Slightly More Than Zero Expectations

Disco Elysium was always going to be a hard act to follow, even without the drama that overtook development studio Za/Um soon after after the game became a hit. Now, with that stinking fish hanging around the necks of whoever held onto the name, a second success has quite the headwind to overcome, as the comments following the just-released "First fifteen minutes of gameplay" video for the follow-up, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, make all too clear.

Here's a taster of the general sentiment:

"Brought to you by the people who stole Disco Elysium".

watch the NOCLIP documentary on the making of "Disco Elysium" instead

Can’t wait to pirate this

Same shit, but way worse. Good luck trying to sell that lol

Forced, uncool, soulless, and most of all- not disco.

All of which is fine but I'd have to say a video of the first nineteen minutes of Disco Elysium itself probably wouldn't come across as a work of genius, either. It took me quite a while to get into  that one and I wasn't completely sold until on just how good it was until I was maybe halfway through my forty-hour run.

Here's the whole video if you want to make up your own mind.

Having watched the whole thing, I would have to say there are some fairly obvious problems, foremost amongst them the voice acting. There are only two speaking parts in the clip but neither is enjoyable to listen to. One is just dull but the other is very annoying, something that's especially worrying considering it's coming from the character you are going to be playing for upwards of thirty or forty hours. 

For some unfathomable reason they've chosen to give her an abrasive and unconvincing estuary accent, all glottal stops and dropped consonants. I'm not sure how that comes across in other territories but in the UK it comes with a lot of baggage that's quite hard to override. 

For anyone, I would imagine it has a certain lack of charm. It's distracting and misleading given the context and although I did begin to tune it out by the end, my strong feeling was that if I was playing the game I'd have to turn the voice-over off altogether.

I'm not alone in my discomfort, either:

Narrator's voice is fkn terrible, can't imagine a sane person listening to this for 20+ hours

narrators voice is horrible

turn-a! in-a! ... they really f'ed up with voice ... played disco Elysium 3 times and i enjoyed the narration there ... here it sounds just annoying.

If the voice acting is disappointing, at least the writing doesn't seem too bad. I'm not sure there's enough in the video to tell if it's going to end up feeling like a pastiche of the original but I fear it might. The vibe is similar for sure but how far it might diverge from the template it's too soon to say.

One thing that jumped out at me early on was a reference to "The Whole Sick Crew", which appears in the dialog in quotes. The Whole Sick Crew is a phrase I attempted to popularize as a name for my friend-group in the 'eighties, which sadly never caught on. I also used it here as a title for one of the sidebar collections until I thought better of it and changed it to something less potentially offensive.

I'm not claiming to have invented it. Like whoever wrote the in-game dialog, I stole it. For anyone who doesn't recognize it, it's the collective name given to a group of characters in Thomas Pynchon's novel "V". To see it used in a video game is both encouraging and worrying although the fact that it appears to have been used as a throwaway does incline me more to the positive end of the curve.

I also don't know how far along in development the game is but there are a few moments when the voice-over doesn't match the text. Then again, that's true of almost all finished games, presumably because if the actor ad-libs or extemporizes or has a slightly variant script to follow, it's too much trouble and expense either to re-record or get the art department to alter the visuals.

Speaking of the visuals, that looks to be one area where there won't be too many complaints. Zero Parades: For Dead Spies (Which is a truly terrible title, by the way...) looks like Disco Elysium (A superb title.) but better, somehow. The images look bigger and clearer without being in any way less painterly. I particularly liked the animation on the player-character, which seemed unusually naturalistic.

What little gameplay there is on show in the video looks as though it might be slightly more challenging than the first game. On the other hand, there's such a scripted feeling to the entire fifteen minutes it's very hard to be sure. 

There are counters for things like Anxiety and Delirium that quickly go into the red and require some corrective action but it's impossible to tell if there's anything the player could have done to avoid ramping them up to that extent. It looked to me as though they were going to go critical no matter what, possibly for plot reasons.

Anyway, I'm not about to start reviewing the game on the basis of a video of someone else playing the first quarter of an hour. Even though I was obviously starting to do just that...

No, what I am going to do is review the demo, which isn't available yet but soon will be. It's going to be part of the next Steam Next Fest, which runs from 23 February to 2 March. It includes "two quests...various side stories... and some of the quirky and questionable characters..."

I do already have the game on my Wishlist although, like everyone else, I am somewhat dubious about the provenance and suspicious of the circumstances that brought it into being. I'm hoping the demo will be enough to make it clear whether the people that retained the name also kept the talent. 

We could certainly do with another RPG as good as Disco Elysium. Whether this is it remains to be seen.