Zero Parades: For Dead Spies Review

Zero Parades: For Dead Spies grew in the long shadow of ZA/UM’s critically successful Disco Elysium, a 2019 narrative CRPG hit. Disco was bold and strange, expanding the boundaries of what a point-and-click isometric game could be when it eschewed tactical combat for something more squishy and weird. It added elasticity to a well-trodden space and was deeply welcome for a decades-old style of game. 

ZA/UM experienced afterward a very public implosion with the “involuntary departures” of some of its key creatives: Helen Hindpere, Robert Kurvitz, and Aleksander Rostov. There were messy allegations from the trio about financial wrongdoing on the part of the studio and its CEO, and that wreckage threatened to overshadow the studio’s massive success. 

That context is unavoidable, but Zero Parades is not just a referendum on ZA/UM after Disco Elysium. It is a story about aftermath, The End of History, and the aching want around shedding past failures. There are still people at ZA/UM who worked on Disco Elysium, talented creatives who sweat and bled to give that game its indelible impact, and Zero Parades shows this studio still has more stories to tell. 

BACK IN PLAY

The people of Portofiro, the city-state where the game takes place, live under the pressure of ominous monolithic governments and their interests. The characters of Zero Parades are chess pieces thrown into the wood chipper while trying to survive their own inner turmoil. Enter the player as Hershel Wilk, known as CASCADE (her cryptonym, a codename for spies), thrust back into spy work after a long hiatus due to past failures. 

CASCADE is not a blank slate. She is an “operant” with a storied career, a body count, documented failures, and an agenda: forgiveness. She works as a spy for the Opera, the Superbloc’s version of the KGB or CIA. Where Disco Elysium provided Harry DuBois as a tabula rasa for the player to fill in, Hershel Wilk is a developed individual. She has a past. She has a sexuality. Old friends, enemies, and shame. She feels authored and personal, and I felt motivated to carry her through to a better ending. 

This is a role-playing-ass role-playing game, and you can still make distinct choices for CASCADE that influence how she approaches the world. You can lean into the overcompensating badass spy with delusions of grandeur, escalating to de-escalate when things go south. You can play victim, putting Hershel into an anxious and sorry playing-for-sympathy stance. You can also play CASCADE as a ruthless and calculating femme fatale, the spy that Bond taught you to watch out for (or not watch out for, to be honest).

CULTURE WARS

Do you like weird cultural amalgams and pastiches of countries with thorough constructed histories? Me too! Zero Parades’ major players are the Superbloc, La Luz, Portofiro, and L'Empire Sans Terretoire, also known as EMTERR.

The Superbloc is Eastern European and Soviet-bloc-coded, a ramshackle alliance of republics on their version of the Soviet collapse in the ’90s. Their espionage arm is the Opera, and Portofiro is a territory they failed to annex, a sore spot the game digs into in-depth.

La Luz is the burgeoning powerhouse of the moment, chasing a “cultural victory” à la Civilization by flooding international markets with L-Pop, sneakers, plastic toys, and dubbed animated shows. It reads as a South Korea/Japan/United States blend, with contemporary anxieties around Chinese and American technocratic authoritarianism stirred in for good measure. EMTERR, meanwhile, is an exceptionally powerful neoliberal international bank, influencing politics and markets through soft power, bureaucracy, corporate finance, and institutional investment dressed up as social good.

ZA/UM is so good at this, crafting believable wax figures of real-world governments and cultures, blending them into something recognizable, but distinctly their own. Portofiro in particular gave me warm feelings with its winding cobblestone streets, tuk-tuks, gondolas zipping along dangling wires, and cafés and bars dotting the party district. Assuming the name isn’t a coincidence, Portugal seems like a likely influence here, right down to Portofiro’s faux history with a recently toppled dictator. 

Do you need to know any of this? Not really. It might help you develop the motivations of your CASCADE, but the important thing to remember is: everyone hates you, and your own government is merely tolerating you. 

I AM SAVE SCUM

Zero Parades: For Dead Spies relies heavily on skill checks, dice rolls representative of chaos, though influenced by CASCADE’s attributes and abilities. Your dossier organizes your skills into three categories: Faculty of Action, Faculty of Relation, and Faculty of Intellect. Action includes Shadowplay, your training and capability as a spy. Intellect includes Grey Matter, your Holmesian ability to deduce and infer based on provided information. 

You can improve these skills by earning experience, though the ceiling of your skills are influenced by your starting character choices & your “conditioning.” Conditioning is like the Thought Cabinet in Disco Elysium - ideas that Hershel is kicking around, her private debate around internalizing new tenets. These can raise your skill ceilings, usually at the cost of guidelines around behavior. 

Look - these games are just more fun if you save scum sometimes. Sometimes I wanted to see the results of an insane gambit, what would happen if Hershel made a pass at a flirty enemy spy, or if I could somehow summon the charisma required to talk her way into a secure facility. I find that failures in games like this are often less interesting than successes, so saving and reloading to pursue the options available to me felt like its own kind of freedom. 

