Zero Parades for Dead Discourse
February 19, 2026
I have been following the development of ZA/UM's upcoming game Zero Parades with much interest, partially because I have a friend who is one of the developers at the studio working on the game. You deserve to know that up front, as it inevitably colours my perspective on both the game and the press coverage it has received and continues to receive.
Today, a number of major games press outlets have published their impressions on an early demo of the game and it seems that they almost uniformly cannot keep Disco Elysium, or ominous refereneces thereto, out of their titles. I find this a little annoying and a little troubling and I hope to explain why.
Now, I am well aware that writers do not choose their headlines with any consistency. The editorial staff for any given piece work to reconcile the substance of the article with the increasingly-vague branch of divination that is search engine optimization, and the resulting headlines are inevitably a compromise of these sometimes-contradictory priorities. Okay.
I am also aware that textual comparisons between Zero Parades and Disco Elysium are normal, inevitable, and necessary. It would be absurd to have played 30, 50, 150 hours of Disco, and then not be bursting at the seams with intertextual ideas when playing Zero Parades.
What bothers me is the air of lamentation that suffuses nearly all of the preview coverage. The previews demonstrate a deep preoccupation with Disco and its own creative leads which goes beyond the headline and extends into paragraphs of handwringing about how, damn, it really sucks that we'll never get another game from the original writers. Damn, it sure was messy how they left the studio yikes emoji. Most of the previews express interest and even admiration of individual moments and parts of Zero Parades, but continue to invoke Disco as an albatross that the current work is unlikely to shake off.
There are two things I dislike about this preoccupation. The first problem I have here is that the uniformity of this criticism has no parallel in how the same outlets treat, say, Xbox, which has for over a year been the target of an organized boycott in protest of Microsoft's contracts with the Israeli Occupation Force, a partnership which actively enables the latter's ongoing campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people.
The second reason I dislike this uniform holding pattern of lamentation is a little simpler and a little more sentimental. It's really starting to feel like y'all just aren't interested in seeing the game in front of you. A critic I admire, Roxanne B., touched upon this recently, writing of the critical tendency to shadowbox with the game you anticipated or imagined rather than the game you got. I see a lot of shadowboxing happening here, looking both forward (the Disco 2 we never got) and backward (the Disco 1 we never got over), but never really at the present.
There's one additional moving part I want to touch upon here. Autumn Wright recently penned a strong criticism of an IGN editorial nominally defending then-unreleased shooter Highguard. Autumn admonishes that the IGN piece conflates the work of a critic with that of a hype man, and that the article serves a purely ideological function rather than a critical one.
The neverending wake I see being held for Disco Elysium in every word of coverage about Zero Parades seems to me to likewise fulfill an ideological rather than critical purpose, albeit opposite in intent and effect.
Here's the way I see it. Gossip about ZA/UM is sport. Endless editorializing about the messy departure of its original creative leadership is fun--and fair game--because it is low stakes. Compare with how most of the big outlets stay mum on the BDS campaign against Xbox because speaking up might anger Microsoft, their readership, or both. Conversely, ZA/UM is a smaller target, one who cannot meaningfully fight back. It needs Zero Parades to be a sales success to survive and it cannot afford to play favourites with which outlets get priority access to demos and review copies.
In an article a little while back my friend Kaile Hultner responded to the criticism that supporting the BDS campaign against Microsoft would unfairly injure the studios working under Microsoft's umbrella. Kaile countered that there is no reliable correlation between a studio's success and its odds of survival under a corporate organism as large as Microsoft, citing the example of Tango Gameworks, shuttered by Microsoft in the immediate wake of its successful release of Hi-Fi Rush.
I see a certain hypocrisy in the initial criticism that Kaile was responding to here: "Think of the devs" appears to be an incredibly selective and case-by-case rejoinder depending on the size of the target. Editorializing (and I use that word deliberately, because nobody in games press really knows everything that went on between the current management and Disco's departed creative leads) about ZA/UM intrigue is good because players should know where their money is going and where it is not. Calling out Microsoft's partnership with a state doing war crimes is bad because it might have some intangible influence on the already-inscrutable calculus that informs what studios Xbox leadership choose to shutter in the next wave of mass layoffs.
There's a little bit of irony, I think, in the consensus opinion that Zero Parades languishes in Disco Elysium's shadow. I find myself wondering in all of this whether it is Zero Parades that is caught more deeply in Disco's gravity well or the games press itself.