Video Game / ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies

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ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies is a Spy Fiction Western RPG developed by Estonian studio ZA/UM, the maker of the critically-acclaimed Disco Elysium. A demo of the game was released on February 23, 2026, as part of Steam Next Fest and was available until April 13, 2026. The demo covered the game's opening hours and took place in part of Quisach, a district of Portofiro. It was released on May 21, 2026, for PC (via Steam, the Epic Games Store, and GOG.com) and is set to be released on PlayStation 5 at a later date. ZERO PARADES is ZA/UM's second game, but its first under a new creative team led by returning Disco Elysium writers Justin Keenan, Siim Sinamäe, and Jim Ashilevi, and returning artists Kaspar Tamsalu and Anton Vill. 

ZERO PARADES places players in the role of Hershel Wilk, cryptonym CASCADE, an operant for the Superbloc, an alliance of communist nations locked in a cold war with the burgeoning, technofascist superpower La Luz. Five years ago, Hershel was the lead operant on an assignment in the tropical city-state of Portofiro that ended badly: her network of assets was exposed, and years of work went up in smoke. Hershel managed to escape, but her superiors at the Operant Bureau exiled her to "the Freezer" as punishment. In the present, she has been recalled to duty and sent back to Portofiro for a mysterious new assignment that could get her back into her superiors' good graces, only to find her would-be partner has already been "zeroed out." Facing a return to the Freezer, Hershel must recover her atrophied skills, remember her conditioning, and navigate a city filled with eccentric characters to figure out her new assignment and see it through.

Previews: Announcement Trailer, Gameplay Reveal Trailer, Steam Next Fest 2026 Demo Teaser, First 19 Minutes of Gameplay, PC Release Date Trailer, The Friends You Left to Die, Features & Gameplay Trailer, Gameplay Deep Dive, PC Launch Trailer

ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies displays the following tropes:

• Ability Depletion Penalty: Hershel starts with a 20-point tolerance in each of three key stats that represent her social, mental, and physical limits: Anxiety, Delirium, and Fatigue. Story events, exerting skills (accepting penalty points for a stat in exchange for boosting the odds of a favorable dice roll outcome), certain consumables, or other decisions and circumstances will accumulate points in a relevant stat. When a stat reaches 10 points, Hershel cannot exert skills in the related faculty (Anxiety is tied to the faculty of Relation, Delirium is tied to Intellect, and Fatigue is tied to Action) until it is reduced below that threshold. Hitting 20 points immediately triggers a penalty, resulting in a skill in that faculty being reduced by 1; however, this also resets the tolerance. Consumables like cigarettes, alcohol, coffee, and more are the simplest way to manage the three stats, as long as Hershel has them on hand.
• Achievement Mockery: There are multiple achievements for getting specific Non-Standard Game Over endstates.
• Advertising by Association: The trailers note that the game comes from the creators of Disco Elysium.
• Aroused by Their Voice: CASCADE can tell several characters that their voices turn her on.
• Artist Disillusionment: In-universe. Ultra Violeta staged her own "kidnapping" to escape the confines of L-Pop genre and restart her career in another country under a different stage name.
• Badass and Child Duo: Tempo and his teenage girl assistant, Yana.
• Badass Crew: The Whole Sick Crew, the spy ring recruited and led by Hershel during her earlier stint in Portofiro. Hershel and HOLOCENE were trained spies, Tempo was a crime boss, Vespar was a carabinero (one of Portofiro's elite police), Eszti was a deep cover mole in the local government, Ramses was a tech expert and wiretapping wizard, and Karolina was a Child Prodigy infiltrating her own father's sleep study. Hershel indicates they were all capable, trustworthy people, and stresses it was she who failed them five years ago, not the other way around.
  • The new members that you can recruit to the crew also count:
    • Yana, Tempo's foul-mouthed, hard-edged 16 year-old protege who's single-handedly running the Bootleg Bazaar in his absence and who also happens to be imprinted with his consciousness.
    • KALEIDOSCOPE, a deadly EMTERR operant who's willing to work with you and risk it all due to his love of L-pop star Ultra Violeta.
    • PSEUDOPOD, Hershel's new double who begins the game in a comatose state, but who Hershel can imprint her consciousness on, effectively making him her psychic clone.
