ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies Review – Familiar But New

When I think about spy fiction, I always think about slow-paced stories that focus on the tension that a spy might feel, sometimes punctuated with bombastic action sequences as the spy in question heroically jumps away from an explosion after having successfully completed their mission.

Aside from a few examples, the genre has largely stayed the same, and seldom have we seen it take a more serious look inwards, with the characters questioning their work and the people they have chosen to ally themselves with. With ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies, developer ZA/UM is taking what it learned from its 2019 RPG Disco Elysium to tell a more introspective story that still doesn’t skimp on its more outlandish elements, be it the world, its politics, its people, or even just the strange circumstances you might find yourself in.

Let’s get this out of the way right from the outset, comparisons with Disco Elysium are going to be inevitable for just about every aspect of ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies. Unless you were intimately familiar with both games, for example, just glancing at screenshots wouldn’t allow you to tell the difference thanks to their closeness in art style. Even in gameplay terms, the two RPGs have quite a bit in common, from how its core skill check system works, right down to how your character’s skills act as companions in any situation.

Aside from that, ZERO PARADES isn’t simply just a case of the studio giving us more Disco Elysium. It tells its own story in a brand new setting with a new, diverse cast of characters, and even the gameplay has seen a few changes. The most interesting and important distinction between the two titles, however, is the protagonist.

You take on the role of Hershel Wilk – a spy with a storied history of espionage behind her. However, due to an (at first) unnamed incident, you were put into the proverbial freezer. Now that several years have passed, the agency once more needs your capabilities, and the story kicks off with one of the strangest conversations I’ve ever experienced in a video game. And I was instantly hooked. You are activated by a fellow agent, referred to by many in the story as your “Double”, who goes by the name PSEUDOPOD. Referring to you with your own codename, CASCADE, PSEUDOPOD tells you that, despite your previous failures, the world still needs you, and you have a larger role to play in upcoming events, leaving you with the simple phrase, “what will happen has already happened.”

Without giving you any more direction than that, you wake up to find PSEUDOPOD in a strangely comatose-adjacent state. His body is with you in the room, and he still has a pulse. However, he doesn’t seem to respond much to your attempts to interact with him, and even with all the skill checks I could try, I got little more out of him than some grunts and drool pooling at the edge of his lips. And this is where my favourite thing about ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies brought itself into sharper focus – the stat system.

The idea to let each one of your stats essentially act as full-fledged party members that you can have entire conversations with based on specific topics felt like genius when I first saw it in Disco Elysium, and ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies has only made me double down on this opinion. Rather than having to deal with simple stats like in other RPGs, like strength or intelligence, ZERO PARADES instead breaks these outs into more abstract concepts. For example, the thought in your brain that you are part of the country you live in and work for is Statehood, and it’s the voice in the back of your head that’s always telling you to toe the party line and give your all for the country. When you find yourself needing to peruse your own memories, on the other hand, you’ll have conversations with your Records stat.

"Comparisons with Disco Elysium are going to be inevitable for just about every aspect of ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies."

All in all, there are 15 of these stats categorized into three “Faculties” – Action, Relation, and Intellect. Action has all your physical stats, like Shadowplay, which governs your sneaking ability, and Doppelgäng, which is the equivalent of your physical strength. Relation is how you see yourself and the world around you, with stats like Nerve, the steadiness of your own mind, and Blueprints, your knowledge of the city. And finally, the Faculty of Intellect includes skills analogous to your character’s intelligence, which can range from your capability with technology, governed by Technoflex, or your deductive reasoning capabilities with Grey Matter.

As you would expect, each and every single one of these 15 stats has its own distinct personality, and the writing for them tends to be so clever and distinct that you’ll never confuse your Personalism for your sense of Statehood, for example, since one is quite clearly about your own humanity, while the other sees you as little more than a cog in the larger machine that helps the country function. These stats being voices you hear in your head also helps to further flesh out Hershel as a character, while also giving the player more tools to change her outlook on the world, and potentially, the ultimate fate of the story.

ZERO PARADES doesn’t really have any combat, per say. You will find yourself in many situations that require you to succeed at skill checks, and the system governing these is quite simple. Using an early example, fixing up an old broken-down fax machine, you get a target number you have to hit based on the difficulty of the action, and there can be more modifiers applied to this target number depending on the situation. How high is your Technoflex skill? Did you read the manual? Do you even know where the panel to get into the guts of the fax machine is? Through this, the target number is calculated, and you can to see whether you succeed or fail.

While success in these situations is almost always a positive thing, failure is often an interesting outcome in its own right. Depending on the stakes of your current task, you might even take some “damage” across three distinct health pools, Fatigue, Anxiety, and Delirium. The first represents physical damage and fatigue you might feel. The second deals with your general anxiety about the world and the situation around you, and the third has you start questioning your sanity in moments of intense pressure. As you rack up “damage” across the three pools, hitting the maximum of 20 with any of them gives you a serious consequence: reduce one of your skill’s levels by 1.

Thankfully, there are other ways to recover your health, from simply taking a nap to reduce anxiety, to finding a doctor to help with your fatigue, or even just simply getting your hands on some drugs that will lower your delirium.

"While success in these situations is almost always a positive thing, failure is often an interesting outcome in its own right."

Aside from making you better at certain tasks when you raise a skill from the experience points you gain throughout ZERO PARADES, the skills also start shaping Hershel’s personality at large. Invest heavily into Statehood, for example, and the idea that Hershel doesn’t really have any humanity of her own starts creeping into just about every conversation you can have. Similarly, raise your Records skill to give yourself a perfect memory, and you’ll start thinking that there are people from your past out to get you around every corner, with each face in a crowd seemingly strangely familiar.

This emphasis on player agency also has its downsides, however. While a journal keeps track of all of the quests you might have taken on, you don’t really get much in the way of handholding. Rather, it’s up to you to find clues that might give you your next lead. While great for encouraging a sense of exploration for some players, others might find themselves feeling a bit lost in the city of Portofiro.

ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies is an incredibly interesting RPG that raises quite a few interesting questions about not only its own story, but also the current state of the world. A spy drama that has more of an emphasis on the drama than it does on sneaking around, ZERO PARADES is a phenomenal achievement for the RPG genre, and while it may have Disco Elysium to thank for laying down the foundations on which it was built, the RPG succeeds on its own merits quite handily, and is an easy game to recommend for just about anyone that might be even passingly interested in a narrative-focused adventure with plenty of player agency and twisting pathways throughout its story.

This game was reviewed on PC.