The game did delight me at one point, when a novel thought entered my Conditioning menu: “What if you just stuck with one Reality?” A fourth wall break, inviting me to cease my use of the Load menu in-game, and if I did so, I got a +1 bonus to all checks for the remainder of the story. I was about two-thirds of the way through the game when this was slid across the desk to me - and I said screw it, playing my final, messy third of the story locked-in. And it was a disaster, albeit an enjoyable one. 

PLAYING DRESS UP

The main way you shift your attributes around in order to pass checks isn’t by leveling your skills - it’s by collecting clothing out of the trash or from vendors, and then putting together outfits that maximize your chances of passing specific checks. That might mean wearing some La Luz sneakers, or some old man’s thick glasses you found in the trash. I found this a compelling element in Disco Elysium, but in Zero Parades it veers sometimes into a frustrating exercise, particularly in the late game. 

I find the interface and user experience of the game to be generally excellent, but inventory management is bafflingly bare - there’s no ability to sort by skill, and the only tabs available are All, Clothes, Tools, and Other. I think there’s a low-lift, high-impact update to be made here that would make for a major quality-of-life bump. 

There’s also the issue of - is this how I want to adapt to the game and make my way? By slipping on a gaudy leather jacket to intimidate someone, or changing my sunglasses out for specs so I can root through filing cabinets? The concept really sings when CASCADE is put in a position to infiltrate an apartment with a cleaner’s outfit, but those scenarios are fairly sparse. 

SPYENCE FICTION

I really enjoyed how unafraid the writers were to stomp right into weirdness: strange psychology, conspiracy theories, ghosts, men in black - where Disco Elysium sprinkled in these elements, Zero Parades pours. When story threads along these lines made themselves available to pull, I did, and it usually resulted in a fun side story that circuitously made its way back to factoring into the overall narrative. 

There are many characters in the game eager to spew their own takes on how or why major events happened, and it’s generally a coin flip as to whether they’re full of it or not. An Infowars-style show plays wherever a TV can be found, with a man wearing a paper bag on his head spewing nonsense, going on about our “Reality” or the menacing space shrimp.

The gadget-crafting side of this is light, but there are some instances of playing with weird tech that I really enjoyed, and the game gives you ample opportunities to screw up by messing around with them at inopportune times. 

FILLING OUT THE CAST

The characters of Zero Parades are well written and acted, with many of them - even minor characters - mostly voiced. Where Disco Elysium delighted in repulsing the player with characters like Cuno, Zero Parades properly plays like a spy film, where even the baddies are fun and enjoyable. 

A major story beat involves making contact with CASCADE’s old team members and forming a new team, with or without them - the options for which characters were recruitable were often surprising, with no silhouetting or hints at who could be recruited and who couldn’t. It felt like a very Mass Effect 2 moment, but without the written-up dossiers telegraphing who was available.

Look - there’s no Kim Kitsuragi here. How could there be? But the cast here delights, and I enjoyed poking through their dialogue trees and checking in with them at the pub. 

SCENES IN PHOTOGRAPH

Zero Parades is a game about subterfuge, yes, but more often about memory and how painful the seared images in our minds can be. Remorse hangs heavy over our protagonist, and she's often given the choice to throw up her defenses or to tear it all down, letting her regrets and agony have their way.

I felt like I was pinning Polaroids to a cork board whenever I plucked a new scene or memory from CASCADE’s background. Zero Parades often asks that you dig in the dirt for bits of truth, muck collecting under your fingernails as you push through to the meat of its characters’ trauma. 

I was engrossed in CASCADE’s attempt at her redemption arc, particularly because I was presented with multiple ways to achieve it. Did I want Hershel to simply make good with her old crew as a means to an end, or genuinely reconnect and apologize? Was I putting them at risk after hurting them five years prior? Maybe the Superbloc and CASCADE’s party loyalties should take center stage, as the ideological storms on the horizon sweep in and threaten to undo the status quo.

DEBRIEF

Zero Parades is a masterfully crafted tale of espionage, relationships, regret, and forgiveness. CASCADE’s fate is truly in the hands of the player, and every option felt enticing and many of them not mutually exclusive: making amends with Hershel’s old team, remaining a puppet of the Opera, sentimentally helping sensitive entities escape the scene, or even perpetrating a bloodbath. 

ZA/UM’s team has a strong voice and distinct flavor coming through in their second major release, stepping out of the shadows of their prior success and proving that not only can they reproduce the quality of Disco Elysium, they’ve been able to make something distinct and all their own. There are flaws here: a clunky clothing-management “minigame,” and occasional moments where the game seemed to lose track of itself when I twisted its narrative threads too hard. But none of that took me out of a fantastic experience.  

Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is weird, beautiful, and dense with characters that I wanted to understand. It plays with its choices and narrative threads with confidence, allowing foundational elements to rot and die in service of the paths the player is willing to take.