Zero Parades: For Dead Spies Review

Zero Parades: For Dead Spies grew in the long shadow of ZA/UM’s critically successful Disco Elysium, a 2019 narrative CRPG hit. Disco was bold and strange, expanding the boundaries of what a point-and-click isometric game could be when it eschewed tactical combat for something more squishy and weird. It added elasticity to a well-trodden space and was deeply welcome for a decades-old style of game. ZA/UM experienced afterward a very public implosion with the “involuntary departures” of some of its key creatives: Helen Hindpere, Robert Kurvitz, and Aleksander Rostov. There were messy allegations from the trio about financial wrongdoing on the part of the studio and its CEO, and that wreckage threatened to overshadow the studio’s massive success. That context is unavoidable, but Zero Parades is not just a referendum on ZA/UM after Disco Elysium. It is a story about aftermath, The End of History, and the aching want around shedding past failures. There are still people at ZA/UM