Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, A Review

Fri 29 May 2026

You: Some imitations can be more real than the originals.

Ultra Violetta: I don't think so. There's no such thing as a real imitation -- just an endless call and response, getting weaker by the round.

It's difficult not to compare Zero Parades to Disco Elysium. Everything from its watercolory high-detailed map and narrative tangents down to the very human readable code of the same engine that is calculating the same virtual dice throw is Disco Elysium. Not just a facsimile or Disco-like but literally, materially a new Disco Elysium. At which point it is my duty as a leftist to point towards the interpersonal fall-out between the creators of that first game, between the proletarian artistes and the hateful bourgeois after its release or, more importantly, its universal success. A story about how the money men in their insatiable greed not only wretched away the fruits of the Estonian artists' labour but their whole world - a world with which they, the Estonian artists, once tried to escape their own post-soviet, neoliberalised, and shock disciplined little universe.

This review contains spoilers for one major side character.

Which makes it difficult to say if Zero Parades is a true Disco Elysium successor or not. Of all the around half a dozen studios that formed after the implosion of the original ZA/UM studio, this one, the creator of Zero Parades, is still called ZA/UM and is still the owner and benefactor of the "intellectual property" that is Disco Elysium. Of course, the game boasts a new name, an entirely new setting, a new protagonist and cast, all of which has more to do with financial spite¹ than a manifest desire to create something radically new. On the other hand, everything is so much a photo-copy of Disco Elysium: it's setting within a rundown city that exists at the push and pull of international superpower forces, it's propensity to drop words like "fascism" or "communism" in a medium that is shockingly devoid of even naming ideology, it's noir genre and it's vanguard of state sanctioned violence protagonist, heck, even it's name!² But more importantly, it seems, this Schroedinger's video game situation is a wonderful Petri dish for The Discourse, with wild and hot takes abound and debates of how the ethical consumption under capitalism should finally be performed.

Which is as good a place to summarise the game's narrative premise as any: In Zero Parades you follow Hershel Wilk aka CASCADE, a disgraced Soviet spy who is re-activated after a botched operation to return to their former playground and make amends with their old crew - who because of her absence have been tortured or disgraced by the enemy - for one final clandestine assignment. All in all classic spy-noir fanfare. John le Carré would have been proud, potentially. In an effort to rub against the naïve anti-capitalist fantasy that would dictate a video game studio which ousted its main creative forces can only generate uninteresting slop, Zero Parades is a surprisingly great video game. It does manage to create an interesting story with surprising twists and a world that rides on the edge between intriguing historical parallels and cyberpunk fatalism. Most of it's mechanical iterations from it's predecessor - like a new split-second mode that you cannot "save-scum" the best result out of with believably high-stakes consequences - are a delight and mechanics that I would not want to miss in any Disco-Elysium-like CRPG in the future. Above all, it's writing is like its predecessor easily part of a very short list of video games that cherish the written word as much as any literature professor. Despite some irregular crashes and missing or wrong voice-over dialogue that I'm sure will be patched within some moon cycles, this game is an absolute delight to play. Finally a great game to play again. Like arriving in an oasis after living off the odd cactus.

And yet.

And yet, it is missing that je ne sais quois that elevated Disco Elysium from a great video game to something transcendent. Make no mistake, I do have my issues with the game, not least of which is its cop-centrism, but as I have brushed upon in my essay on the game, Disco Elysium is about more than just the neo-noir story of a murder within a historical materialist setting. That game's brilliance lay outside of these: it's endlessly enticing metaphysics around that which it called the Pale on the one hand and its extraordinary generousness with which it presented its side characters on the other. As I wrote in the essay: "Anyone who played this game can tell you of at least one or two characters that have stuck with them." Zero Parades lacks that. There is no Neha, the Novelty Dicemaker, no Billie Méjean, the Working Class Woman, no Isobel Sadie, the Washerwoman, all of whom were allowed to exist outside of Disco Elysium's grander plot or Harry du Bois' existential crisis. Which, again, isn't to say that the characters that do exist are badly written but that unlike Disco Elysium all the side characters in Zero Parades fall into two types: they play either an (in-)direct role within the larger plot of the game or they are mere caricatures of themselves.

