Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, much like ZA/UM’s predecessor Disco Elysium, starts in a room. A small slice of paradise is getting worse by the minute. There are differences, though, the most obvious being that this time you are a spy rather than a cop. Ironically, the confusion as you try to get your bearings remains. Cascade was meant to meet a contact here. Instead, the mission has already gone sideways when they discover that the person they were meant to meet is instead catatonic, not alive but definitely not dead.
If you put your time into Disco, you probably know what’s coming. The player is thrust into an investigation where they are basically at the center. Wandering the room, you will have the option of interacting with most everything, like a pair of pants hanging in the bathroom with a clue that might be in it. Before beginning, there are choices of archetypes, or a custom set if you are feeling brave, with nearly every action having a hidden dice roll controlling it. In most cases, whichever way you go, there isn’t much effect in getting a hidden understanding in a dialog tree.
This being said, the Zero Parades either hates me or I made a mistake in creation, as the first few major dice roll options ranged from a chance of failure to serious failure. For the most part, this doesn’t punish you for taking a chance and failing, but leaving free experience points and lore on the table never feels good. This is offset by the return of the depth of absurdist dialogue, courtesy of the returning voices of no reason. This is represented by each metric you can feed experience into, making how skilled you are with points along the bottom of each.
One thing I learned early on is that one of my least favorite elements, the lead character’s mental state, was altered slightly to be less punishing. Reminder that in the prior game, our cop protagonist could literally go insane within a few bad transactions, resulting in a game over. Finding yourself in a situation like the one in that room, it makes sense that nearly every revelation leads Cascade to an increase in anxiety. Seriously, I could not catch a break.
This wasn’t what inevitably drove her state over the threshold, though, as there was a red CD I could play on the radio. There was no sound, only a +2 to my delirium. I was CONFIDENT that if I chose to listen 6 more times, eventually I would crack this case wide open. Nobody could have possibly seen each listen raising my delirium as I and the voices in my head could tell something was wrong, but since I failed my dice check, nobody could place a finger on it. These three mental attributes correlate to several minor skills, and maxing out the bad thoughts causes a debuff for a period of time. Much less harsh, much more fun. There is always humor in failing a simple knowledge check and being shamed for it.
I did eventually make it out of that room when the clues were gathered. Then I got sidetracked with fixing a fax machine, WHERE I GOT MY FIRST SUCCESSFUL DICE ROLL! Just call me the fax machine whisperer, because when I left the building, that machine was functioning. I also made a point to lie through my teeth about the state of the person in the room when our ally at the front desk asked. Telling her I tried to move him, had a bad dice roll, hurt my back, and left him face down ass up on the floor just felt like a bad idea. And so I moved to my next stage of the investigation, harassing people on the street.
The clues I found in the room pointed in several directions, to locations I had no idea how to actually find. This led me to talk to everybody I saw. You can ask them directions, which is easy, but in Zero Parades For Dead Spies, a simple conversation can turn into a novel real quick. For instance, I ask the line worker on the side of the road for directions, only to get pointed in the right direction. 20 minutes later, I was familiar with the man’s time living on the moon, so it was time to move on to what his job is. Hopefully, I will have enough dice luck to learn how to repair the wires for him. I’m a helpful sort when lady luck permits.
As best as I can tell, the title of the game, the Zero Parades part, refers to a send-off spies get when they retire. Whether this is an actual parade or a metaphor is unclear (at least in the first few hours), but as the name implies, should you fail and die in your service, you do not get such a parade. Before the events of the game, your character was in the ‘freezer.’ It SOUNDS like this is a real freezer; your character was frozen, so they are getting their bearings throughout as this is their comeback tour. Your character may have been on a farm upstate, though, as much of the dialogue refuses to engage you at face value.
This is part of the fun, though; a normal conversation starts by talking about how busy a bar is, somehow moving into a discussion of communism. You get a multitude of choices to sort of shape your own philosophy for things, but if you lack the imagination, the ability to gain thoughts and ruminate on them, it can lead to a shift in your abilities. And yes, they are just as weird as you might think. I am currently thinking hard on the quest for IT, and thanks to an internal dialogue… I am still no closer to figuring out what IT is.
One of the things I absolutely love about Zero Parades is just how bizarre it is for a supporting quest to just sort of crop up. You are knee-deep into talking to some guy, trying to figure out what happened to the gentleman back in that room. The one you try hard not to think about, the state you left him in. Suddenly, it just comes up. You get the pop-up, and the title is just so odd; even with the context, you need context for the context. You are still a hapless idiot in some regards, so even as these become something tangible, the dialog can still humorously drag you away and spit out your focus, or even just distract you with further rabbit holes.
It’s not always background chatter, though. The bartender clearly required help, so I bused some tables and then discussed the home team. In both cases, my anxiety went down, that thing that never happened after work in my life. It’s a reminder that it is extremely hard to gauge which choices will lead to changes in your mental state. Backend minor rolls, should they succeed, might offer some context clues, like showing the bartender had a reaction to one team and none to the other. Others, a snide remark and a guessing game at best. I’m not convinced that some options really even change that, but it’s the fun of a game like this. I might go back and make different bad decisions just to find out.
The risk-reward of conversations is that you gain most of your experience in them. That makes this system, I feel, deeper. Now these effects risk debuffs that follow you to the next conversation or to a skill check when interacting with an object. If you stick through it, though, a discovery will reward you not just with renewed purpose and the ability for self-improvement. One of the things I loved about Disco Elysium was that much of its ‘combat’ was actually a battle of wits, trying to suss information out of people by distracting them Columbo-style with menial talking points. There is a lot more of that in Zero Parades, and while not billed as a successor or a sequel, it is a lot of the same in the best way possible.
At the time of writing this, I am only about three hours in and working slowly. My issue with high dynamic games of choice is I’m always afraid to choose wrong and piece together I’m on a bad route too late. Zero Parades: For Dead Spies makes failure fun, though. Hell, it’s downright charming sometimes. By the time you realize every choice was wrong, you have already moved on, content with the trail of discourse you left in your wake.
I think there is a conversation to be had about whether this reaches the heights of its predecessor. There were zero expectations there compared to Zero Parades, drawing obvious comparisons. That’s a tomorrow conversation, though. This is everything I love about the formula. A meta-analytical cluster playing out with Shakespearean timing, and I am buckled in for the ride.
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