The new game from Disco Elysium's studio feels like the first Christmas after your parents' divorce

Commodity fetishism is the Marxist term for the process by which relationships between people become relationships between commodities. That is to say, the long narrative of the box of cereal, the pair of shoes, the smartphone you pick up from a store shelf is mystified by the scale and complexity of capitalism.

You don't see the sweating South American farmer, the Bangladeshi textile worker working her hands into claws, or the exploited African cobalt miner. You see a product, new and gleaming and brightly wrapped, interpretable only by its relationship to other products: a phone is worth X boxes of cereal is worth Y pairs of shoes. The people vanish, as if by magic.

Zero Parades: For Dead Spies has whatever the opposite of commodity fetishism is.

It's impossible to play the demo for the second game from ZA/UM—that studio what made Disco Elysium—and not see the ghosts hovering around it. You see the people that made it: the rump state of a collective that splintered spectacularly in the wake of its first, incredibly successful game. You see the people that did not make it: the founders who left under acrimonious circumstances, alleging financial malfeasance on the part of moneymen who, they claimed, had used underhanded means to swipe the studio out from under them.

Call for the dead

But let's try for a second to consider Zero Parades, which I've played a few hours of in demo form, in a vacuum. Is it good? Yes, I think so, but so far too trapped in Disco's shadow to be great. You are Hershel Wilks, alias CASCADE, a spy for the communist "Superbloc" of People's Republics dispatched by her superiors on a mission she knows nothing about.

She's also a fuck-up. Five years ago, an as-yet-undescribed error on her part resulted in the deaths of her entire cadre of comrade spies. Since then, she's been in The Freezer (think Slow Horses' Slough House), the spot the Superbloc sends its washouts to fade out in ignominy.

It's good spy fiction, and much of the writing emulates, effectively, that detached, grey, dissociative style of John le Carré at his best. But you see the ghosts already, right? A terminal loser sent on a mission they barely understand in a world defined by ideological extremes? I could be describing Disco Elysium right now.

Okay, yes, Harrier DuBois was actually a good cop when he wasn't drinking and doping himself to death (and sometimes when he was), but my time with Hershel Wilks suggests she might be none-too-bad of a spy herself, whatever her bosses think.

Charisma check

Besides, the comparisons begin there, not end. Mechanically, Zero Parades feels like ZA/UM adopting Disco Elysium's skill and check system as its house style. Your abilities chat to you and your progress still manifests in the form of white (repeatable) and red (non-repeatable) skillchecks, though the studio has made some innovations here, and not every system that will be present in the final game—notably its take on the Thought Cabinet—is present in the demo.

There are three ability pools—physical skills, interpersonal skills, and intellectual skills, roughly—each with their own health bar. So long as you're not too low on HP for a particular skill pool, you can "Exert" yourself on relevant skill checks at the cost of a little damage, effectively giving you a D&D 5e-style advantage on whichever roll you're attempting.

It feels like a natural evolution of DE's system, and introduces a little frisson of gambling into each of the game's checks; if any of those skillpool healthbars takes too much damage, you have to sacrifice a point in one of its associated abilities to bring it back down.

Win or lose, everything is narrated by a voice you've never heard anywhere else in videogames. Here, though, Lenval Brown's bassy rumble is replaced by a nasal, feminine voice that's simultaneously ancient and adolescent, perpetually in a stance of semi-mockery where Brown was studiously neutral.

It is, I should clarify, a fantastic voice, albeit one that I imagine lots of people will find grating. As for the things it says? Those are good too. Even with its exodus of talent, ZA/UM can still write, and Zero Parades' dialogue is often sharp, strange and funny.

The studio still excels in conjuring memorable, off-kilter personalities, like safehouse manager Constanz, a model petit-bourgeois rebelling against mummy and daddy by throwing in with the communists, or Petre, the flea-market music salesman who categorises his collection by genres like Hairdresser Music, Opinionated Female Vocalists, Music By Pederasts, and Music For Pederasts.

Accept no substitutes

But it's also all quite familiar, isn't it? Zero Parades never—in my admittedly limited time with an admittedly limited demo—transcends imitation. Everything it does, Disco Elysium did first and frequently better, and the game seems to constantly invite the comparison by just how similar it is to its forebear.

Even those funny dialogue options tend to feel ripped straight out of Disco. Discussing her confinement to the freezer, you're able to make Wilks adopt a kind of Superstar Cop mode: "I was too cool," she declares. "They couldn't keep me down."

It feels like someone doing a Harrier DuBois impression, and all the stranger because Harry's particular weirdness was inextricably tied to his copness and maleness.

Don't misunderstand me: my feminism recognises that women are just as capable of being monumental, self-deluding screw-ups as men are. Nevertheless, Harry could get away with walking up to people and declaring that he was the prophet of the end-times or the herald of a celebrity cop-culture to come because, as the loading screens in DE would tell you, people are more tolerant of that sort of thing from authority figures, and they're more tolerant of male peculiarity (which we call eccentricity) than the peculiarity of women (which we only recently stopped treating with electroshock therapy).

When Wilks delivers these sorts of lines, or even has the option to, it feels like ZA/UM falling back on what it knows is popular rather than what feels right for the character.

That feeling of a sort of timid imitation pops up quite regularly. One of my earliest subtasks was to repair the safehouse fax machine. Simple enough, except Zero Parades kept describing the whole process in terms that made it feel like it was trying and failing to channel DE, inviting me to "pacify the machine spirit" and lamenting the various demonic entities that surely possessed it, as if Wilks had suddenly become a kind of off-brand Harry DuBois. It felt like a studio doing a ZA/UM impression, not ZA/UM itself.

It leads to an experience that feels like the first Christmas after your parents' divorce. Sometimes it's good! Often, even! But there's an absence that is looming and unmistakable, and everyone's desperate desire to act like everything is still normal only serves to highlight it, not obscure it.

From my time with my demo, Zero Parades is a good time, but it's stuck in the shadow of Disco Elysium and its absconded creators, and so long as that's the case it's doomed to feel like an epigone. Often it's a good copy, sometimes a pale one, but never something more than an imitation.