You wake up in a drunken stupor, naked and afraid. You see your necktie hanging from the ceiling fan. You reach for it, and the strain on your battered body causes you to have a heart attack. You die. Game over. So begins Disco Elysium, one of the most lauded releases of the last ten years and a story full of embarrassment, adventure, and the kind of detective work only someone born for the role could pull off, no matter how elongated their suicide has become. How do you follow that up?
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies opts to take an antithetical route. Instead of a fuck up forced to work in a stretched thin system by virtue of raw talent we take on the role of a veteran spy burned by some nondescript fuck up in the past that left us on desk duty for half a decade. Called back into the field it isn’t more than a moment before we find our confidant catatonic in his room and are called back home. Unwilling to lose her shot at redemption, CASCADE takes to the street to retrace the steps of our confidant and find out exactly why we’ve been thawed out.
To help us in our pursuits are a set of fifteen skills ranging from physical to spiritual, a notable reduction from Disco’s 24. Thankfully this feels more like a consolidation than a loss by virtue of many of Disco Elysium’s skills feeling a bit redundant, especially in the motorics category. Instead skills are separated by physical, metal, and spycraft. This simplification works towards Zero Parade’s biggest switch up from the original, stress. As you unravel the secrets sewn throughout Portofiro 91 you will encounter and build up stress in three distinct forms: Fatigue, Anxiety, and Delirium. Build up too much and you will compromise one of the corresponding categories, losing points in some of your precious skills until the end of the day.
Individually these systems would improve the simplistic health system of its predecessor and increase readability, but in tandem the revamped skills and stress drastically improve moment to moment gameplay. Now any conversation or encounter could be a major hurdle to your playthrough if it builds the wrong stress at the wrong time. In practice, Disco Elysium was effectively a visual novel that just hid certain passages from you if you didn’t meet a skill check. By incorporating such a simple system into nearly every encounter, Zero Parades has the potential to be a far more reactionary and engaging game.
It’s a system that reminds me of the Hardcore mode additions in Fallout: New Vegas. There, players were forced to engage with new mechanics built around sleep, hunger, and hydration. The reality of these systems were needling debuffs every once in a while, but the flavor they added to my adventures in the Mojave felt complex and fulfilling. I recall early in a playthrough imagining my Courier in a moment of crisis locking himself in a hotel room for a week, drinking down the dozen or so bottles of vodka and bourbon I’d acquired in my travels, then waking in a mad dash to the sink because I was nearly dead from dehydration and having to try and balance my radiation intake from the faucet. It’s a defining moment of not just my time with New Vegas but one of the best moments I’ve had in all my time gaming and the thought of interlacing those systems with the dense narrative of Disco Elysium is a tantalizing prospect.
The potential in the mechanic seems strongest in the “Delirium” category, the one that governs the mental faculties of our fair CASCADE. Done properly, the Delirium mechanic could open up disassociating episodes where the game can more directly and surreally attack the player. It’s a tantalizing idea and one I’m hoping isn’t just wishful thinking. In my pre-release build, Zero Parades has some mismatched dialog and text, a standard problem with games of this type and one that could be completely removed by a forthcoming launch day patch. But on some level I can’t help but feel some of this is intentional, a way to try and trick the player into disassociating along with CASCADE.
The only major foul up I’ve seen in my time with Zero Parades is in the humor. It’s not that Zero Parades isn’t funny, most of the jokes land pretty well, but in my time with it I can’t say I saw anything half as funny as what Disco Elysium managed to stuff into its starting area. Part of this is the tone of the work has shifted into a more Cohen Brothers comedy of errors rather than the Thomas Pynchon absurdist slapstick of Dick Mullen and Co, which may be the only time a “Coen brothers” comparison could be taken as unfavorable.
Another part is simply the sluggish pace of an RPG. When you’re a hungover amnesiac sloughing your way across town the slower pace of the days and conversations feels natural, but Zero Parades feels like it should be moving at a breakneck pace. I can imagine the opening scene of Zero Parades as it was written was meant to be frantic, like Vincent Vega finding Mrs. Wallace OD’d in Pulp Fiction, rather than the lumbering awkward scene it came out as. One aspect of this is due to CASCADE’s characterization as the real deal in spycraft, where as our Disco Detective was an obvious fuck up to anyone with eyes. It’s significantly harder to wrench the same kind of cringe pathos out of your lead when every other person stops to notice just how slick they are.
This is the only place I found the writing wanting however. Zero Parades paints a vivid and unique world, tinged in the same bizarre psuedo-scifi of its predecessor. Familiar terminology is augmented and used in unexpected context. Operants from the Opera, dopplegang and technoflex, familiar and alien phrasing that tantalizes the ear. The world of Zero Parades feels sharp and woven even without a major exposition dump about its political situation like we got with Revachol. Its characters feel real and eclectic, its conversations easy to get swept away in.
In the years after Disco Elysium’s success developer ZA/UM saw a loss of major talent that prompted a question: was Disco Elysium the product of an auteur, or a collective? I’d hope after an evening with Zero Parades I’d have the answer, but of course the truth was more complicated. While Zero Parades lacks the blitz of lightning strikes that sears Disco Elysium into the players cerebellum, it shows potential to blossom into something grand, and I can’t say I’ve disliked anything I’ve played. Instead, the biggest winner so far seems to be the format. Disco Elysium may have accidentally produced the perfect framework for a dense novelesque approach to game narrative, the next step of the visual novel. Even if Zero Parades doesn’t fulfill its potential, it seems certain to open the floodgates to the new future. The Question now is, will we know them as Paradecore, or Disco Likes? God help us.
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies releases May 21, 2026 for PC (Steam, Epic Games Store, GOG). Smash Jump has received a pre-release version for preview and review. Please stay tuned for our review of the full game.
