Zero Parades: For Dead Spies2026

(copied by Steam) As so often, not everything is gold that shines. Zero Parades is a title that I would actually have to evaluate negatively due to its objective shortcomings, but which still convinced me absolutely. Unfortunately, there was bad news right after my first review. After about ten hours I had to give up my score and start completely new, as a bug made it impossible to get ahead without Savefile editing. Apart from these technical problems, however, the story of the game is fantastically and literally heartbreakingly written. Many side stories run in the sand and serve purely the world building, but still exude enormous charm. Of particular note is the protagonist Hershel (aka Cascade). Personally, I found her even more appealing than Harry from DE. The game gives us just enough information to grab her personality, but does not necessarily push us into the role of absolute failure, even if Hershel often indirectly portrays it as such. As players, we have less freedom to shape their character the way we want, but this gives us exciting and new perspectives that you didn’t have with Harry, as he was more of a blank slate. Their struggle with their own past and the attempt to break out of old patterns and strip the invisible hand of third parties appealed to me very much on a personal level. Once the bugs are fixed, I will definitely take a second pass with a "different" Hershel. Unfortunately, this strong immersion is repeatedly disturbed by substantive blunders. A lot of excitement gets lost for a spy game when seemingly everyone in town knows who you are and what you do. In addition, there are irritating logic gaps; NPCs wish you a "goodnight" at 9 a.m. or talk about characters as if they were dead, even though the event did not occur during the game. My biggest criticism is the quest structure. Too often it was completely unclear what the next step should be. Some quests simply did not start or end due to bugs. In addition, there is a partly extremely vague formulation of the quest goals (at least in the German version), which offers neither temporal nor local context. This disturbs the flow of the game massively, because you constantly wonder if an event, or the absence of an event, is wanted or if you should just take it cum grano salis. The fact that the German and English texts often do not agree with what is actually spoken is also negative. Very sad! Here I hope that patches will be improved soon. All in all, I can highly recommend Zero Parades to any fan of CRPGs and Disco Elysium. For this, the spy story, the freedom of choice and the excellent writing are simply too strong. I can hardly understand the criticism of some players on the script. Of course, the criticism of the "techno-fascist" or hyper-capitalist system is sometimes very "on the nose" and in some inappropriate places somewhat confused. In its entirety, however, worldbuilding is at least as consistent as its great model. I enjoyed my time in Portofino, albeit with a weeping eye. Zero Parades is at least half as good as DE. And half of a masterpiece still makes a very good game, even if it has corners and edges.

Translated from German·Show original