ZA/UM’s Zero Parades: For Dead Spies has big shoes to fill. Its direct predecessor, Disco Elysium, is widely regarded as one of the best narrative adventure games of all time, for its esoteric nature, sharp wit and layered dialogue.
There is also the matter of Zero Parades being developed by a relatively different team at ZA/UM, as many of the creatives behind Disco Elysium have departed the studio since its release, due to a variety of alleged incidents. The fallout of these various conflicts and allegations has been messy, and created many studio offshoots, all working on various games that tread in Disco Elysium‘s footsteps.
This week, as part of Steam Next Fest, Zero Parades has become one of the first successors to be publicly showcased, with a lengthy demo revealing a game that’s beholden to Disco Elysium while still feeling entirely, stylishly fresh.
Zero Parades preview – quick links
Beginning with a classic spy mystery
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies opens with a tantalising mystery. You are a sleeper agent spy who’s been woken for an extraordinary mission, the details of which are withheld by your partner and handler. Waking in a ramshackle upstairs bedroom, you quickly come to grips with your new circumstances: your partner has been poisoned or attacked, apparently through the sound waves generated by an odd record.
You may gain more insight into your conundrum by passing various checks, depending on your personal skills and dice rolls, but the mystery remains: you have some final assignment to complete, with mysteries upon mysteries to solve.
The setup is wildly compelling. A sudden assignment that brings you out of the cold? A locked-door mystery? An operated haunted by failures? The opening has all the makings of a classic spy story, with plenty of oddness to boot. You want to see more, and know more, immediately.
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies shares plenty of DNA with Disco Elysium
Like Disco Elysium before it, this mysterious setup is aided by weird narrative flourishes that add personality and flair to each clipped conversation, and each step through its world. Your character is guided by various skills, which take shape as little thoughts and whispers in their head.
If you want to test a particular theory, or ask a dangerous question, you must consult the voices in your head, and roll a dice to determine the success of your move. These personified instincts can instruct you to kill a particular target, or spot danger ahead of its arrival. Poetics introduces you to the nuance of the arts. If you put points into Cold Read, you can also make clever assumptions, guiding what options are available in dialogue.
While more grounded than Disco Elysium‘s thought system, Zero Parades maintains a similar discombobulating tone, with layers of anti-reality threaded through your spy’s journey. They’re plagued by strange thoughts as they pursue leads throughout a fictional town. They’re haunted by their past failures, and their chameleonic nature.
In the demo preview, it seems like player choice will play a genuinely impactful role in this mix. While there is a rigidity in the game’s point-and-click adventure – in that you’ll be required to explore far and wide, and go through various set dialogues to discover each new lead – there is choice, chance and difference based on how you skill up your spy.
As mentioned, each skill has its own unique persona that contributes thoughts and dialogue options to your travels. Picking Instincts, Cold Read and Poetics, I found I was able to discover more about various circumstances, with this opening up dialogue options and better dice rolls, giving more insight into my spy’s various conundrums.
I failed plenty of dice rolls too, as I didn’t have the appropriate Nerve or Records skills. But with new avenues opening up, the game works well around your choices, to make you imbue more of yourself into your spy, and to make the game seem more engaged with you, as the player.
In its Steam Next Fest demo, Zero Parades was genuinely riveting, in a way that focuses all your attention. Its spy story is sharp and interesting so far, and the way the threads unravel is logical and encouraging.
For those who played Disco Elysium, there’s a surprising amount of familiarity here, with core systems and dialogue clearly inspiring this new adventure. Zero Parades also has a very similar look, as you’ll be charting a dingy, secret-infused city where examining the people and locations around you will reveal much more about your character, and their circumstances.
As mentioned, the game has big shoes to fill but this early preview shows great promise, suggesting Zero Parades: For Dead Spies has been developed with learned lessons from Disco Elysium, while also charting its own ground.
For now, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is set to launch in 2026. I would strongly encourage keeping an eye on what comes next.
