ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies was provided by ZA/UM for review. Thank you!
ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies will already be divisive for many players. Anyone who knows about the excellent Disco Elysium will be aware of the controversy that erupted between ZA/UM and the creative leads for Disco Elysium. That was a gigantic mess, to say the least, and I will not go into it again here. Regardless, ZA/UM have returned with their new game, and despite all my misgivings surrounding Zero Parades, I’ll admit, it got me curious.
For all intents and purposes, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is a narrative CRPG that will be constantly compared to Disco Elysium. I’ll do what I can to keep my thoughts on the game separate, though that's hard to pull off!
On top of that, my review was delayed due to some pretty major technical problems, so I had to wait for the launch build to smooth out some of the bigger bugs. Even still, I have found Zero Parades: For Dead Spies to be an overall solid experience, but there are plenty of bugs that remain.
The player character is a secret agent whose undisclosed mission collapses when her partner becomes unresponsive/dead; she is ordered to leave the city but stays behind to follow up on loose ends. That quickly escalates, however, into a tangled web of deceit, ghosts of her past, and talk of a forbidden ‘ritual’ that can undo all the past wrongs of the agent cabal she was part of. It is surprisingly compelling stuff after a slow start.
Zero Parades shares a similar game design philosophy with Disco Elysium, featuring exploration, long dialogue sequences with a large cast of mixed quality, resource management, and skill checks. Time only moves during dialogue or interaction sequences, so you have all the time in the world to explore on the map.
The aesthetic is grungy and poverty-torn with a steampunk-esque world setting. The atmosphere is pretty solid all around, with a haunting soundtrack that builds upon the immersion. The visuals are rather pleasant with plenty of environmental touches as well. Citizens go about their business, rollerblading around the city districts, etc., and I love how the ambiance changes during the time of day. There is something about this gritty world that grabbed me, and there are some interesting dilemmas the security is dealing with, such as a boar infestation of all things. That was not in my bingo book!
Not everything is voice-acted in the current version of the game, which I found a little disappointing. The main narrator does a decent job, but she sounds like she has spent twenty years chain-smoking fifty cigars a day. It is a little jarring, although it adds to the atmosphere. The other voice acting present in the game is solid across the board. Our protagonist is less flamboyant and less crazy than the sad, useless cop in Disco Elysium. However, she is more competent, which makes the scenarios feel less intriguing as a result.
There are some good characters I really liked, such as the Man with No Heart and the young enforcer of the Bazaar, and I found the lore and worldbuilding to be excellent. Despite the overall depression of the place, some moments stood out, such as the elderly ex-pilots trying to access a phone sex line, the mix of Eastern European architecture and lunar colonization, and even a spike in occultism that brought some fascinating design.
Resource management involves a skill system covering Fatigue, Anxiety, and Delirium, with plenty of events that will spike these. When things reach a critical point, you must choose a skill to downgrade to reset the board. The system is an interesting way of doing things, although it still feels a bit too punishing for my liking. There are plenty of items to find in the overworld that can help relieve these issues, such as drugs and rest, which help in a pinch.
Technical performance is a little sketchy, and I ran into quite a few bugs. Sometimes I ran into an endless loop in dialogue that forced me to reload a save. Sometimes animations bugged out, where my poor spy ran into a wall and got stuck. I had a few hard crashes, forcing me to hard reboot the Steam Deck. Things definitely feel rough around the edges here, and I hope the game gets more patches to improve on that.
Overall, however, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is a competently made CRPG, which, while it does not quite match up to Disco Elysium’s quality, does not take away from it being a solid RPG in its own right.
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is rated as Steam Deck Verified by Valve, with a Gold rating on ProtonDB. Overall, I’d say that it runs okay on the Steam Deck, although there are some compromises regarding the so-so technical state right now.
Zero Parades plays decently well out of the box with full controller support, and despite the vast amount of text, it is fairly easy to read on the Steam Deck. If you struggle with the default text, there are a good number of accessibility options to increase the font size, although too much will make the interface bug out on occasion. I just stuck with the default text and had no big issues. There aren’t many graphical options we can tweak apart from resolution and a scaling setting that gives us three options. I saw little difference in visual quality between them, but Low gave me the best performance overall, so I stuck with that.
With few graphical toys to play around with, I went with the standard setup for Zero Parades. An unlocked TDP, default resolution, and the graphics on Low felt the most stable balance between performance and battery life. Even on low, the game is one of the nicer-looking RPGs I have played, with its atmosphere, and it looks great on the OLED screen.
However, the game needs some better optimization, and I saw plenty of framerate drops during scene transitions and loading into dialogue. Even unlocked, I found the game often fell below an average of 50 FPS. While the game is playable on the Steam Deck, it eats through battery faster than I did when a Nando's opened up five minutes away from my house. Without any framerate caps, the average power draw exceeded 15 watts, occasionally spiking to 20! With a 30 FPS framerate cap, I saw a slight improvement in battery life, but still a lot less than I expected. The game looks gorgeous, but it shouldn't drain so much battery.
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is available in English, German, Russian, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish - Latin America.
ZA-UM has done a pretty good job with accessibility options this time around. In the audio section, players have full control over which part of the sound takes precedence, such as environment, voices, and user interface, and the voiceovers are fully customizable, too. For gameplay, you can toggle mouse lock, auto-select, and the sprint function, as well as Twitch integration. For visual effects, the text size can be freely scaled, and there are plenty of options for colorblind and dyslexic gamers. Keymapping and Vsync are also available. Overall, this is a solid number of options, more than the average game played.
Zero Parades is a somewhat baffling, sometimes broken, and sometimes captivating experience. Given the history, I do not blame people for coming into this with a wary eye. The somewhat rough optimization, buggy technical state, and sporadic voice acting are a bit frustrating, but despite these things holding the game back, I surprised myself by getting drawn into the world of Zero Parades.
The haunting soundtrack coupled with the gritty atmosphere of being a lost espionage agent rather nicely, and the worldbuilding is probably the game’s biggest strength. The game sells for 40$ at the time of writing, which is about the maximum I would be comfortable paying.
The main question on everyone’s lips is the obvious: Is Zero Parades a patch on Disco Elysium? No, but I do think it is worth playing, and it deserves a chance. I do recommend waiting for a few more patches, whether playing on a PC or on the Steam Deck.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.
ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies is a buggy yet captivating spy CRPG that may struggle to live up to the excellent expectations of ZA/UM's first game, but is still worth checking out. The game is playable on the Steam Deck, but technical issues hold it back for now.
