u/flying-kai

I'm surprised by how often I get the tipping pop up on the card reader (how much would you like to tip? 25% 20% 10%...) when paying the bill at cafes and restaurants here - even in places that don't seem all that touristy. I thought tipping was only a thing in the US, and that here, workers would be compensated well enough that they wouldn't be dependent on tips to get by. Has that changed recently? Or is this just a way to get money out of americans who don't know better?

Hey folks, I'm about to move to Sweden to take up a job offer, and I was wondering about what the queer scene there is like for gaysians.

Most of the accounts and descriptions I see online don't seem to be by Asians, and there's a lot that I read in (not queer) circles about how insular and racist Swedes can be despite the country's progressive image.

If you're a gaysian with an experience of living there, I'd love to hear from you about how welcoming you found the queer scene, whether you ran into issues in general society on account of your asian-ness, or if you're currently there and are just open to making new friends!

The city I'm moving to is Stockholm, if that matters!

Is anyone else also dealing with a lot of burping while on the medication? Literally within the hour after taking it, I'm starting to burp, and basically seem to throughout the day regardless of how I change up my diet, although it has been more protein heavy lately. Is this a side effect of the medication, or am I just not changing up my diet enough.

So the Queen is Eliza, right?

Going back to #7 after reading #16, when Valentina asks the Queen who she is, she answers: "I am a residue and lost and a final hope and I -- It doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Only this matters."

As others have pointed out, there's some similarities in their design and they share a similar power signature (making flora sprout from the ground around them - but then again, so does Valentina).

The Queen brings the second summer of love to an end when she realises that "this is as good as it gets - it's not enough - it's not even close!" Wherever she came from (hell or another reality), it sounds like Eliza's attempts at escaping the torment of hell. Snapping when she realises that making a heaven on earth won't allow her to escape her fate makes sense in that context.

Eliza's fixation on heaven (as a devout Christian), Valentina's (and Magus's) weakness to her hellborne powers explains why she couldn't beat the Queen on her own, the Queen thanking Eliza for killing her, Eliza being torn apart by a singularity in her head that leaves her with a similarly circle-shaped visage as the Queen's monstrous form, and then Eliza being thrown into hell which exists outside of the linear timeline conveniently allows her to return at an earlier point in time like Valentina did in #16... a lot of details line up.

The only thing that makes me uncertain about Eliza being the Queen is that Magus states that the Queen didn't come from upstairs or downstairs, she just came. Also: Magus's explanation that Magus and Valentina's powers bounce off each other because they share a same source, while Valentina's trumps theirs - could also point towards the Queen just being Valentina from a different timeline, if she's any of the superpowers we already know rather than a genuinely distinct character.

Also, Eliza's exchange with hell only happens as a result of the Queen's arrival. Is that the tragedy? That Eliza was always doomed to fall? That her being doomed in one timeline means that she will always be doomed in every timeline? I'm so curious about what her character will be like in the reset timeline.

Honestly, I think what makes Zero Parades a polarising experience for me is how there are genuinely so many peaks in this game, but I don't think it ever reaches the level of consistency of its predecessor, which was just gripping from start to finish.

What works

Gameplay changes: A lot of the changes to the core mechanics felt like a clear improvement from Disco Elysium - from the damage system (meaning that certain characters no longer have the durability of a wet paper) to the exert ability. Conditioning your thoughts is also way more interesting, because trying to avoid the actions that violate them means that adopting certain thoughts really does change your gameplay style quite significantly.

The espionage: Zero Parades shines the most when it remembers it's a game about espionage, and not just a detective story. The best (and most emotionally impactful) writing in the game comes from the moments when you genuinely feel like a spy. >!I was so torn up when I convinced Yana to let me trade UV for the prisoner, by using Statehood to convince her that UV doesn't care about her since she's never asked Yana to come with her into her new life. Later at the hand-off, after passing the Nerve check to keep up the lie to UV, she tells you that when saying goodbye to Yana she DID ask her to come with - only for Yana to look away heartbroken.!< It was a rare moment when you felt like you were the kind of spy that would leave a bunch of collateral damage in your wake. Ditto with other really cool espionage moments like>!fending off your former crewmate trying to stab you with a needle!< or>!the sort-of-date with Silhouette where you're trying to suss out her true motivations for helping you and your skills can both tell you that she lacks empathy and is really into you.!<The game shines the most when it's about betrayal and trust.

