Zero Parades: For Dead Spies Hands-On Preview – ZA/UM is Leaping Out of the Freezer

When you look at the state of the video game industry today, where long-running studios with veteran talent and brand-new teams (even ones built with veteran devs) get laid off entirely after their first project flops, it's easy to say that each new game hitting the market has a lot riding on it. In that general economic sense, ZA/UM's upcoming espionage CRPG, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, has a lot riding on it. But it also carries a heavier burden than other new titles.

Few games have to deal with trying to best a predecessor that is as well-regarded as Disco Elysium, and fewer still have to do it while carrying the weight of well-documented controversy that has yet to be fully resolved, if that'll ever happen. And Zero Parades isn't just trying to distract you from controversy; it's trying to be so good that you forget that the controversy in question drove out the original core writing team behind Disco. It has to be so good that it convinces you the studio's art collective foundation is still alive and well, and that it hasn't been squashed by executive greed.

It has to be so good that Disco faithfuls still feel like they're playing a game from ZA/UM, the team that brought them Disco Elysium, even if so many key members of that team are no longer there and didn't actually work on it.

If it isn't good enough to accomplish those things for the majority of people who give it a shot, particularly for Disco Elysium fans, then the cloud hanging over the studio will only grow larger and darker, making it even more difficult to step out of Disco's shadow.

Excited as I was based on what I saw in my hands-off preview of Zero Parades: For Dead Spies back in September 2025, during which I got to hear from writer Jim Ashilevi and producer Jess Crawford, I walked away from that asking myself if it could be that good, and now that I've spent some significant time with it in its Steam Next Fest demo, I feel like it has that chance.

NOTE: Steam Next Fest has officially kicked off, and alongside Luna Abyss, I've checked out a slew of demos worth playing this week. You can read about them here.

Zero Parades: For Dead Spies Hands-On Preview

"It's All Ideation Until You Commit"

One thing I want to get out of the way: I have not played Disco Elysium. I know, it's one of the most revered games of the last decade, and it's a pretty significant blind spot in my gaming history as someone who will tell you that they like narrative-driven games. But everyone has those kinds of blind spots, and I don't think coming to a series/franchise/style of game with a fresh perspective is any less valuable than coming to it with experience. There will be a lot of critics who are constantly comparing this to Disco Elysium, so I have no doubt you'll be able to find that perspective if you want it.

But that's not my angle, so now that we're all on the same page, I want to start out by saying there's a lot about Zero Parades that is very striking when you first load into the demo. Its opening moments feel like they are trying to put you immediately off balance as you enter the world of Zero Parades. It reminded me of how the opening of The Shining sets the tone by starting the audience in the air, in the middle of a lake, with the score immediately going to work to raise the tension and your anxiety, like there's some kind of impending doom. A fitting opening considering that one of the key takeaways I got from my preview of Zero Parades last September was the notion that players should "embrace failure."

2 of 9

After you've chosen a couple of key traits that your version of the player character, Hershel Wilk, will start with, you're greeted by a quote from Jenny Holzer, "The beginning of the war will be a secret," followed by a deep, partially muffled voice that practically roars out the words, "I once knew a spy," while the screen looks like you're trying to play a VHS tape that still barely works.

From that opening conversation, you start your journey in a small apartment, and as you investigate your surroundings, you start to learn more about your player character and the game's setting. Hershel is a spy for Superbloc, one of the three superpowers in this world made up of a union of communist nations, and this is not her first time in Portofiro. She was here years ago, working with a group of contacts who grew to be her friends, friends she chose to abandon when things went south.

The Opera, the Superbloc's espionage firm, put her 'in the freezer,' which is another way of saying they chained her to a desk job for five years after making such a mess with her last job. Now, she's back, and you quickly learn (or don't, depending on the dialogue choices you make), that she's there because one of her former contacts reached out, asking for her specifically.

2 of 9

It's at this point that the story of Zero Parades: For Dead Spies begins, with Hershel standing in a cramped apartment space, with her 'double,' the Operant (the Opera's word for spy), she was supposed to meet barely alive in an armchair, unable to move or do much of anything. Known to you as Psuedopod, he was meant to give you your assignment brief, and you were supposed to move forward from there. Now, you have to figure out what he had been investigating before you got there, and try to find out who got to Psuedopod before whatever mission you're meant to be on could even get going.

