Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is both bootleg Disco Elysium and a spirited interrogation of fake culture in all its guises

Authentechnoflex

For many players, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies will never be anything other than a seedy clone of ZA/UM's reputation-making Disco Elysium – a soul-sucking forgery of a doomy leftist masterpiece, whose original lead writers and designers have been ousted by scheming executives. It's appropriate then, that, Zero Parades proves obsessed with clones, forgeries, bootlegs, and the ways in which these entities can be wielded for erasure and displacement. Its opening third is a comical squabble over notions of authenticity and (thereby) identity, an interrogation of connoisseurship and the notion of the 'genuine article' as vectors for assimilation.

The setting, Portofiro, is a coastal city whose local culture and Communist past are disappearing beneath a deluge of ostensibly smuggled, but in practice carefully disseminated 'bootleg' media from a rising "techno-fascist" state, La Luz, who are seeking to reacquire dominance over their former colonies (a nod to Putin-era Russia, probably, but Putin hardly has a monopoly on the exercise of 'soft power').

La Luz is led by a philosopher clique who are rumoured to be heavily inbred: as your character puts it, they are themselves "the worst kind of bootleg", dealing out bootlegs in advance of putting boots on the ground. But the local ageing commies and artists aren't all that much more sympathetic, the futility of their bitterness summarised by one of the grand "conditioned" narratives you can imprint upon your character in return for a stat buff - "People's Republic of La-La-Land".

Luzian art thrives in Portofiro because it is easy, aggressive, jargony, intoxicating, and above all, because it has commandeered the idea of the future. It deals in tasty strings of effervescent nonsense like "electric magenta Saltuzuri Dream-on Neon". It attracts teen pop zealots who talk casually of lyric-induced suicide, and who tell you that it's "disrespectful" to listen to the best Luzian singers on bootlegged media – the kind of purism that can be a gateway to grander bigotries.

This cultish enthusiasm is mirrored from across the aisle by the superbly withering elitism of a rare format vendor in Portofiro's central bazaar. He defines the very idea of replayable media as a narcotic, designed for "format-assisted auto-annihilation", and laments that "anyone with the wits to create anything *new* just spends their time devising ways to get past the signal blockers and access Luzian drivel." The same music seller speculates that bootleg Luzian media isn't even what people consume in La Luz; the 'exoticness' of the contraband is precision-engineered for Portofiran consumption.

Meanwhile, the ghost of the local music scene clings on in sob stories about backalley "feedback parties" and long-vanished schnapps stands. One such alleyway harbours a poetic surprise that invites you to perceive the game's visual direction as a mechanism for Luzian indoctrination - a sudden rotating of the fixed perspective to reveal a shrine comprised of old Portofiran art.

Again, though, the writing handles this twisty backward-glancing with the same ambivalence and cynicism it levels at the sinister modern imports. One local policeman grumbles good-naturedly that he wishes the old folk would shut up and accept that, overall, life in the age of Luzian re-ascendence is pretty liveable. The rare format seller, whom I enjoy to the point that I half-suspect him of being bait for self-regarding theory-soaked critics, summarises the music available under the ancient regime as "the same kinds they play in the so-called developed world, except a couple decades late and desperately effortful."

After 15 hours, Zero Parades seems in love with this profusion of violent nerdery and fannishness, a delight that extends from particular characters to the overall sensibility of the writing. The rare format seller has a dedicated box of genres he despises - 'Hairdresser Music', 'Made for Pedarests', 'Pretentious Time Signatures', all of them itemised with a viciousness that borders on worship. Later, you'll browse a book stall full of caricatures of different 'mass' literature genres, ranging from Jordan Peterson-esque self-help books through cheesy comics full of gore and tits. At the other corner of the map, you're offered the chance to hop into a dumpster that, if you fail an associated skill check, becomes a miniature excavation of dark fantasy novels, with your character hallucinating a muculent quest through valleys of grot.