Plot structure: One of Disco Elysium's main flaws is that if you ONLY wanted to solve the main mystery, you could do it in a really quick span of time by disregarding all the side quests. That would be missing the point of the game, but a lot of side quests and characters weren't well integrated into the main path (even if that did contribute to a more lived in world). Zero Parades, in contrast, feels like it has a more traditional video game structure where the world shifts from act to act, with a much clearer reason for why you're doing everything you're doing beyond vague curiosity. Rather than having just a few setpieces (the conversation with Klaasje, visual calculus, the mercenary tribunal), setpieces are scattered throughout the game in way that genuinely makes it more varied and less predictable.

What doesn't

Intentionality: When playing through Disco Elysium, I never once thought that I was playing through content that could be considered "filler", or which wasn't extremely fun to play through or in some way provide some fascinating human insight into life in a crumbling world. In contrast, there is a *lot* of gameplay in Zero Parades which feels either pointless, both thematically and plot-wise, and could be cut without any loss to the game. >!(For instance, contrast the church in DE to the palace of culture, both stories about squatters - and the church is full of memorable moments whereas the palace is just... there.)!<

Gameplay changes: I can't help feeling like the introduction of the exert ability made the developers increase the difficulty of ALL checks in the game. Throughout much of the first half, it just felt like my character wasn't great at doing ANYTHING. And in contrast to Disco Elysium's treatment of alcoholism and drug use, there are no consequences to being an alcoholic druggie in Zero Parades. We're a different kind of disgraced agent, but it feels narratively disappointing that drugs and alcohol are reduced to potion status essentially.

The espionage: As fun as the espionage moments were, I was so so frustrated with how ultimately, so much of it did not matter. >!For instance, Ignatz and Kaleidoscope aren't actually hostile to you - and those are the main hostile interactions of the game outside of being interrogated.!<Also, way too often, information security just DOES NOT MATTER. It doesn't matter if you tell everyone your real name, that you're a communist spy, etc. Things don't ever feel like they come to bite you in the ass even if you're the most unsubtle person in the world. It's a pity, because there are so few moments in the game where I feel like playing like a cold professional allows you to outsmart someone, the essence of spy gameplay.

The absurdist and quirky elements: Everything supernatural or insane in Disco Elysium felt earned or entirely on theme for Harry to experience. I found way too much of Zero Parades' writing to be pointlessly absurd, especially when your protagonist is dissociative but not insane? >!Hershel speaking to monkeys, seeing ghosts, meeting insane musicians, conspiracy theorists, etc!<did not feel like it made much sense. The conspiracy theorist plotline in particular was extremely weak to me,>!with maybe the exception of the copper stripper, because it really doesn't go into any of the very real world reasons why people fall prey to things like QAnon.!<

Worldbuilding: Where Disco Elysium's world feels lived in and deeply considered, Zero Parades' world pretty much does everything in broad strokes and minimal detail. We never really get a sense of what life in the Peoples' Republics is like, and how it contrasts with the capitalist world - though I get that's part of the point of the End of History. Still, it says something that they could probably have changed Hershel's employers to liberals or fascists and the game likely wouldn't be much different. >!There is something genuinely interesting to the treatment of fascists in this game - as being just copies of copies - and your conversations with the Prisoner are where the uniqueness of this world shines the most.!< But otherwise, the worldbuilding was pretty flat and unmemorable. Disco Elysium is a deeply political game, and characters would often devolve into what is essentially political monologues, and I found myself wishing that characters like that existed in Zero Parades - which is ironic considering how you'd imagine a spy game would be more political than a detective one. For a team of communist spies, you and your crew have surprisingly little to say about the politics of the world you inhabit.

The ending: All I'll say here is that for all the setup of getting there, the ending of Zero Parades was surprisingly brief and unexciting to me. I wish the crew you'd recruited got to do more and that there was more reactivity to your choices. DE also had a bit of an annoying ending, but is saved by having just the most beautiful moments with the cryptid and your former colleagues going over all the significant choices you'd made. >!I expected this to happen during your final call, and would have much rather have had Melita discuss how you conducted yourself throughout the game rather than just giving you a letter grade. It felt like they just ran out of time because why end the game in such an arcade-y way that suggests the endings are ranked from optimal to suboptimal when nothing in the game so far matches that vibe?!<

Overall, if Disco was a 10/10 game, I would say Zero Parades is very much a 7.5/10. It scratches the same itch, but also frustrates you with all the lost potential.

How does one get into the housing campaign zone of the map? I thought the solution was changing into the janitor's outfit that's locked in the van nearby but the brand ambassador trio still won't let me through. What's up with that?

Even the Singaporean chasing the most cookie cutter of marriage-to-BTO-to-babies lifestyle yearns for accessible and thriving third spaces. But this yearning is eclipsed by their yearning for accessible tuition centres.