Image credit: ZA/UM

For many players, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies will never be anything other than a seedy clone of ZA/UM's reputation-making Disco Elysium – a soul-sucking forgery of a doomy leftist masterpiece, whose original lead writers and designers have been ousted by scheming executives . It's appropriate then, that, Zero Parades proves obsessed with clones, forgeries, bootlegs, and the ways in which these entities can be wielded for erasure and displacement. Its opening third is a comical squabble over notions of authenticity and (thereby) identity, an interrogation of connoisseurship and the notion of the 'genuine article' as vectors for assimilation.

The setting, Portofiro, is a coastal city whose local culture and Communist past are disappearing beneath a deluge of ostensibly smuggled, but in practice carefully disseminated 'bootleg' media from a rising "techno-fascist" state, La Luz, who are seeking to reacquire dominance over their former colonies (a nod to Putin-era Russia, probably, but…