Zero Parades and a Bleak Espionage Triumph

Hershel Wilk is anything but a hyper-competent spy. In fact, within the opening minutes of Zero Parades For Dead Spies, the second game by Disco Elysium developer ZA/UM, it's abundantly clear that not only is Hershel not even competent, she's a world class fuck up. I'm choosing to believe that her cryptonym, CASCADE, is a reflection on the fact that once she starts fucking up she is incapable of stopping. A waterfall of bad decisions, bad luck, and a bad attitude fueling it all. Our bold operant isn't a hero of Empire, a huntress for Party, or even an Alec Leamas. She's a danger to herself and everyone around her. Depending on how you play her, in the few moments of lucidity where she understands this, she's almost proud. The introduction shows us a photograph of Hershel, taken in a rare moment surrounded by friends (assets, crew, gäng) before everything goes pear-shaped. I look at the blonde bob swept behind the ears, the stylishly loose t-shirt, and neck that won't quit and immediately stuntcast Kristin Scott Thomas circa The English Patient. When we flash forward to the present, Kristin Scott Thomas after a Belinda Carlisle bender. This only endears her to me more.

We learn in the opening minutes of Zero Parades that CASCADE is the only agent to return from a job gone bad, and now she's warehoused in a filing cabinet-gulag for failed spies called “The Freezer.” This is where you stew in self-accusatory depression, spending your days drowning under paperwork while you hold trauma's finger and point it right at yourself. This is spy hell. 

Leaning hard into this I have put four points into the stat governing physicality, two into intellect, leaving just one for "interpersonal effectiveness." All scar tissue and perforated soul — game recognize game, Hersh. I build my skills such that the CASCADE I will be unleashing into the ersatz-Iberian hub known as the Quisach is a nuclear-hot live wire of Id, a quantum-entangled dental nerve in a bad tooth. This is her first time in-theater after being caged. Crunchy and reactive, an hour in and I already love her more than any protagonist since Dragon Age 2. Before the end of this I'll love her more than I ever could Hawke (and we cucked Anders with a ladypirate together). The first decision I make is to shake the shit out of our catatonic partner and leave him slumped-over, mostly-dead, pantless, and ass-up on the floor of what we lackingly refer to as a safehouse. Any sense of the assignment we’re supposed to have is locked in his catatonic mind. There’s a job to do, and only half-formed clues to go off of, like the desperate nicotine-addict scrounging through an ashtray for anything that will combust.

I listen to the record that probably left him in this state, a curiously silent techno-fascist pop disc. It nearly obliterates Hershel's psyche until we push through and make contact with something cosmic. Five minutes into the game, and I'm losing a skill point. This is going great. As a coffee ad will explain — “Safehouse is anywhere.” But can a compound fracture like CASCADE ever truly be safe? Can anyone in her orbit? Over the next 60 hours, I put this to every test imaginable as we return to the scene of her defining failure — the former penal colony city-state of Portofiro.