• Banana Republic: Portofiro is a tropical island country and former colony that was once prized for its silk industry. It has a dysfunctional government propped up by an international bank, and serves as a battleground for a cold war between two global superpowers.
• Becoming the Mask: By the time of CASCADE's return to Portofiro, Eszti ended up quite liking her local government job that she got as a cover, and she needs quite a bit of persuasion to rejoin the team.
• Big Damn Heroes: After Hershel enters Tempo's office and learns that he has been murdered, she sees the man from the photo shop, now knowing that he is an Weeping Eye agent and does her best to escape. When her attempt goes wrong, she runs through the bazaar and is cornered...only to be saved by Tempo's assistant Yana, who pulls up in a tuk-tuk to get her to safety.
• Black Market: The Bootleg Bazaar in Portofiro's Quisach district.
• Broken Ace: While Hershel is one of the most highly trained operants, she is stated to have trouble managing her fragile mental state. Her file states that she has a 10mm bullet lodged in her chest from before her service, a history of dissociative episodes, panic attacks, and reckless action, and a degree of suicidal ideation. As PSEUDOPOD describes her in the opening:
  "I once knew a spy. She was brilliant, erratic, cursed. An anti-personnel mine in human form."
• Brown Bag Mask: One of the TV shows available in Portofiro is a pirate broadcast called "The Reality Situation", the host is a Conspiracy Theorist wearing one of these who calls himself Subcomandante Bagman. CASCADE can even find a poster of the show and decorate her room with it. A wearable version is also available.
• Brown Note: The "Ultra Violeta - You But From a Dream" disk has this effect on any who listen to it.
  • When the game begins, fellow operant PSEUDOPOD has already been rendered in a vegetative state from having played it in his room. When CASCADE listens, no music is audible, yet it rapidly increases your Delirium as you keep listening, forming images in your mind that require an Entanglement roll to comprehend. After investigating the tape, and with the right stats, CASCADE can speculate that PSEUDOPOD listening to whatever was originally recorded on this self-erasing tape somehow erased his brain.
  • Subcomandante Bagman manages to reconstruct the audio on the disk after having one of his delusional followers steal it from CASCADE, and plans on playing it live on air, unknowingly exposing anyone who watches to the track's mind-destroying music. Luckily, CASCADE can intervene and recover the disk, and even deploy it herself during the game's climax as a psychological weapon against the Weeping Eye's operants.
  • Ultra Violeta herself admits that she doesn't fully remember actually recording the song, and that it was never released to the public. Given what the player uncovers through exploring the abandoned rocket silo and learning the truth behind the experiments that took place aboard the satellite, it's strongly implied that V somehow managed to tap into some sort of esoteric, cosmic knowledge when writing the song - exposure to which in the form of listening to the track being what shatters one's mind.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Much like the detective before her, Hershel is noted to be a highly trained operant but exhibits some strange behaviours. Indeed, one of her first possible actions involves rubbing the head of a comatose PSEUDOPOD in the room "for luck". She also imagines that she can talk to the King of Trade, get extremely into collectible merchandise from a children's cartoon, and publicly indulge in some rather odd sexual fantasies over the Miracle Line.
• City of Spies: Portofiro is a hotly contested region amongst the game's three powers (the Superbloc, EMTERR, and La Luz). As such, operants of all three organizations are lurking around the city: CASCADE and PSEUDOPOD (and the Whole Sick Crew) are agents of the Opera, while SILHOUETTE and KALEIDOSCOPE work for EMTERR, and Ignatz is a low-level member of the Weeping Eye.
• Code Name: CASCADE (for Hershel Wilk) and PSEUDOPOD, among others. In the lingo of the Operant Bureau, codenames are referred to as "cryptonyms," and these are assigned to both operants and assets.
  • HOLOCENE, Hershel's former double, is known only by his cryptonym — his real name is never revealed.
  • SILHOUETTE and KALEIDOSCOPE are operants of EMTERR.
  • You can also make up cryptonyms for Yana and Ignatz.
  • The Opera also has codenames that they use to refer to the high-ranking members of the Luzian elite: Facundo Reyes, the Minister for Mass Culture, is 'The Grand-Lich of Technofascism', while Tesoro Buendia, the head of the Weeping Eye, is 'The Hundred-Eyed Golem'.
