ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies Wiki

ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies

ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies is a 2026 espionage role-playing game developed and published by ZA/UM, the studio behind Disco Elysium. Set in 1996 in the coastal city-state of Portofiro, a former penal colony of the techno-fascist power La Luz, it casts the player as Hershel Wilk, cryptonym CASCADE, a burned-out operative recalled from five years of internal exile to rebuild the network she lost in 1991. Play is conversation-first: fifteen skills across three faculties drive dice-based checks, Dramatic Encounters turn confrontations into staged dialogue battles, and a stress model of fatigue, anxiety and delusion punishes pushing too hard. There is no conventional combat system, so violence, interrogation and betrayal all resolve through the same skill checks, and the campaign branches on which of Hershel's old crew she can still trust.

• Fifteen Skills in Three Faculties — Hershel's capabilities are split into the Faculty of Action (Coordination, Doppelgäng, Instincts, Sensors, Shadowplay), the Faculty of Relation (Blueprints, Cold Read, Nerve, Personalism, Statehood) and the Faculty of Intellect (Entanglement, Grey Matter, Poetics, Records, Technoflex). Every dialogue branch, locked door, deduction and physical risk is gated behind one of them.
• Dice-Driven Skill Checks — Checks roll against a target number using the relevant skill and its current value, and failure is written to be as playable as success: a missed check diverts the scene onto a different route instead of ending it.
• Stress, Exertion and Conditioning — Pushing a check past Hershel's means spends Exertion and feeds a three-track stress model of fatigue, anxiety and delusion. Conditioning and Thoughts then reshape her psychology, raising some skill potentials and distorting others.
• Dramatic Encounters — When a conversation turns pivotal or violent the scene shifts into a stylised, cinematic Dramatic Encounter, where the confrontation itself is the combat and every beat is resolved through dialogue choices and skill checks rather than a real-time or turn-based battle system.
• Espionage Tradecraft in Portofiro — Investigation, tailing, infiltration and asset management replace dungeon crawling. Portofiro is a hub of districts, vendors, informants and burned networks that reopen as Hershel rebuilds trust with the people she left behind in 1991.
• One Last Assignment — Recalled from the Freezer in Novessa after five years, Hershel has to re-establish the Whole Sick Crew that the Weeping Eye destroyed, deciding which of her former operatives are still usable and which are already lost to the other side.