Hershel Wilk (codename: Cascade) is in over her head. No, that’s an understatement. The spy at the center of Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, developer ZA/UM’s espionage RPG, is so far out of her depth that it wouldn’t be worth endangering a rescue party to retrieve her. She would only bring down the ship by trying to thrash her way onboard. Even within the first few minutes of an assignment meant to redeem her after a notorious failure, she’s so hopelessly lost that the idea of her getting popped on the job begins to sound like a mercy. Cascade is a terrible spy, and Zero Parades is a terrible spy story. So why is it just as impossible to put down as the brainiest thriller?
Rewind the tape. Study the evidence. Zero Parades is the sophomore effort for ZA/UM, the developer behind Disco Elysium. The studio has been at the center of its own tangled mystery for years, after two of the key creatives behind Disco Elysium were ousted from the art collective in 2021. Even with extensive reports and documentaries surrounding the drama, it’s still a case with too many missing pieces. Somewhere in that mess, however, several of the remaining Disco Elysium developers at the studio got to work on a follow-up. It would be another narrative RPG cut from the same cloth, but something entirely new: A story about one spy’s quest for a second chance after betraying her comrades.
If you’re a super sleuth still searching for clues, you could easily read Zero Parades as a coded cipher hiding the missing key to the ZA/UM story. All I have is the game in front of me, and that tells me that Zero Parades is an absolutely absorbing mystery that lies somewhere in the cross-section between geopolitical thriller, comedy of errors, and humanist tragedy. When it’s not trying too hard to retrace Disco Elysium’s signature, Zero Parades excels as a complicated story of a perpetual fuck-up desperately searching for redemption.
A lot of spy stories start with some kind of briefing. Someone’s been assassinated or evidence of a mole within British intelligence has been discovered. It’s up to a capable spy to unravel the mystery. Zero Parades immediately makes it clear that we’re not following the formula. The story opens with Cascade, a spy working for the shady Opera (Zero Parades’ version of MI6), hopelessly lost. She wakes up in a room above a photo shop only to find that her partner for her new assignment has been “zeroed” out, lying pantsless in a comatose state. A call to her handler yields no explanation about what’s going on. Instead, the voice on the other end of the phone insists that Cascade get the hell out of the fictional town of Portofiro before learning why she was dispatched there in the first place.
The opening scene is a hysterical shitshow that sets the stage for what’s to come over the next 20 hours of compounding confusion. Zero Parades isn’t the story of a brilliant super spy, though one of its greatest jokes is that it allows you to think it is for a while. The choice-driven dialogue system always gives you the option to play it cool, characterizing Cascade as a smooth talker and a sharp thinker. I took that bait — hook, line, and sinker — when I put my first skill points into Personalism and Poetics, brainy stats that would play into the RPG’s dice-driven skill checks. I thought I was making a charismatic persona for Cascade, but I was actually creating a disguise. And one that became increasingly less convincing as the circus unfolded.
When I posit that Zero Parades is a terrible spy story, I mean that as a high compliment. Zero Parades is an inversion of an espionage thriller rather than a send-up of one. Its writers have said that the game was inspired by the works of John le Carré, the novelist behind The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. That inspiration is very apparent, drawing on le Carré’s heady style of methodically plotted mystery rather than James Bond’s sexy brand of globe-trotting danger. There’s one major difference between le Carré’s mastermind spy George Smiley and Cascade, though. Smiley is always three steps ahead of you; Cascade is always three steps behind you.
So, what actually is going on anyway? Cascade only learns what her assignment is after going through an exposition-heavy few hours that require a lot of patience. Portofiro is engaged in a form of intellectual warfare with La Luz, another nation whose greatest export is insufferable pop music and propagandistic wolf cartoons. Multiple sects are vying for cultural power in Portofiro, possibly including some of the Opera’s old foes. Cascade’s assignment — that she has no real choice but to accept — is to assemble a crew and put a violent wedge in the conflict.
Though slow to start, Zero Parades does a stellar job of establishing its fascinating world early. It hangs in a tantalizing middle ground between realistic and fantastical. There are shades of familiar European history, but there’s also an ephemeral cassette format that deletes its contents as you listen to it. Cascade winds up on psychedelic side-trips between chats with bazaar vendors about bootleg merchandise. It’s just enough outside of reality that when someone tells you their conspiracy theory that an abandoned rocket silo is being used to make dolphin-human hybrids, you believe it could be true.
Like Disco Elysium, Zero Parades wades into some dense politics. Communism, neoliberalism, and techno-fascism are all invoked in a story about how some political battles are fought in ideological battlefields. As much as those discussions helped turn Disco Elysium into a well of screenshottable one-liners, they’re the weaker link in Zero Parades. Sure, the discussion is lively, but it doesn’t always feel like it’s in service of Cascade. Quips about the bourgeois often feel like they exist because that’s what ZA/UM is known for, so, of course, that signature needs to be present. That feeling is unshakable early on, as Zero Parades retraces a lot of Disco Elysium’s steps, even when they don’t seem to fit. Some jokey dialogue options that players can choose feel especially odd for Cascade, like they exist more for social media bots that repost quotes rather than deliberate character development.
