Are human beings mere flesh, delicate as the tape in an audiocassette, as the leaves on a tree? Or does each of us possess an everlasting soul, hidden away in some vast fortress of memory? Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, the second game from Disco Elysium developer ZA/UM Studio, gives both possibilities equal weight. It’s a story about emphemerality—of art, of nations, of people, of secrets—but also one about the untapped power of the human psyche.
The year is 96, as in double digits, the calendar having been reset to zero with the signing of a treaty that marked the so-called End of History. In his book The Wisdom of Insecurity, philosopher Alan Watts refers to the present as “the great stream, the eternal now.” For Watts, the future is an abstract concept of little use to us here in the material world. The fictional Operant Bureau of Zero Parades would insist otherwise; the future is all that remains, the tyranny of narrative history consigned to a past best left forgotten. This convenient framing probably serves the state well enough, but it rings more and more false as the story progresses.
As the player, you take on the role of Hershel Wilk, returning to “in-theater” work under the alias Cascade. You’ve spent the last few years in the Opera’s archival division, stewing in personal shame over your past failures, but now it’s time to get back to what you do best: espionage. The game allows you to choose between three character archetypes—Kinetic, Charismatic, Analytical—or build a custom spy all your own. I opted for the Charismatic class, but frequently found myself botching important conversations or choosing unthinkably cruel dialogue options as I navigated the colorful, diverse city of Portofiro in service of—the Opera’s communist state, yes, but personal missions as well. My early selection of skill bonuses (Shadowplay, Nerve, and Poetics) were largely out the window by the time my twenty-hour playthrough had ended.
So many role-playing games spoonfeed you with compasses and waypoints and fourth-wall-breaking warnings. Head that way. You’ll find what you’re looking for in this particular spot. Or: Are you sure you want to go through with this? This is not that sort of game. You’re one exhausted secret agent in a city brimming with powerful people, each willing to die for their respective geopolitical cause, TV personality, pop star, or preferred audio format. Members of Portofiro’s police force, the Guardia Municipal, are colloquially known as GMs, which has a secondary meaning in tabletop gaming. And though you might pray to martyrs and saints for clever stat boosts on occasion, the dice are your only true gods here. All this to say that Zero Parades challenged me, sometimes in the best of ways.
It begins with all the clichés of the spy thriller, true enough—a fractured mind puzzling through shards of the past, the crew you got killed—but its rich cast of characters and their various stories are bursting with the unexpected. (The year 91, when Cascade last worked in-theater, evokes the year the Cold War ended; Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible film was released in ’96. Five years is the same stretch of time Cascade spent in the Opera’s Freezer. Coincidence? Probably.) There’s almost no combat to be found here. To succeed, you’ll have to rely on your mind, like any capable operant, and explore every nook and cranny this tale of the New Weird has to offer. Leave no pixel unturned, take no character for granted, and cast aside your notions of main quests versus side quests.
Throughout my time with Zero Parades, I kept returning to the thought that this game’s structure is not unlike that of Mass Effect 2, where you gather your merry band of weirdos—friends old and new—for one big, possibly suicidal mission. Where it differed from Mass Effect 2’s shape, I found, was in its illusion of completeness. Every story beat, every roll of the dice, felt like a pocket-watch movement ticking inexorably toward one of countless possible conclusions, using every character, item, location, idea in a combination that felt wholly unique to this one playthrough. Sure, the game crashed on me once or twice due to this or that Unity Engine error. And, yeah, Cascade’s running animation would sometimes snag on a loop of “rubberbanding” as ZA/UM’s little clockwork city strained to keep up with my tomfoolery. That I could see the jagged edges, the marionette strings, the stage lights, the stitching, made them no less impressive. “Any flaw a man creates in the pursuit of his craft becomes a part of the craft,” says the game’s high-end tailor. “A mistake made by a machine is just a mistake.”
Portofiro and the baroque universe surrounding it—communists on-world, techno-fascists offplanet, and all manner of augmentoids and spooks in the immaterial planes between—can make for a dizzying read. As a frequent player of games like Morrowind and Fallout 4 and whatever the latest mind-numbing shooter happens to be, I struggle to get into slower-paced isometric RPGs. I can count the number of times I’ve played tabletop Pathfinder or Star Wars one-shots on one hand. But I grew up playing Bond and Mission games on the Nintendo 64 and watching the films that inspired them on VHS. As a teen, I read about Frank Herbert’s mentats and wrote my own science fiction, which I stored on floppy disks. Despite years of failing to get into Disco Elysium or Citizen Sleeper, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies feels like familiar territory.
Spycraft makes for an effective metaphor, too, especially when you’re living in perhaps the most individualistic country on Earth. On one hand, it’s a lens for examining the human mind, or a way to have characters blending in to the point of disappearance, like ghosts marching among the living. But there’s also the notion of the collective. Working for an agency like the Operant Bureau—or the CIA or MI6—means a level of self-sacrifice, organizing for the whole-cloth good of humanity (or a particular intelligence-gathering body). Whether you revere a given flag’s colors or despise them, I think most of us crave a sense of belonging: we want to be part of something greater than ourselves. The trouble, then, is discerning between what’s democratic and human and what isn’t.
Zero Parades can be a frustrating game now and again. Time creeps pretty slowly, while mission objectives might specify a certain time of day or night, and although you have to sleep to manage your Fatigue, Anxiety, and Delirium meters (no health bars or action points here), you can only sleep so often. The best way to pass the time in Portofiro is to take meaningful action. There’s a key image in the game, of a ginkgo tree planted near the town center, and one plot point hinges on waiting for its petals to fall. History has ended, says the Opera, and there is only the future. In life, however, poets and artists and even gamers see the leaves are always turning, forever dancing along with nature’s curious rhythms. Half a dozen gingko trees are known to have survived the bombing of Hiroshima; it’s believed some live for thousands of years.
For all that the game fought against me, luck and skill thwarting me in equal measure, I’m left with the distinct satisfaction I felt as every facet of this Rubik’s Cube twisted into place. Not to mention the bittersweet, moonglow certainty that I’ll never experience this or any game the same way again.
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