Zero Parades: For Dead Spies review: "Being built from Disco Elysium's bones is a blessing and a curse for this spy RPG"

In a rented room above a 24-hour photo shop – your makeshift safe house here in Portofiro for the duration of Zero Parades: For Dead Spies – your partner is slumped in his chair. Dead? Not quite. But just a shell, now, absent the gooey human filling that makes a body a person.

The scene gets stranger. The apparent cause of this comatose state is a home stereo, spinning a disc marked with the name of a popstar but playing nothing but silence. Oh, and this man – codename PSEUDOPOD – is fully dressed above the waist but below, the unenviable job of protecting his modesty is left to a pair of tight red briefs. In one pocket, you find a potential explanation for Pseudopod's trouserlessness: a card for a phone-sex line. Well now.

These opening minutes of Zero Parades contain plenty of mysteries to pull you forward into its story – but they also hark back, in a way that threatens to pull me out of it.

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There are the superficial details of the scene you wake into, this slightly tatty room with the man in his underpants and the protagonist not quite sure how they got there (two different people, in this case). Before that, the choosing of a character template from three archetypes: intelligent, charismatic or physical. Then the portentous epigraph (Jenny Holzer this time: "The beginning of the war will be secret") followed by voices in the dark, as you converse with your subconscious. It's almost a beat-for-beat reconstruction of Disco Elysium's now-iconic opening.

That's both understandable – the two games hail from the same studio, ZA/UM – and a problem, because of all the ghosts it invites in.

ZA/UM notoriously splintered after the release of its debut, in a whirlwind of accusations and lawsuits. This is now one of five potential games, from as many studios, vying for the title of true heir to Disco Elysium's throne. Zero Parades has the advantage of coming first, and of the right brand name above the door but – check the credits – very few names in common with the previous game.

All of this matters more than it might for another studio, another game, because questions of labor and capital were always at the heart of Disco Elysium, an RPG where you could stumble into a strike and get called a scab from the picket line within the first half hour, and are now at the heart of Zero Parades too. There are people who'd shout "scab!" at this game, as well, and fair enough.

But, for this review I try to quiet that part of my brain while playing, to tackle the game on its own merits. Every new, uncanny likeness makes that harder, though – and so the voices constantly chatter away in the background, just as they did in the head of Harry Du Bois, as they now do in the head of Hershel Wilk, aka CASCADE.

I, spy

Zero Parade's protagonist has at least one thing over her predecessor: a backstory she can clearly remember. CASCADE was last here in Portofiro five years, spying for the communist Superbloc, operating with a crew who she… failed? Betrayed? That's for the game's story to unpick, and (to some extent) for you to decide yourself. Whatever the case, things went bad, and CASCADE's spymasters consigned her to a life sentence of paperwork in the Superbloc equivalent of Slough House.

In terms of the here and now, though, CASCADE leans more towards the 'cipher' end of the RPG-protagonist spectrum. A shell for you to fill with whatever substance takes your fancy. And what I fancy, it turns out, is someone in the mould of Roger Moore's Bond: a kind of raised-eyebrow lothario who relies on charm over brainpower.

I reckon that best translates into the charismatic archetype, majoring in the faculty of Relation with a minor in Action (and, stretching the analogy to breaking-point, skipping the lectures of Intellect). Key skills: Cold Read and Personalism, which pepper dialogue sequences with analyses of what people are thinking. Instincts, represented in the game by an icon of a wide-eyed rabbit, its internal voice speaking in short sharp sentences that always make me think of the dogs in Up suddenly stiffening and shouting "SQUIRREL!" And Sensors, less for its detail-oriented qualities than for the touch of hedonism – my CASCADE delights in sights and smells and the sensation of peeling the plastic film off box-fresh technology.

As in Disco Elysium, these stats and skills contribute to dice-roll checks dotted through every conversation and interaction with the world. When you want to manipulate someone, that's a Relation check. When you want to dive headfirst through plate glass, that's Action. And once again, the odds of success can be further augmented with stat boosts from what you're wearing. (I end up in a neon-pink party wig and sunnies, with a string of Christmas lights – unlikely to blend into any crowds, but that's just how my CASCADE rolls. In both senses.)