Take, for instance, the Phantom Line Engineer who sits atop a radio-communications pylon idling away because his employer is demanding the impossible of him: either approve the pylon as-is which would lead to damages later for which he would be held accountable or send in a disapproval which would lead to his firing. And so he decides to do the only thing he thinks he can do which is to do nothing at all, sit atop the pylon and observe the going-ons in the Portofiran bazaar below. The engineer's tale is like a literary short story that enriches the game's whole world, a glimpse into the existence and soul of a fellow human being, the captured essence of our most human capability we call empathy. Disco Elysium would have kept it at that or maybe had thrown in an absurdist response by our chaotic protagonist. But Zero Parades uses his situation to point the protagonist towards a door on the far end of the bazaar that - if the player should disregard the engineer's bidding - leads to machinery Hershel can use for wiretapping and furthering the overarching story. This happens again and again. All side characters are entangled in the general plot of the game to some degree or are at least used as a vehicle to propel the action forward at the end of which the player can come away with a "Oh neat, this narrative tangent actually connects here." An unremarkable puzzle piece that adds nothing to the greater picture but at least gives us the satisfaction of wholeness when we can plop it into where it belongs. But this comforting unity comes at the expense of the characters: In Zero Parades people are always functional, they either benefit or directly hinder the player. From the game's point of view other characters might just not exist at all if they cannot accomplish that. We can see that on the streets of Portofiro that are adorned with countless people the player just cannot interact with as if they are simply part of the local scenery. All of those people potentially having an entire universe of knowledge, wisdom and experience to share but lacking an outline, a purpose.³

And when a side character's usefulness might seem too far-fetched or roundabout Zero Parades always knows that it can at least resort to making fun of them. Like Kurt who is a self-styled connoisseur of "the scene" and who - in his quest to make his outward appearance match his learned wisdom of "the scene" - got swindled into a predatory credit contract that the player can help him get out of. If they do, the end of this sidequest might see him taking up the mantle of communism (you know, to really stick it to capitalism). While I appreciate the game's commentary on the fictitiousness of credit and debt on the macroeconomic scale, Zero Parades focus in this sidequest is squarely on the personal shortcomings of the debtor and the money people than either one's interiority.⁴ 'Haha, stupid consumerist fool, should have taken more time thinking about the ramifications of signing a contract than how cool the new jacket might be,' completely missing that the young man's fixation on "the scene" in the adolescent attempt to form an identity is not a mistake of his own vain pursuits but merely capitalism doing exactly what it is supposed to do: presenting consumerism as the only means for generating belonging and social connection. Instead of a sidestory that humanises any of its characters it is merely making fun of people living within the contradictions of capitalist ideology. It would be a mistake to think that Disco Elysium was always super sincere and didn't know how to poke fun - or that all of its jokes and tangents always landed - but the difference here is that in Disco Elysium the butt of the joke always was either the protagonist or the player. For everyone else, especially its many, many side characters that were not part of either the investigation or the political machinations around it, Disco Elysium always had an enormous amount of generosity and sympathy.

This made me feel disconnected from the people in Portofiro. I just couldn't find myself to care for any of them, laser focused on furthering Hershel's assignment instead. But then I tried to make contact with the Whole Sick Crew. Hershel's former spy assets from five years ago, before the operation failure and Hershel's retirement in a lonely archive somewhere. By far the best writing in Zero Parades is reserved for the four survivors each of whom had to deal with the fallout in their own personalised way. The game tries really hard to make the protagonist feel bad for themselves and to impart on the player that she thinks she was the reason for shit hitting the fan. But it is in these moments of reconnection where these confusing and overlapping feelings of guilt, sadness, remorse and anger Hershel is constantly telling the player about are actually and manifestly brought to the fore. Zero Parades' wonderful trick here is that although the stories of what happened to them during the last five years is often cruel, it's not what happened to them that makes them human but how they tried to deal with it after. Even though I assume that no one reading this knows a disgraced spy, we all know people who tried to bury their traumas with drugs or work or pretensions of a happy domestic life or were hindered any future at all because health care or other social systems abandoned them. It is in these moments where the centrality of the player-protagonist slips into the background and the raw humanity of these fictional characters takes center stage. And then the game makes us let Hershel recruit them one last time, all over again. She truly, deeply loves everyone of her crew and would if she but could do anything for them. But as in any dysfunctional relationship the next bad repercussion is only waiting to happen. When the game distills itself into these stories of inter-personal dependencies it truly does shine brighter than Disco Elysium - with its meandering, borderline misogynistic reverence for the immaculate wife-mother-figure - ever was able to do.

