Zero Parades: For Dead Spies review

What is Zero Parades? A game about a spy with a dark past, sent back into the field for one last mission after years kept away. What else is Zero Parades? The second game from ZA/UM, assigned the gargantuan task of following up Disco Elysium after widespread acclaim and dramatic, ongoing controversy.

What isn’t Zero Parades? It is not a sequel. It contains none of the characters from Disco Elysium, and is set in an entirely different world. What else isn’t Zero Parades? It isn’t its own thing, not really.

It’s a chimera of a game, a new face and subject welded onto a familiar body. It makes some interesting mechanical improvements, but the refusal to adapt its narrative approach means that it’s not a particularly good spy game.

Hershel Wilk, alias CASCADE, has just been pulled from the Freezer (think: Mick Herron’s Slough House) by the Opera (think: John le Carré’s Circus) for one last job. On her arrival, she finds her contact zeroed out: catatonic, unresponsive. From there she must finish her assignment while wading through the mess she made the last time she docked in the city of Portofiro. She had a group of assets and friends called The Whole Sick Crew that was shattered during a job gone wrong; she is probably responsible for this destruction and definitely responsible for their subsequent abandonment.

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Behind her swirls the world: colonialist, expansive La Luz, her communist Superbloc, and the global bank EMTERR, all with different interests in Portofiro. It’s a perfect setup for some good old-fashioned espionage. It’s also lost on Hershel, who’s more interested in intermittently angsting, drinking, and telling strangers her real name during their first interaction than doing much spying.

Midnight in Portofiro

(Image credit: ZA/UM)

The good news is that Hershel’s wandering around being bad at her job in a very well-crafted game. Zero Parades uses the same painterly art style as Disco Elysium, and its environments are just as lovely (and a bit more flexible, as Hershel can find her way onto rooftops with surprising ease). The UI is significantly upgraded, sleek to look at and deliciously tactile to use. The moment-to-moment experience of piloting Hershel around the environments feels polished and balanced.

A great addition to this is Hershel’s fatigue, anxiety, and delirium meters, which she has to keep an eye on as she moves through the world. Watching them increase during stressful conversations or decrease when she solves a problem adds a level of engagement with Hershel’s character that can’t be conveyed through text, and managing them with consumables or tactically planning which tasks to take on before sleep provides a good avenue of low-level constant interaction with the game. These are aided by the ability to exert yourself on skill checks, taking a hit to a stress level in return for an extra die to roll.

(Image credit: ZA/UM)

Another excellent mechanic is Conditioning, a variant of Disco Elysium’s Thought Cabinet, where Hershel can choose to condition different thoughts for various bonuses. Its flexibility contributes to a feeling that Hershel is, in fact, some level of professionally competent secret agent who has the ability to approach the world tactically. My favorite, Jar of Faces, gave me additional points in the skills Personalism and Entanglement as long as I did not violate the thought by covering my face, and had the bonus of reminding me of the first line of The Sympathizer, a classic of contemporary espionage literature: I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.

Zero Parades’ standout mechanic, however, and its most frustratingly underused, is the Dramatic Encounter, a cinematic narrowing of a tense moment to an inflexible, opposed skill check. Dramatic Encounters are extremely cool: the world goes gray, a spotlight focuses on Hershel and her target, and the skills she can use pop out in vibrant, almost grotesque imagery as she chooses between them. The world slows down to a crawl, and Hershel falls back into an instinctive state, beholden not to her ideas or neuroses but to an echo of long-ago, bone-deep training that she couldn’t escape if she tried.

(Image credit: ZA/UM)

When you hit a Dramatic Encounter in Zero Parades, everything works. The vision is clear. Hershel becomes what the game says she is, without any caveats. There are stakes, there is urgency, and there is that sense of person as specialized tool that is so key to making a spy feel like a spy and not a petty diplomat or foot soldier or just some guy.

This stands out because the rest of the game either cannot figure out how to evoke this feeling, or does not care to.

Hershel’s terrible horrible no good very bad espionage career

Hershel, as a character, is as subtle as an air raid siren. She gets information important to her career as a covert agent for a foreign state by just, like… asking. Everybody. All the time. Constantly.

It is never treated as particularly important whether the average Joe on Portofiro’s streets knows she’s a spy. It is never treated as particularly important whether she bothers to pretend she’s not a spy. (There is a quest where you’re looking for a secret jail and can find it by asking the right rando “Hey, you hear of any secret jails around here?” There are no consequences for this.) The individual conversations that Hershel has are often well-written and interesting, but the satisfaction of this is little when every other conversation feels like it’s actively working against the stated goals of the narrative.

(Image credit: ZA/UM)

There is a consistent preference for making every conversation Hershel has with others tie into either personal or political lore. Consequently, there are comparatively few opportunities to be actually sneaky, subtle, or tactical. When they are, they’re big setpiece scenes: pretending to be a poet to get into a magazine office, or wearing a cleaner’s suit to gain access to a rich guy’s apartment.

Outside of those contexts, Hershel has no opportunity to be anything but herself (her extremely weak “cover” is referenced only a handful of times, and quickly forgotten.) It gives the impression that spying is something you do for a moment, when circumstances demand, instead of the definition of the lifer’s game.

For a long while I really did try to roleplay someone who was trying to be covert and do espionage, even if I sucked at it. After 10 hours of clicking the most boring dialogue option when the writer’s intent was clearly for me to choose between apology spy, commie spy or hedonist spy, I just gave in. At that point I was missing out by pretending that it mattered whether I spilled my deepest secrets to another side character—everything that mattered was signposted, and even those parts were generous with Hershel’s idiosyncrasies, accommodating her personality at the expense of her profession regardless of whether that made sense within the story.

Contradictory impulses

The rest of Zero Parades struggles to hold itself around this incoherency. No matter how fun or well-designed individual aspects of the game are, they all swirl around Hershel’s fundamentally nonsensical approach to international espionage. Unfortunately, it seems like a consequence of transplanting Disco Elysium’s structure directly onto Zero Parades without considering how it actually plays. It’s jarring to have little sister spy walking around rambling and blustering in exactly the same way as big brother cop.

It’s also just weird to be playing a covert operative who doesn’t seem to give a shit about the flow of information—that seems like a thing that should be important!

What this also means is that Zero Parades is confusing. Confusing to play, confusing to follow, confusing to understand. Questlines turn out to be fairly linear, or with simple A/B branches, but when you’re within them fuck knows why you’re doing these things. I’d get sensitive information from separate characters without any indicator that Hershel had heard the information before; conversely, the journal would occasionally connect plotlines I hadn’t discovered were related yet, essentially spoiling their own reveals. Main quest-relevant options opened at the end of winding sidequests that I could not possibly have justified pursuing if I was actually roleplaying a character that was trying to do her job.

(Image credit: ZA/UM)

By the end of it I was getting conspiratorial about the point of all the mess. Maybe it’s their long game, I thought. Maybe I’m playing right into it. Maybe if I suck at my job long enough someone will just show up and shoot me. Man, that’d be a great Dramatic Encounter.

The spy genre works against Zero Parades. It is fundamentally not an information game, despite that being the genre’s bread and butter, and has little interest in patience, finesse, or subtlety. For all the love and care it has poured into its world, and despite mechanical flashes of genius, it can’t escape the fact that it’s using the tools for a different job. Without context, it might just appear sloppy, like the rules of the game Hershel was playing hadn’t quite been defined when she set out on her journey. Take a step back, though, and look at the whole picture, and it becomes clear that Hershel Wilk is casting Harry du Bois’ shadow on the wall.