Hershel Wilk awakes in a small, dirty apartment in the city of Portofiro. Why she’s here, she does not know. Her mission objectives were supposed to be provided by her partner, codename “Pseudopod”, but he’s unresponsive – he just sits there in his underwear, staring at nothing, his senses on lockdown. In his pockets are an invoice for socks and a lipstick-printed business card that simply reads “All you need is miracle.”
It’s not just Hershel who needs a miracle. Developer ZA/UM needs one, too. Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is an espionage RPG that follows the playbook of the studio’s previous game, Disco Elysium, incredibly closely, right down to opening on a confused protagonist in a run-down room. It’s another high-concept, combatless, dialogue-driven game about following threads and investigating leads. But capturing lightning twice is no easy feat, and simply repeating Disco Elysium’s triumphs is no guaranteed road to success. Thankfully, there are fresh ideas here that expand and evolve ZA/UM’s formula, making for what appears to be, on the surface, a more traditionally accomplished video game, but potentially at the cost of crafting a less interesting artistic creation.
I recently spent around six hours with Zero Parades, playing through the entire upcoming Steam Next Fest demo, plus a significant amount beyond it. That meant exploring a wide section of Portofiro, a vibrant hub of criss-crossing cultures, painted in shades of Central America and Southern Europe. It’s made up of six districts, stretching from docklands, through a central marketplace and winding back alleys, and up to a hillside housing project. While perhaps small by traditional RPG standards, this is a much larger playspace than we saw in Disco Elysium, and that’s not just reflected in your step count.
The city is alive. Rather than a decaying echo of times gone by like Revachol was, Portofiro is active. Every street is home to an oddball with their own strange perspective and, often, their own weird problem in need of solving. In the “Bootleg Bazaar” you’ll find two children transfixed by Sixty-Six Wolves, a cartoon that seems suspiciously like foreign propaganda. A few stalls down there’s Petre, a “Format Fetishist” obsessed with a type of vinyl record that wipes itself clean after a single play. Further up the road, you’ll bump into Kurt, a man so consumed by the need to follow imported fashion trends that he’s landed himself in crippling debt. Each is a window into a place where personal obsessions are the tools through which sinister powers manipulate the world.
I will, of course, need to play Zero Parades to completion to judge if its writing around this and other topics can match the unbelievably lofty heights of its celebrated predecessor. And I understand if you’re skeptical – ZA/UM’s controversial firing of key Disco Elysium creatives in 2022 has left many fans wary of both the studio’s management and the current team’s ability to craft something as meaningful. Based on my experience of this demo, though, I feel positive about the writing’s quality, with the odd caveat.
The skills, for instance, which once again form the pieces of your fractured psyche and comment on your choices and the world around you, lack defined voices and feel largely interchangeable (with the exception of Statehood, which bellows your home country’s party line in all-caps). But when it comes to the city’s collection of strangers, it appears the current writing team has successfully penned a cast possessed of a similar blend of literary prose, otherworldly Lynchian vibes, and off-kilter political humour. And, as I cross-referenced their tales with those of others, I began to paint a picture of this deeply troubled world, where techno-fascist superpowers, communist republics, and investment banks battle for power, using secret police forces as knives and pop culture as rifles.
Finding my place among all that initially felt overwhelming. As a spy, it’s my job to be a disruptor, to exploit those tensions for the gain of my home state. But, as previously mentioned, Hershel has no idea what her mission is. You simply need to talk and talk and talk until you find the threads relevant to your objectives, and there is no shortage of people to pull them from. But soon I began to see the connections. A representative of EMTERR, the world’s super bank, could be the starting point for solving Kurt the fashionista’s financial woes. A group of grizzled veterans impatiently waiting for their turn to dial into the “Miracle” sex line suddenly makes that business card I discovered make sense. And the suicidal Dr. Gonza’s medical know-how could diagnose Pseudopod’s condition… but first I’ll have to bring him the teeth of a medical board “narc” to halt his hanging attempt. As you collect these leads, Portofiro begins to feel like a Venn diagram of multiple overlapping quests, much like the cities of Baldur’s Gate and Athkatla did in BioWare’s seminal Infinity Engine RPGs.
While Disco Elysium certainly shared some DNA with the classics, it held many traditional RPG ideas at arm’s length. Zero Parades is less shy about being a video game. That feeling starts with the increased size and scope of its city, but is cemented in its more wholehearted embrace of regular skill checks and, importantly, building a gameplay system around failing them. You have a trio of pseudo health bars – Fatigue, Anxiety, and Delirium – which fill when you stumble through conversations and interactions in their respective field. For example, elongating an early phone call by asking all of the wrong questions will cause your anxiety levels to soar. Fail too often, or keep digging down into a dark memory hole that you shouldn’t, and you’ll take a permanent penalty to one of your stats.