Most surprising to me, though, is the difference between Zero Parades and its predecessor in their musical choices. Disco Elysium made the ingenious decision to contract the English alternative rock band Sea Power who created a unique sound landscape with immediately recognisable riffs and hooks. No one who played Disco Elysium is not immediately transported back to the snow covered, brisk sea front of Martinaise when hearing the opening horns of Instrument of Surrender or doesn't remember the warmth of the orange-and-green tiles of the Whirling-in-Rags when hearing the main melody of any of its three eponymous music tracks. Music has always been an integral part of video games and while a good soundtrack is not a strict requirement for a good video game it seems undeniable that a great video game invariably also boasts a great soundtrack. More than the visuals, the sound is what sets the tone of the scene and thus the overall game, just like the metric dictates the overall rhythm and sound of a poem. Sea Power's soundtrack moved the player from the melancholia of the ravages of globalised financialisation, to the youthful radicalism of a squatters' discotheque, to the up-beat lighthouse of community that is the Whirling-in-Rags.

Zero Parades barely features any music. Soothing synths meet unintrusive beats and sometimes jazzy horns, echoing somewhere in the distance. None of which is bad, far from it, but the sounds go to great lengths to be as much background as is physically and digitally possible. Even in moments that narratively place heavy focus on music - say the discovery of a song that might literally explode or meeting the scumsynth duo Un-Deux - the soundtrack keeps itself oddly in the background. The music is all serviceable, good even in its complexity but also unremarkable. Just like with the side characters the focus lies on Hershel and her mission, the world even the way it sounds is in service to that. Which makes it all the more fascinating that the studio's own insert, at least that of its writers', is a kidnapped-but-actually-asylum-seeking pop singer mega star by the stage name of Ultra Violetta. Think Taylor Swift by way of downtempo K-pop ballads explicitly created to expand the imperial interests of La Luz. Like when the CIA sponsored expressionism but using sci-fi technology so as to put the 'tech' into 'techno-fascism'.

But let's back up a bit and talk about the politics of this game. The macropolitical world of Zero Parades is separated into three superpowers: that of the Superbloc, a collection of communist countries supposedly akin to the former USSR and your spytastic employer, the Illuminated Empire of La Luz, the "techno-fascist" empire waging an open culture war against the others (and could, therefore, maybe be equated with the late stage US of A with all its Musks and Thiels and culture-imperial dominance on the world?) and L'Empire sans Territoire or EMTERR, a financial institution that Kaile Hultner so fittingly likened to "the IMF, WTO, G8/G20, Eurozone and World Bank rolled up into one."

Look, I have to be honest, I think this is all nonsense. It's as if the game is unsure if it wants to be a facsimile of the 1970s, the 2010s or 2020s, but even if we'd just accept that the Cold War had never ended and any form of Stalinist or Maoist communism had survived in the form of an international Bloc that still sends out spies into the field, the idea that the International Liberal Order that is represented by the EMTERR would and could have existed independently of one of the other players is, frankly, ludicrous: In our world one bloc perished because the other bloc established the world bank and its institutional allies. If we keep within the confines of historical parallels, EMTERR or "the Developed World" would have been propped up by either La Luz or the Superbloc. Unless, of course, unlike our world Zero Parades' witnessed the rise of a third superpower donning the mantle of techno-fascism - at which point it would become very difficult to even figure out what any of that is supposed to mean. As in: what would have happened if Nazi-Germany had stopped bombing Europe and committing genocide on an industrial scale and instead Hitler, Stalin and Roosevelt had signed a treaty of non-aggression to carve up the planet? And that's what caused Fukuyama's "end of history" 96 years ago?⁵ That would misunderstand that fascism is a maximalist death cult that cannot stop of its own accord until everyone including its high priests have been brought to the slaughterhouse. Unless "techno-fascism" here means something else entirely in a private language fallacy kind of way making all of this quite unintelligible. Zero Parades is either withholding crucial information that relativises its apparent international system or presents us with a history not based in any materialism, not even the "post-historical materialism" (whatever that is, the game does not seem to want to get into details) of its own Superbloc. In contrast, Disco Elysium's political world worked because it understood that ideologies are quasi-religious beliefs people do hold, consciously or otherwise, and that nation states are built around these beliefs so as to then in return indoctrinate their populace. An endless ouroboros of beliefs and contradictions. Zero Parades, to its detriment, uses our words to signal recognition (fascism = bad, communism = totalitarian, also spycraft, banks = also bad but not that bad) and to illicit an emotional response but without the thematic depth it risks sounding more like a leftist bingo card than a fantastic contemplation of who we are as a species, how we ended up where we are and what role ideology plays in all of that.

