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.
While it's tempting to map Portofiro to the world we know, both the factions at play in the city-state of Portofiro and the Developed World don't map cleanly. Here Compact Discs come in cartridges, and contain magnets that can erase themselves as they're played, payphones are wireless, and the truly irredeemable ex spies are sent to lunar colonies to mine cadmium until they die and take their secrets with them. The game will throw dates like that of CASCADE's failed job (PORTOFIRO '91) that are immediately readable, but also disjointed and disconnected from our reality. Similar to how Shadowrun and Cyberpunk took the 1980s and ran them into their own deep-lore futures that are-not-ours, but are perfect for interrogating them, Zero Parades lines up just enough to do some deep hauntological thoracic evisceration of the 21st century. You won't get to kill Henry Kissinger, but you might get to do the closest thing to killing Kissinger outside of a game specifically about Killing Henry Kissinger. Or maybe you'll take all the neurotic tendencies and dice-rolls and your Hershel will fall deep into a techno-fascist trance by the end of things. Most of your time spent navigating Portofiro will be in figuring out who your Hershel is now, how you want to react to the interpersonal and geopolitical situation on the ground. And a lot of that will be reacting to dice rolls – a lot of them.
Rolling dice (2d6-plus-modifiers) is the electro-mechanical pump providing the unfeeling numerical modulation that keeps the wet-meat heart of choice-driven, narrative gameplay alive in Zero Parades. From behind a curtain, an unseen GM makes checks, rolls dice, and occasionally lets you know something. Did the quantum world send you vibrations from the future? A roll will let you know. Are you so finely attuned to the smells of a Portofiran alleyway that you can pick up a bead of sour sweat from the sticky piss, schnapps, and cabbage? These checks are a representation of stray thoughts, air currents, facial tics, the small actions of chance or the other. Pass/fail and offer detail more than providing consequence. Active dice rolls fall into two camps — white (ones that can be repeated later if you fuck up the first time) and red (Stop. Danger. No rerolls, Operant). If you're not falling apart at the seams, you can press a related aspect of your psyche and add a third die to the pool (best two out of three). Dice are never obscured, the game will show you the modifiers, your odds, and even provide a descriptive ranking for your chances. Despite her best intentions, my Hersh is impulsive, reckless — I force the rolls when I can. I spent many of my days leading up to the ending wandering the former silk factory turned open-air market crispy and crashing out. I stumble into more rolls, riding the tide of "Expect Despair," and the psychic damage accumulates.
The thing is, failure isn't a bad thing. It might not be what you wanted, but the writers of Zero Parades have ensured that failing forward is every bit as rich, well-developed, and reactive as being a high roller. Each playthrough is undoubtedly going to have a mix of successes and catastrophic failures. Sometimes I'm lucky, sometimes that makes me feel better. Sometimes failure is actually the result I hoped a win would be. Most of the time, CASCADE is a Gibsonian mess of chemical dependencies and a contradiction of conditioned thoughts.Eventually, real danger comes for all spies. Whether it's a rooftop gunman, or an eastern bloc grandmother, a member of the fifth column, or just another spy about to enter Hershel's death orbit. In that moment Hershel will drop into a frozen slice of time for these "Dramatic Encounters" where decisions are made, dice are thrown, and consequences are very, very real. Weirdly enough, perhaps because these moments are few and far between, their impact on the game overall doesn't quite feel as tense as it should. But it might just be that while my CASCADE got a bullet in her shoulder that really fucked up my rolls and impacted interactions even before the dice were cast, I already had an emotional revelation with a child struggling to undo a fishing knot that felt so much more immediate and powerful on a moment-to-moment basis. To say nothing of my aggressive trade negotiations with a marital-aid-wielding monkey, or being heckled by teenage Little Monsters who dared to call me "thirty." Not even George Smiley could withstand that kind of ethering. Tension and peril are everywhere in Zero Parades.
