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Given that I do "know the deal" about what happened with Disco Elysium, I don't think I couldn't ever play and enjoy ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies in any real sense. Esoteric Ebb, on the other hand, I'll probably be all over that one, once it hits a good enough sale (if not sooner).
Pat: "I've had two thoughts kicking around in my head, the first of which is that when you play Disco Elysium, very early, I mean before leaving the room, but definitely by the time you get to talk to Cuno, you get this overwhelming sense, like few games have ever made me feel, that the people who are making it, they don't just have something to say, they have so much to say, it is exploding out of them."
Woolie: "Bursting. Bursting at the seams. Uncontained. Absolutely."
Pat: "Oh my god, they have many, many things of note they want to talk about. And... when I played Zero Parades, and to be fair I only got about 20-25 minutes in, I got the overwhelming feeling that their bosses told them to make another Disco Elysium. Like that was my take away is that the core artistic, like, scream coming out of that game is 'I want to keep my job and make a video game.'"
I might still try Zero Parades, someday, if I ever see it for, like, sub five dollars or something, maybe, who knows. And yeah, more generally, I agree with Woolie in that, in the downfall of ZA/UM into a zombie-like pretender of what it used to be, with the creators having been scattered to the four winds and each making their own new studios to try to recapture the lightning in a bottle that was Disco Elysium (not to mention others, like the creators of Esoteric Ebb, who had nothing at all to do with ZA/UM other than being inspired by DE [and Planescape: Torment]), if what we get out of that is several Disco/Elysium-likes that are even only half good as DE was, that still would be a fairly decent enough timeline to be in, I guess, maybe.
Talking about Planescape: Torment, again, the best parts of that game were when you were in a conversation with some oddball character or other for half an hour or an hour or so. The absolute worst parts of that game were when you were in a dungeon fighting monsters.