A fresh addition to the stat-buff mix is Conditioning, a tweak on Disco Elysium's Thought Cabinet that, rather than stewing your way towards a realization, allows you to load up multiple thoughts at once, each offering bonuses as long as you play by their rules. The actual benefits aren't always tangible, so they're best treated as tools for roleplaying. Knowing that I've got, for example, Unguided Missile Strikes ("Escalation is the only way forward") slotted into CASCADE's brain incentivizes more reckless decision-making – not that I need much encouragement on that front.

This is one of two tweaks to the underlying RPG systems of ZA/UM's previous game, the other being your status bars. Rather than health and morale, you're now dealing with fatigue, anxiety, and delirium, each tied to a particular faculty. In a Relation skill check, for example, you can choose to exert yourself, taking on extra anxiety for a better chance of success, choosing the best two best dice rolls out of three. That's an option that disappears if you become too anxious – and if you ever let the bar max out, you'll have to choose a Relation skill to permanently hobble.

At its best, this gives Zero Parades an extra vector for storytelling. The seductive voice of the phone-sex operator is effectively communicated by a gradual ratcheting up of anxiety, one point at a time – until it all spills back out of you, leaving you calmer than you were in the first place. The way you're encouraged to use drugs to pass the buck from fatigue to anxiety (caffeine), anxiety to delirium (alcohol), delirium back to fatigue (cigarettes) feels stingingly real, too.

This can, however, devolve into a slightly tedious game of resource management, and the stats don't always carry the narrative weight they're meant to. After one particularly intense hour of espionage action, where I manage to keep all my neuroses just about in check, CASCADE's delirium level maxes out while she's browsing a rack of clothes in the market. You could explain this as a kind of delayed onset shock, maybe, but that requires a lot of head-canon work from the player.

Moore like it

The fact I'm drilling down on these relatively minor deviations from Disco Elysium's underlying systems - its shell, if you like - is indicative of just how close Zero Parades sticks to the formula. And that includes inheriting some of its basic flaws. The inventory screen hasn't really evolved, so that even putting on the right pair of shoes for the job is a chore. And ZA/UM still hasn't found a way to perfectly convert point-and-click targeting to a controller: I often end up selecting the wrong thing, and it almost always seems to be the one that triggers the longest mandatory animation.

The game's most unmistakable inheritance, though, is tonal. Both games are written in a way that feels like being cornered at a party by someone very smart and very opinionated and slightly horny and not afraid to make these things clear to you. It's such a specific voice that at times Zero Parades can read like it's doing an impression – and one that's just slightly off, missing the knife-edge balance needed for this storytelling style to work.

This is worst at the outset, when the game seems most intent on bombarding you with its personality. I'll admit to sighing at the first encounter with Dr Gonza, a kind of hybrid between Harry Du Bois and The Simpsons' Dr Nick, who you must talk down from hanging himself while he rambles on about erections and calls me "momma". But either the game settles down, or I do, and gradually a more tender side begins to emerge. I even manage to warm to Gonza, a little – but the best stuff is saved for CASCADE's old crew, and her new one.

The story spirals ever outwards from that safehouse room, encompassing everything from missing popstars to lunar conspiracies, but it's all held together by a relatively simple, grounded 'getting the band back together' structure. You have a mission that can't be achieved solo, and that means tracking down the old friends you once wronged, learning about the lives they've lived – or haven't – in the years in between, and trying to make amends. The game takes a little too long to get here, a few thousand words too many.

But, once it does, these relationships help fill in the all-important humanity this shell has been missing. Whether this game should even exist is a decision you'll need to make for yourself, but it probably says something that, when CASCADE wrangles with the ghosts of her past, the ones that haunt Zero Parades begin to ebb away. If nothing else, the floor is now clear for whoever wants to Disco next.

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