I lost two and a half hours of progress the first time Disco Elysium crashed on me. I remember staring at the save slots, my own bemused expression greeting me in my Steam Deck's reflection. It seemed to taunt me with a twisted promise: you can come back for more, but you'll have to do things all over again.
Instead, I quit the game for six months. The horrors of infrequent autosaves and a total lack of remembering to do so manually, paired with the purposely impenetrable nature of Disco Elysium's philosophical crypticism, filled me with rage. I also deeply enjoyed the game, despite how things sound – but Zero Parades fixes my biggest problems with it by far.
A night at the Opera
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies review: "Being built from Disco Elysium's bones is a blessing and a curse for this spy RPG"
Put simply, it's a lot less frictional. The new game from ZA/UM trades buddy cop black comedy for bizarre spy dramatics. Changing my clothing and swapping out internalized thoughts is even more important this time, from a narrative angle, as Cascade (aka Herschel Wilk) changes her personality as easily as her wig to fit a given situation.
If Harry Dubois is a one-man enigma with a tangle of neuroses to wade through, Herschel is fundamentally unknowable. There is no such thing as the "real" her, because she is so many things all at once. It's what makes it plausible that she can go from being obsessed with technofascism in one breath to living and dying for a popstar in the next. Each thought feels like a carefully-crafted persona, a role she must play as a secret agent under cover, and each can be violated by breaking a cardinal rule ascribed to it.
Showing regret of any kind violates trigger-happy persona The Wang Way, whereby Herschel uses the word "wang" instead of "kill", "shoot", "murder"... you get the gist. Tossing a soft ball at a group of piglets immediately violates Animal Magnetism – I was trying to play, not be cruel to them, I protest to the game uselessly – and showing mercy to your enemies is another big no-no.
But unlike how these violations would cause permanent consequences in Disco Elysium, which also features a lengthy period of internalizing before a thought can be properly used, Zero Parades eases up on you. The temporary debuff gives a temporary disadvantage in conversation checks until you manually suppress the thought, equip a new one, and wait 12 in-game hours for the suppressed thought to resurface for use.
This is one of my favorite system tweaks in Zero Parades, but it's not the only one that's making my life easier. The increased frequency of autosaves makes game crashes and the occasional bit of savescumming much less punishing to grapple with. The whole game is governed by rolling the dice and living with those consequences, but the truth is that Herschel as a character feels so much more flexible in her changeable nature that it makes perfect sense she should get more do-overs than Harry.
When I'm caught out by a secret EMTERR operative in the basement of a sham poetry magazine, autosave lets me hop back in time, rejig my outfit, and have better chances at the skill checks I'd just failed miserably at. Thought violated in the middle of an important dialogue? Autosave comes to my rescue. There's really no problem that savescumming can't solve for me in Zero Parades, and the only thing that makes me feel bad about it is the existence of a specific thought that rewards you for playing without any manual saves.
The spy who loved weed
Herschel is fundamentally unknowable.
But the fact that it exists at all means that the increased frequency is fully intentional, as is how it reflects Herschel's character so well. She's a social chameleon, a drugged up little gremlin living on soda, schnapps, and cheap cigarettes. Unlike Harry's own overreliance on vice, Herschel's is less pathological and more ironical. Have you ever seen James Bond drink anything but a vodka martini?
I've finished Zero Parades, and I'm already digging back through my (numerous) save files to see what I can do differently by donning a different personality. Where Disco Elysium would have me begin a whole new playthrough for the pleasure, Zero Parades lets me change up my build as I go along. I can force point loss by taking too much MDMA, farm XP to funnel into other skills, and greet each morning as a brand new woman. Yes, that makes Zero Parades objectively easier than its predecessor, but it's a fundamental difference that makes each game feel perfectly tailored to its protagonist. There's more important things than friction in an RPG. Like wanging your enemies and dressing up as a fascist cop, for example.
Check out more of the best RPGs out there if your spy days are already behind you.
