RPG developer ZA/UM has a difficult—maybe impossible—wire to walk with Zero Parades, its follow-up to Disco Elysium. The spy thriller wants to strike a different tone to one of the best RPGs ever made while still working in the same verbose style. And while parts of it indeed feel very similar, as PC Gamer’s Joshua Wolens noted from the Steam demo, a longer build I played this week at San Francisco’s Game Developers Conference delivered some fantastical spycraft situations that I think embody the ideal of Disco-with-a-twist.
The intercom
Stepping into the shoes of disgraced and confused spy Hershel, brought in from the cold after a colossal fuck-up for one last chance, I tried to stay on-mission by tracking down another agent who’s been disappeared by the mysterious forces at work in the city of Portofiro. Talking to the locals helped me narrow down his location to a sketchy warehouse by the water’s edge, and after skulking around the edges of the building I found the front door. Locked, of course, but an intercom offered me a tantalizing option: could I talk my way inside instead of sneaking in?
I pressed the buzzer, and the resulting conversation tree gave me everything I wanted from the situation: Unexpected comedy, sincerity, sarcasm, problem-solving, and a dramatic skill check that embodied Disco’s tendency to offer dramatic outcomes for rolls, good or bad.
My favorite bit of this encounter—the part that reminded me of the ways Disco’s conversations often flew off in unanticipated and absurd directions—was the option to peel the plastic from the intercom. It’s deftly done, communicating that the security at this facility has been set up recently and in haste, while also reappearing in the conversation in a meaningful way rather than just being a one-and-done bit of flair.
And then that sincere dialogue option actually paying off by reducing my character’s anxiety? Even in that short back-and-forth, Zero Parades gave me some meaningful choices in molding who Hershel is—whether she stays “in character” as a spy, or lashes out, or lets herself be vulnerable for a moment.
The locked door
My powers of persuasion weren’t potent enough to get me in the front door, but a bit more investigating led me to an underground entrance that was, itself, locked. But the keypad here seemed more promising than the talk-my-way-in route… at least until I failed the 35% skill check that would’ve let me deduce the code. I was able to determine the code’s four digits, but their order eluded me.
Rather than smacking me in the face with a dead end, Zero Parades turned my failure into a bit of comedic bumbling, offering me eight dialogue options instead of the usual three or four. Each one was a possible four digit combo, and, as I discovered, they were all wrong. Every one I picked spiked Hershel’s delirium stat, but I pressed forward until the game gave me another full list of choices. By the time I re-attempted the skill check, I’d blundered through so many possible permutations that my odds of success had jumped up significantly.
Disco Elysium made failure more fun than it is in any other RPG, except maybe Baldur’s Gate 3. The outcome of each failure was almost universally funny or meaningful in some way rather than serving as a mere dead end. I loved how Zero Parades turned each failed code input into a visual joke, the list of dialogue options shortening one-by-one as I kept trying them and failing over and over. Flavor text heightened the absurdity of the moment by making my ability to press four digits in the correct sequence seem practically herculean.
I’m not sure yet what to make of Zero Parades’ tone on the whole—at first blush, the sillier or more sarcastic dialogue options seem less fitting for a spy at the end of their rope than they did an amnesiac, drug-addled wreck of a man. But the writing is consistently fun, and suggests ZA/UM has plenty of ideas for how to turn the act of spycraft into a handful of text choices that rocket off in surprising directions. Could Zero Parades be the MacGruber RPG we never knew we needed?
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