Zero Parades: For Dead Spies Is Inseparable From the Mess Behind It

There is a moment near the beginning of Zero Parades: For Dead Spies where your handler orders you to abandon the mission and return to the Freezer — the bureaucratic purgatory where disgraced operants are sent to wait out the rest of their careers in quiet irrelevance. CASCADE, the spy you play as, has just arrived in Portofiro. Her double is catatonic in an armchair, the mission is already compromised, and the sensible thing, the institutional thing, is to go home. She ignores the directive and stays.

It is a small act of defiance against an institution that has already failed her once. It is also, depending on how much you know about ZA/UM’s recent history, one of the more uncomfortable moments I have spent in a video game in a long time.

Let me explain.

The Studio That Made Disco Elysium No Longer Exists

Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is the new game from ZA/UM, the studio behind Disco Elysium. If you are reading a piece like this, you probably already know what happened there: in 2022, the studio’s business executives forced out several of the key creatives behind Disco Elysium, including lead designer and writer Robert Kurvitz, writer Helen Hindpere, and art director Aleksander Rostov. Kurvitz has alleged that the executives raised the money to acquire a controlling stake in ZA/UM by stealing from the company itself. One of the producers involved had previously been convicted of investment fraud. After the firings, two writers who stayed on (Argo Tuulik and Dora Klindžić ) were given the green light to develop a standalone Disco Elysium story called Locust City, only to have it cancelled in 2024 before they were laid off alongside roughly 25% of the studio’s staff. Tuulik noted that the layoffs primarily targeted women and team members who had raised complaints about working conditions. Only around 35% of the people working on Zero Parades contributed to Disco Elysium. The rest of the original team has scattered across four separate studios, each working on their own games, each carrying their own piece of the world that Kurvitz had been building since he was a teenager in Estonia.

I am not going to pretend that any of this is irrelevant to the experience of playing Zero Parades. It isn’t. And the game, perhaps inadvertently, keeps making it impossible to forget.

Zero Parades is explicitly a game about communist politics, institutional loyalty, and what happens when the people and structures you trusted betray you. CASCADE is a spy for the Superbloc, a union of communist nations, who was burned by her own network five years ago during a mission that ended with six assets lost and her reputation destroyed. She has spent the intervening years in the Freezer, exiled from the field by the institution she gave everything to. Now she is back in Portofiro, the city where it all went wrong, trying to figure out what happened and maybe, if she is lucky, make it right.

It is genuinely interesting material. The world ZA/UM has built for this game, a Cold War-esque struggle between the communist Superbloc, the techno-fascist La Luz, and the neoliberal world bank EMTERR playing out in the cramped city-state of Portofiro, is exactly the kind of politically serious setting that made Disco Elysium feel like something more than entertainment. The ideological factions are not abstractions. They live in the texture of the city: in the children who can’t go to school because the system has been privatized, in the record salesman who sells media he despises because he has no other choice, in CASCADE herself, a true believer in a cause whose institutions have already failed her once and may be about to do so again.

Disco Elysium had a character named Joyce who explained capitalist realism to Harry Du Bois: the idea, drawn from the theorist Mark Fisher, that capital has the ability to absorb all critique of itself, to take any challenge to the system and fold it back into the system’s own logic. It is, in Fisher’s framing, easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. I kept thinking about Joyce as I played the Zero Parades demo. Because what ZA/UM has produced is a game about the betrayal of communist ideals, made by a studio that allegedly betrayed the workers who built it, published under the banner of the very institutional power those workers lost. If that isn’t capitalist realism in action, I’m not sure what is.

What the Game Actually Does Well

The game is interesting. That is the honest thing I can say about it, and it feels important to say it plainly rather than let the controversy swallow the work entirely. The Dramatic Encounters, which turn pivotal moments into tense, branching sequences of skill checks and decisions, are a smart evolution of the formula. The pressure system, which tracks CASCADE’s fatigue, anxiety, and delirium and punishes over-exertion with permanent skill reductions, captures something true about what sustained stress does to a person. Portofiro is a city I want to spend more time in. The writing, while it does not consistently reach the heights of Disco Elysium, is doing real work, and the people who wrote it are clearly talented.

But interesting is not the same as excited. And I notice, sitting with the demo, that I cannot quite get to excitement. Every time the game earns a genuine reaction from me, something pulls me back. It is not that the work is bad. It is that playing it feels like being asked to separate the art from its context in a way that the art itself keeps refusing to allow. A game about loyalty and institutional betrayal, made in the aftermath of a real institutional betrayal, about communist ideals, produced under conditions that may have been their antithesis. The game keeps handing me the tools to critique it.

The demo was free, and I played it willingly. Whether I’ll buy the full game is a question I genuinely haven’t answered. Part of that is the controversy. Part of it is a quieter uncertainty: whether any team, however talented, can recreate what made Disco Elysium a masterpiece. That game felt like something that could only happen once, under specific conditions, with specific people. Most of those people are no longer at ZA/UM. What remains is clearly capable. Whether capable is enough is something I won’t know until the full game is in front of me — and I’m not yet sure I’ll be the one to find out.

I don’t know if that is a flaw or the most interesting thing about it.

What I know is that I will play the full game when it releases. I will do so with genuine curiosity and with the same discomfort I felt in the demo. CASCADE defied her institution and stayed in Portofiro because leaving felt like surrender. I understand that. I’m just not sure yet whether staying, in this case, is an act of faith or one of complicity.