Following up on a hit game with something new is never an easy task. That’s doubly complicated for the team behind Zero Parades: For Dead Spies.
The latest game from ZA/UM is the studio’s follow-up to Disco Elysium, a CRPG that’s gone on to become highly influential in the indie game scene since its 2019 launch. There’s a lot of pressure on the team behind it both because Disco Elysium set such a high bar with its enduring writing and because drama behind the scenes at ZA/UM has cast an odd shadow over the studio. Those two factors have created a particularly high stakes environment for the creatives at the studio who are just trying to make a game they believe in.
Following the release of Zero Parades’ beefy Steam Next Fest demo, the writers behind the project stopped by this year’s Game Developers Conference to reveal a bit more about the game. In an interview with Polygon, writers Siim “Kosmos” Sinamäe and Honey Watson discussed where Zero Parades intersects with Disco Elysium, and how it’s trying to stand on its own apart from that complicated legacy. It’s a high-pressure balancing act, but as Sinamäe says, “Pressure is a privilege.”
At a surface glance, Zero Parades looks very similar to Disco Elysium. Despite the apparent differences in its art style, it’s still a dense CRPG full of talking skills, existential dread, and disaster heroes. But for the game’s writers, the story is a radically different riff on some shared themes.
“It’s a very different type of story from a cop story, where a cop story is about justice, even redemption,” Sinamäe told Polygon. “In a spy story, there is no black and white. There is no good or bad in espionage. It’s psychologically more interesting, because you don’t want to repeat the beats of having a substance addict again. We want to investigate more about the human condition.”
“The system is quite well-built for a spy story,” Watson added, discussing how Disco Elysium’s CRPG structure fit the new story naturally. “With a police officer, you get the power that comes with that, whereas a spy has no authority. They’re just a common person, and they give themselves away if they stop acting like a common person. You have a lot more dice rolls, more using your skills, and trying to get people to tell you information without knowing that that’s what they’re doing.”
Zero Parades drew its inspiration from a variety of places — Ursula K. Le Guin and Thomas Pynchon, to name a few — but its most central influence is John le Carré. The spy novelist has a more cerebral approach to espionage compared to the power fantasy of James Bond, and that was a fit for the story ZA/UM wanted to tell. It’s a game about an ordinary person doing “sneaky, horrible things,” Watson said.
Doing that story justice would require a very different kind of hero than Disco Elysium’s Harry Du Bois, an alcoholic cop wrapped up in a complicated detective story. Zero Parades instead follows Hershel Wilk, an operant working under the codename Cascade, who is sent on an espionage mission in the town of Portofiro. As someone who is deep undercover, she’s struggling with a deep identity crisis that players have to work through. That setup alone would force the team to tell its story in a completely new way, thanks to what Watson called some “complicated” dynamics that never came about with Harry.
“Harry is a very, very strong character,” Watson said. “But there are more diverse ways to play Hershel. Part of that is because of the spy genre. She’s undercover, so you are choosing your way not only to approach the job of spy work, but there’s also how you’re going to play being undercover? It’s role-playing as a roleplayer. You put on the character Hershel, and then Hershel puts on the character of being undercover. How do you approach the character of Cascade herself, and how do you approach the character of Cascade the spy?”
What is similar about the two games, though, is their political edge. Zero Parades isn’t shying away from continuing Disco Elysium’s conversations about communism, the bourgeois, and other thorny topics. The team believes that espionage is inseparable from politics, so that setup only allowed them to come at familiar ideas from new angles.
“The political world is very much important to Zero Parades, but in quite a different way,” Watson said. “In Disco Elysium, with the construct of having an amnesiac, you get the benefit of getting able to spoonfeed the players bits of politics. With Hershel, you have someone who grew up in the developed world, grew up bourgeois, and then defected to a communist state. So she has quite a strong political bent herself. You come with that naturally ingrained in the game, although you can question that.”
As we discussed the connection between the two games, I asked Sinamäe and Watson if they felt that Zero Parades was in active conversation with Disco Elysium. Neither of them are thinking of it that way. While there are shared ideas between the games, the writers chalk that up to working with a like-minded team that’s naturally interested in the topics it’s interested in. At the same time, the two make it clear that they aren’t actively trying to distance themselves from Disco Elysium either.
“We did not set out on a mission to divorce [Zero Parades from Disco Elysium],” Sinamäe said. “This is the world of comparisons that we’re brought into based on our previous game and based on what people are saying online. But it’s what makes the most sense for us… We keep it to a high quality and see what we can do with the writing differently. We have an internal saying: ‘Half as much, twice as good.’ That we can be snappier, because I personally feel like there are some places in Disco where it feels like you’re in the backseat. You want to make a decision about what happens. But we felt like we could tell a story in a different way, have more checks and gameplay, but push on things.”
It’s a weird position to be in. The team is walking a tightrope due to the complicated aftermath of Disco Elysium’s release. ZA/UM has been mired in controversy ever since cutting ties with some of the creative leads behind the project, including designer Robert Kurvitz. It’s a confusing bit of insider drama that seems to come up anytime Zero Parades is discussed (including here), despite the fact that ZA/UM is far from the first studio with a contentious creative split on its record.
Due to that situation, Zero Parades has been under the microscope since it was first announced. Disco Elysium fans have scrutinized every new detail to determine if the RPG was going to feel like a pale imitation of what came before. If you look through Zero Parades’ Steam Next Fest demo, you can find some similarities to Disco Elysium in how it’s structured. Its opening, set in a small safe house, is particularly close to Harry’s first moments in a trashed hotel room. As someone who has been with ZA/UM since 2017, Sinamäe finds all that a little silly.
“If you want to see similarities… like, oh, you start the same way in a hotel room and you have to walk down the stairs… man, there’s so many fucking games where you start in a hotel room and you have to go down the stairs! That’s the genre of roleplaying games!” Sinamäe joked. “We’ve been a bit more daring in introducing more of the game part of the video game. It feels more like a game.”
Perhaps that’s why Sinamäe and Watson seem so hesitant to say that their project is in active conversation with Disco Elysium. To approach Zero Parades like a “spot the difference” puzzle is to undermine the work that’s gone into telling a very different story with similar RPG systems. There’s shared DNA for sure, but the two games aren’t identical twins. The sooner Disco Elysium fans can accept Zero Parades as its own game rather than a spiritual sequel burdened by expectation, the sooner they’ll be able to uncover the espionage RPG’s true identity.
“When it comes to this spiritual successor stuff that’s been said, it’s kind of weird to hear,” Sinamäe said. “If I had two children, I wouldn’t think of my second child as a spiritual successor to the first one. Thank you firstborn for your service!”
