Following up a game as lauded as Disco Elysium can be an unenviable task for any developer, but especially one as fractured as ZA/UM. With lots of the key creative minds behind the detective RPG separated from the studio following an unpleasant, and really public, legal dispute, it’s as much as those left behind to choose up the pieces. That is plenty of baggage to hold going right into a brand-new, albeit familiar, game, so it is not surprising how ZA/UM has tried to distance itself from too many comparisons with its previous hit.
As a spy thriller, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies largely strikes a distinct tone than Disco Elysium. Facets of it are still inescapably familiar, nevertheless, and it’s this looming shadow–and sense of imitation–that prevents it from matching the identical highs as its spiritual predecessor. Yet there are also enough fresh ideas for it to face by itself two feet, even when its footing is barely uneven and fewer creatively distinct.
Zero Parades’ opening does little to quell the comparisons as you get up on the ground of a small, dirty apartment. Hershel Wilk, codename Cascade, is here on an espionage mission. That is as much as each you and he or she know. The groggy spy was speculated to get more details from her mission partner, codenamed Pseudopod, but he’s permanently indisposed–you find him unresponsive and sitting in a chair in his underwear, overlooking the town of Portofiro through the apartment’s grimy first-floor windows. Rummaging through his pockets reveals an invoice for socks and a business card that simply reads, “All you would like is a miracle.” Determine the remainder on your personal, agent.
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