I don't want to dig too much into narrative spoiler territory here - the demo is out today with the launch of Steam Next Fest if you want to play it yourself, and if I go through every story detail, not only will this be an incredibly long preview, but it'll take away from your experience of actually playing it. What I will say is that even without playing Disco, I can understand why the team at ZA/UM was praised for their storytelling.

Every element - the environmental design, the art, the writing - just made me want to keep digging, to know more. I've spent almost half a dozen hours in this demo, and even after playing through it more than once, I still want to spend more time with it, just to be in this world for a little longer.

Safe-ish Bet

2 of 9

The narrative was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the strongest element of Zero Parades so far, based on my time with it. It has me so interested that I'm almost starting to get over my least favourite aspect of the game, which, unfortunately, has to do with Hershel, specifically her voice. I'm not ripping into the voice actor's performance here, I'm ripping into the director's choices. I don't know why ZA/UM chose to have Hershel sound like she has permanent vocal fry, but it was incredibly grating on my ears when I first heard it.

She doesn't carry it for every line - if one of the traits you upgrade is 'Records,' which increases Hershel's ability to recall historical facts, plenty of those lines will sound perfectly fine. But so much of her inner dialogue of thoughts is read with a tone that sounds like it's trying too hard to be dark and gritty. It was genuinely a pain to listen to at first, and I was thankful that by my second playthrough of the demo, I could skip through lines I had heard before just to hear less of it.

2 of 9

Thankfully, none of the other voices you'll hear in the demo are nearly as bad. They're not bad at all, frankly, and it makes it even more curious as to why the actors behind those voices were directed so well, while Hershel's actor was seemingly told to sound like she is almost incapable of speaking with her full voice. And when I say I'm 'starting to get over' how bad she is to listen to, it's because I'm growing to tolerate it for the sake of experiencing everything else.

2 of 9

What I'm not tolerating are its more interactive bits, i.e. the dice rolls and one of Zero Parades' new mechanics, Dramatic Encounters. When I first heard about them in the presentation I attended for my September preview, I was extremely skeptical. They didn't exactly sound enticing, and frankly, they seemed like they might be an attempt at adding a deeper gameplay layer for people who may need some convincing to play such a dialogue-heavy game in the first place. What I found was that they are a really clever solution to adding tense espionage-driven gameplay.

Some of my favourite moments in the dense spy stories I love (the kind that Ashilevi and Crawford told me inspired Zero Parades) are those moments where the scene might not devolve into an action-heavy moment, but the pressure in the room gets to its absolute peak just before it's about to blow. So far, that's what playing these Dramatic Encounters felt like, and I'm very happy to have been wrong about them.

I also appreciate the de-skilling mechanic that occurs whenever you max out on one of three core feelings: Fatigue, Anxiety, and Delirium. Any of these getting raised beyond a halfway point indicated in the bottom left gives you that permanent status condition, and maxing out forces you to lose a skill point. It wasn't always obvious which dialogue choices would lead to my anxiety or something else going up, so I can see how you might get annoyed by that. I read it more as another layer of long-term game strategy, as I'll likely have to go back and forth, and probably discover which skills I need/want to keep raised along the way and which I don't mind losing a point in.

2 of 9

Coming back to the espionage, it also feels like a way of translating the human realities or perceived realities of espionage work. So many spy stories want you to believe that their heroes could always handle the pressure, no matter how tense things got. Maybe that was true for Hershel once, but it's not true after what sounds like the greatest failure of her career. She's more vulnerable now and can't handle being out in the field and investigating like she could before. It feels more honest that she would struggle, regroup, and build her strength back, just as the player does whenever they put a skill point back somewhere it was lost.

Out of the Freezer

2 of 9

I made it clear that I won't be able to tell you if this is feeling better or worse than Disco Elysium. What I can tell you, as someone with no capacity for comparison and thought on what the 'old' ZA/UM might've done with this game, is that this is a game I absolutely did not know I needed that is now one of my most anticipated titles this year.

It's right up my alley with its espionage angle, and while I'm honestly still a little bit concerned that I'll never hear a better side to Hershel as long as the game goes on, this game has more than enough going for it for me to eventually get over it. If the story, art, characters, Dramatic Encounters, investigative gameplay, and Conditioning can come together to and bottle the feeling of these cloak-and-dagger activities mixed with high stakes political and ideological drama and themes like they've done in this demo across a whole game, this is absolutely a Game of the Year contender for 2026, assuming it's out this year.

PC version tested.

Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.