Zero Parades: For Dead Spies

The rain lies like oil over the streets of Portofiro as Hershel Wilk steps off the night train after five years in exile. At first, the city looks almost unreal in its beauty, with neon lights flickering in the puddles, late-night bars still buzzing with whispers and cigarette smoke, trams screeching through the darkness as if they already know the next disaster before it has happened. But beneath that alluring surface lies something else, something feverish, something wrong. For Portofiro does not forget people. The city stores them away, chews them over slowly and waits patiently for them to return.

And Hershel does not return as a hero, she comes back as a problem, a former agent with a tattered reputation, gaps in her past, and far too many people who seem to know details about her life that she herself no longer remembers. As old contacts begin to emerge from the shadows - some friendly, others almost uncomfortably helpful - the suspicion grows that the whole town is playing a game where the rules were changed long before you even got to sit down at the table. In Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, espionage isn't about saving the world. It's about realising how many versions of the truth can exist at the same time and how many of them ultimately want to see you dead.

Nor is it the violence that does the most damage in Zero Parades, but the people, the words and the voices in your own head. The game is a paranoid thriller steeped in cheap booze, ideological decay, and psychological erosion. Every conversation feels like an interrogation and every friendship reeks of betrayal before it's even begun.

It's hard not to draw comparisons with Disco Elysium, even if that might be unfair on some level. ZA/UM's role-playing game still casts a long shadow over the entire genre, a game so literary, broken, human, and politically charged that it felt like a banned novel smuggled into the gaming world. But after its launch, the success story quickly turned into something considerably darker. Reports of internal conflicts, legal proceedings, and creators leaving the studio began to trickle out, and suddenly the entire legacy of Disco Elysium splintered in several different directions.

Perhaps that is why games like Zero Parades feel so immediately fascinating, not just because they are reminiscent of Disco Elysium, but because they almost feel like the echo of that whole explosion. As if an entire generation of developers are still trying to understand what actually happened with the game that changed everything.

First and foremost, I want to be clear that Zero Parades is not a new Disco Elysium. It doesn't reach the same heights, but then again, that's not what I expected. I went in with a rather negative attitude; "this is going to be an attempt to make a carbon copy of Disco, completely devoid of soul and individual expression", but I soon realised I'd been a bit too harsh in my judgement. For although ZA/UM's masterpiece hangs like a heavy fog over the entire experience, Zero Parades still stands firmly on Portofiro's cracked asphalt.

Hershel, or Cascade as her codename is, bears many similarities to Harrier "Harry" Du Bois from Disco Elysium. She doesn't wake up in the same total mental disaster, but just like Harry, she fumbles around in the remnants of her former self. When Cascade arrives, the agent who was supposed to brief her - Pseudopod - is stuck in a vegetative state, and large parts of the mission instead turn into a desperate search for clues, people, and half-truths. This is also the whole point of Zero Parades; paths open up, others close, and you can never really be sure how, where, or why.

There are many players in Portofiro, each with their own goals, motives, and hidden agendas. Without giving too much away, we have, among others, the greedy megabank EMTERR, the criminal organisation Weeping Eyes, fans of L-pop, and the 66 Wolves anime, as well as fashion fascists who have established a cultural blockade where only sufficiently "cool" people are allowed to pass. Ideologically, politically, and economically, things are pulling in all directions, yet the world is still held together by the same twisted logic. At times, Portofiro is a city where every ideology has become a subculture and every subculture has eventually evolved into some form of cult.

One of the clearest differences between Zero Parades and Disco Elysium lies in the badge system, which is the game's equivalent of perks, personality traits, and mental specialisations. Whereas Disco let different parts of Harry's psyche speak directly to the player, badges function more as identities that Cascade actively begins to adopt depending on how you play her. So it's less about voices in your head and more about the kind of spy you're gradually being shaped into.

Some badges are unlocked through specific actions, be that how you behave during interrogations, which people you manipulate, which lies you tell, or how often you resort to violence, charm, or paranoia to solve problems. Others feel almost more psychological, as if the game is observing your behaviour in the background and, step-by-step, begins to categorise who you are becoming. At times, Cascade feels less like a human being and more like a dossier under constant update.

Mechanically, badges function as both bonuses and narrative filters. They open up new dialogue options, change how certain characters react to you, and can grant access to alternative solutions during missions. But just like so much else in Zero Parades, there's almost always a downside. A badge that makes you better at manipulation might simultaneously make it harder to form genuine relationships, whilst another enhances your intuition at the expense of stability and control. It's a system that fits the game's paranoid spy theme perfectly.

