ZA/UM doesn't want 'to invite too many comparisons' to Disco Elysium with new game Zero Parades—'We didn't feel like we wanted to repeat our greatest hits'

Seven years on from Disco Elysium's release and we are once again getting a game with the ZA/UM studio name on it. Zero Parades is a CRPG spy thriller that—when I played its demo a few weeks ago—felt very Disco-Elysium-shaped indeed.

Which is weird, because when our Wes Fenlon chatted to principal writer Siim Sinamäe at this year's Game Developers Conference (GDC), he said the studio doesn't want "to invite too many comparisons" to its predecessor.

"[In Zero Parades] You start in a safe house, not a hotel, right?" pointed out Sinamäe, his first example of a ZP divergence from Disco. "Let's do a safe house, you know, we don't want to invite too many comparisons because people, in bad faith, they will already compare and say that it's the same thing, despite there not being a body hanging out in the yard, right?"

Another difference, of course, is the protagonist. Gone is Disco Elysium's cop protagonist Harry Du Bois, in his place is Hershel Wilks, a spy whose bosses locked her out in the cold after an op gone wrong. "The backstory is different. The universe is different. You know, the job is different," said Sinamäe. "The police is about what's black and white, what is justice—a story of redemption. [In] espionage you do a lot of dubious things.

"We didn't feel like we wanted to repeat our greatest hits, so to speak. It's like, 'Let's challenge ourselves.'"

Which, hm. Big caveat here: I've only played ZP's demo—a small slice of a much larger game. Nevertheless, what I played felt very, consciously Disco-ish. Lines that come from Hershel (the game's protagonist) could come right from Harry Du Bois' mouth, your skills chatter and jostle with one another, and the game's setting is a mishmash of communist and fascist states in various states of conflict. If the goal was not to invite Disco Elysium comparisons then, well, that sure surprises me.

Sinamäe said the approach to ZA/UM's second game is "very much trial and error and testing and iterating." Working on the new game was, he said, a process of figuring out the thing the studio could do well and the things it really couldn't (perhaps this is why ZP still ends up falling into old patterns so often). "We have this team. This is what we can do—this is what we can do well, and let's do the things we can do well really well. And let's do the things we suck at kind of average."