Management of physical and psychic limits is the real metagame of Zero Parades' systems—a long-form decanting puzzle with two overflow states. Hit your upper limit, and you'll be forced to downrank a corresponding skill — zeroing the meter. In Zero Parades, only real sleep in a real bed can get you back to baseline, but that's easier said than done for a disgraced spy and so there's mechanical pressure to turn you into the kind of hard-living acrobat of stimulants and depressants that litters the pages of detective stories and spy novels. I lost a lot of skill points in those early moments, before my Operant found the joys of substances. Vending machine canned coffee (Jefe Red & Black) to stay awake and alert, Oxen Bock (the People's Beer) to smooth out the shakes, and then an entire pack of Suprema 100s (but I'd smoke a Sturdy Pony in a pinch, addicts only care about brand loyalty when they're in a William Gibson novel) to shake us back to the present. Then there were the pharmaceuticals and street drugs. Like the persistence of personal debt, there's no real clawing our way out.
Because whatever you do, Hersh is stuck doing a hard job at the scene of her life-defining career mistake. Portofiro might only be an ex-Luzian penal colony, regarded by many as a provincial backwater only recently thrust into the Developed World, but the three superpowers we know of all want to pull it within their Hill Spheres. And who can blame them? Sure it's a ravaged and rebuilt place where discarded knockoffs mound in alleys as more bootleg goods replace them, but it's also a sensuous 3D world that you'd be forgiven mistaking as the high resolution scan of a post-Soviet Where's Waldo in soft impressionist oils. It's a city that floats beneath dreamy soundscapes that hum like an overburdened power grid while the raucous pockets of human life thump, rattle, and shout under the rush of a passing aero-tram. Bootlegging and transience are major through-lines for Portofiro and Zero Parades itself, so naturally there's layers of history, ideology, tragedy, and hope sandwiched between an accumulation of ocean-bound plastics, disposable electronics, and upcycled fabrics. There's also extremely bored teenagers—it's people who make a place, after all.
Portofiro has all the fascinating characters you’ll meet trapped (some happily, some not) by the inescapability of geopolitical fission. In the middle of the street, two teens are doing their best to cosplay ("fan-shift") as Ultra Violet, the current pop-sensation imported from the techno-fascist La Luz. In the bootleg bazaar, a young woman is in a state because of her father. He's disappeared, and it's all she can do to keep hawking trendy clothes. She used to party in the surrounding hills at illegal shows. My Hersh buys a pink wig (my attempt to be "moonglow" for the teens) as she presses me with a photograph of her father. There's a cantankerous old woman with a Past. An old man sweeps the stairs of a housing complex and wonders what happened to this generation. On the television, a man with a bag over his head screams about Reality at night. By day, young children watch an imported cartoon about a young woman with 66 chambers in her heart that houses 66 wolves. I swindle a young boy out of his plastic sword from the show for a photograph of my old crew. His sister gives us a deep lore reason for why this is a good trade. Later Hershel and I talk to a phone sex operator about my guilt in scamming this kid. Elsewhere my drug and gun dealer, Goat Eyes, asks me out for lamb tagine. He doesn't realize Hersh is gay or that his "compliments" are clearly sexual harassment. But his drugs and black market connections are good, so we let it slide.
And then there's the crew, the ones who CASCADE pulled deep past her Roche Limit and were torn apart by her own chaotic tidal forces: Eszti the deep cover bitch, Ramses the spliff and wiretap genius, the precious, youthful Karolina, Vespar the cop, and master bootlegger Tempo del Sur. Oh, I almost forgot HOLOCENE, an extremely punchable Otacon. No one likes HOLOCENE.
Can they ever forgive us? Are we forgivable? How do you even begin apologizing for abandoning the Crew for the Party? Very ungäng, of us.
Nearly everyone has a voice, and I’m told “the goal is to have 100% of all dialogues with full VO implemented in [their] first patch shortly after launch.” While I’m never sold on the idea that games need voice acting, I have to say, the voice direction and actors here are exemplary. None so potent as the Narrator, the closest thing that Hershel has to a voice. She gives rise to the panoply of CASCADE’s thoughts, observations, actions, catastrophic failures — every miserable, damp corner of her psyche. It does things to me. Things I can only describe in the manner of “scraping the back of your brain with an antique dental implement” and every bit as satisfying. The vocal personification of depraved Eastern Bloc dive bar bathroom sex with an unknown arms dealer after a liter of vodka. It's a voice that tastes like leather, ashtray, and regret. It’s rare that I find voice acting elevates the writing in a game, but hers is an exaltation. And this is already a phenomenally well-written game.