Perhaps the most stress-inducing system in the whole of Zero Parades, however, is the one centred around Fatigue, Anxiety, and Delirium; three mental and physical strains that constantly simmer in the background throughout the game. Unlike a traditional health system, it's not about how many bullets Cascade can take, but about how much pressure her mind and body can withstand before something starts to break down for real.

Fatigue represents sheer exhaustion; sleep deprivation, physical stress, and the feeling that the body is gradually starting to give up. Anxiety, on the other hand, is the paranoid thread running through the entire game, the suspicion, the stress and the feeling of being watched from every dark corner of Portofiro. Delirium is the most unpleasant of the three and acts almost as a measure of how close Cascade is to mental breakdown, where reality begins to feel increasingly unreliable.

Your inventory therefore quickly becomes a walking medicine cabinet full of alcohol, cigarettes, and various drugs that raise or lower these values depending on the situation. Almost the whole of Portofiro is also littered with substances, medicines, and strange little objects that encourage constant "scavenging" rather than traditional loot hunting. Alongside this, there are also plenty of clothes and equipment that alter your badge attributes, including everything from cheap wigs and fetish gear to futuristic astronaut suits that make Cascade look like someone who's fled straight from a failed space programme.

On top of that, you also collect various tools and odd gadgets along the way. For example, I ran around with a toy sword for much of the game, although the tool kit almost always had to come along as it lets you pick locks, pry open passages, and cut through locks that would otherwise shut out large parts of Portofiro.

The genius lies in how the game lets you actively use these states through what's called "Exertion". During crucial dice rolls, you can push Cascade beyond its limits and deliberately raise, for example, Anxiety or Delirium to force better odds. It's a fantastic system because every decision feels desperate and short-sighted in exactly the right way. You start to think like someone trying to survive an impossible mission rather than a player who just wants to "min-max" stats. The only problem is that the consequences become permanent if you push too far. When any of the gauges reach their limit, you're forced to sacrifice parts of Cascade's abilities, and skills deteriorate, attributes are downgraded, and certain aspects of her personality begin to feel scarred. The game doesn't just want you to fail sometimes, it wants those failures to linger in your body afterwards.

The third major system is called Conditioning and functions somewhat like the game's own, considerably colder version of Disco Elysium's Thought Cabinet. Through various events, dialogue, and mental crossroads, Cascade can begin to anchor herself in specific memories, thought patterns, and behaviours that gradually change who she is. Some Conditioning paths unlock new dialogue options or passive bonuses, whilst others gradually twist her personality in unsettling directions without you really noticing until much later. The beauty of it is that Conditioning never feels like a standard skill tree. Rather, it feels as though you are, bit-by-bit, reprogramming a person who is already broken from the start.

However, the aspect that makes Zero Parades shine brightest of all is the freedom. Hershel's journey constantly swings her between despair, hope, and sheer desperation, depending on how you choose to play her. Just like in Disco Elysium, the dialogue choices are genuinely significant, and your playthrough doesn't have to resemble mine at all, partly because the choices actually affect the world around you, but also because the amount of side quests and optional content is enormous.

You get to infiltrate secret prisons, have very strange phone sex via the Miracle Line, and scavenge for scrap copper at a derelict missile silo. But almost everything in the game revolves around conversation. Words. Interrogation. Manipulation. In Portofiro, people rarely kill each other with bullets, as they do it with conversations instead. Furthermore, the journal rarely gives you any clear instructions on exactly where to go next. Instead, Zero Parades works more with fragments; names, places, hints, and loose observations that you must piece together yourself. The game almost never points the way with a heavy hand, as instead, much of it involves connecting the dots yourself, following your gut and trying to understand which people or places are actually worth investigating further. It can be frustrating at times when several leads are open simultaneously with no obvious direction forward, but at the same time, this is also a major part of why Portofiro feels so alive. You're not playing an all-knowing hero with a perfect overview. You're playing a spy feeling your way through lies, half-truths, and fragmented information.

It also helps that Zero Parades is exceptionally good at making failures interesting. The dice rolls can be brutal and sometimes entire plans collapse before your very eyes, but the game almost never treats a failure as a traditional "game over". Instead, you're forced to improvise, find new ways forward, or live with the consequences of something going completely to hell. This makes every decision significantly more nerve-wracking because you never really feel safe, whilst the world feels more dynamic when the game actually dares to let things go wrong for real.

