Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is the new release from The Studio But Very Decidedly Not The People behind the popular visual novel with extra steps, Disco Elysium. I won't go over the details of the studio's history after Disco Elysium's release, mainly because, if you're here, you've probably heard it before. But the short of it is: After DE's release, most of the games creative team was forced out and Zero Parades was made almost entirely by a new team.
Now, I suppose, the new team had two options: Make something completely different and try to avoid any direct comparisons to Disco Elysium, or try to make a worthy succesor and hope that the comparisons to Disco Elysium will be at all favourable. They, either confidently or naively, went with the riskier of the two options. Zero Parades is a game that presents itself as an iteration on Disco Elysium. The art direction is nearly identical, the interface ist nearly identical, the skill system is nearly identical.
What is it about, then? Well, the player assumes the role of Hershel Wilks, code name CASCADE. Hershel works as an operative for the foreign intelligence agency of a declining communist coalition. Having been condemned to office work for multiple years after botching her last job, she gets assigned back to the field, specifically to her old territory, the city state of Portofiro. Arriving there, however, she finds her designated partner in a catatonic state after listening to a mysterious audio record, unable to brief her. So it's on her to figure out what happened to him, what her mission is and, ideally, how to execute it.
Zero Parades, aware of its status as a tribute to a game widely considered a classic, has a rather metatextual preoccupation with the concept of authenticity. The city of Portofiro, you see, has a flourishing scene of bootleggers. One of its primary location a bazaar selling counterfeit products from the Techno Fascist Empire of La Luz, a powerful nation treated by Portofiro's citizen with a mixture of resentment, on account of being its former colony, and admiration, on account of its advanced technology and prolific cultural exports. It ruminates a great deal on whether a copy can live up to its original and whether it should and whether something original can be preserved at all through the process of iteration. And whether a copy can, dare they say it, surpass the original.
Now, before we ruminate on these questions, let me preface the actual critical part of this review by saying that Disco Elysium isn't as sacrosanct to me as it seems to be to a lot of people. It's a game I like quite a bit. It's fairly smart and fairly witty and more political than most modern games have the guts to be. But I think it's also kind of up its own ass. I like to compare it to Terry Pratchett's later City Watch novels, if they had been written by someone who's half the writer Sir Terry was while having the pretense of being twice the writer he was. I felt it consistently undercut its own mournful, down in the gutter atmosphere with overly verbose, overly flowery dialogue and narration and its attempts at insightful social commentary with goofy, cartoony caricatures that aren't as hilarious as they should be for how much you have to listen to them.
Certainly by design, Zero Parade shares many of Disco Elysium's slightly annoying writing quirks. Once again the run down, crime ridden slum you find yourself in just happens to be a place where every random back alley drunk is full of clever witticisms and esoteric political terminology, half of which is made up, the other of which sounds like it is. Once again about half of the characters feel like fully realized people and the other half like irritating cardboard cutouts of whatever type of person the writer felt annoyed by that day. Once again some of the dialogue and narration is so overly verbose that you regularly have to cut through a thicket of ten dollar words to understand what it's on about. Once again, I feel like the writers are simply trying a bit too hard. Which isn't to say that the writing in Zero Parade, or in Disco Elysium, for that matter, isn't good, but I can't help but scrutinize it because I very well know that Zero Parades writers, moreso than Disco Elysium's, are about my age and have a frame of reference very close to my own.
I can't deny it, I'm a pavlovian dog. I have a reflexive impulse to soyface when a game drops terms like "Interzone" or "The Whole Sick Crew" in its dialogue, before the dopamine hit fades and I realize I'm being pandered to. Moreso than Disco Elysium, which was written by someone a bit older and a bit more immersed in the local Eastern European literary scene, Zero Parade feels written by and for exactly the demographic of bitter, aging hipsters, overcultured but undereducated, that I belong to. Which, frankly, shouldn't earn them that much of my good will by itself. See, I have to admit, I sometimes indulge in the vice that are gacha games and after having experienced games like Reverse 1999 or Limbus Company that can't help but go out of their way to rub in your face just how gosh dang literate they are, that sort of thing simply shouldn't impress me anymore. Everyone can do it.
While all of that surely sounds mighty critical, Iet me put away the stick and let me pull out my carrot for a moment. In a lot of ways, Zero Parades is actually quite good. Frustratingly good, honestly. In some ways I would have preferred it falling flat on its face for the insolence of attempting to follow up Disco Elysium after stiffing most of its creative team. Not because I'm especially attached to Disco Elysium, but because I simply don't want to reward that sort of behaviour. Which is why I got my digital copy of this game off the digital back of a digital truck rather than buying it at the digital store. But, honestly, despite everything, it's a strong game. Derivative of Disco Elysium as it is, similar Dieselpunk setting, similar fictionalized, but clearly real word adjacent political landscapes, it never feels phoned in.
