PREVIEW – The studio behind Disco Elysium is back with a new RPG that can absolutely drive its lead character off the rails. I played the free demo, and you should give it a go too. Zero Parades: For Dead Spies promises to carry Disco Elysium‘s mechanics and weight into a different arena – the world of spies.

You haven’t even opened your eyes, yet someone is already talking to you. The voice isn’t coming from outside: its sentences, its sarcastic jabs, its razor-edged remarks don’t travel through the air to reach your ears. Is it your conscience? Or the spy’s burned-in instinct to detach from reality when it suits you? Whatever it is, it’s there. And it’s not friendly. It reminds you how naive you were when you mistook your resources for “friends”. It brings up – without forcing you through the ugliest details – the catastrophic mistake that left you useless. And it drags back the respect, and the fear, provoked by the mere mention of your codename – CASCADE. Three key ideas dropped into one murky conversation, and the intrigue in Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is already live.

ZA/UM, the studio that made waves across the industry with the brilliant Disco Elysium, has returned with a new RPG that draws heavily from its 2019 breakthrough. The goal is familiar: a narrative-driven experience where choices reshape the protagonist’s personality and behavior, now wrapped in that extra layer of distrust spy stories thrive on. Zero Parades may look and feel close to Disco Elysium in plenty of ways, but it isn’t positioning itself as a continuation of Harry and Kim’s acclaimed journey. Instead, it wants to carve its own route – through collapsed networks, conspiracies, and secret agencies operating beneath the surface of ordinary life. The demo, shown during the first Steam Next Fest of 2026 (and available only in English), builds such an alluring atmosphere of mystery within a few hours that it practically dares you to keep digging into its new investigative world.

Interact, obey, transgress

Zero Parades opens with a conversation set in an unreal space, yet it immediately starts feeding you fragments about CASCADE – her past as a spy, and the future waiting at Opera. The picture is incomplete, though: personal trauma and information withheld from her superiors mean her internal monologue raises more questions than it answers. That gap is one of the game’s sharpest strengths, and during the Steam demo I latched onto it hard, trying to untangle as much as possible of the mystery ZA/UM is deliberately laying out.

Early on, it becomes clear that Cascade is being handed a second chance. A mission pitched as a risky homecoming quickly slides into a frantic, deeply personal path, aimed at uncovering the truth behind the biggest disaster of her career. Still, Zero Parades doesn’t want to be strictly linear, and it builds a major chunk of its momentum around interactions where you interrogate and pressure multiple NPCs. Those characters also prove that ZA/UM can still assemble a wide range of deep, memorable personalities.

The world of Zero Parades is in the middle of an ideological, political, and cultural realignment, and the NPCs mirror it: the different perspectives and lived experiences in CASCADE’s operational space come through in conversations that can stretch on for minutes. What stood out to me is that ZA/UM shines again in character design, because every figure runs on their own motives, worldview, and goals. Over all of it sits the spy-story baseline – suspicion and constant doubt – because in this genre you can’t take anything at face value. How do you separate an honest opinion from a flawless performance? How do you read the intent of someone who claims to back you from the first minute? How do you spot a rival operative in a crowd? And if those doubts never go away, how do you tell ally from enemy? I treated everyone as suspect in Zero Parades, and I doubled back on conversations more than once because I wanted to actually understand the world around CASCADE. The result was simple: very few answers, and my tension level shot through the ceiling.

No, I’m not talking about my own anxiety. I’m talking about Cascade’s. By bringing back the mechanics people loved in Disco Elysium, Zero Parades again runs on a stats system built around three main traits: strength, charisma, and analysis. Obviously you can’t max everything, and right at the start of the demo you already have to choose what kind of “spy type” you are before the game properly gets going. That core identity keeps shifting throughout Cascade’s new mission, as you make choices. And as you deal with what those choices do to you.

Dice, ticking, snapping

Digging into her past can trigger spikes of anxiety. Pushing too hard to peer through the cracks of reality can slide you into delirium. And if you keep testing physical limits, fatigue will happily chew you up. These conditions grow via a point system as Cascade pays the price of her own decisions, and if they spiral, they hit the protagonist hard. The Zero Parades demo may only be an introduction, but it already shows part of this layer, both narratively and through the consequences that punish the character.

