Seven years after Disco Elysium became a critical darling, ZA/UM is releasing a new game that deliberately avoids echoing its predecessor. Zero Parades is a CRPG spy thriller that—when played—felt very Disco-Elysium-shaped indeed, yet the studio is taking pains to position it as a distinct work.
When principal writer Siim Sinamäe was asked at this year's Game Developers Conference, he said the studio doesn't want "to invite too many comparisons" to its predecessor, pointing out that "You start in a safe house, not a hotel" as one example of divergence. The choice of location is deliberate: by avoiding the hotel setting of Disco Elysium, developers can sidestep inevitable fan comparisons from the outset.
Sinamäe said the approach to ZA/UM's second game is "very much trial and error and testing and iterating," working to figure out what the studio could do well and things it couldn't do. The studio settled on the philosophy: "This is what we can do well, and let's do the things we can do well really well. And let's do the things we suck at kind of average".
In Zero Parades, you play as a brilliant but tormented operant on one final desperate assignment, gathering a broken network and untangling a web of lies. The game is set in the fictional city-state of Portofiro and centres on dialogue-driven storytelling.
This repositioning matters because ZA/UM's recent history has been tumultuous. The studio has been plagued by layoffs, firings and departures of the core team that made Disco Elysium, including creator Robert Kurvitz, art director Aleksander Rostov and writer Helen Hindpere, with the company's new executive suite firing all three in 2022, accusing them of misconduct and attempted intellectual property theft. Kurvitz and Rostov refuted the allegations, writing in an open letter that they were fired as they attempted to investigate suspicious activity surrounding the takeover of ZA/UM.
The departures have created a fractured landscape. The conflicts around the studio led to four different projects from different members each seeking to be a successor to Disco Elysium, in addition to Zero Parades. After leaving ZA/UM, Kurvitz and Rostov launched Red Info in June 2022, a development studio backed by at least $10 million in funding by NetEase. Three other spiritual successor projects were announced nearly simultaneously in October 2024 by three separate studios, each with some former members of ZA/UM, including Longdue Games with Disco Elysium narrator Lenval Brown and other developers from Bungie and Rockstar Games.
The practical reality is that the team behind Zero Parades does not include the original creators of Disco Elysium, with labour tensions and conflicts over creative control leading the authors to part ways with the studio to found new companies. This fact looms over every discussion of the game, because the question for players is whether an institution can survive the departure of those who built its reputation.
A free demo of Zero Parades was available from February 23rd until March 16th during Steam Next Fest, giving players a taste of the opening few hours of the espionage RPG. The studio stated that early player feedback had been positive.
The game's success will hinge on whether players can evaluate it on its own merits rather than as a measure of what was lost. ZA/UM is banking on the notion that a competent spy thriller with strong dialogue systems can stand alone, even if it arrives without the architects of its most celebrated work. The real question is whether a studio can escape its greatest achievement, or whether that shadow will follow every release it produces.