Zero Parades: For Dead Spies arrives with a problem no RPG should have to solve: almost nobody can talk about it without talking about Disco Elysium first.
That is fair, up to a point. It is ZA/UM's second major RPG after Disco Elysium, it keeps the text-heavy, dice-driven shape, and it opens in a way several critics read as an intentional echo. The new game swaps the detective story for espionage, sets its mess in the city-state of Portofiro, and follows Hershel Wilk, codename Cascade, a disgraced spy pulled back into the field after years away.
The review spread is the interesting part. OpenCritic currently has Zero Parades: For Dead Spies at an 84 Top Critic Average, with 89 percent of critics recommending it across 54 reviews. That sounds tidy. The reviews themselves are not tidy at all. Eurogamer gave it 5 out of 5 and called it "an exquisitely constructed take on consumerism, empire, nostalgia and beyond." PC Gamer landed much harder at 66 out of 100, writing that Zero Parades has "a beautiful world and some clever mechanical flourishes" but "doesn't commit to its espionage concept enough to be convincing." GamesRadar+ sits in the middle at 3.5 out of 5: the old charm is there, but the game is "a little too fearful to roll the dice on something new."
That is the shape of the whole conversation. Zero Parades is not being dismissed. Even the cooler reviews sound engaged by it. But critics disagree on the thing that matters most: whether it earns the right to stand beside Disco Elysium, or whether it keeps looking over its shoulder.
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies review scores in brief
The critic-score picture is strong, but unusually jagged for a game sitting in the mid-80s. OpenCritic lists the game at 84, with individual reviews ranging from PC Gamer's 66 out of 100 to Eurogamer's 5 out of 5. TheGamer gave it 4 out of 5, GamesRadar+ gave it 3.5 out of 5, GameSpot gave it 8 out of 10, Giant Bomb gave it 4.5 out of 5, Hardcore Gamer gave it 4 out of 5, and DualShockers gave it 9 out of 10.
The basic facts are cleaner. Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is from ZA/UM, released on May 21, 2026, and OpenCritic lists PC as its platform. It is a narrative RPG about espionage, failure, ideology, and old friends left behind. The player character, Cascade, returns to Portofiro after a past operation went wrong. Her contact is incapacitated, her mission is unclear, and the city is under pressure from competing powers.
That last part is where the praise starts to gather. Reviewers who liked Zero Parades most tend to talk about Portofiro as a place with texture, not just a backdrop. Eurogamer opens with the player learning they are "a fuck-up," then spends time on the tiny disasters of field work: luck, skill, bad calls, and the terrible feeling that a spy's old sins have not stayed buried. TheGamer frames Portofiro as a quasi-independent town being pulled between global interests, with debt, imported culture, and political pressure doing as much damage as any gun.
So the appeal is not just that ZA/UM made another talky RPG. It is that Zero Parades gives critics a city worth reading closely.
What critics agree on
The first point of agreement is simple: Zero Parades can write. Not every critic likes the same parts of the writing, but very few treat it as thin. GamesRadar+ lists "some of the richest writing in gaming" as one of its pros. Giant Bomb calls the game "weird, beautiful, and dense with characters" the reviewer wanted to understand. TheGamer says the game has "that ever-elusive quality of convincing you to keep playing," which is a plain way of saying the narrative pull works.
The second agreement is that Cascade is not Harry DuBois in a new coat. That matters. Giant Bomb points out that Cascade is not a blank slate. She has a career, old friends, enemies, shame, and a body count. The review calls her "authored and personal," which gets at why some critics seem relieved by Zero Parades even when they note the familiar structure. A spy story needs a protagonist with history. Cascade has too much of it, and that weight gives the game a different temperature.
The third agreement is that the Disco Elysium comparison is unavoidable. Nobody really pretends otherwise. PC Gamer calls Zero Parades "a chimera of a game, a new face and subject welded onto a familiar body." GamesRadar+ says the opening almost reconstructs Disco Elysium's famous setup beat for beat: archetype selection, voices in the dark, a strange room, a body that raises more questions than answers. Eurogamer also places the game directly in ZA/UM's shadow, while still arguing that its own systems and themes land.
