ZA/UM Studio, the company behind Disco Elysium, just dropped a trailer for its upcoming RPG Zero Parades: For Dead Spies. This is the first real footage we are getting of the game, though we got a mysterious teaser last year when it was still being called Project C4.
This is a highly stylized sci-fi RPG in the vein of Disco Elysium, but with a unique scrapbook-esque visual style. It’s being called a “psychedelic espionage RPG,” and the name suggests a heavy emphasis on spycraft. It actually looks kind of neat.
This is something of a shadow drop announcement, as Zero Parades will be available for PC on May 21. That’s in just two weeks. It’s coming to PS5, but not until later this year. The game has been shrouded in secrecy, ever since ZA/UM Studio lost the core team that made Disco Elysium.
This includes creator Robert Kurvitz, art director Aleksander Rostov and writer Helen Hindpere. All three were fired by the company’s new executive suite in 2022, after the trio was accused of misconduct and attempted intellectual property theft. It’s worth noting that Kurvitz wrote the novel that Disco Elysium is based on.
Lawsuits were filed and Kurvitz and Rostov set up their own company. The pair refuted the allegations of IP theft and wrote in an open letter that they were fired due to an investigation surrounding the takeover of ZA/UM by Estonian businessmen Ilmar Kompus and Tõnis Haavel. These two were previously convicted of investment fraud and have been accused of creating a hostile work environment for women.
“I know at least five women who’ve left or been made to leave the studio since Disco’s launch, naming Tõnis Haavel as a major factor. There are zero women in creative leadership and very few women in leadership positions in general,” a former writer for Disco Elsyium told PC Gamer.
Other former ZA/UM employees formed a company called Longdue that’s making a new game called Hopetown that acts as a spiritual successor to Disco Elysium. It’s been a while since we’ve gotten an update on that one. In any event, we only have two weeks to see if ZA/UM still has some juice after all of the aforementioned drama. Zero Parades: For Dead Spies will be available to download from Steam, Epic Games Store and GOG for $40.