But the longer I played Zero Parades, the more it began to reveal itself in engrossing ways. Set the grand political theater aside, and you have a remarkably human story about Cascade. Early on, you learn that she’s haunted by a cowardly act of self-preservation and needs this assignment to redeem herself — especially because she’s going to need the help of her old crewmates to pull it off. It’s less of a spy thriller and more akin to someone returning to their hometown and dealing with the mess they left behind.
And oh, what a delicious mess it is! The sick pleasure of Zero Parades is in seeing just how much everything has gone to shit and figuring out how much of that is Cascade’s fault. That’s the real mystery you’re solving. A dastardly layer of chance-based RPG systems only makes that juicier. You can play Cascade as cool as you want, but she will screw up in spectacular ways. Even if you try to optimize your stats, there are too many to fully cover. An easy skill check will inevitably fail, leaving Cascade floundering through a cover story. The fun thing about a tabletop RPG is that every player is kind of a screw-up sometimes; there’s just no graceful way out of a critical failure. One mission required me to get into a rich local’s penthouse. Easy, all I had to do was get on the callbox and create a convincing cover. I beefed it so hard that the voice on the other end wouldn’t even humor me again. With no other option, I had to stoop to jumping through a window and causing a whole scene instead. Every time the dice don’t roll in Cascade’s favor, all you can do is pity her.
Sometimes it just feels like nothing you do is ever right, doesn’t it?
The narrative RPG systems are inherently at war with Cascade and her hopes at redemption. They’re the game’s primary antagonist, acting as an extension of her terrible instincts and utter incompetence. That starts with the fact that Cascade has meters that determine her level of anxiety, delirium, and fatigue. All of those can increase at a moment’s notice, because Cascade is a skittish disaster who is easily triggered thanks to her past screw-up. If you push your luck too much and one of those meters hits 20, Cascade has to lose a stat point. You have to force her to chill out — whether by sleeping, downing some alcohol, or petting a payphone dolphin mascot — so she can do her damn job.
She can also learn new skills, but each one comes with a downside. One boosted some of my stats, but also made it so I’d gain a disadvantage anytime I picked a dialogue option that expressed remorse. Not exactly the most helpful quirk to have on an apology tour, is it? Trying to shape Cascade into a better person while the game fights back at every turn morphs Zero Parades into a humanistic tightrope act. Sometimes it just feels like nothing you do is ever right, doesn’t it?
The choices you’re forced to make are antagonistic, too. In a video game like this, your relationship with the people around you is shaped by your dialogue choices. It’s only natural to lie to someone, or manipulate them in order to progress a quest. Usually you wouldn’t think much of it, but every decision stings here. You have to go through the work of earnestly apologizing to an old crewmate, knowing the entire time that Cascade’s end goal is roping them into another suicide mission that she can’t get a handle on. Forgiveness is always just out of reach, because you’re ultimately in a line of work that forces you to backstab your colleagues to survive.
The most gutting moment of my playthrough, where I began to see Zero Parades’ hero as more of a tragic figure than a slapstick one, was when I found one of Cascade’s abandoned colleagues holed up in town. Unexpectedly, her comrade was actually thriving. She had made a wonderful life for herself in spite of everything. In a clumsy act of forgiveness, Cascade decided that the best way to smooth things over was to write a very earnest apology on a tacky card. With my choices guiding her pen, she smashed it — one of the first assignments she truly completed. I felt a weight fall off my shoulders as my old friend softened up. Maybe redemption is possible for a career screw-up after all.
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When that conversation ended, I noticed a new dialogue option available to me. With my friend having somewhat accepted my apology, I now had the vulnerability I needed to coerce her into setting up a crucial meeting for me. I looked at the tempting option, paralyzed. It would be an immediate betrayal, but it’s for the greater good… right? I left her apartment, desperate to find some way to get what I needed. Anything but this. But the clock was ticking, and the pressure from on high was unbearable. I took the low road, absolutely acing the requisite dice roll for once, in a cruel bit of fate. The mission advanced and someone Cascade cared about lost all respect for her, permanently.
Was it worth it, Cascade? Letting your colleagues down just to hang on to your professional standing in the Opera for another day? Zero Parades knows that those choices aren’t always as cut and dry as they appear. When there’s always a gun aimed at your back, even the most disciplined spy is bound to crack eventually. Misinterpret a cipher and “betrayal” quickly becomes “survival.” They have the same number of letters, after all.
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies will be released May 21 on Windows PC. The game was reviewed on Windows PC using a prerelease download code provided by ZA/UM. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