You yourself are something of a bootleg, Disco Elysium's Harry Du Bois with the serial numbers filed off, a diverging backstory and an expanded complement of supporting mechanics. Rather than a remorseful amnesiac detective, you are a disgraced master spy, Cascade - dispatched by the Superbloc, an alliance of neighbouring Communist countries, to carry out One Last Job at the scene of your greatest professional failure.

Like Du Bois, you are a parliament of foul mouths. You've got a headful of skills – thinned down from 24 to 16 – who speak like distinct characters, needling and grandiloquising as you walk around the city. You'll face randomised skill checks, some of which can only be tackled once, none of which lead to Game Over even when you strike out. As with Harry, Cascade is a creature of improvisation, and 'failure' only continues the journey. She is a cursed genius capable of both accidentally donning a giant mascot head to blend into a crowd, and then somehow working this to her advantage in a subsequent physical encounter.

Unlike in Disco, you also have to deal with Anxiety, Delirium, and Fatigue, three status bars or "Pressures" that fill as you do, say and hear things that rattle you, unhinge you or make you tired. Fill one of the bars up and you'll trigger a debuff and eventually, have to deduct a point from your stats to reset your troubled brain. Pressures can be reduced by means of booze, smokes and caffeine, but each remedy for one Pressure exacerbates another. The lasting solution is sleep, which obviously costs you time, and may trigger other events.

I don't find the Pressure bars hugely compelling, at the moment. At best, they help structure your movement around the world, disciplining your choices as you orbit between characters, slowly amassing hints that unlock fresh dialogue options or make replayable skill checks easier. At worst, they add a layer of fussy managerialism to an emotional flux that Disco explored more organically by way of its writing.

Speaking of, the new game's dialogue covers a familiar spectrum of moods and ideologies: whimsically functional, prankishly narcissistic, outright deluded, insufferably communist, insufferably capitalist. I find the more addled choices less convincing than those of Disco, simply because your character is not an amnesiac - there's no extended blank tablet comedy of being totally alienated from the setting and figuring yourself out. The voices of your skills also seem rather interchangeable, so far: the standout is Statehood, who peddles chunks of manifesto in all-caps. The others kind of flow together into one vein of flowery sarcasm. It might help if Cascade's voice actress, Boo Miller, hadn't been asked to maintain the same air of sneering diffidence throughout. (I quite like Miller's performance, myself, but I can understand why others find her grating.)

There is a little less antagonism toward the player in Zero Parades than in Disco. Perhaps because the spy story creates a pretext for playing all sides, the game seems less inclined to mock the player for being noncommittal - I've encountered fewer of Disco's infamous Option D is for Dithering gags. More importantly, it feels like there's less anguish and less to fear, despite the threat of skill point loss. The writing of Harry came from desperation, from extensive personal experience of addiction and defeat. It can be clownish in its self-loathing: "I don't want to be this kind of animal anymore."

By contrast, Cascade's turmoil feels like something out of a book. This doesn't necessarily make Zero Parades a badly written yarn – on the contrary, the script is a lot of fun, as the above excerpts hopefully suggest, and I don't actually know what inspirations the writers brought to the work. But Zero Parades seems less earnest and driven. Cascade may have a closetful of dreadful memories, but she is also a composite of references in a setting where everything is a little fake. She is one more cipher among the rest, waiting to be filed away by the disdainful connoisseur.

Zero Parades being somewhat of a parody of authenticity and cultural overwrite does not make the alleged treatment of Robert Kurvitz, Helen Hindpere and the other now-departed Disco creatives any the less terrible. But I'm finding the game – which is the work of many dozens besides the studio bosses who allegedly carved the creatives out of their own company - to be more in synch with the conversation around it than expected. I've still got many hours to go, and it's possible this opening analysis will be turned upside down; in particular, I've yet to reach Portofiro's Museum of Culture, which will surely bring some of the above conflicts to a head.