Zero Parades Hands-On Preview: A Complex Spy RPG Hiding in One Giant Shadow

Zero Parades Hands-On Preview: A Complex Spy RPG Hiding in One Giant Shadow Southeast Asia Home Amazon Deals Pro-tips by Codashop PC PS4 Xbox One Nintendo Mobile Entertainment EsportsMoreSearch Home More About IGN SEAContactAdvertisePressUser AgreementPrivacy PolicyCookie PolicyRSSIGN Southeast Asia is operated under license by Media Prima Digital Sdn Bhd (199901014126) Change Region United States United Kingdom Australia Africa Adria Serbian/Croatian Adria Slovenian Benelux / Dutch Brazil China / 中国 Czechia / Slovakia France Germany Greece / Ελλάδα Hungary India Israel Italy / Italia Japan / 日本 Korea / 한국 Latin America Middle East – English Middle East – الأوسطالشرق Nordic Poland Portugal Southeast Asia Spain / España Turkey / Türkiye world.ign.com Register / Login Register / Login Login Register Zero Parades Zero Parades Hands-On Preview: A Complex Spy RPG Hiding in One Giant Shadow IGN's extended look at the new game from the Disco Elysium studio. This post might contain affiliation links. If you buy something through this post, the publisher may get a share of the sale. By Matt Purslow  Updated: Feb. 19, 2026, 9 p.m. Related reads:MapleStorySEA Celebrates 20th Anniversary With Massive Summer Updates Hershel Wilk awakes in a small, dirty apartment in the city of Portofiro. Why she’s here, she does not know. Her mission objectives were supposed to be provided by her partner, codename “Pseudopod”, but he’s unresponsive – he just sits there in his underwear, staring at nothing, his senses on lockdown. In his pockets are an invoice for socks and a lipstick-printed business card that simply reads “All you need is miracle.” More like thisOpen Back Headphones: A Sound Experience Like No OtherIt’s not just Hershel who needs a miracle. Developer ZA/UM needs one, too. Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is an espionage RPG that follows the playbook of the studio’s previous game, Disco Elysium, incredibly closely, right down to opening on a confused protagonist in a run-down room. It’s another high-concept, combatless, dialogue-driven game about following threads and investigating leads. But capturing lightning twice is no easy feat, and simply repeating Disco Elysium’s triumphs is no guaranteed road to success. Thankfully, there are fresh ideas here that expand and evolve ZA/UM’s formula, making for what appears to be, on the surface, a more traditionally accomplished video game, but potentially at the cost of crafting a less interesting artistic creation. I recently spent around six hours with Zero Parades, playing through the entire upcoming Steam Next Fest demo, plus a significant amount beyond it. That meant exploring a wide section of Portofiro, a vibrant hub of criss-crossing cultures, painted in shades of Central America and Southern Europe. It’s made up of six districts, stretching from docklands, through a central marketplace and winding back alleys, and up to a hillside housing project. While perhaps small by traditional RPG standards, this is a much larger playspace than we saw in Disco Elysium, and that’s not just reflected in your step count. The city is alive. Rather than a decaying echo of times gone by like Revachol was, Portofiro is active. Every street is home to an oddball with their own strange perspective and, often, their own weird problem in need of solving. In the “Bootleg Bazaar” you’ll find two children transfixed by Sixty-Six Wolves, a cartoon that seems suspiciously like foreign propaganda. A few stalls down there’s Petre, a “Format Fetishist” obsessed with a type of vinyl record that wipes itself clean after a single play. Further up the road, you’ll bump into Kurt, a man so consumed by the need to follow imported fashion trends that he’s landed himself in crippling debt. Each is a window into a place where personal obsessions are the tools through which sinister powers manipulate the world.I will, of course, need to play Zero Parades to completion to judge if its writing around this and other topics can match the unbelievably lofty heights of its celebrated predecessor. And I understand if you’re skeptical – ZA/UM’s controversial firing of key Disco Elysium creatives in 2022 has left many fans wary of both the studio’s management and the current team’s ability to craft something as meaningful. Based on my experience of this demo, though, I feel positive about the writing’s quality, with the odd caveat. The skills, for instance, which once again form the pieces of your fractured psyche and comment on your choices and the world around you, lack defined voices and feel largely interchangeable (with the exception of Statehood, which bellows your home country’s party line in all-caps). But when it comes to the city’s collection of strangers, it appears the current writing team has successfully penned a cast possessed of a similar blend of literary prose, otherworldly Lynchian vibes, and off-kilter political humour. And, as I cross-referenced their tales with those of others, I began to paint a picture of this deeply troubled world, where techno-fascist superpowers, communist republics, and investment banks battle for power, using secret police forces as knives and pop culture as rifles. Portofiro begins to feel like a Venn diagram of multiple overlapping quests, much like the cities of Baldur’s Gate and Athkatla.Finding my place among all that initially felt overwhelming. As a spy, it’s my job to be a disruptor, to exploit those tensions for the gain of my home state. But, as previously mentioned, Hershel has no idea what her mission is. You simply need to talk and talk and talk until you find the threads relevant to your objectives, and there is no shortage of people to pull them from. But soon I began to see the connections. A representative of EMTERR, the world’s super bank, could be the starting point for solving Kurt the fashionista’s financial woes. A group of grizzled veterans impatiently waiting for their turn to dial into the “Miracle” sex line suddenly makes that business card I discovered make sense. And the suicidal Dr. Gonza’s medical know-how could diagnose Pseudopod’s condition… but first I’ll have to bring him the teeth of a medical board “narc” to halt his hanging attempt. As you collect these leads, Portofiro begins to feel like a Venn diagram of multiple overlapping quests, much like the cities of Baldur’s Gate and Athkatla did in BioWare’s seminal Infinity Engine RPGs.While Disco Elysium certainly shared some DNA with the classics, it held many traditional RPG ideas at arm’s length. Zero Parades is less shy about being a video game. That feeling starts with the increased size and scope of its city, but is cemented in its more wholehearted embrace of regular skill checks and, importantly, building a gameplay system around failing them. You have a trio of pseudo health bars – Fatigue, Anxiety, and Del