Zero Parades: For Dead Spies

Zero Parades is a role-playing game, played from an isometric view of the various scenes. The player controls Hershel Wilk, a female operative under the code name Cascade sent to the town of Portofiro on a covert mission. Hershal can explore Portofiro and interact with objects and its residents to start dialog trees to learn more information and find useful gear. Similar to the main player-character of Disco Elysium, Harry Du Bois, Hershel has a split psyche, and rather than resolving conflicts through combat, the player instead makes skill checks against these facets of their psyche or other characters.^[1] Differing from Disco Elysium, the player can opt to exert additional effort, gaining an extra die on these skill checks, but at the cost of affecting one or more different stress levels on Hershel, such as anxiety. Other actions can also raise or lower these stress levels.^[1] Zero Parades also added "dramatic encounters", chains of events that the player must commit to one of several options at each step, often based on skill checks, to pass.^[1]

ZA/UM was formed in 2016 by Estonian novelist Robert Kurvitz to develop Disco Elysium based on his 2013 novel Sacred and Terrible Air, inspired by Planescape: Torment. The game set itself apart from other role-playing games in that it lacked combat, instead the player resolved encounters through skill checks made against the internal voices of Harry's fragmented persona. Disco Elysium won several year-end gaming awards,^[2] and is considered one of the greatest video games of all time.^[3][4][5]

Despite its success, there were several legal issues that surrounded ZA/UM after the release of Disco Elysium, during which Kurvitz and other founders of ZA/UM left the studio.^[6] ZA/UM initially planned to continue with development of prequel and sequels of Disco Elysium,^[7] but internal studio struggles lead to cancellation of these projects and additional layoffs.^[8][9] Of the remaining projects by 2024 was a mobile version of Disco Elysium and a unrelated project named C4.^[8]

ZA/UM revealed C4 as Zero Parades in March 2025, which ZA/UM said was not connected in story or setting with Disco Elysium, nor considered as a spiritual successor.^[10][11] Writers Siim “Kosmos” Sinamäe and Honey Watson said that unlike Disco Elysium which was a cop story, Zero Parades is a spy story, where there is necessarily no right or wrong action, making the game more suitable to the systems they had developed for it. Zero Parades was inspired primarily by the spy novels of John le Carré, which Watson said were more intellectual compared to James Bond, and about a person doing "sneaky, horrible things" as part of their espionage, and allows the player to opt to role-play more directly with Hershel.^[12] Additionally, the works of Ursula K. Le Guin and Thomas Pynchon inspired the story.^[12]

The game is scheduled to release for Windows on 21 May 2026, and for PlayStation 5 later in the year.^[13]