24.10.2026, 15:00
ReviewPolygon
One of 2026’s Best-Rated Games Is Basically Mass Effect With Spies
This week's news that EA was shutting down Mass Effect developer BioWare and canceling the next game in the series was a blow to the industry.
From ZA/UM comes ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies – a story-rich espionage RPG. You're a brilliant but tormented operant on a desperate assignment. Pick up the pieces of your broken network, untangle a bloody web of intrigue at the End of History, and prove yourself on the big stage or blow it all up – again.
Brilliant, burnt-out, possibly cursed – you play as operant Hershel Wilk, alias CASCADE. Five years ago you led your team into the abyss and have been haunted by your failures ever since. Now you've been recalled for a mysterious assignment that may give you a chance to prove yourself again. Fulfil the demands of your assignment by hunting down secrets hidden within the architecture of both the city and the human mind. Collaborate and clash with informants, loyalists, and agitators. Pass skill checks to get them to open up and improve your abilities with the experience you receive. The choices you make affect everything: the loyalty of your friends, the paths you can take, and the fragility of your mind. Find yourself thrown into a three-way struggle for cultural and ideological power, played out across an unforgettable city. You'll go up against international bankers, foreign techno-fascists, psychic doppelgängers, a paranoid TV presenter, a man with a box for a heart, and dozens more. Everyone you meet has their own agendas, beliefs, and secrets for you to uncover and turn to your own ends. In ZERO PARADES, even the world itself is a character with its own secrets, traumas, and miracles for you to discover. Operants go through years of training to learn how to hone their minds into a weapon. Do you favor heightened reflexes, an analytical approach, or perhaps a charismatic angle? Conditioning lets you reinforce Hershel’s thoughts to construct her identity and unlock new ways forward. It’s our snappier successor to Disco Elysium’s Thought Cabinet, you are not only investigating the past, you are shaping the future. Employ a variety of different skills to gain the upper hand in unexpected confrontations with your antagonists. Tactical View pauses time so you can assess your moves and analyse moments ahead of time, as you clash across the urban stage. Will you play it safe or risk it all? The dice decide your fate but a bad roll isn’t always the end – though it will definitely hurt. Pressures simulate the physical and psychological toll of being an operant. Exertion pushes skill checks with dice rolls in your favour – just remember that you’re gambling with your life. Keep your Fatigue, Anxiety, and Delirium in check or face the deadly consequences. In this line of work you're going to fail way more often than you succeed. That much is expected of you. What matters is how you pick yourself back up. If the dice don't go your way (and they won't) you'll have to improvise and hope the consequences are ones you can live with.
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Unified technical telemetry aggregated from Steam, Valve Steam Deck, ProtonDB, PCGamingWiki, and IGDB.
| Langue | Interface | Audio complet | Sous-titres |
|---|---|---|---|
| Russe | |||
| Anglais | |||
| Allemand | |||
| Spanish (LatAm) | |||
| Simplified Chinese |
Official minimum and recommended hardware configurations.
Top helpful player reviews pulled directly from the Steam open registry with verified playtime hours.
It isn't Disco Elysium, though it's more than fair to compare the two. Many people who worked on Disco worked on this game, and the effort to improve gameplay systems is apparent; this is a better *game* than Disco Elysium, when it comes to the actual playing, because of the improvements to the dice rolls, the exertion system, the dynamic action sequences, the game's thought cabinet. and so on. Is it as well written as Disco Elysium? I think that's the wrong question. Disco Elysium is a philosophical and political exploration of what it means to be human, disguised as a police procedural. Zero Parades is a "spy" narrative that's really a story about... well, that's the thing. I can't really say the story is about one thing, because it isn't. There's moments of genuine philosophical interest (the motif of "bootlegging," creating derivative works, and the uniqueness of expression vs. mas
It often feels like a sincere effort to recapture some of what made Disco Elysium special. Still, it has plenty of depth, is clearly well made, and proved well worth playing. Its biggest challenge is simply that Disco Elysium set an impossibly high bar.
Reviewing this game on it's own merits comes with a big asterisk because of the drama that went down after the release of the studio's last game, Disco Elysium. Following the release of that game, investors took control of Za/um and several of the game's leads were pushed out of the company. With lead writer Robert Kurvitz and lead artist Aleksander Rostov alleging that the acquisition was made illegally using money taken from the studio's own funds. Money which did not belong to it's majority shareholders. A lot of things happened after this. Some people left, a lot of other people got fired. A game development and publishing company being bought out by investors is quite common in this industry. That does not mean the creators deserve to lose control of their company or especially the Disco Elysium IP, but there's been a lot of misunderstanding and hyberbole around this topic and a l
TL;DR Yeah, Zero Parades delivers for people willing to give it a fair chance. I am part of the crowd that thinks ZA/UM should not parade (he he) Disco Elysium's corpse around as a selling point for this game, but I also think people are doing the game a disservice by dismissing it because of that. The game has some issues. It throws a ton of exposition at you, quest and journal tracking can be buggy, achievement tracking is unreliable, and the OST never quite reached the same heights as the rest of the game's art departments for me. That being said, the worldbuilding is fantastic, the characters are incredibly memorable, and as someone from South America, seeing a game so heavily inspired by Latin America and its history was honestly surreal. There is a lot of genuine passion and heart put into this game, and despite its flaws, I think it's absolutely worth your time if you're into
Let me start with what works: the detective gameplay is genuinely excellent. I'd argue it's mechanically stronger than Disco Elysium. The core loop of piecing things together is satisfying and the art direction is outstanding throughout. But the narrative side let me down in ways I want to talk about, because I don't think this game is bad I just think it's uneven in ways that matter. The world is weirdly hard to understand For how text-heavy this game is, I came away knowing surprisingly little about the actual world and its history. You get enormous amounts of dialogue from individual characters about their personal circumstances, but concrete information about the setting itself feels almost deliberately withheld. Some of the names and factions are so ornate that I genuinely couldn't keep track of who was who even 20+ hours in. A lot of quests go nowhere Several side stories build
zaum is scum, check Tangerine Antarctic and Hopetown - upcoming games by former Disco Elysium devs. that being said however, zero parades is indeed a good game.
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