One of the most remarkable things a work of art can do is entice you to change your mind. Mental agility, surely, is a worthy virtue.
I changed my mind quite a bit while playing Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, an isometric role-playing game by the studio behind the celebrated Disco Elysium. I reassessed things I instinctively looked down on (pop music funded by a techno-fascist state). People I otherwise abhorred charmed me (until it happened, I never imagined that my character would go on a date with the person who tortured her).
In Zero Parades, players guide Hershel Wilk, a middle-aged communist spy, through the city-state of Portofiro, a place marked by its history of shifting political and economic ideologies. She has been going through a career slump.
Hershel is at a loss as to the nature of her assignment because the undercover colleague she was supposed to meet suffered a fatal injury while listening to a specially encoded disc. Her powers of projection are strong, though, and she finds herself in a safe house talking to her brain-dead colleague. “I once knew a spy, she was brilliant, erratic, cursed,” he tells her. “An anti-personnel mine in human form.”
The world of Portofiro is the battleground for influence between three regional powers. There is the Superbloc, a communist federation that would prefer to see the global status quo maintained; La Luz, a techno-fascist former colonial power looking to reassert its hegemony; and EMTERR, or L’Empire Sans Territoire, a banking consortium that has benefited from its grip on Portofiro’s economy.
La Luz hawks mass culture, with L-pop its chief cultural export, while EMTERR positions itself as the underwriter of a more highbrow enterprise, the local poetry magazine. Editors and a global pop star are some of the dazzlingly well-observed characters Hershel meets. Others include a warmhearted woman who runs a phone-sex line, a dictator’s son who raises profanity to art form and an unhinged doctor who you meet while he is trying to hang himself. (When I asked the doctor to set aside his noose, he replied, “Ha! I know false concern when I see it — three years in pediatric oncology.”) All of the characters, and Hershel’s inner monologue, are brought to life through superb voice acting.
Zero Parades also contains allusions to the work of Thomas Pynchon, John le Carré, Philip K. Dick and even William Empson. One of Hershel’s overarching goals is to reassemble her old spy network, the Whole Sick Crew, which is also the moniker of the ragtag group of aesthetes in “V.,” Pynchon’s first novel.
“In Pynchon world there’s always these kind of vast ungraspable conspiracies happening beyond the characters,” said Justin Keenan, the narrative director of Zero Parades. He added: “But he’s actually a very warm writer. No matter how grotesque or weird his characters are, you can tell he loves them.”
“I think that is something that is kind of in our bones,” Keenan said of the studio ZA/UM.
Another major touchstone for the writing team were le Carré’s spy novels, particularly “Smiley’s People,” where the protagonist has to meet people from his past, some of whom have left on bad terms and some of whom might have new allegiances.
“That felt very potent to us,” Keenan said. “It grounded whatever political or intellectual matters the game had in something very concrete and relatable.”
For a chorus of engaged internet users, Zero Parades was never supposed to be good, let alone great. ZA/UM had lost much of its original talent through a series of bitter lawsuits and layoffs. When Allen Murray, now its head of studio, joined the company in March 2024 it was on a Monday following a round of terminations.
“I’d say the team was pretty tender at that point of just sad and trying to figure out, ‘OK, what are we doing?’” Murray said, adding, “‘How are we going to pick ourselves up and move forward?’”
Like Disco Elysium, what helps give Zero Parades such a literary sensibility is how cleverly it depicts a consciousness moving through the world attended by all of its drives, attributes and shortcomings. Hershel’s equilibrium can be affected, for better or worse, by conversational choices, physical trials such as bartending — money is tight in Portofiro — and the drugs at her disposal. If her level of fatigue, anxiety or delirium spike she must sacrifice a skill point in one of her various attributes. (My favorites include poetics, which governs Hershel’s verbal dexterity and entanglement, i.e. her spooky sense.) Success in conversational or more vigorous gambits are connected to dice rolls.
The game’s mechanics reinforce the idea that Hershel is a fallible professional moving through a complex world with limited information. There is a conditioning mechanic — which features punchy videos — that allows Hershel to internalize thoughts and acquire corresponding attributes at the risk of running afoul of violations. Choosing the Ineffable Melancholy of L-pop, for example, can raise Hershel’s poetics skill but carries the risk of incurring an “intellectual disadvantage” strike on certain dice rolls if she shades L-pop.
Although there are a few turn-based action sequences, most of the quests in Zero Parades revolve around chatting with people and making decisions. One of Hershel’s first major challenges involves finding a way to a secret room in the office of the poetry magazine.
Keenan said the quest’s design was inspired by the flexibility that Elden Ring gives players in regard to how they can tackle obstacles. Elden Ring and other FromSoftware games are notorious for their opaque menu presentation and lack of direction, which he said influenced the development of Zero Parades. “The magic of the game doesn’t take place on the screen — it takes place in here,” he said, tapping his forehead.
“There’s no glossary to explain all the world building,” he added. “There’s no tool tips, or hyperlinks or anything like that, because the game only works if you are engaged with the text and with the world and the setting.”
It took time for the city of Portofiro to come together, said Ruudu Ulas, the lead producer on Zero Parades. For five months the developers worked with Konstantinos Dimopoulos, a consultant who helps developers create coherent urban environments.
“It was really, really important to know that this is not just a backdrop for our story to plop it in, but that it is a lived-in city,” Ulas said.
Asked whether there was a turning point during the development cycle, Ulas recounted several days in March 2023 that the team spent walking around Porto, Portugal, while taking pictures and talking about architecture.
Nearly two years later, in January 2025, Allen summoned all of the game’s developers to London for difficult conversation about the pillars of the game and what they wanted to portray through Hershel’s experience as a spy.
“Like the idea that this job will eat you if you let it,” he said. “How does that affect the psyche of the operant, how do we express that through gameplay?”
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is available on the PC.