    • Hershel can also incorrectly guess at a few other nicknames in this style: 'The Faceless Star-Eater', 'The Wampyr of Social-Democracy', 'The Revisionist Cacodaemon', and 'The Hermaphroditic Arch-Liberal'.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: There are at least two scenes where it is described in some detail, involving Karolina and CASCADE herself.
• Collection Sidequest: One sidequest CASCADE can engage in is collecting novelty cup-based characters from a Luzian cartoon. There are 66 cup designs in total, but due to various logistical factors (high demand, limited quantities released in waves, and haphazard distribution outside of La Luz), only six are currently available in Portofiro.
• Colonized Solar System: It is mentioned that there are "lunar mines" where cadmium is extracted, and people can sign up to work there for a term. In the People's Republics, those who commit political offenses are punished by being sent to the lunar mines to organize the miners. Portofiro once had its own short-lived space program that was shut down twenty years ago after its first manned rocket exploded in mid-air, a tragedy that was broadcast live to the world.
• Constructed World: The island city-state of Portofiro, the setting of the game, exists in a world embroiled in a cold war between technofascist La Luz and the communist People's Republics, an alliance of states also known as the Superbloc.
• Country Matters:
  • The favourite word of Tempo del Sur, who uses the word "cunt" so frequently its almost a Catchphrase. His teenage protégé, Yana, is much the same, having evidently picked up her mentor's foul language. In fact, their shared usage of the word is a big clue towards the fact that she had a copy of Tempo's personality imprinted into her brain before he died.
• Covert Group: Three major spy agencies exist in the setting - the machinations of which form the bulk of the game's story.
  • The Operant Bureau, whom the player character works for, are the espionage wing of the People's Republics.
  • EMTERR, while technically being a bank, is such a vast organisation with its own political interests that it also employs an array of operants for the purposes of espionage.
  • Lastly, there's the Weeping Eye - the secret police of the Illuminated Empire of La Luz.
• Deadpan Snarker: Most of Yana's dialogue is iced over with sarcasm.
  CASCADE: Any idea on a location for this jail?
  Yana: Yeah, it's right under the flashing neon sign that says 'SECRET JAIL THIS WAY'.
• The Dreaded: The Weeping Eye is a terrifying force, given that they were responsible for the failed mission five years ago, and have managed to "zero out" both PSEUDOPOD and TAXMAN before Hershel can even get her bearings in Portofiro. This even integrates into gameplay: in early sections, any mention of them adds at least a point in Anxiety or Fatigue.
• Eat the Evidence: You can have CASCADE eat mission-related papers on at least two separate occasions.
• The Empire: La Luz. Once a powerful empire that declined and lost territory, until the second wind in the modern era. Not only is La Luz seemingly outmaneuvering the Superbloc in soft-power projection, but it is also carrying out a long-term strategy, the Reunión, to re-annex its former colonies; the Reunión is said to be entirely legal despite its frequent reliance on violent military suppression. It is believed to be only a matter of time before La Luz sets its sights on Portofiro.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The boatman at the docks is only known as "The Boatman". Notably, if you try to press him to reveal his name, he says that his first name is "Boat" and last name is "Man"; while it's obviously a deflection, his name in the UI changes to "Boat Man".
• Evil Phone: One of the sidequests CASCADE can do involves several random people going missing, apparently all of them were abducted by government agents after speaking several random words into a specific payphone. The people were really abducted, but the phone itself is perfectly ordinary.
• Failure Hero: Hershel is portrayed as such. She is still haunted by her failure five years before the event, and the mysterious woman in the Gameplay Reveal trailer is skeptical of her being given a new assignment, believing that she is likely to "butcher it like last time."
• Fiery Cover-Up: A variation. Failed launch of a space rocket, which exploded on live television, was used to cover up a successful launch of a manned vessel that was used for secret and highly unethical psychological experiments.
• The Generalissimo: Portofiro's on-again, off-again ruler, Supreme Leader Nestor. Out of power at the time of the game, Nestor's reign was punctuated by at least two periods where he had to flee into exile. Proponents of Nestor's ideology, which espoused Portofiran self-governance ('Nestorismo'), were known as Nestoristas.
• The Handler: Melita is Hershel's handler and was meant to oversee Hershel's assignment in Portofiro.
• Hope Spot: CASCADE can try to revive PSEUDOPOD with a skill check at the very beginning, but even if she succeeds, it doesn't help him one bit.
