With no combat system, Zero Parades is an RPG all about skill checks and spycraft, and it's a more exciting adventure for it

Artwork from Zero Parades: For Dead Spies showing the Conditioning thought How to Pull This Off, showing CASCADE slumped in a chair with her innards turned into a pinball machine — (Image credit: ZA/UM)

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I like my purple wig in Zero Parades. It makes people want to open up to me more, even if it dampens my spy-like ability to blend into the shadows and read a room. My spikey cuffs, meanwhile, might detract from ingratiating me to others, but help me pluck up the nerve to stand my ground in some vital and tense situations.

Dress-up can be deadly in this world of spycraft, and my mission hinges on it more than my gun in this socially-driven RPG. It's a firearm I spend hours working to acquire deep in the field, and never even fire once – though I hover over the option to take a shot in more than a few dicey conversations, and flash my piece a few times to try to hammer home a point. In an RPG that hinges so much on reams of text, dialogue choices and ways to deploy different skills to worm through situations successes and failures both pushing my tale forward, every skill bonus matters, and every item in my inventory can be key whether I use them or not.

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The outfit inventory in Zero Parades: For Dead Spies — (Image credit: ZA/UM)

RPG gear giving buffs is par for the course, but Zero Parades' dedication to the humble skill check makes those bonuses more vital and tangible than ever. When you're rolling two six-sided dice to roll a 10 or above, every additional point to lower that goalpost is felt. Skill-boosting clothing is a system that evolves on precursor Disco Elysium's, but Zero Parade's spy-theming better suits burnt-out spy Hershel Wilk, known under the alias CASCADE. From hair pieces, hazard boots, black market police uniforms, to simply a paper bag with holes, she's able to wear the right fit for the right occasion.

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No dedicated combat system doesn't mean that Zero Parades doesn't have action or tense moments. In fact, it's filled with them. Dice rolling skill checks abound. Zero Parades continues forward even when failing one of the bright red one-try skill checks, which, rather than dampening the feeling of consequences, increases it by forcing you to live on with your failure.

Zero Parades continues forward even when failing.

One such muck-up transitions me into a brutal torture sequence, filled with tough rolls, and where even free dialogue options can annoy my captor to the point where they electrocute me, slowly increasing my fatigue, anxiety, and delirium. These mental faculties can also be accrued to push a dice roll's chances, but come with their own downsides when they get too high, overspilling to permanently lose a precious skill point. Even worse, tied to a chair in a dank basement, some of my clothing has been removed. Without the associated buffs, I feel even more powerless, as poking and prodding to glean information I can use to further my mission quickly gives way to just trying to survive as intact as I possibly can.

CASCADE is tortured in a dark room in Zero Parades: For Dead Spies — (Image credit: ZA/UM)

Watching CASCADE's conditions stack up, drawing closer and closer to maxing out, makes for some of the tensest use of RPG mechanics I've experienced in years. It's refreshing to see this coming from a design direction that doesn't need to lean on battle systems, selling vibes that hew closer to some of my favorite tabletop RPG experiences playing with friends. In our Zero Parades review, we were impressed with the "extra vector for storytelling" these systems can create.

But, Zero Parades isn't only about drawn-out dialogue trees and slow-building tension. Action can kick up a gear as well. These Dramatic Encounters underscore the RPG's diciest moments, presenting a series of difficult to accomplish possible reactions in sequence during high-stakes moments – trying to lose a tail through a bustling bazaar, for example, or being suddenly jumped in a kitchen by someone with a mysterious syringe.

As the animation in Dramatic Encounters plays out, the action then pauses, showing an overlay of gaudy artwork representing CASCADE's lightning-quick spy analysis for how she should respond. Because they're often sudden, and back-to-back, it's difficult to tailor your build to meet them, and here more than ever you'll come up against some diverging failure states that make bungling through your spy assignment feel like your own unique story.

CASCADE weighs up choices during a Dramatic Encounter in the bootleg bazaar in Zero Parades — (Image credit: ZA/UM)

Primarily dialogue-driven, these moments of action are few and far between, but carry more weight than if Zero Parades was constantly using them. Even some of the best RPGs can become bogged down in a deluge of combat encounters that can become background noise.

The effect is that Zero Parades feel more like an espionage novel or a spy thriller. Even the upcoming 007 First Light is drawing a line between when James Bond can draw his gun on enemies. With its spy-fi tone, Zero Parades holds back its biggest heart-in-mouth moments, deploying them only when the narrative truly crescendos, and thanks to a web of diverging choices, often feeling events are spiraling out of control because of what you, yourself, have done.

Exploring a penthouse's dirtied bathroom post party in Zero Parades: For Dead Spies — (Image credit: ZA/UM)

The approach to action, choice, and how you use your spy skills fits Zero Parade's structure as well. Though it takes a while to spin into motion, it's about putting a new spy group together after you've spent five years on ice following a mission gone massively wrong. Quite what you did and how you handled it is, in true RPG fashion, left for you to make some decisions about, as is how you handle either reconnecting with old faces or forging connections with new ones (and how willing you are to put them in danger).

Make no mistake, something like combat occurs to cap off my own bungled approach to accomplishing my mission, but there's no glossy combat system that awaits CASCADE and her allies to cap off my many hours of play. Just a handful of incredibly tense, heart-in-mouth dice rolls, each potential choice more dangerous and casually violent than the last. I'm still not sure if I succeeded or failed by the time credits roll, not really, and my deliberately esoteric results are something I'm still turning in my head – but one thing I am sure of is there are no parades to be had here, and Zero Parades doesn't need them anyway.

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With no combat system, Zero Parades is an RPG all about skill checks and spycraft, and it's a more exciting adventure for it

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