There are some games you finish and immediately want to talk about. Then there are games you finish and need to sit with for a while, turning them over in your mind, thinking about what they meant and what they were really trying to say. Zero Parades is firmly in the second category. It is a deep, text-heavy RPG built around dice rolls, dialogue choices, and a richly written world and it is one of the best games of 2026.
A World Worth Getting Lost In
The game takes place in Portofiro, a fictional city set in 1991. It is a place full of bootlegged goods, clashing cultures, competing ideologies, and people just trying to survive in a world that feels slightly out of control. Developer ZA/UM has built a city that feels genuinely alive, with different districts that each carry their own personality and atmosphere.
The most memorable of these is the Bootleg Bazaar a busy, chaotic marketplace packed with counterfeit products, street vendors, costume shops, and music stalls. It feels like the kind of real place you might have wandered through on holiday, messy and colorful and full of small human stories happening all at once. One moment you are watching two children completely absorbed in a cartoon on a television. The next you are reading the history of a large astronaut sculpture, or listening to a girl talk about her father who vanished after using a payphone. These small details add up to something that feels genuinely meaningful.
As you explore the city, you learn about its history, the divisions between its districts and social classes, and the three powerful forces fighting for control over it. There is EMTERR, a banking system that uses debt as a weapon. There is La Luz, a technofascist group that floods the market with cultural media to control people’s minds. And there is the Superbloc, a communist-led organisation whose spy agency employs the game’s protagonist.
Meet Cascade
You play as Cascade, a spy who was once considered the best in her field until something went wrong five years ago. She was pulled off duty, her team got stuck in Portofiro, and she was shelved by her own organisation. Now she has been brought back, waking up in a strange room next to her partner Pseudopod, who is barely conscious, missing his trousers, and unable to explain what is going on.
From that strange starting point, you begin piecing together what happened. Your handler orders you to leave the city. Cascade ignores that order and starts her own investigation. What follows is a slow, layered unravelling of secrets involving her old team, a mysterious red disc, and an assignment that nobody officially gave her.
Cascade is a well-written character. The choice to make her a spy rather than a police detective the role Disco Elysium’s protagonist filled turns out to be a smart one. Espionage naturally lends itself to secrecy, misdirection, and the slow discovery of hidden truths. It suits this kind of game perfectly. Some of her dialogue options do feel a little too similar to moments from the previous game, but these are minor complaints in an otherwise strong character portrait.
How the Game Actually Works
If you have played Disco Elysium, the mechanics here will feel familiar. You move Cascade around the city from an overhead perspective, clicking on characters and objects to interact with them. Conversations branch based on your choices, and many of those choices are governed by dice rolls.
There are fifteen skills in total, split across three categories: Action, Relation, and Intellect. Each skill represents a different part of Cascade’s training and personality. As you invest points into different skills, they influence how conversations play out and which options are available to you. Higher skill levels improve your chances of succeeding on dice rolls, though nothing is ever guaranteed.
Alongside your skills, Cascade has three status bars Fatigue, Anxiety, and Delirium each linked to one of the three skill categories. Push too hard in any direction and these bars fill up, creating complications. If they hit their limit, you lose a skill point from that area. Managing these bars adds a layer of planning and strategy to every conversation and decision.
You can also influence Cascade’s abilities through the clothes she wears, the cigarettes and drinks she consumes, and the mental conditioning you unlock through certain conversations. Building the kind of spy you want to be is genuinely engaging, and the system rewards careful thinking without ever feeling overwhelming once you understand it.
Some choices in conversation are white checks, meaning you can try them again later if you fail. Others are red checks one attempt only, no second chances. These permanent decisions give the game real weight. You cannot just reload and try everything. Your playthrough is shaped by the choices you make and the skills you have built.
Looks Great, Sounds Mixed
Visually, Zero Parades is a strong game. Each district of Portofiro has its own look and feel, from the neon-lit streets of the night market to the cold, industrial atmosphere of the docks. The lighting in particular does a lot of heavy lifting the way the evening sun falls through narrow alleyways, or the way artificial light bounces off wet streets at night, gives the world a cinematic quality that suits the spy setting perfectly.
Performance is mostly smooth. There are occasional brief stutters and a couple of moments where the character model clips through the environment, but these are rare and never seriously disrupt the experience.
The weakest area is the voice acting. It is not bad across the board, but it is inconsistent. Some performances feel convincing and natural, while others feel forced and theatrical. More importantly, the different skill voices which in Disco Elysium were one of that game’s most memorable features, each skill feeling like a distinct personality living inside your head do not feel as separate or as vivid here. They blend together in a way that makes them feel less like individual voices and more like variations of the same one. It is a noticeable step down from what the studio achieved before, and it is hopefully something that can be improved through future updates.
The Disco Elysium Question
It would be impossible to review Zero Parades without addressing its relationship to Disco Elysium. ZA/UM’s first game is widely regarded as one of the greatest RPGs ever made, and one of the most artistically ambitious video games of all time. Since its release, the studio went through significant internal changes, with many of the original creative team departing. Zero Parades arrives carrying all of that history on its shoulders.
The honest answer is that Zero Parades is not quite at the level of Disco Elysium. That game had something rare a depth of melancholy, a literary quality, and a sense of tragic beauty that is genuinely difficult to replicate. Zero Parades does not fully reach those heights.
But it does not embarrass itself either. It takes the mechanical foundation of Disco Elysium, improves several parts of it, and builds something that stands on its own. Portofiro is not simply a copy of Revachol. It has its own identity, its own political textures, and its own way of drawing you into its world. The themes it explores cultural bootlegging, the weight of capitalism, postcolonial identity, the way media and debt are used as tools of control are handled with real intelligence and care. It explores these ideas without being preachy, which is harder to do than it sounds.
The new Dramatic Encounters mechanic adds moments of tension and urgency that the original game lacked. The Fatigue, Anxiety, and Delirium system creates a satisfying layer of risk management. These are genuine improvements, not just imitations.
Final Verdict
Zero Parades is a thoughtful, beautifully written RPG that deserves to be taken seriously. It is the kind of game that rewards patience, curiosity, and a willingness to read carefully. Its world is rich, its protagonist is compelling, and its gameplay systems click together in a way that feels well-designed and satisfying.
It carries the shadow of Disco Elysium throughout, and that shadow is long. For some players, the comparison will be a source of slight disappointment. For others, it will be a reason to play. Either way, Zero Parades earns its place as one of the best text-based RPGs in recent years, and one of the most interesting games released in 2026.
The voice acting needs work. Some moments feel a little too familiar. But the world, the writing, and the ideas behind them are more than enough to make this worth your time.
Rating: 9.5 / 10
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