  • Later, she can try to treat PSEUDOPOD with some dubious medicine provided by Dr. Gonza, but the successful check, again, does nothing.
• Hotter and Sexier: There's much more suggestive dialogue than in Disco Elysium.
• Intimate Telecommunications: There's a sex hotline in Portofiro that is mostly used by dirty old men. CASCADE can engage its services too.
• Irredentism: La Luz is steadily making progress with the Reunión, a campaign to bring its former colonies back under its thumb.
• I Was Quite a Looker: You get to meet a "ghost" of a young, beautiful Carmuna during a sidequest.
• MacGyvering: There's a quest that has CASCADE build a gun from a bunch of random stuff.
• Meaningful Name: Nestor's seventh son is named Septimus.
• MegaCorp: The international bank EMTERR (l'Empire Sans Terretoire) is so big that it is sometimes referred to as simply The Bank. It exerts a tremendous influence on various countries through its economic "stabilization" initiatives, which appear to involve financial aid coupled with enforced privatization of government services. It also boasts the most well-funded intelligence organization in the world. The Operant Bureau considers EMTERR its oldest foe.
• Military Maverick: Upon telling CASCADE's handler, Melita, that PSEUDOPOD has been "zeroed out," she immediately aborts the assignment and orders CASCADE to return to base. Hershel, knowing that a return to "The Freezer" is, effectively, an end to her career, decides that she can do some "self-directed espionage" instead.
• My Greatest Failure: Hershel has several opportunities to regard the mission that led to the destruction of The Whole Sick Crew as her fault.
• N.G.O. Superpower: EMTERR, which even explicitly calls itself "An Empire Without Territory."
• No Export for You: Inverted in-universe. According to Petro, there are Luzian mass culture works that are specifically intended to be consumed by foreigners as a tool of cultural assimilation and are not distributed in their country of origin at all.
• Non-Standard Game Over: It's possible to die by failing a skill check while trying to retrieve a stuck can of coffee from a vending machine.
  • Another way to die prematurely is to play a certain pop hit with a music-activated old bomb in your inventory.
  • Yet "another" way to die prematurely is to help yourself to a 'breath mint' when ransacking Dr. Gonza's desk.
• The Peeping Tom: The Man in the Ugly Coat/aka Ignatz is a photographer who is implied to be this by Constanz, and with Hershel's help, she banishes him from Foto 24.
  • If you decide to assist him later, you have to become a bit of a creeper yourself by taking covert photos of a couple having a rendez-vous on a bridge.
  • The Ex-Pat Ex-Pilots are an audio-only version of this, eavesdropping on each other and every other person who comes to use the Miracle Line.
• One Last Smoke: If Yana is mortally wounded on the final mission, she asks CASCADE to light her one last cigarette before she dies.
• Pensieve Flashback: CASCADE can enter two of them. One depicts the Cold-Blooded Torture of Karolina by Weeping Eye agents, the other a failed attempt to assassinate Nestor with a music-activated bomb.
• Pop: One of La Luz's cultural exports is a genre of music called L-Pop, or Luzian electro-pop. Every artist and song is apparently optimized with algorithms and must be approved by the state. The current breakout star of the L-Pop scene is a female singer named Ultra Violeta.
• Press Start to Game Over: Downplayed in comparison with Disco Elysium, but it is possible to trigger the first Ability Depletion Penalty before leaving the first location of the game.
• Private Intelligence Agency: EMTERR is both the world's largest international bank and the world's richest intelligence agency.
• Propaganda Machine: Apparently, La Luz is trying to culturally assimilate Portofiro by broadcasting entertainment programmes, notably Portofiro has tech that should block out foreign transmissions, yet La Luz keeps bypassing the blackout.
• Putting the Band Back Together: CASCADE assembles the new Whole Sick Crew for her current mission, which may include some former old Crew members.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: After she failed in Portofiro five years ago, Hershel's superiors sent her to a place called Satellite Facility B, "the Freezer," on what was termed an indefinite assignment, but in truth was an unofficial incarceration. The Freezer is where the Operant Bureau confines all operants who botch an important task, age out of the job yet know too much to be allowed to roam free, or crack under the immense strain of a lifetime of espionage work.
