Pick up the pieces of your broken network, untangle a bloody web of intrigue at the End of History, and prove yourself on the big stage or blow it all up – again.

Brilliant, burnt-out, possibly cursed – you play as operant Hershel Wilk, alias CASCADE. Five years ago you led your team into the abyss and have been haunted by your failures ever since. Now you've been recalled for a mysterious assignment that may give you a chance to prove yourself again.

Find yourself thrown into a three-way struggle for cultural and ideological power, played out across an unforgettable new city. In ZERO PARADES, the world itself is a character with its own secrets, traumas, and miracles for you to discover.

To get anywhere in this world, you'll need friends. Unfortunately, you don't have any. Instead, you'll go up against international bankers, foreign techno-fascists, psychic doppelgängers, a paranoid TV presenter, a man with a box for a heart, and dozens more. Everyone you meet has their own agendas, beliefs, and secrets for you to uncover and turn to your own ends.

In this line of work you're going to fail *way* more often than you succeed. That much is expected of you. What matters is how you pick yourself back up. As an operant, your dice are in the hand of fate. If they don't go your way (and they won't), you'll have to improvise and hope the consequences are ones you can live with.

So let’s take a deep dive into those you can see in the gameplay reveal trailer:

Dramatic Encounters

This is a brand-new feature we are introducing for Zero Parades. We want you to feel like a true operant (our term for spies) and that means including high-intensity scenes alongside the more methodical ones.

Dramatic Encounters are moments in which time stands still so you must make a series of choices to resolve a potentially deadly situation. But this isn’t James Bond. You can’t just smile and shoot your way out of everything. So, while you are skilled, the outcome of your choices will ultimately be determined by dice roll – which is influenced by your character’s attributes. If you do fail, the sequence will continue, and you’ll have to hope your next choice goes better for you.

To illustrate with an example from the trailer: you are being tailed. You only have time to react to the ongoing situation and hopefully worm your way out of it. It begins by time slowing down to a pause and your highly trained eye showing you your options. Do you try to hide in a crowd and lose the tail that way? Or do you take a risky jump and pray that they don’t dare follow? Neither option is right or wrong, but you will have to live with the consequences either way.

Failing forward & Exertion

A core pillar of our game design philosophy is the idea of ‘failing forward’. The story continues no matter what happens – you’ll just be better off if it goes well. Those who played Disco Elysium should know the joy of embracing failure that we put into our games. Don’t be so quick to reload the game as there’s a surprise waiting for you after every bad dice roll.

We have evolved how this plays out in Zero Parades with the introduction of the ‘Exert’ button. When you’re faced with a dice roll, you now get the chance to push your luck a little further. Hitting the ‘Exert’ button allows you to roll with advantage (by adding a third die to the roll) so you can take the scores of the best two dice rolls and ignore the worst one, giving you more chance at success. This does come with a small sacrifice, but we’ll go into what that is at another time. 

Conditioning 

A big part of the spy fantasy is the ‘conditioning’ that they must go through. This is training their mind to deal with the worst situations they may encounter – such as being interrogated or being able to act like the enemy to sneak past in plain sight.

We have turned that idea into a gameplay mechanic in Zero Parades. It’s called, simply, Conditioning. An advancement of what we did with the Thought Cabinet in Disco Elysium, this is where you can reinforce Thoughts that you come across in the game world. These may enhance your skills or allow you access to new ways of thinking. But, being a spy, Hershel doesn’t have the luxury of internalising ideas for several hours or days like in Disco Elysium, so the experience with Conditioning is a lot snappier to match our new setting.

We’re very interested in how the human mind is affected by the pressures of being a spy. Conditioning is one way in which we explore this as you can decide how to shape Hershel from the inside out. As with everything, you can’t have it all, so you need to balance the positives with the negatives. Being an operant isn’t easy and if you’re not careful it could eat your mind.

Key Features:

• Become an Anti-Icon: Play as Hershel - brilliant, relentless, magnetic… and cursed. A former top operant whose touch turns everything to ash. She is as dangerous to her enemies as she is to her friends. 
• Espionage Reinvented: Descend into a world of bootleg mind-erasure, failed space programmes, and state-sponsored pop stars. This is espionage stripped of glamour - no parades, no happy endings - at least probably not for you.
• Failing Forward: In the life of an operant, failure is inevitable. Here, it’s another way forward - every misstep opens doors that success would run swiftly by.  
• A Story-Rich Espionage RPG: From the studio which brought you Disco Elysium. Blending the psychological depth of a spy novel with surrealist undertones and richly drawn characters. 
• A Question of Identity: Who are you when no one is watching? Or, at least, when you *think* no one is? In ZERO PARADES, the answer will define much more than just the assignment. Cope with the terror of reality by giving up parts of yourself and try not to lose your mind in the process.

Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is coming to PS5 and PC (Steam) in 2026.