This espionage RPG is launching on PC first, with one current-generation console set to receive it a bit later. ZA/UM’s new project looks like a dense, story-driven role-playing game with surreal overtones, one that aims to fuse the psychological depth of a spy novel with the identity-focused strangeness the studio has already made part of its signature.
From ZA/UM comes Zero Parades, a story-rich espionage RPG. You’re a brilliant yet tormented operative on a desperate mission. Pick up the pieces of your broken network, untangle a bloody web of intrigue at the End of History, and prove yourself on the big stage – or blow it all up again. You play as operant Hershel Wilk, alias Cascade, a brilliant, burnt-out, possibly cursed operative. Five years ago, you led your team into the abyss, and you have been haunted by your failures ever since. You’ve now been recalled for a mysterious assignment that may give you a chance to prove yourself again.
You find yourself thrown into a three-way struggle for cultural and ideological power across an unforgettable new city. The world itself is presented as a character, with its own secrets, traumas, and miracles waiting to be discovered. To get anywhere in this place, you are going to need friends, but unfortunately, you do not have any. Instead, you will be dealing with international bankers, foreign techno-fascists, psychic doppelgängers, a paranoid TV host, a man with a box for a heart, and dozens of others. Everyone you meet has their own agendas, beliefs, and secrets for you to uncover and turn to your own ends. In this line of work, failure will come far more often than success. That is part of the expectation. What matters is how you get back up. As an operative, your dice are in the hands of fate. If events do not unfold the way you want them to – and they will not – you will have to improvise and hope the consequences are something you can live with.
Play as Hershel – brilliant, ruthless, magnetic, and cursed. A former elite operative whose touch turns everything to ash. She is as dangerous to her enemies as she is to her friends. Descend into a world of illicit mind erasure, failed space programs, and state-sponsored pop stars. This is espionage stripped of glamour – no parades, no happy endings -, at least probably not for you. In the life of an operative, failure is guaranteed. Here, it becomes another path forward – every misstep opens doors that success would rush straight past. Coming from the studio behind Disco Elysium, Zero Parades blends the psychological depth of a spy novel with surrealist undertones and richly drawn characters.
Who are you when no one is watching? Or at least when you think no one is? In Zero Parades, the answer will define far more than the assignment itself. Confront the terror of reality by giving up parts of yourself and trying not to lose your mind in the process.
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies launches for PC on May 21, and it will also arrive for PlayStation 5 later this year.
Source: Gematsu
