ZERO PARADES For Dead Creatives

Identity is not given, it is earned. A Damoclean sword hangs over ZA/UM. Just as the phantom of communism loomed above Europe for Marx, the latest Computer Role Playing Game by ZA/UM, a studio now infamous for stealing the company from the original creative team, is haunted.

Not only that, but the game concerns itself with communism and fascism once again, a contradictory place for the studio to find itself in.

So how do we engage with art so compromised by its premise and creators?

Having played two hours and change of ZERO PARADES For Dead Spies demo I'm left with a few elemental questions about the story's pursuit of communism as a central topic, especially given the studio's carnal history of obliterating the original creative team. The excellent reportage of People Make Games outlines a series of unethical, fanged board room sleight of hand that becomes somewhat inseparable to any consideration of Disco Elysium’s follow up, ZERO PARADES For Dead Spies, especially being a game that slings the word communist and techno fascist within minutes.

The story concerns CASCADE, an operative for the Opera, a secret communist agency engaged in a phantom war with the techno fascists who run the country. This is revealed within minutes of the game commencing, gesturing to a slippery aspect of Disco Elysium that many of us spent pages and pages trying to convey: the experience of playing Disco Elysium is one of slow, constant realisation. No one ever sits you down to explain The Pale (unless you literally badger Joyce into telling you about the world) but when you find a bottle of Pale Aged wine, something in your brain clicks. The game’s writing is an experiment in tasking you to read not between the lines but below the lines and before the lines.

ZERO PARADES contains flashes of this writing. A man selling music records belies the taste of his customers, the art of the cassette gone to hell thanks to the destruction of taste at the hands of capitalists. He is truly insufferable, and, as my friend put it, “reminds me of you talking about booktok when we’re out drinking” which is… unfortunately accurate. The world building of the banal, flavourless slop peddled by the new ruling class infecting this man’s special interest is well realised, and perfectly aligned to how this happens in the real world. The supposed fantastical turned mundane is transposed from Disco as well. A leering creep watching the bizarre is just a logistics employee, in perpetual corporate punishment by his employer, unable to quit but unable to do the unethical thing. A young woman’s father and friend are missing after investigating a phone tapped by the fascists, and she rightly feels a little silly admitting this is what she suspects occurred.

Being concerned with a kind of cyberpunk grunge rather than a decaying soviet docklands, ZERO PARADES’ setting allows for more open discourse about the state of the world. This produces an odd doubling where characters voice displeasure with the state openly but double-speak on the specifics. This is a promising combination that one expects to perform the magic trick of Disco once again. I am, however, not convinced the idea wasn't meant for Kim as the protagonist. The notion of communist spy craft to counter techno-fascist spies feels coconstituent with the ending of Disco and Kim's realisation that traditional policing is insufficient to all scenarios. You could imagine a story set ten years after Disco picking up in the same way ZERO PARADES does with Kim undercover performing spycraft in a new city.

I'm reminded here of Gilory describing the need to focus Bourne's identity into action and rely on Damon's micro-performances when writing a spy, but the difference here is the words have to do that heavy lifting and that leaves much to be done across the length of this game. Visually, the UX of ZERO PARADES feels as fresh and electric as in Disco, each click and interface a glitchy, neo noir collection of secretive documents and smuggled evidence. The decaying town built around a stale canal is interrupted by green and purple graffiti, occasioning after Gibson’s entropic future Singapore. The writing reflects this cyberpunk tilt that hums alongside the spycraft. “Is he zeroed out” your handler asks through an encrypted telephone. A one-time trip code begins the mystery of your assignment. CASCADE’s rain slick straight out of Blade Runner 2049. Cyberpunk is here, the game announces loudly.

But as much as the individual components feel like Disco, the difficulty of engaging with the project is a familiar one. The executives of ZA/UM obliterated the original creative team in a messy bid for control of the software firm and for profit, only to write a sequel concerned with spies attempting to fight back against techno fascists. The irony is… visceral and didactic. The closest colocation for these problems is the time weathered question “can you truly make an anti-war film without making a war film” - to which 2005’s Jarhead answered a resounding “yes, but you have to really want it.” And so ZERO PARADES is charged with a similar quest, whether the new writers want to take on this task or not.

Art about communism feels especially a heavy burden in our moment when we see democracy failing around the world, even in the once goliath moral authority of the US where secret police murder citizens, the government threatens war with Iran for a genocidal dictator and pedophiles run the country. Just one example of the knife’s edge, where other countries are actively experiencing their own genocides and existential violence at the hands of capitalists. These moments of interval - between what was and what will be as the ruling class decimate reality - are often retrospectively applied to pressure art of the moment. This is useful, certainly. Looking back at the sequel to Starship Troopers or the dreadful Jarhead follow ups, the history of franchises capitalising on established works of political significance is not a well decorated one. To state the obvious: when money men acquire an anti-capital intellectual property they are motivated to write backwards from a piece that, generously, represents a threat to said money men. This, combined with the Neo-liberal insistence on producing “balance” because “there are good people on both sides” is how you arrive at a pro-war Jarhead sequel, for example. So while I don’t think ZERO PARADES is going to be pro-fascist, one has to wonder how the writers will earnestly pen critiques of fascists in bed with technocratic mega corporations when the studio itself is so deeply compromised.

The fortunate position of the critic allows me to perform this cautious finger wagging without committing one way or the other to a perspective on the available content of the game. Since beginning this piece I’ve since finished the available demo, and my guess is that the game will be perfectly fine, and feeling enough like Disco to serve the casual consumer. In so far as there is a casual consumer of CRPG’s concerned with the finer workings of Marx and the tides of mass capital in a dystopic cyberpunk city. Which feels an odd place to find the follow up work for ZA/UM who many of us once thought of as the ultimate resolution of a desire for modern, well written Planescape and Fallout. Replaced by Larian, then as swiftly left wanting as the CEO told some fairly dreadful lies about the studio’s “love” of generative LLMs.

ZERO PARADES is still a little rough (audio occasionally fails to play or is a take that isn’t matched with the prose) but the bones of the Disco engine are here, and we know the format is absolutely killer. In the category of game design, all aspects are closer to art and sound rather than graphics and audio respectively, but I struggle to get under and in front of the studio’s history. The trouble, I suspect, is what that art will be in service of. It’s all just art, at the end of the day, but I wonder if ZERO PARADES will crumble under the phantom of its own history. How can the game write jokes about being pro-cop when the owners of the studio are likely believers in the thin blue line? Only time, and a great deal of words, will tell.