ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies

My first instinct when ZA/UM announced this was cautious skepticism. The studio's history since Disco Elysium has been publicly messy, the original creators are gone, and the pressure to follow one of the most acclaimed CRPGs ever made is the kind of weight that buries projects. Zero Parades does not get buried. It lands somewhere genuinely interesting, even if it's not quite the same height. You play as Hershel Wilk, codename Cascade - a burnt-out communist spy recalled from desk duty after five years of professional disgrace, dropped into the city-state of Portofiro with no clear mission and an agency (The Opera) that barely trusts you. The setup is deliberately disorienting. You are not the hero. You are possibly a liability. From that starting position, the game builds a three-way ideological struggle between entrenched international banking interests, a technofascist foreign power with holographic fashion choices, and the communist network you nominally serve. The cast you encounter on the way - a paranoid TV presenter, psychic doppelgangers, a man with a box for a heart - is the kind of NPC roster that makes you want to talk to every person in every room before touching the main plot. Mechanically, this is a no-combat CRPG in the same vein as its predecessor. You move through Portofiro from an isometric view, interact with objects and residents, and resolve almost everything through dialogue and skill checks. There are 15 skills to develop across your espionage toolkit, plus a Conditioning system that lets you reorder Hershel's psychological traits to genuinely change how the game plays - not just stat tweaks, but rules-of-the-game alterations. The split-psyche mechanic, where Hershel's internal voices weigh in on decisions, carries forward the DNA of Disco Elysium's internal monologue system but applies it to a spy framework that creates its own distinct flavor. Where Harry Du Bois was a self-destruction engine, Cascade feels more like someone trying to hold fractured competence together under pressure. The criticisms floating around the game are real and worth flagging. It launched with bugs - some reviewers hit significant technical problems, and text-versus-voice consistency issues crop up in places. The writing is very dense, and some reviewers found it tips from complex into exhausting in stretches. The Disco Elysium comparison will follow this game everywhere, and anyone coming in hoping for a straight successor to that exact experience will find the tonal and mechanical differences take adjustment. The setting and world are new, the protagonist is new, and the game clearly wants its own identity - it mostly earns it, but the shadow is long. For the right player, though, this is exactly the kind of RPG that is in short supply. If you read every tooltip, sit with the dialogue, and like games that treat ideology as a genuine gameplay mechanic rather than window dressing, Zero Parades delivers. The community reception since launch has been very positive, bugs have been getting addressed, and the Steam Deck version received specific optimization work. The writing, even at its most baroque, has a wit and political sharpness that most RPGs don't come close to. It is a flawed, fascinating game doing one thing - dense, story-driven role-playing with real mechanical consequence - exceptionally well.

Alex · Scout Team

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