Zero Parades: For Dead Spies wants you to question the price of forgiveness. After leading a crew of spies through a failed operation, protagonist Cascade is willing to pay whatever amount is needed to reestablish contact not just with fellow agents, but with the friends she let down. After being “frozen” for five years and forced to do desk work, Cascade is sent to the city of Portofiro with an assignment and a chance to redeem herself.
Zero Parades highly resembles Disco Elysium, the critically acclaimed 2019 RPG featuring a disastrous detective dealing with generational heartbreak and a hangover that split his psyche into dozens of voices in his head. On paper, this makes sense — both games were made by the same studio, ZA/UM. But the ZA/UM that released Disco Elysium and the one that exists now are very different studios.
This is all because, over the last seven years, the current ZA/UM and some of its founding members, who were dismissed from the studio in 2022, have been in a seemingly endless dispute. It has involved a court ruling, allegations that ZA/UM stole the Disco Elysium IP from the people who were pivotal in its creation, alleged misconduct by key members of the team, the aftermath of what’s described as a grueling development driven by overtime, and community outrage deeming the people who are still at ZA/UM to be scabs, reportedly going as far as receiving death threats.
Because of this, Zero Parades carries heavy baggage. It’s also impossible to divorce it from the shadow of Disco Elysium. From a design perspective, it takes almost every feature and standout mechanic of its predecessor as a foundation. Perhaps more notably, the fictional story, whether deliberate or not, seems to reflect the real-world situation. This baggage weighs Zero Parades down to the point that it can’t match its predecessor, nor forge its own identity.
It all starts by asking what kind of spy you are. You can either pick from preselected archetypes or invest your own points across 15 skills. Much like in Disco Elysium, these skills not only help inform your dice rolls during conversations and while carrying out specific actions, but they also inhabit Cascade’s mind as separate entities sporadically chiming in. Depending on your choices, your Cascade can be a spy who is savvy with technology, one who thrives when reading the room and catching the slightest change in attitude or expression, or one obsessed with the metaphysical.
Zero Parades has you balancing Cascade’s fatigue, anxiety, and delirium, all of which are exacerbated by what she witnesses and any mistakes she makes. Hit a breaking point, and you’ll be forced to lose a skill point you’ve already invested. Notably, you can also exert certain actions by purposefully agitating one of the three conditions to get better chances of succeeding. It feels as if the spy is forcing her own body and mind to achieve her goals, even if that means losing parts of herself in the process.
This exertion perfectly encapsulates Cascade, as she’s constantly haunted by her phantoms. It’s her defining trait. While the main story revolves around the assignment, you need to build a crew for it, which means tracking down your former colleagues and reckoning with the results of your screw-up years ago. Each character is broken in a different way, and you’re not exactly welcomed with open arms.
Here is where the espionage component of Zero Parades clicked for me. When it came to successfully pretending to be someone else in stressful situations, I botched it pretty much each time. But my Cascade became very effective in knowing exactly what to say and what buttons to push to assemble her crew — despite knowing that there was a chance that they might get hurt again. As a character puts it, “You break them, over and over, and still they stick by you.”
Image: ZA/UM
In People Make Games’ initial report on the ZA/UM situation in 2023, lead writer and designer Robert Kurvitz said that “this company has destroyed the lives of four of my closest friends.” Kurvitz, alongside art director and designer Aleksander Rostov and writer Helen Hindpere, was dismissed in 2022. It was one of the many dominoes that have continued to tumble since, with allegations fired primarily between Kurvitz, Rostov, and what remains of ZA/UM. It’s a long, drawn-out ordeal: People Make Games’ initial report is over two hours long, and there’s also a follow-up investigation, along with a separate five-part documentary by noclip, and plenty of other reporting and statements.
The more salient points, however, involve a studio holding the rights to an IP without the founding members, and ongoing disputes regarding the shares of said studio and how they fluctuated over the years as external stakeholders got involved. There have also been allegations of toxicity by present and former developers, with employees alleging that Kurvitz, in particular, was challenging to work with. ZA/UM has since dealt with layoffs and reported project cancellations, and to make things even more complicated, there are also four companies founded by former members of the team. Ironically, the success of Disco Elysium, which went on to sell more than 5 million copies, inescapably converted a romanticized art piece into a product. The result is all of these developments becoming antithetical to its primordial anticapitalist spirit.
The absence of Disco’s key creative minds is readily apparent. There’s a clear technological jump in how the game plays and how Portofiro looks and feels. Yet, the writing and worldbuilding are less elegant and arresting. The main story largely plays it safe, the city is quite condensed, most characters lack depth, and some of Cascade’s dialogue options read as online memes. Seeing “now kiss” and “big, if true” rubbed me the wrong way, while attempts of recapturing the anticapitalist sentiment of Disco Elysium with throwaway phrases like “dreaming is bourgeois” feel like odd attempts at reclaiming that original spirit.
After the credits rolled, the ongoing problems within and outside of ZA/UM kept lingering in my mind. I can’t stop thinking about the developers who joined as fans of Disco Elysium and have been forced to achieve sky-high expectations while also being caught in the crossfire of disputes involving creatives who aren’t even part of the studio anymore. In distinctive ZA/UM fashion, Zero Parades voices the studio’s worries and frustrations, while inevitably mirroring both sides of the overarching story, leaving much up to interpretation.
As Cascade, I did what I had to while pursuing forgiveness. I manipulated old friends into joining me in one last job, I deceived people who put their trust in me in order to obtain information, and I left multiple tasks unresolved, which will no doubt have ramifications for a city that I never plan to set foot in again. In Zero Parades, you get to choose the mask you wear. Force the right dice checks, choose the right words, and you may convince yourself that your actions were right all along.
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies launches on May 21st on PC.