Disco Elysium’s spiritual successor can’t escape its phantoms

Zero Parades: For Dead Spies wants you to question the price of forgiveness. After leading a crew of spies through a failed operation, protagonist Cascade is willing to pay whatever amount is needed to reestablish contact not just with fellow agents, but with the friends she let down. After being “frozen” for five years and forced to do desk work, Cascade is sent to the city of Portofiro with an assignment and a chance to redeem herself. Zero Parades highly resembles Disco Elysium , the critically acclaimed 2019 RPG featuring a disastrous detective dealing with generational heartbreak and a hangover that split his psyche into dozens of voices in his head. On paper, this makes sense — both games were made by the same studio, ZA/UM. But the ZA/UM that released Disco Elysium and the one that exists now are very different studios. This is all because, over the last seven years, the current ZA/UM and some of its founding members, who were dismissed from the studio in 2022, have been in a seemingly endless dispute. It has involved a court ruling, allegations that ZA/UM stole the Disco Elysium IP from the people who were pivotal in its creation, alleged misconduct by key members of the team, the aftermath of what’s described as a grueling development driven by overtime, and community outrage deeming the people who are still at ZA/UM to be scabs, reportedly going as far as receiving death threats. Because of this, Zero Parades carries heavy baggage. …