From the creators of Disco Elysium comes Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, an espionage RPG. Yet the choice to move from detective fiction to spy thriller was far from inevitable. When principal writer Siim Sinamäe discussed the game at this year's Game Developers Conference, he said the studio doesn't want "to invite too many comparisons" to its predecessor.
That restraint extends beyond superficial differences. Gone is Disco Elysium's cop protagonist Harry Du Bois, in his place is Hershel Wilks, a spy whose bosses locked her out in the cold after an op gone wrong. The shift is deliberate, reflecting both creative ambition and a changing cultural landscape. The studio recognised early that retreading familiar ground would serve neither the game nor the audience.
In late 2021, Disco Elysium's lead writer and designer Robert Kurvitz was pushed out of the company along with art lead Aleksander Rostov and writer Helen Hindpere. They claimed that the new majority stakeholders in the company had acquired it in a fraudulent way, whereas ZA/UM's new CEO Ilmar Kompus claimed that Kurvitz and Rostov were fired for misconduct. The studio has since restructured under a new creative team, and Zero Parades represents their first substantial project under that arrangement.
The espionage setting shapes everything from narrative structure to gameplay mechanics. "When you're a police officer looking into a crime, anybody who's in the vicinity is a potential suspect and expected to speak with you. And in a spy game, it's kind of like the inverse of that. You don't want to stand out. And because of that, we needed to create a slightly busier backdrop", one designer explained. The city itself becomes a different kind of character when you're hiding in plain sight rather than investigating openly.
ZA/UM producer Jess Crawford notes "one thing we've been thinking about when creating Hershel is that we wanted her to be the anti-James Bond. There's a lot of glamour shown within modern day spy stories... and that is not Hershel. There is a lot of mundanity and a lot of heart that can be explored". The spy game genre offers freedom from certain narrative conventions while still demanding psychological depth.
Zero Parades is set to be released sometime in 2026 for PC and PlayStation 5. Though conflicts at ZA/UM around 2021 led several lead developers and writers to leave and form their own studios, by October 2024, at least four different studios in addition to ZA/UM had announced projects to develop spiritual successors to Disco Elysium. The creative wreckage of that split has spawned a competitive ecosystem of games, each trying to capture something essential from the original.
Whether Zero Parades succeeds will depend not on how closely it echoes Disco Elysium, but on whether it commits fully to its own ideas. The decision to move away from police procedure suggests the developers understand that much.