Zero Parades – For Dead Spies: first gameplay of the mind-bending spy RPG, out 2026 on PS5

Hey everyone! We are super excited to reveal the first-ever gameplay of Zero Parades – For Dead Spies. If you’ve been wondering what our next game after Disco Elysium looks like since our official announcement at Gamescom’s Opening Night Live, then get yourself ready for a whirlwind tour.

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Zero Parades – For Dead Spies is a narrative-first espionage RPG steeped in paranoia, surrealism, and a struggle for redemption. You play as Hershel, a brilliant yet unfortunate operant in a world where trust is scarce, betrayal is just around every corner, and failure is inevitable. 

You’ll see that our game bears its cRPG lineage proudly. If you ever played Disco Elysium, Baldur’s Gate, or Pillars of Eternity, you will feel right at home. There are, of course, a lot of new ideas we wanted to bring into the mix. So let’s take a deep dive into those you can see in the gameplay reveal trailer:

Dramatic Encounters

This is a brand-new feature we are introducing for Zero Parades. We want you to feel like a true operant (our term for spies) and that means including high-intensity scenes alongside the more methodical ones. 

Dramatic Encounters are moments in which time stands still so you must make a series of choices to resolve a potentially deadly situation. But this isn’t James Bond. You can’t just smile and shoot your way out of everything. So, while you are skilled, the outcome of your choices will ultimately be determined by dice roll – which is influenced by your character’s attributes. If you do fail, the sequence will continue, and you’ll have to hope your next choice goes better for you.

To illustrate with an example from the trailer: you are being tailed. You only have time to react to the ongoing situation and hopefully worm your way out of it. It begins by time slowing down to a pause and your highly trained eye showing you your options. Do you try to hide in a crowd and lose the tail that way? Or do you take a risky jump and pray that they don’t dare follow? Neither option is right or wrong, but you will have to live with the consequences either way.

Failing forward & Exertion

A core pillar of our game design philosophy is the idea of ‘failing forward’. The story continues no matter what happens – you’ll just be better off if it goes well. Those who played Disco Elysium should know the joy of embracing failure that we put into our games. Don’t be so quick to reload the game as there’s a surprise waiting for you after every bad dice roll.

We have evolved how this plays out in Zero Parades with the introduction of the ‘Exert’ button. When you’re faced with a dice roll, you now get the chance to push your luck a little further. Hitting the ‘Exert’ button allows you to roll with advantage (by adding a third die to the roll) so you can take the scores of the best two dice rolls and ignore the worst one, giving you more chance at success. This does come with a small sacrifice, but we’ll go into what that is at another time. 

Conditioning 

A big part of the spy fantasy is the ‘conditioning’ that they must go through. This is training their mind to deal with the worst situations they may encounter – such as being interrogated or being able to act like the enemy to sneak past in plain sight.

We have turned that idea into a gameplay mechanic in Zero Parades. It’s called, simply, Conditioning. An advancement of what we did with the Thought Cabinet in Disco Elysium, this is where you can reinforce Thoughts that you come across in the game world. These may enhance your skills or allow you access to new ways of thinking. But, being a spy, Hershel doesn’t have the luxury of internalising ideas for several hours or days like in Disco Elysium, so the experience with Conditioning is a lot snappier to match our new setting.

We’re very interested in how the human mind is affected by the pressures of being a spy. Conditioning is one way in which we explore this as you can decide how to shape Hershel from the inside out. As with everything, you can’t have it all, so you need to balance the positives with the negatives. Being an operant isn’t easy and if you’re not careful it could eat your mind.

Zero Parades – For Dead Spies will launch in 2026 on PS5. Wishlist today.