“Since the last round of EMTERR ‘stabilisation’, they’ve been trying to force us lifers out,” the phantom line engineer tells Zero Parades protagonist Hershel Wilk. “We can’t be fired, not easily, but they can take away the work that made us stay in the first place,” he continues. “I have two options. I could falsify my reports and declare line 9 safe for construction anyway, or I could quit. Either way, the company can’t lose.”
Approximately 15 minutes later, I’m talking to a monkey sat atop a pile of goods in a random abandoned house. “YOUR PRESENCE IS WEAK. FATE DELIVERS ME AN UNWORTHY ADVERSARY,” it says, before declaring its name to be the KING OF TRADE. Immediately, one of voices in Herschel’s inner chorus, dubbed Statehood, starts shouting back about needing to defeat the forces of capitalism.
Both of these are scenarios I ran into while playing the Next Fest demo of the spy CRPG finally emerging from ZA/UM, following years of reported bad times and discord at and around the Disco Elysium studio. Both of them feel simultaneously like encounters you could plausibly have run into in the original Disco, and like they could just as easily be pale imitations dressed up to resemble that first game’s much quoted trenchcoat of surrealist detecting.
My brain’s spent most of the demo wedged in the space between those two extremes. On one hand, judging Zero Parades on its own merits is important. On the other, it’s hard not to think about Disco Elysium when playing a game that resembles it so closely. Statehood is the one that shouts the loudest, roaring communist diatribes as if Karl Marx’s complete works have been fed into the mind of original Disco’s Half Light screeching, but the voice inside Zero Parades’ spy that best mirrors the world around her is Doppelgäng.
The opening hours, which you’re let loose on in the demo, resemble a Freaky Friday-esque reversal of Disco’s start. Rather than being the amnesiac waking up from a whirlwind meltdown, Wilk begins by walking into the scene of one. Her spy partner, portrayed as a fairly buttoned-down and sensible type, lies slumped and unresponsive in a chair in his flat. Thus begins a rush to discern what’s happened to him and what his assignment was, which resembles how Disco might have played if ever-calm and dependable sidekick Kim Kitsuragi had been the lead, rather than the invaluable support act to gifted but unstable protagonist Harry Du Bois.
Herschel, though, isn’t a Kim. She’s a Harry, something made plain when she’s given the option to do a terrible impression of her comatose partner when letting their spy agency know the tragic fate that’s befallen them. If anything, her partner’s a Kim. A physically nondescript middle-aged bloke under the sensibly mundane cover of a sock salesman. I can’t help but feel making Herschel a Kim might have fit better with the scenario flip, but the cynical side of my brain reckons she can’t be for practical reasons.
The appeal of Disco Elysium is in you being the Harry, and so Zero Parades must be interpreted through the eyes of a Harry too, if it’s to hit the same synapses ZA/UM are known for hitting. You can’t have a world of technicolour batshit revolve around someone capable of sorting a tax return.
Though, the early hours of Wilk’s tales aren’t as in-depth a reassembling of self-image and identity that the initially faceless and nameless Du Bois faces. Zero Parades establishes early on that she’s a spy for the Operant Bureau, born bourgeois on foreign shores but seduced somehow into joining the espionage arm of a communist state. Like Du Bois, her current state is defined by past trauma, in this case a mission gone wrong which saw her abandon her network of colleagues/mates, dubbed “The Whole Sick Crew”. Since then, she’s been in the doghouse with her spy agency, reduced to a lonely drudge filing files back at base.
The game flings her into Portofiro, a small cluster of districts which feels like a slightly more upmarket and less innately characterful version of Revachol’s decaying sprawl. There are industrial docks where weather-beaten workers patrol, a bustling bazaar of counterfeit goods, and a seedy section of streets dubbed Party Alley. There are music snobs to chat to, gangs of retired pilots to ambush, and at least one pay phone that serves as a direct connection to a 24/7 sex line. There’s also a quest based around some old men having gone missing, after a TV show hosted by a man with a bag on his head got them into investigating inane conspiracies.
Lurking hidden among it all are traces of the spy world in which Wilk operates, filled with mysterious and terrifying-sounding factions with names like the Weeping Eye. Those traces make the plot’s setup feel a lot less grounded that original Disco’s initially simple goal of solving a murder in a boiling pot filled with factions who are far more upfront about their purposes. There’s a union on strike. There’s a corporation trying to end the strike. There are various sub-groups caught in the middle to different degrees. Solve the thing quickly enough to minimise bloodshed. Zero Parades feels like it has a chance to expand the Discoverse’s complex and often whimsical web of background lore to a larger degree than the original did, but its challenge will be staying grounded enough in doing so to keep you invested in the nitty-gritty of Wilk’s situation while it weaves tales of nations and history.
The main example of it doing this well – and the section which felt most like ZA/UM moving away from well-trodden territory – was a sequence that closes out the demo. Wilk realises (or suspects) that she’s being followed. So she faces having to find a way to flee through the bazaar. As she approaches her apparent pursuer, time stops and you’re tasked with picking one of two ways to approach this initial slipping-past. As in dialogue, each way involves passing a dice roll-based skill check. I got through both checks required to clear the section first time, unsurprising given they’re heavily weighted in your favour. That was a tad disappointing, as I was keen to see what happens if these action sequences go wrong. Especially if they’re going to be a more regular fixture than in the original Disco, which employed its short bursts of in-the-moment set-piece action rather sparingly.
Another way Zero Parades aims to set itself apart from Disco is by adding more moving parts to the latter’s refreshingly simple health and motivation bars. Wilk has to juggle bars representing anxiety, fatigue and delirium. I can’t say tiredness had any tangible effect on my time with the demo, though that could be down to its short duration simply leaving little room for downtime. I didn’t seem to get all that delirious either.
The anxiety, on the other hand, did rear its ugly head, as stress from the early goings-on forced me to pick which of Wilk’s skills to lose a point from. Though, that too proceeded to remain quiet for the rest of the demo. As a result, at least in this snippet, Wilk feels less vulnerable than early-game Harry Du Bois. At no point did I feel as though any uncomfortable chairs were likely to be my sudden undoing.
Throughout the entire thing, however, I’ve felt the most mixed of feelings. At times, Zero Parades feels very much like a cynical imitator wearing Disco Elysium’s skin. At times, it feels like a game that could have the potential to excel in similar ways to its beloved predecessor or offer enough of a new direction to step out of the shadow of ZA/UM’s substantial baggage. It’s Schrodinger’s Disco, and I want to see more of it before making a definitive judgement as to its fate.