• Redemption Quest: Hershel's driving motivation to uncover and finish her intended assignment in Portofiro is to prove her worth to the Operant Bureau so she can resume working in the field. Should she fail, she will spend the rest of her life in the Freezer.
• Resurgent Empire: La Luz, nicknamed the Illuminated Empire. After centuries as one of the world's most prominent empires, it fell into decline and granted independence to many of its colonies, including Havagerly, the Territories, and Portofiro. In recent decades, however, La Luz made a rapid and dramatic recovery, and even Hershel, a staunch communist, acknowledges it as "the rising cultural and military power of the day". La Luz's current focus is a velvet-glove (and sometimes gloves-off) campaign to re-annex its former colonies called the Reunión.
• Rummage Sale Reject: Much like the Detective before her, CASCADE is willing to get into the right headspace to complete a task by putting on the right clothes, no matter how ridiculous it makes her look.
• Secret Police: La Luz has a secret police force known as the Weeping Eye. It appears to function as an intelligence or counterintelligence agency as well, with agents known to act on behalf of La Luz in other countries.
• Self-Imposed Exile: Supreme Leader Nestor had to flee Portofiro at least twice. The second time was the result of Portofiro's boondoggle of a space program, one of Nestor's signature initiatives, devastating the country's economy.
• Sinister Spy Agency: Played straight with EMTERR and La Luz's Weeping Eye, but the Superbloc's Operant Bureau doesn't have clean hands either.
• Space Cold War: Following the signing of the Latour-Woolgar Treaty - an event so significant that the global calendar was reset to zero - an end was declared to history itself. In practise, what that meant is that the near century of international conflict between the treaty's signing and the game's beginning was waged in the "theatre" of espionage, rather than through open warfare. The three superpowers of the war are as follows:
  • The People's Republics - a "Superbloc" of communist nations in the vein of the USSR.
  • The Illuminated Empire (more commonly referred to as "La Luz") - a techno-fascist Vestigial Empire that seeks to reclaim its former colonial territory through a combination of cultural assimilation and, failing that, excessive violence.
  • The Developed World, a league of liberal capitalist nations independent of the other two superpowers. In theory, the nations are only loosely affiliated with one another, but in practise, they serve as an imperialist superpower that is de facto governed by EMTERR.
• Spy Fiction: Hershel Wilk, codename CASCADE, is a disgraced "operant" (spy) for the People's Republics who is reactivated and sent into the city-state of Portofiro on an assignment, only to find her partner, PSEUDOPOD, in a vegetative state and unable to communicate the assignment's particulars. Hershel's handler, Melita, immediately aborts the mission and recalls her, but Hershel delays obeying the order to figure out what the assignment was, hoping that she can complete it and redeem herself.
• Superweapon: La Luz has "berrion bombs," unconventional explosives of such power that they don't even leave craters or ruins, just smooth expanses covered in gray dust. According to Pigeon, the Luzian military dropped one on the city of St. Ulwen to make an example of it.
• Sweet Polly Oliver: Hershel can don a beard and wig to pretend to be a man.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: Dante is actually The Grand Lich, the one you try to assassinate in the endgame is a Body Double. It is possible to kill him when the opportunity arises.
• This Page Will Self-Destruct: Turns out the entire record format of the disk PSEUDOPOD used has this as an intentional feature; "Einzeltone" tapes erase themselves as they are being played. Investigating the record and talking with Petre, an extremely pretentious music record salesman at the bazaar, reveals the format was created as some Avant Garde art statement but became popular in the espionage community, invoking this trope. It is theoretically possible to recover the data after it has been erased, but doing so would require specialist equipment, and Petre, who takes being a hipster so seriously that he compares CASCADE listening to the erased record and trying to restore it properly to necrophilia and necromancy respectively, is disgusted by the idea.
• War Refugees: Loud João, one of the expat airplane pilots in The Backways, used to make a living as a "lamprey," a people smuggler. Before getting caught by the Weeping Eye, he flew cargoes of refugees out of the Territories during the Luzian invasion a decade ago, though his motivation was money, not compassion.
• We Have Reserves: The mysterious man in the Gameplay Trailer says that Hershel failing her assignment is not a big deal, as they can throw more people at the problem.
  Mysterious Woman: And what if she butchers it like last time?
  Mysterious Man: We'll do what we always do. Throw more assets at the problem. We have plenty more.