The exploration is also significantly better than I first thought. Portofiro is vast, densely packed, and at times, almost confusingly laid out, which means you sometimes get completely lost between different missions and side quests. But after enough hours, the city slowly starts to settle in the back of your mind in the same way that real places do. The streets become familiar, shortcuts start to feel natural, and eventually, you navigate almost purely on instinct. The fact that the game also allows you to fast-travel between areas means the pace never falters, despite the city's size. It also helps that Portofiro constantly rewards curiosity. New areas, locked passages, and little secrets are hidden all over the city, and almost every detour leads sooner or later to some strange character, a hidden quest, or a new opportunity to manipulate the world around you.

At the same time, this is also where Zero Parades sometimes loses a bit of momentum. Portofiro is structured as a web of half-clues, broken people, and loose ends that constantly pull you in different directions at once. There are almost always several storylines running in parallel, but the game isn't particularly good at signalling which of them actually drives the plot forward. The result is that you sometimes find yourself drifting between neighbourhoods, returning to old conversations and chasing people who might be sitting on important information, or perhaps just another dead end. Sometimes this reinforces the feeling of actually playing a disoriented agent in the middle of a conspiracy where no one really seems to be speaking plainly, but at other times it just gets tedious as you wander around without really understanding what the game actually wants you to do next.

For an uninitiated player, the sheer volume of dialogue can almost feel off-putting, but if you give the game time, read carefully, and listen to the strong voice acting, you'll be richly rewarded. Lore, humour, and clever references are mixed with razor-sharp social commentary aimed at politicians, mega-corporations, and capitalism. Zero Parades: For Dead Spies isn't a game you rush through. It's a game you sink into.

The soundtrack is also really good, and the heavy soundscape adds enormously to the overall experience. The music often hums in the background like a broken shortwave message from a city on the verge of losing its mind, whilst rain, distant voices, rumbling ventilation, and dirty industrial sounds constantly keep the paranoia alive. The atmosphere fits the game's themes perfectly and ensures that Portofiro never feels like a typical game world, but rather like a place that, step-by-step, breaks down the people who live there. Aesthetically and technically, it still bears a strong resemblance to the studio's previous games, but the developers have also polished up far more details than is immediately apparent. The lighting is better, the environments larger, and the animations considerably more lifelike, whilst everything still stays true to that gritty, dreamlike ZA/UM aesthetic that constantly feels half a step away from collapsing before your very eyes.

The artwork is also absolutely stunning. Zero Parades possesses that rare kind of visual identity that makes you occasionally pause just to stare at a background, a menu illustration, or some strange "Conditioning" image for a little longer than necessary. Several of the motifs are so powerful that I could seriously imagine hanging them up as pictures at home. Everything from grimy underground stations and rain-soaked alleyways to surreal psychological scenes and crumbling advertising posters feel hand-painted with the same blend of melancholy, paranoia, and ideological fever that permeates the rest of the game.

The only technical issue I've actually encountered during my time reviewing the game is that it has crashed on a couple of occasions. That said, the developers deserve credit for how quickly they've worked on updates even before release. Several patches have been rolled out whilst I've been playing and much of the most glaring frustration has already been ironed out. Otherwise, Zero Parades is actually surprisingly well-polished for this type of massively dialogue-heavy and system-driven role-playing game. Bugs do occur, absolutely, but the overall experience feels considerably more stable than the genre's history has almost taught us to expect.

I'm actually really surprised here. I didn't think Zero Parades: For Dead Spies would turn out as good as it actually did. The only real downside is that it constantly lives in the shadow of its big brother and the genre's master, Disco Elysium, the game that, in a way, redefined the modern CRPG genre after Fallout, Fallout 2, and Planescape: Torment laid the foundations, something that is, fundamentally, unfair, but nonetheless a fact. It isn't quite as well-written, never quite as stylish or spot-on, and the characters rarely reach the same heights as Harry, Kim, or Cuno, and had I not played Disco Elysium before, or enjoyed Esoteric Ebb earlier this year, I would probably have come away from Zero Parades feeling considerably more underwhelmed than I did. But that also says quite a lot about just how high the standard actually is here.

No, Zero Parades never reaches the same dizzying heights as Disco Elysium, but perhaps it doesn't need to. When I switched off Zero Parades, it almost felt as though Portofiro continued to exist without me somewhere out there in the darkness, as if the city were simply waiting for the next broken player to devour.