The most scrutinized indie release of May is out: Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, the new game from ZA/UM, launched May 21 on PC. Every sentence about it must legally begin with the same sentence: this is the studio's first game since Disco Elysium.
ZA/UM has gone out of its way to insist Zero Parades is neither a sequel nor a spiritual successor to that masterpiece. And yet the game's public presentation is doing a lot of talking: the same painterly art direction sensibilities, the same skill-check-driven role-playing where dice rolls and trained abilities decide your fate, the same dry narration. Where Disco had an amnesiac cop deconstructing himself in a city that hated him, Zero Parades has a spy haunted by her failures, navigating a three-way power struggle where every agency thinks it's the only sane one in the room.
Whether it inherits the writing quality is this week's critical question — and it carries extra weight given the baggage behind the studio's doors. Most of the creatives who actually defined Disco Elysium — its writer-designers, artists and producers — departed ZA/UM years ago amid a very public split. They've since scattered into new studios, at least one of which has already announced its own rival successor project, Tangerine Antarctic. Zero Parades's "from the creators of Disco Elysium" billing has therefore become a point of genuine contention in the community.
A PC demo has been available for a while for anyone wanting to judge the writing directly. Console players have further to wait — a PlayStation 5 version is only vaguely dated for 2026.
However the legacy drama lands, what matters today is simpler: ZA/UM shipped. A new espionage RPG with audacious writing ambitions exists, and it's playable now. The verdicts will decide whether the crown ever really stayed put.