The ideological posturing and lengthy political diatribes that can be drilled into through various NPC conversations will be satisfying for some. Embracing or demolishing techno-fascism, or wrapping yourself in the Superbloc warmth of post-historical materialism, not only provides for lively and rich discussions with the locals and Interlopers, but mechanical advantages as well. Dive deep into discussions of communism if that's your thing. Me? Like the 24-hour photo proprietress, I'm petit bourgeois. I'm really only here for the espionage (and the pathos).
For all the whizz-bang Magnitizdat le Carré that's shot through with often outrageous humor from a homebrew handcannon, Zero Parades is not without its melancholic howling. A rictus painted smile that holds back a swallow of blood and bile. A worn and worried inner cheek. Molars rounded from years of bruxism. There is real anger and heartache expressed as unexpectedly poetic prose found in an airport paperback in the stories that Hershel encounters. This is writing that you can, and I frequently did, get lost inside of. On more than a handful of occasions I had to remind myself to look at the left side of the screen, away from the text. It's genuinely evocative enough on its own.
Because underneath the high-octane intrigue, the coquettish-yet-feral sexuality, and the irreverent cast of effete media scions, francophonic torturesses, Metal Gear Men and surprisingly authentic children — there are furtive depths. Frequently unmediated by the tension of dice rolls, presented straight: there is the languid guttural shriek of chicken claws on sheet metal, the long overdue bill of brutalities from the 21st century, of desaparecidos, and bureaucratic hellscapes, the gasoline rag of capitalism over the mouth of the world, and the murder-suicide of empire. Not purely as trite thought experiments, a saturation of extracurricular reading, but summoned up from the epigenetic trauma and present anxieties of Zero Parades' own creators. It's beautiful, affecting. It's rare a game gives me goosebumps like this has.
I don't want to say I was shocked by Zero Parades, but I was certainly thrown off by how much I resonate with it, and how quickly. Months ago I was sucked in by the promise of a richly-layered spy thriller with a lady protagonist. A commingling of high concept pop surrealism and high noise-to-signal textured promo art that just fucking worked. I was prepared to be disappointed by having over-hyped myself. I did not expect to have the wind knocked out of my lungs by a game firing so aggressively on every cylinder that a younger me would easily have found herself making it a cornerstone of an adolescent personality. Zero Parades speaks to me in a language that makes me want to immediately dive right back in and gratuitously probe its depths like a Peter Chung-animated tongue. This is how I imagined the legwork phase of my Shadowrun campaigns in high school and college would look like (and always fell short of) — a multi-day electric fever of narrative switchbacks and political hairpin turns, a blitzkrieg of personalities and kinetic proper nouns all leading up to the mother of all disastrous runs.
I can't tell you about all of the mundane secrets and high level redactions I experienced in my playthrough, but I can tell you that I felt every time I knew I missed something. I've lost hours to the imagined trajectory of paths not taken. What if I didn't peel another girl's plastic?
At a crucial point in my Hershel's story, we made a choice, one that broke the pact she made with a conditioned thought. Selflessness, compassion, a fracture for healing to seep in temporarily annihilating a pact of destructive solipsism. New thoughts emerged and new paths broke through. I watched as regrets fell into Hershel from their decayed orbits, peppering my poor girl no matter how hard she tried. She was no longer able to hold them at bay, she actually had to begin dealing with her damage. The CASCADE who ran PORTOFIRO '91 into the ground, who crashed through the opening days of this mission with substances and self-annihilating guilt was finally taking real responsibility as she geared up for the last run. Together we’re finally ready to make things count. Maybe this time we’ll have made the right choices.
As the spy satellite camera pans out, with distinctive visual interference effects, above my surviving operants, Moby does not kick in. Our ways were extreme, but CASCADE is not Jason Bourne, even now death and regret give her gravity beyond mass. In the end, it's the plaintive Lunar-inflected down-tempo electro-pop of a renegade Luzian ex-star that plays us into a dark and uncertain future. For spies like us, we can only hope one day our apologies will be enough, and maybe safehouse could be somewhere.