Creators of the critically acclaimed Disco Elysium debuted the main character in their follow-up espionage thriller ZERO PARADES.
In a digital preview conference, ZA/UM C4 Producer, Jess Crawford and VO Director/Writer, Jim Ashilevi, sat down with members of the press to give them an introduction to the main character of ZERO PARADES: a burnt-out, quasi-ex spy by the name of Hershel Wilk—codenamed CASCADE.
“Writing ZERO PARADES, we’ve been obsessing over classical espionage fiction,” said Ashilevi, adding, “we’ve been looking towards John Le Carré, in particular, and his excellent novels. But then also, we’re huge sci-fi geeks, so it made sense to tap into that part of our literary obsessions as well. So we’ve been reading a lot of Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, and Stanisław Lem…to name a few.”
When describing Hershel, they painted the picture of a character who is both incredibly skilled and deeply flawed. As Crawford explained, “One thing that we have been thinking about when creating Herschel is that we wanted her to be the anti-James Bond.” She continued, “There’s a lot of glamour shown within kind of modern-day spy stories…And that is not Herschel.”
Crawford also went into a bit of the gameplay elements that will shape Hershel as players progress through ZERO PARADES. Similar to their previous game, certain things will affect Hershel’s psyche and result in positive and negative effects through a new system called “Conditioning.” As Crawford describes it, Conditioning is the Thought Cabinet+++. Players can choose to reinforce thoughts or punish them, which will drastically change Hershel’s ability to do her job.
“In Zero Parades, you need to just roll with whatever happens…”
Using an analogy of punishing a thought about smoking, Crawford described a situation where Hershel could be at a party and some delegates are smoking outside. If Hershel were to go outside and smoke with them, she might gain crucial information, but it would negatively affect her modifiers because she’s acting against her Conditioning. “That’s the choice throughout gameplay,” said Crawford, “its who you want to be versus who you really are.”
Lastly, the most interesting part of the presentation was what they call “Dramatic Encounters.” According to Ashilevi, these are “a game mechanic that we came up with in order to find a compelling answer to the question, ‘how do we inject high tension and urgent drama into an otherwise text-based game experience?'”
These moments essentially play out as a series of checks where, as a player, you’re forced to be quick on your feet and to just make quick decisions without worrying about the results. “You need to just roll with whatever happens,” said Ashilevi, adding, “and if the end result is not what you expected, our dream would be to just encourage you to just embrace the failure instead of save scumming.”
No release date has been set for ZERO PARADES, however the game is available to wishlist on Steam.