There are interesting mechanical wrinkles to this system. Skill checks typically involve rolling two dice, but you can choose to “exert” yourself, adding an extra die to increase your chances at the cost of damaging one of those pressure bars. It’s vital to learn how to manage your stressors, then, to keep the bars balanced. Smoking, for instance, will reduce your anxiety, which in turn gives you another opportunity to exert yourself.
Another example of this more crunchy, systemic approach can be found in “Dramatic Encounters”, which turn moments of peril into a series of turn-based decisions, creating a sense of life-or-death drama in a game devoid of combat. It’s essentially Disco Elysium’s late-game tribunal sequence transformed into a defined mechanic. The example in my demo saw me attempt to evade an enemy agent through a busy marketplace, and the branching decisions offered classic spy fiction options: Do I pause to analyse, or act on gut feeling? Try to flee, or hide in plain sight? A skill check on my “Nerve” stat – a test of how cool I can stay under pressure – succeeds, and I walk straight past my hunter, confidently blending into the crowd.
While this example is fairly low stakes, at every junction I nonetheless held my breath as I picked my next move, anxiously waiting to see if my choice paid off. I’m very interested to see how this approach will be applied to other spycraft staples – perhaps tailing, deploying bugs, or even straight-up assassination – as success here will likely be the thing that helps Zero Parades feel distinct from its predecessor and truly cement it as an espionage RPG, rather than Disco Elysium with a 00 license in its wallet.
Zero Parade’s most interesting push into more traditional video game territory, though, is how it uses the city’s physical space to structure its branching quests. My final few hours were spent completing tasks that await beyond the Steam Next Fest demo, and the majority of that time saw me searching for a hidden jail, inside of which awaited a prisoner with vital information. The way you find this jail is determined by a number of different factors; there’s your personal method of investigation, of course, but your character’s stat build and your own ability to interpret the world’s clues also come into play. From what I can tell, this results in at least two completely different routes to the jail: breaking into a subterranean tunnel, or via poetry. Yes, poetry.
It was that second, more artistic path that I took. After quizzing a reluctant boatman who clearly knew about the jail but refused to talk, I was able to use my “Blueprints” skill to track his involuntary eye movements and approximate the prison’s location. Poking around the region he kept gazing at led me to the offices of a poetry magazine, the Noscorrentes Review, which featured a suspicious locked gate that only contributing writers were permitted to pass through. So, how do you convince a pretentious editor that you’re a genuine, publish-worthy poet? Well, dumpster diving through the publication’s trash will secure you a poem, but it’s in the garbage for a reason. And so the only option is to literally write a verse yourself, digging deep into your own soul to increase the chance modifiers on your “Poetics” skill check. The task provides an insight into Hershel’s painful past, but also – most importantly – creates a composition worthy of the magazine’s pages. The editor lets me past the locked gate, and there, in the basement of the Noscorrentes Review, is the secret jail. It’s real. And it’s a path to even more trouble… but I won’t spoil that here.
This branching path, effectively creating two entirely separate questlines that take place in entirely separate locations, reminds me more of RPGs like The Witcher and Baldur’s Gate than it does the almost immersive theatre approach of Disco Elysium. That’s not to say that Zero Parades is a traditional role-playing game. Far from it. But it’s clear that ZA/UM’s attempt to build on its established formula has taken it down a path that makes this project more recognisably a video game than the parameter-defying art experiment that was Disco Elysium. It’s a feeling only reinforced by the espionage genre and the more global approach to its story. There are factions, and one of them is an evil empire! That’s video game stuff.
Although on the surface they run the risk of appearing as less experimental design decisions, I don’t think these are poor choices. In fact, they are what I think make Zero Parades interesting. I left the studio feeling as if I’d just played a fascinating RPG with a strongly defined, richly realised setting, spearheaded by a protagonist who could navigate that world’s obstacles in a myriad of compelling ways. And yet, despite this, Zero Parades still feels beholden to Disco Elysium, as if its ambitions are caged by the reluctance, or refusal, to stray too far from the safety of beloved ideas. Elements like the sentient skills feel like they are template, rather than tradition. In many ways, it feels willing to risk being an imitation in the hope of capturing lightning twice. I doubt that was a risk worth taking, and yet I still think the odd chimera of old and new that ZA/UM has produced may prove to have merit in its own right.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Executive Editor of Features.
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