Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, appropriately enough, lands in medias res. This spy thriller RPG is the second game produced by ZA\/UM, the legendary and troubled Anglo-Estonian game studio that made Disco Elysium in 2019. It\u2019s their first game since several of Disco Elysium\u2019s creators were fired, kicking off a series of legal battles that continue to this day.<\/p>\n
This game was developed under oceans of pressure and expectation. It could not be a sequel, but it had to be the heir to Disco Elysium\u2019s mantle. For some fans, Zero Parades is a mere sellout, an affront to the communist spirit of that legendary debut game.<\/p>\n
So, is Zero Parades bourgeois? The problem with this question \u2013 a riff on a famously hilarious exchange from Disco Elysium \u2013 is that it terminates thought. Zero Parades is not only a worthy spiritual successor to Disco Elysium, standing tall above the competition as a mid-season competitor for Game of the Year: it\u2019s also a worthy addition to the top-shelf canon of spy drama. It wears its many influences, from John le Carr\u00e9 to Thomas Pynchon, like haute couture, while never being reducible to them.<\/p>\n
Suffused with the cigarette smoke of its atmosphere, drenched in neon moods of regret, hedonism, ideology and sensuality, Zero Parades can stand among the world\u2019s great espionage literature. ZA\/UM\u2019s workplace drama is worthy of press coverage, yes, and its former employees should not be immiserated for the crime of making good art. But nor should ZA\/UM\u2019s current artists, some of whom also worked on Disco Elysium.<\/p>\n
With this new story, they\u2019ve done something magical with the single-player RPG genre: a gymnastic trick of storytelling, worldbuilding and game mechanics that transcend impossible expectations, putting it up there with the Lazarus act of Baldur\u2019s Gate 3. It recalls classic RPGs while feeling strikingly current.<\/p>\n
It is a potent reminder that RPGs are not condemned to be live-service, always online, open-world mulch. They can still have grit and soul. Even ZA\/UM\u2019s legal wranglings can\u2019t obscure the fact that, with Zero Parades, the studio has developed a house style.<\/p>\n
This is a spy story that binds you in telephone cords of trauma. It features ZA\/UM\u2019s signature black humour and a city peopled by strange, colourful characters who evoke a hundred flavours of quiet desperation.<\/p>\n
You play as agent CASCADE, also known as Hershel Wilk. She\u2019s a chain-smoking communist spy for the Soviet-like Superbloc who is on her first field assignment after five years frozen at a desk job \u2013 punishment for a failure that still haunts her. You arrive in the troubled city-state of Portofiro, the site of that trauma, only to find everything going horribly wrong from the moment you arrive. Your partner \u2013 or \u201cdouble\u201d in this game\u2019s effortlessly alluring spy argot \u2013 is in a coma, and only he knew what your mission was. You have no gun, no money, no support from the Superbloc, and it\u2019s all happening again, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n
Hershel wants nothing more than to be forgiven. This is her last chance.<\/p>\n
This is a spy story that binds you in telephone cords of trauma. It features ZA\/UM\u2019s signature black humour and a city peopled by strange, colourful characters who evoke a hundred flavours of quiet desperation. The story unfolds in a way that you deserve to experience for the first time, with the immense pleasure of a thriller where schemes are revealed, keys turn in locks with satisfying clicks and twists strike with centripetal force.<\/p>\n
Without giving anything away, here are some elements of CASCADE\u2019s journey I can declassify. This is a game where you learn to stop worrying and love the bomb, where pop music is a super weapon. Literally, in both cases. It\u2019s a game about a delightfully fucked-up found family. Here communism is an actual spectre haunting a city in a game about the \u201cEnd of History\u201d that, remarkably, seems to have read more than two paragraphs of Francis Fukuyama\u2019s book.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not a James Bond-style adventure and yet CASCADE can still find it in herself to be suave, quippy and romantic. A tense \u201cdate\u201d at a bar is, for my money, one of the most fascinating and rewarding scenes in the game, not least because of how you can get there.<\/p>\n
Early previewers lamented that Zero Parades, with its nearly identical graphics and emotional themes of self-destruction, trauma, repressed memory, addiction and so on, was merely a pale imitation of Disco Elysium.<\/p>\n
But if you let this game into you, the way CASCADE can let music into herself, you\u2019ll find it sings confidently in its own voice. With two diegetic, plot-relevant pop hits woven into the narrative, the drama croons to you, giving a real soundtrack to Hershel\u2019s chaotic redemption tour. This is something delectably other than Disco Elysium.<\/p>\n
Mostly. CASCADE\u2019s dialogue options occasionally slot into clunky archetypes: Neutral\/Sober Spy, Bad Parody of Communism, Bad Parody of Capitalism, Harry Du Bois. Then there\u2019s the place where it perfectly apes Disco Elysium in the most annoying way possible: everyone in the game seems to be joined to a hivemind that makes them analogise everything imaginable to sex. Everything is like sex, according to 75 per cent of the cast. International relations? Fucking. Investigations by the medical board? Fucking. Getting out-spied? Fucking. Capitalism? Believe it or not, also fucking.<\/p>\n
To fixate on this, though, would be to miss the enchanted forest for a few limp trees. When it counts, with the big arcs and quests, this game delivers. Speaking of sex, one of the most important quests involves a phone sex line. There are several ways to dig into it, all of them fascinating, rewarding and meaningful. The political satire wends through fetish in a way that is shockingly funny, satirically rich and profoundly human. What it says about sex work without prudish moralising or empty empowerment rhetoric is a high-water mark of the game\u2019s stand-out writing.<\/p>\n
CASCADE\/Hershel Wilk emerges as a real character: whatever path you set her on, it feels like different versions of her. Even some of the zanier, Harry Du Bois-like dialogue options sometimes fit like a glove. The world around her effloresces with character. This universe is very different from Disco Elysium\u2019s and yet it also feels derelict and doomed, rich in character from its profoundly troubled history, like a battered paperback novel.<\/p>\n
The mechanics, beautifully illustrated and visualised, make it hang together. Instead of health and morale, you\u2019re battling three \u201cpressure meters\u201d \u2013 fatigue, anxiety and delirium \u2013 gained through your words, deeds and experiences. If they max out, they roll back to zero at the cost of one of your ability skill points. Meanwhile, the conditioning system \u2013 analogous to Disco Elysium\u2019s Thought Cabinet \u2013 can literally rewrite the rules of the game. It opens up new interaction modes, such as stealing money from vending machines or claiming diplomatic immunity, or punishes you using other mechanics, such as calling your controller for help. It requires you to reorder your mind a little on your spying journey.<\/p>\n
The game\u2019s political influences are deployed astutely, with deep attention to history. From 1970s hijackings to International Monetary Fund ultimatums to Peronism to K-pop, there\u2019s a rich tableau to savour.<\/p>\n
To paraphrase the words of a Zero Parades pop song, you\u2019ll want to cover the moon when it\u2019s gone. Or perhaps, like Hershel, you won\u2019t accept that it\u2019s gone and you\u2019ll try one more time to recapture that feeling.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is available for PC and PlayStation 5.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, appropriately enough, lands in medias res. This spy thriller RPG is the second…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":800983,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,63,105],"class_list":["post-800982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=800982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800982\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/800983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=800982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=800982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=800982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}