Zero Parades: Director's Cut Review (Switch 2)

How does a studio follow an era-defining masterpiece without the original creative forces behind said masterpiece? The answer, for better or worse, is to emulate the experience almost completely.

ZA/UM emerges from a controversy far too storied to cover here with a follow-up to existential crisis simulator Disco Elysium. Zero Parades is once again about a lone figure of questionable authority and skill, wandering a political melting pot of a city and trying to find salvation or oblivion. It’s achingly beautiful and constantly thought-provoking, but also very familiar for fans of Harry DuBois’ misadventures in Revachol.

The complex and multi-branching story follows Hershel Wilk — whose spy name is the distinctly cooler-sounding CASCADE — as she is reactivated after being put out in the cold following a botched mission. She awakens in her apartment with a hazy memory and her partner, Psuedopod, passed out in a chair. The meat of the story has CASCADE try to find out why her partner is in a comatose state and what exactly the Operant, her shadowy handlers, want her for.

Hershel/CASCADE ventures out into the bustling streets of Portofiro, an ideological morass that struggles and rebels under the watchful eyes of multiple factions. The societal clock has been reset to zero following the Latour-Woolgar Treaty and CASCADE’s handlers work intelligence for the ruling communist power of the Superbloc. Meanwhile, propaganda and word-of-mouth for techno-fascist group La Luz permeates every conversation she has.

ZA/UM doesn’t hold your hand in a narrative sense; the world around you is a complete mystery to the player and in most cases, the protagonist. You are left to glean an emerging plot from colourful NPCs around the city.

Not a traditional mainstream RPG experience by any stretch, the game plays out more like an investigative tabletop adventure. You navigate dialogue trees, while passive and active skill checks determine when and where information becomes available.

There’s a character build system of sorts that gives you relative freedom in what kind of amnesiac spy you wish to be. Yellow skills govern how personable and empathetic you are, pink focus on physical spycraft, and purple are technical aptitudes.

There are three status meters to balance throughout the game: fatigue, delirium, and anxiety. Actions and poor conversation choices have a direct impact on these levels, and maxing them out will force a downgrade of a corresponding colour of skills. These status effects can be managed by successful dialogue rolls, consumables, and several environmental interactions. Keeping one eye on these levels adds a layer of tension to the relatively action-free investigations.

Conditioning offers a further way to boost CASCADE's core skills. Throughout her wandering, our confused spy will discover certain thought patterns that she can condition, which in turn buffs a cluster of her abilities. These thoughts have specific unlock criteria that, much like everything else in the game, are never obvious. Unlocking them, however, adds an element of intrigue and abstract progression to your character build.

Another way to boost certain skills is by assembling an aesthetically ridiculous outfit from items picked across the city. Your skills are also vital in several decision-making encounters that occur throughout the story. These multiple-choice scenarios usually require a series of rolls and give your status levels a beating. Dramatic encounters are the closest the game gets to action and they contrast just enough with the rest of the gameplay to be exciting.

Navigating Portofiro is a smooth experience, falling somewhere between point-and-click-style pixel hunting and free exploration. ZA/UM has made incremental traversal and UI improvements over Disco Elysium that have really paid off. Movement and investigation are intuitive, and exploration is decidedly less laborious than in the previous game. There is still a lot of aimless wandering as you figure out the next objective, but a helpful map and scanning system keeps things moving at a healthy clip.

The city itself is dripping with atmosphere, thanks in no small part to the beautifully haunting score from Fernando Cabrero. The rogues and grotesques that our anti-hero interacts with are as meticulously designed as their dialogue, and the voice acting is superb (though CASCADE's inner monologue can get a bit jarring). It's one of those games where you can't wait to meet the next NPC and engage in a philosophical battle of wills and/or idiotic argument about what it means to be 'cool'.

Yet, as engrossing as this spy-out-in-the-cold odyssey is, returning fans will feel a pervading sense that they've been here before. Those that laud ZA/UM's debut opus may be clamouring for more political events set in a European dystopia, but they won't get much else besides that. Newcomers, on the other hand, are in for an engrossing, at times mind-bending treat and should certainly follow up with the superior predecessor once they're done here.

The Switch 2 version of Zero Parades is jam-packed with new content and native console features. Noteworthy is the inclusion of mouse controls, which work well and are much better suited to environment interaction than the regular controller setup. Alongside mouse controls, touchscreen support, and HD Rumble 2, this Director's Cut version of the game arrives with new outfits, a behind-the-scenes Backstage mode, and a reported 40,000 additional words in the script.

One downside is the 30fps target, which noticeably mars the experience of wandering the populated streets of the city on a large screen. The isometric perspective and UI-heavy gameplay feel much better to play undocked. It just feels baffling that 60fps was not possible, given the hugely demanding games the console can run at that level.

Going some way to balancing out the performance shortcoming is a generous suite of accessibility options, including colour balancing, contrast and dyslexia settings.