Much like DE, ZP treats its backwater setting as a microcosm for clashing philosophies. In this case Communism, which has become poorly maintained, mired in bureaucracy and falling short of its ambitions, Fascism, which is technologically advanced and efficient and has all the hip fashion and the popular music and the cool gadgets and Capitalism, which is ubiquitous enough that it can treat itself as an immutable force of nature. Maybe not even a microcosm, exactly, as it eventually becomes the scene of certain geopolitical events. Much like Harry, Cascade is a miserable pile of regrets, except with less of the denial. What differentiates it from its spiritual template is... well, for one the fact that it's a better spy thriller than Disco was a murder mystery. Which, I'm aware, was the point, but ZP is much more successful at actually presenting you with a mystery. Much like the Pynchon novels it takes some of its inspiration from, it's very good at giving you the feeling that, surely, once you follow this lead to its end, you'll finally understand what's going on, only to find out that the person the lead ends with is either dead, or disappeared or a clueless idiot. I also feel like the character writing or, rather, the character relationships are overall stronger and more emotional than they were in Disco Elysium, with the exception of the relationship between Harry and Kim. I also feel the late game, that "now to clean up all the loose ends before starting the last act" part is less tedious and the actual finale more climactic than that of the previous game.
So, as someone fond of, but not completely enamored with, Disco Elysium, I would say Zero Parade matches and, dare I say it, even surpasses it in many regards. Matter of fact, if it weren't for the circumstances, and if I didn't know this was made by an entirely new team, I'd probably quite confidently say that it's a net improvement on the first game. And I get the impression that that wouldn't be an uncommon opinion. But considering it is what it is and we know what we know, well, that doesn't feel very good to say, does it?
Zero Parades new writers have certainly proven themselves to be more than capable of carrying the torch and I genuinely do wish them the best and moreso, wish them they won't be treated as disposable, like their predecessors were. But likewise, in an industry that likes to treat its actual artists and creatives as interchangeable, where some would and will and likely already have replaced them with machines, it's important to remember that companies don't produce games. Companies don't produce anything. People do. So while I won't tell you that Zero Parade is a bad game, I'm not willing to recommend buying it either. I want to express my solidarity with the people responsible for it as much as I want to express my solidarity with the people responsible for Disco Elysium and my hope that one day they'll be able to practice their craft free of the arbitrary whims of the managerial class.
Now, I suppose, the new team had two options: Make something completely different and try to avoid any direct comparisons to Disco Elysium, or try to make a worthy succesor and hope that the comparisons to Disco Elysium will be at all favourable. They, either confidently or naively, went with the riskier of the two options. Zero Parades is a game that presents itself as an iteration on Disco Elysium. The art direction is nearly identical, the interface ist nearly identical, the skill system is nearly identical.
What is it about, then? Well, the player assumes the role of Hershel Wilks, code name CASCADE. Hershel works as an operative for the foreign intelligence agency of a declining communist coalition. Having been condemned to office work for multiple years after botching her last job, she gets assigned back to the field, specifically to her old territory, the city state of Portofiro. Arriving there, however, she finds her designated partner in a catatonic state after listening to a mysterious audio record, unable to brief her. So it's on her to figure out what happened to him, what her mission is and, ideally, how to execute it.
Zero Parades, aware of its status as a tribute to a game widely considered a classic, has a rather metatextual preoccupation with the concept of authenticity. The city of Portofiro, you see, has a flourishing scene of bootleggers. One of its primary location a bazaar selling counterfeit products from the Techno Fascist Empire of La Luz, a powerful nation treated by Portofiro's citizen with a mixture of resentment, on account of being its former colony, and admiration, on account of its advanced technology and prolific cultural exports. It ruminates a great deal on whether a copy can live up to its original and whether it should and whether something original can be preserved at all through the process of iteration. And whether a copy can, dare they say it, surpass the original.
Now, before we ruminate on these questions, let me preface the actual critical part of this review by saying that Disco Elysium isn't as sacrosanct to me as it seems to be to a lot of people. It's a game I like quite a bit. It's fairly smart and fairly witty and more political than most modern games have the guts to be. But I think it's also kind of up its own ass. I like to compare it to Terry Pratchett's later City Watch novels, if they had been written by someone who's half the writer Sir Terry was while having the pretense of being twice the writer he was. I felt it consistently undercut its own mournful, down in the gutter atmosphere with overly verbose, overly flowery dialogue and narration and its attempts at insightful social commentary with goofy, cartoony caricatures that aren't as hilarious as they should be for how much you have to listen to them.