But regardless, this is fiction, and even though the game uses the same words we use to describe international relations and ideologies past and current and, well, history generally, the most sensible move would be to pretend that none of these entities really have anything to do with our own. The point here is that La Luz is an empire that boasts the greatest military and technological prowess and is only stopped in its inevitable imperial conquest of the world by the international Huis Clos situation provided by the other two bloc's existence. And so it resorts to a literal culture war that finances literature, art, music and most of all consumable things so as to slowly, but surely, shape the world in its Luzian image. Which brings us back to Ultra Violetta, the pop music sensation to end all music.

From the moment we are introduced to Ultra Violetta we are also introduced to the fact that she has mysteriously vanished. Rumour has it that she was kidnapped and so the speculation of course goes to international spy shenanigans or counter-culture revolutionaries. Only later do we find out that she was, in fact, not kidnapped but tried to flee La Luz and seeks asylum in one of the Developed World countries belonging to EMTERR. You see, one of Hershel's former assets became somewhat of a local crime lord (affectionately) and found a way to smuggle her out of the city. But how do you smuggle a cultural icon on the level of Taylor Swift or Beyoncé out without her being instantly recognised everywhere? After all, her image is plastered in 4x scale across billboards the world over. This is where Zero Parades more magical realist or at least sci-fi aspects come into play: the Luzians have built a way to transfer a person's identity on to another human being, making bootleg copies of one another. The idea was that Ultra Violetta's spirit would have been implanted into a local, young high school dropout to then seek refuge further away. Of course, things go sideways and now she is trapped in a backroom where she keeps composing new material on her keyboard. If only she could have been bootlegged.⁶

This is the key theme of the entire game: The work of art in the age of mechanical and digital reproduction. But unlike Walter Benjamin, Zero Parades is less interested in what gives art its metaphysical mystique but more interested in the bootleg, the what-comes-after, the post-historical material of the art. Or put differently: what does it mean to make a rip-off.

You have to commend ZA/UMs willingness to face the issue of Disco Elysium - that popular and critical darling that won a million or so awards - and its studios' public fallout with its creators so head-on. It was clear as day that any new game made by the studio would not only be compared with Disco Elysium but come under heavy scrutiny of whether it can bottle the proverbial lightning a second time. In fact, you are hard-pressed to find any review that does not draw the comparisons, let alone the whole Discourse within the black hole we call social media. And so the game makes the reproducibility of art the focal point of its world and spy story. It talks about self-destroying music discs that can be listened to only once,⁷ a bazaar filled with knock-offs of upmarket brands that are strategically disseminated by the same brands to increase their identity-promising allure, how sound reproduction can literally melt your brain, and the persistent rumour that the whole political caste of La Luz are literal photocopies of each other.

And then there is Ultra Violetta, herself. The game seems to be of two minds whether it wants to paint her as a replaceable and reproducible face for a culture imperialist ploy or the genuine artist who cannot but create, the material conditions under which it happens being altogether secondary. Of course, if we think about this a little longer we realise that the truth lies within the synthesis: Ultra Violetta knew the conditions of her success would lie not in opposition to the domineering forces around her but in her acquiescence. She decided to enroll in La Fábrica fully aware that she'd be churned out like hundreds of other acts to be the public leader of ideological warfare. For her services she was bequeathed material sufficiency and the ability to create her music unimpeached. As much as we might want to lift the moral finger and admonish Ultra Violetta for her collusion with empire this is often a far more difficult question when one is away from the comfort of the keyboard or the smartphone touch display. Is it the morally right thing to create popular art under capitalism when that by necessity means acceding to its conditions and reproducing the same exploitative circumstances, like a little spring in the clockwork of horrors? Or more concretely, would it have been the moral thing to do to quit in solidarity with Robert Kurvitz, Aleksander Rostov, Helen Hindpere, Argo Tuulik, Dora Klindžić, or any other unnamed member of the original Disco Elysium crew when the original ZA/UM studio inevitably broke down? Would you have risked your income after moving to one of the most expensive cities on earth to do that which you love while working on a Disco Elysium sequel on purely ethical grounds, with no social safety net and the extreme likelihood of losing your visa?