That is the kind of consensus that makes a review roundup useful. Critics are not arguing about whether the DNA is visible. They are arguing about whether that DNA is a strength.
Where the reviews split
PC Gamer's 66 is the outlier, but it is not a lazy outlier. The review likes the art, the UI, the polished movement around environments, and some mechanical ideas around fatigue, anxiety, and delirium. Its problem is sharper: for a game about spies, it does not feel enough like espionage. The reviewer describes Cascade as too willing to angst, drink, and tell strangers her real name, which undercuts the fantasy of operating in secret.
That criticism hits because Zero Parades is selling a specific premise. A detective can wander into conversations and draw meaning from chaos. A spy usually needs cover, leverage, patience, and silence. If the game uses spy language but keeps solving scenes like a familiar conversation-heavy RPG, some players will feel the mismatch.
GamesRadar+ makes a related but softer point. It says Zero Parades is too close to Disco Elysium, but also says the old charm persists. That is the middle position: the game may be derivative, but the writing, characters, and strange turns are still worth the trip. GameSpot's OpenCritic excerpt is similar, warning that the game can feel like a "pale imitation" in places while still recognizing its systemic changes.
Eurogamer is having none of that hesitation. Its 5 out of 5 review treats the game as dense, strange, funny, and politically alive. The review lingers on Cascade rummaging around Portofiro, managing bad rolls with coffee, beer, and cigarettes, and trying to redeem herself in a world where the mission starts broken. For Eurogamer, that instability seems to be the point. The spy who cannot quite spy properly is not a failure of genre fantasy; she is the human wreckage the genre usually sands off.
That is the core divide. Is Zero Parades a spy RPG that fails to commit to spycraft, or a role-playing game about a ruined spy whose failure is baked into the design? Your answer probably decides how much patience you will have for it.
Why the high score still makes sense
An 84 Top Critic Average can look too high if you only read the skeptical takes. It makes more sense when you notice what even the skeptical reviews keep praising. The world is consistently admired. The prose has real bite. The UI and environmental movement sound improved over ZA/UM's earlier template. The cast seems to stick with people. And the game is clearly substantial enough to provoke specific arguments, not just shrugging disappointment.
That last piece matters. Polarized reviews are not always a sign of quality, but they can be a sign of a game with a pulse. Zero Parades is being measured against one of the most beloved RPGs of the last decade, under one of the most loaded studio narratives in modern games. A safer project might have scored more evenly and said less. This one gets accused of being too familiar and too strange, sometimes in the same breath.
For Perthro readers, the practical question is whether Zero Parades belongs in your backlog now or in the "wait until I am ready for a lot of reading" pile. If you use Perthro to keep a wishlist or a custom list of games you mean to play in the right mood, this is exactly the sort of game that benefits from being written down. It is not just a score. It is a state of mind. You probably do not want to start a dense political spy RPG on a night when you only have forty minutes and half a battery.
Should you play Zero Parades: For Dead Spies?
If you loved Disco Elysium for its voices, failed people, ideological clutter, and the strange intimacy of walking through a city while your inner life argues with itself, Zero Parades sounds hard to ignore. The strongest reviews describe it as funny, sad, politically thick, and full of characters worth chasing through conversation.
If you want a clean espionage game, be careful. PC Gamer's review is a useful warning label. This is not Hitman with more paragraphs. It does not sound like a game about perfectly executed cover identities and quiet tradecraft. It sounds like a game about what happens when a burned agent carries the wreckage of the old mission into the new one.
That is why the critic split is more helpful than the average. OpenCritic's 84 tells you Zero Parades is being received well. The review spread tells you what kind of well. It is not universal comfort. It is admiration with caveats, frustration with respect, and a few critics willing to call it brilliant.
I like that kind of reception. It is harder to summarize, but easier to remember. Zero Parades: For Dead Spies may not escape Disco Elysium's shadow for everyone. The more interesting question is whether, by the time the credits roll, you still care about the shadow at all.