Yes, you can spend a solid amount of time listening to the static left on a completely empty CD. And yes, it can launch your imagination into places that stop feeling comfortable even for you. Or maybe you’re actually staring at a cosmic horror hiding in another reality. Those paths are tempting, but they rough up Cascade’s psyche and affect how well she’ll handle the next high-stakes interactions. At the same time, nothing stops you from starting the game with the explicit intent of kicking the protagonist into a spiral of madness until the fragile shell of her mind finally breaks. And as in Disco Elysium, not everything is up to you. ZA/UM once again leans on dice rolls and a probability system that allows some actions and blocks others when you interact with NPCs and objects in the world. The outcome won’t always match what you want, but that is exactly where the tense anticipation comes from – the same feeling players loved in the studio’s 2019 hit.

Set the mechanics and the decision-making machinery aside, and Zero Parades also uses the massive Steam Next Fest stage to remind you why Disco Elysium sparked hundreds of articles, breakdowns, and essays. It’s the world-building, and the intellectual blend baked into every sentence you read in this RPG. That essence has fueled political, philosophical, and cultural arguments across social media and online groups for years. And through CASCADE’s new world, it is back again.

A living world through its characters

The hub of that layer, at least as far as the Steam demo lets you see, is the bazaar. As the name suggests, it’s the commercial space CASCADE can roam in Zero Parades‘ opening stretch. This isn’t a neatly planned mall designed to guide customers by the hand, but a zone where open-air stalls, unattended checkouts stuffed with randomly tossed goods, and racks sagging under wrinkled clothes are welded together between filthy staircases and smashed cobblestones. That rundown yet varied picture also lives in the NPCs who run their own little businesses in this space.

Like any bazaar, there’s a bit of everything. An older woman who seems more absorbed in her magazine than the customers approaching her stall. A music snob who looks down on anyone who listens to “mainstream”. Kids glued to the latest cartoons. But behind these interactions sit the ideas: fear of oppression, the price of ignoring basic labor rights, resignation in the face of cultural backsliding, the erosion of national identity, and political propaganda. ZA/UM once again reaches for timely social themes to animate a world in motion. And its inhabitants arrive with their own perspectives, shaped by origin, ambition, and taste.

After ZA/UM: who writes the magic now?

I couldn’t close this out without addressing the concern that keeps coming up among fans who have followed ZA/UM since Disco Elysium. The original creative team that shaped Harry and Kim’s game is no longer at the studio. If you boil the complicated scandal down, it was personal conflict, creative disagreements, and fights over the direction of a sequel colliding into internal tension and messy decision-making. Robert Kurvitz, ZA/UM‘s founder and the game’s designer, wanted total creative control, while other figures inside the company pushed different visions and approaches. The situation became even more tangled through shifts in share ownership and buyouts aimed at securing greater control over Disco Elysium. In the end, the creators behind the world and the characters either left on their own or were simply dismissed.

Those are not small losses. The original ZA/UM group (before the company even existed) began as a collective of artists and musicians who wanted to explore cultural, political, and ideological themes through a video game. After Disco Elysium launched, corporate-style problems surfaced – the kind you see in an industry obsessed with numbers and licensing control – and the departure or removal of the creatives who infused the RPG with distinct philosophies has inevitably raised doubts around Zero Parades. Can it measure up to what Kurvitz and the team built in 2019? Will it take on sensitive topics, or stay on the surface to dodge controversy? The Steam Next Fest demo suggests the team understands why reflection and critical thinking matter in this kind of experience, but it is still only a demo. Is there something beneath the first layer, or are we looking at a careful imitation of ZA/UM‘s first game?

Mistrust is the best detective

We won’t have to wait forever for answers. Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is currently expected at some point in 2026, which means serious marketing beyond the Steam Next Fest demo should kick off within months. What I can say with confidence is that ZA/UM nails the intrigue, building a suspicious, foggy atmosphere where trusting anyone feels like a mistake. The trial is available on Steam until March 16, and depending on how deep you go into the conversations, it can easily stretch into long hours – I put nearly three hours into ZA/UM‘s spy-flavored RPG slice. The demo did its job: its mysteries pushed me to keep investigating. I’m more interested in this RPG than I ever was before. I want more perspectives on this world, I want to peel back another layer of its dense conspiracy web. And most of all, I want to know what happens to CASCADE.

-theGeek-

Source: 3DJuegos