When you meet Ultra Violetta after finding out your former asset's involvement in her abduction escape she asks whether you are an 'Ultra' - the analogous term for an Ultra Violetta fan in the world of Zero Parades to our 'Swiftie' and 'BeyHive member'.⁸ The game indicates that she herself doesn't care for their most fanatical fans: "I think most of them focus on the wrong things," she explains to you. "These same people would erase me just so they could discover me all over again. Or kill me so I could never make a bad song, never get old, never be more or less than a dream beyond their reach... Fuck them." It is difficult not to interpret these lines as meta-commentary on the game's and the studio's existence after Disco Elysium. If you look around the steam reviews or any forum where lower- or capital-G gamers haggle their opinions you will find a substantial amount of people not even wanting this game to exist, rather wishing for a world where the entire studio had closed for some sense of carmic justice.

"What do you represent?" Hershel asks V. To which she replies: "The end of Culture, if you believe the critics. I'm getting out of La Luz. And out of my own shadow. I'm getting away from 'Ultra Violetta'." Near the end of the game Hershel, in her calamitous capacity to decide the fate of those around her, needs to make a decision: either provide V the means for her escape or sell her out to the techno-fascist empire that created her. Unlike other subplots, Zero Parades requires you to make this decision to move the story forward. It throws its unenviable position back to the player and asks: What do you think? Should this game be condemned to be seen as this paragon of greed, a billboard for our hate to throw at so that we can feel the infinitesimal catharsis of having done something against capitalism, or will you allow it an existence far away from here, in some other state where it might blossom or fall into obscurity?

In the end, the remaining and new creators at ZA/UM studios were never in the position Ultra Violetta finds herself in. They still labour within the material and ideological conditions that they have been since Disco Elysium's release and the studio's interpersonal fallout. They are still labelled class traitors regardless of how they have actually felt about their colleagues being fired or moved out or quitting. And they are still being exploited by those owning the machinery, the assets, the tools of their production, all the "intellectual properties", fully aware that it was them who came up with the names, the designs, the sounds of this whole digital world. Zero Parades is a great game that I had the pleasure to experience, even in spite of its technical issues and philosophical inconsistencies, because it achieves that which this medium is so uniquely qualified to do: Give you the immeasurable privilege to connect with seemingly real people and maybe, just maybe, do good by them this time. For that, the people working at the studio must be congratulated, celebrated even. But unlike Ultra Violetta, Zero Parades is a great game that never was able to move out of the shadow of Disco Elysium's grandeur.

fin

1. Apparently, the now publicly ousted lead-designer Robert Kurvitz and lead-artist Aleksander Rostov part-own the rights to any Disco Elysium 2 thus making it financially undesirable to ever create a literal Disco Elysium 2. ↩︎
2. "Zero" is an in-game euphemism for "death", so it's a "Death Parade". "Disco Elysium"—"Death Parade". Get it? Get it? ↩︎
3. There is, for instance, a teenager or maybe early twenty-something hanging around in front of the local bar with a punk mohawk (sideburns shaved razor clean) who lets out speech bubbles one of which is "Remember when that was a griefsludge bar" or "Since when are toilets only for customers?" sounding as though he speaks from decades of local wisdom. I would have loved to get to know this little punk more. ↩︎
4. Also, this sidequest is likewise a way to funnel the player to meet Oskar, one of the money men, whose connection directly furthers Hershel's operation. ↩︎
5. This "end of history" bit that is brought up multiple times is actually what makes me the most furious about Zero Parades' politics: Fukuyama's "end of history" was concerned with ideology now that the Cold War was over and Liberalism had won to reign supreme across the world. As problematic as his analysis was, it was about how the world will look now that there is one (1) ideological hegemon without any Other it can play off of. Zero Parades has three hegemonic ideologies. That is the opposite of an "end of history". This is a major misuse of terms that would net you a Fail in most PolSci classes. ↩︎
6. At least from how I understood it. The game here seems to be a little bit contradictory, not really knowing if the clone is the one who should escape or the original. I don't think it's that well explained and later in the game it definitely leans towards the latter but I feel like that's entirely for plot reasons with another character suddenly being of complete other minds about this whole thing. Look, the metaphysics of identity are complicated. ↩︎
7. Look, I could write multiple paragraphs about just this idea, about how this is both idiotic and genius from a purely capitalist-exploitative viewpoint, how it makes both fun of and provides a physical likeness to non-fungible tokens, about how Petre, the Format Fetishist's self-defeating and anti-solidary fascination with this format is exactly what lead to his abrasiveness and loneliness. The Einzeltone XR is an incredibly good concept! ↩︎
8. 'Ultra' is also a term for a fanatical association football fan with a propensity towards violence, although they'd probably explain to you the intractable differences between 'Ultras' and 'hooligans'. ↩︎