Certainly by design, Zero Parade shares many of Disco Elysium's slightly annoying writing quirks. Once again the run down, crime ridden slum you find yourself in just happens to be a place where every random back alley drunk is full of clever witticisms and esoteric political terminology, half of which is made up, the other of which sounds like it is. Once again about half of the characters feel like fully realized people and the other half like irritating cardboard cutouts of whatever type of person the writer felt annoyed by that day. Once again some of the dialogue and narration is so overly verbose that you regularly have to cut through a thicket of ten dollar words to understand what it's on about. Once again, I feel like the writers are simply trying a bit too hard. Which isn't to say that the writing in Zero Parade, or in Disco Elysium, for that matter, isn't good, but I can't help but scrutinize it because I very well know that Zero Parades writers, moreso than Disco Elysium's, are about my age and have a frame of reference very close to my own.
I can't deny it, I'm a pavlovian dog. I have a reflexive impulse to soyface when a game drops terms like "Interzone" or "The Whole Sick Crew" in its dialogue, before the dopamine hit fades and I realize I'm being pandered to. Moreso than Disco Elysium, which was written by someone a bit older and a bit more immersed in the local Eastern European literary scene, Zero Parade feels written by and for exactly the demographic of bitter, aging hipsters, overcultured but undereducated, that I belong to. Which, frankly, shouldn't earn them that much of my good will by itself. See, I have to admit, I sometimes indulge in the vice that are gacha games and after having experienced games like Reverse 1999 or Limbus Company that can't help but go out of their way to rub in your face just how gosh dang literate they are, that sort of thing simply shouldn't impress me anymore. Everyone can do it.
While all of that surely sounds mighty critical, Iet me put away the stick and let me pull out my carrot for a moment. In a lot of ways, Zero Parades is actually quite good. Frustratingly good, honestly. In some ways I would have preferred it falling flat on its face for the insolence of attempting to follow up Disco Elysium after stiffing most of its creative team. Not because I'm especially attached to Disco Elysium, but because I simply don't want to reward that sort of behaviour. Which is why I got my digital copy of this game off the digital back of a digital truck rather than buying it at the digital store. But, honestly, despite everything, it's a strong game. Derivative of Disco Elysium as it is, similar Dieselpunk setting, similar fictionalized, but clearly real word adjacent political landscapes, it never feels phoned in.
Much like DE, ZP treats its backwater setting as a microcosm for clashing philosophies. In this case Communism, which has become poorly maintained, mired in bureaucracy and falling short of its ambitions, Fascism, which is technologically advanced and efficient and has all the hip fashion and the popular music and the cool gadgets and Capitalism, which is ubiquitous enough that it can treat itself as an immutable force of nature. Maybe not even a microcosm, exactly, as it eventually becomes the scene of certain geopolitical events. Much like Harry, Cascade is a miserable pile of regrets, except with less of the denial. What differentiates it from its spiritual template is... well, for one the fact that it's a better spy thriller than Disco was a murder mystery. Which, I'm aware, was the point, but ZP is much more successful at actually presenting you with a mystery. Much like the Pynchon novels it takes some of its inspiration from, it's very good at giving you the feeling that, surely, once you follow this lead to its end, you'll finally understand what's going on, only to find out that the person the lead ends with is either dead, or disappeared or a clueless idiot. I also feel like the character writing or, rather, the character relationships are overall stronger and more emotional than they were in Disco Elysium, with the exception of the relationship between Harry and Kim. I also feel the late game, that "now to clean up all the loose ends before starting the last act" part is less tedious and the actual finale more climactic than that of the previous game.
So, as someone fond of, but not completely enamored with, Disco Elysium, I would say Zero Parade matches and, dare I say it, even surpasses it in many regards. Matter of fact, if it weren't for the circumstances, and if I didn't know this was made by an entirely new team, I'd probably quite confidently say that it's a net improvement on the first game. And I get the impression that that wouldn't be an uncommon opinion. But considering it is what it is and we know what we know, well, that doesn't feel very good to say, does it?
Zero Parades new writers have certainly proven themselves to be more than capable of carrying the torch and I genuinely do wish them the best and moreso, wish them they won't be treated as disposable, like their predecessors were. But likewise, in an industry that likes to treat its actual artists and creatives as interchangeable, where some would and will and likely already have replaced them with machines, it's important to remember that companies don't produce games. Companies don't produce anything. People do. So while I won't tell you that Zero Parade is a bad game, I'm not willing to recommend buying it either. I want to express my solidarity with the people responsible for it as much as I want to express my solidarity with the people responsible for Disco Elysium and my hope that one day they'll be able to practice their craft free of the arbitrary whims of the managerial class.
