what made Disco Elysium so extraordinary) eventually made me give Zero Parades a try.

What I can say about Zero Parades is that the tone of the game is akin to “playing” that TV series, The Americans. Similarly, the creators have no real capacity to explore beyond stock liberal tropes on socialism and socialist states, but what was unique about The Americans was how, in spite of its significantly anti-Soviet and anti-communist narratives - par for the course in Western media - it still humanized and, more importantly, equalized the motivations of “the Commies” for a Western audience. Zero Parades manages to achieve the same.

What I mean by that is, while everyone is unsurprisingly portrayed as jaundiced and cynical about their ideological beliefs, they still remain faithful to their side, which I think is a valuable message to confront Western audiences with. Western propaganda can tolerate the “noble loyalty” of disgusting individuals like Robert E Lee fighting for their homeland and themselves personally as the modern West falls deeper into fascism.

Yet, when it comes to communist-aligned individuals or adversary-coded characters, that’s the real bridge too far and they are portrayed (and expected) to be gunning to defect to the “right side” at any moment.

You also see this with real world examples in how libs are constantly baffled as to why the entirety of the DPRK hasn’t defected yet, apparently believing that the only thing stopping a total refugee crisis being Kim Jong Un personally threatening to execute every generation of a defector down to their Homo Erectus common ancestor. Or their sheer spite after seeing how the Iranian football team didn’t mass-defect while playing in the US.

This is one of the common refrains from the game’s subreddit, which is the same lib and left-lib demographic of Disco Elysium’s but without any integrity that at least the former have through their position on ZA/UM. Their only issue with the game is apparently simply that “it doesn’t give you the choice to defect or consider the communists as an enemy.” Ironically, this was the primary redeeming quality of the game.

The portrayal of the protagonist remaining with their side in spite of their cynicism places them alongside Western counterparts like James Bond, who serves a decrepit imperialist power, rather than being a traitor who teams up with the adversary to fight their own side, Black Panther-style. This is what makes the game evidently rather uncomfortable for those libs, similarly to Disco Elysium's subreddit where they spend their time cherrypicking lines from that game to demonstrate the writers were merely "wink-wink nudge-nudging" about not actually being serious in portraying communism as a credible thing people can actually genuinely believe in.

It’s a shame, because even though the bar here is literally “narrative treats communist-aligneds with the same motivations and sense of begrudging patriotism as us,” games that give leftists this sort of treatment could be counted on just one hand.

On the other hand, perhaps the venture capitalist inability to successfully squeeze sufficient blood out of this stolen stone might drive a more conciliatory resolution to the theft of ZA/UM or at the very least further motivate the other successors (Red Info Ltd and Summer Eternal) to move forward on their concepts now that the original studio no longer can attract the genre's audience.

Time to go Good Will Hunting