20 minutes into Zero Parades and I have to lose a skill point because my anxiety is so high. It’s been a morning; my spy double PSEUDOPOD has been zeroed, unresponsive in a chair, listening to music that cannot be replayed. He’s also not wearing any pants. My handler has called to demand I get out of town on the first tram. I can’t tell who to trust. I’ve leaned into a paranoid intellectual archetype, built on too much media literacy of 1970s spy thrillers. I’ve been at this job way too long, seen all my colleagues disappear, and I’m starting to believe the man with a bag on his head on TV.
This is how Zero Parades opens. It only gets weirder from here.
An hour later, I’m standing in a market watching TV with two children who tell me all about their favourite television show. Sixty-Six Wolves, where lycanthropes emerge from the heart of a girl to fight the angels. I wonder about the future symbolism of this, as a woman who is clearly destined to fight the powers that be. To aid my proletarian struggle, I wrangle a cool sword off the kids.
An hour after that, I’m impersonating the police, I’ve called an abduction hotline, and found out there’s a boar infestation in town. Which I’m clearly going to fight with my plastic sword.
The point here is not absurdity, although it abounds in Zero Parades. It’s time.
Time is important in Zero Parades. Like the spy that you are, it pays to observe the passing of time and the movements of its people. The world progresses around you as the day passes; when I went back to the bazaar in the evening, the children were gone, the television abandoned. It’s one of the most subtle and beautiful aspects of Zero Parades’ narrative design.
As I was playing, it struck me how this progression through the day was so perfectly constructed; from the first examination of Pseudopod’s body which directs you to ask around the market, to finding the disc seller, to moving further into the city. The conversations you have along the way aren’t guaranteed; sure, you could come to these places by various paths. But these conversations built the world and my quests as I progressed: a young party vendor worried about her missing father; a market seller bothered by the pervert observing from on high; the children wanting to collect six wolf cups, in a heady portent to your six missing colleagues.
Mid-life crisis
In Zero Parades, you play Hershel Wilk, cryptonym CASCADE, a rogue Opera agent in the city of Portofiro, back in theatre for one last mission. Her catastrophic last mission saw her comrades dispersed by the fascist surveillance operators of the Weeping Eye, and this past haunts her throughout her choices in the game. You uncover the city’s secrets one by one, each significant chapter bookended by thrilling set-pieces where your choices – and your dice rolls – determine the outcome. While you can occasionally die, the fail-forward system means that the story won’t stumble to a halt at a failed dice roll. Although you’ll be surprised how your choices eventually play out. Even the most innocuous conversation can affect future events.
CASCADE’s cryptonym is representative of what the player does; each choice has a positive or negative affect throughout the game. It cascades down over time. That little chat I had with the depressive audiophile in the market comes back to haunt me later as I try to engage in conversations about music. His misanthropic views bum my enthusiasm in the form of negative modifiers to my skill checks.
Sometimes, exhausting dialogue trees is actually bad for you (and occasionally, your health). There’s a more nuanced take to this gamer FOMO where we’ve been trained to click every button, ask every question. In Zero Parades it’s best to remember that you are a spy – and as they say, discretion is the better part of valour.
CRPGs have always been dialogue heavy, but Zero Parades overwhelms the senses. The rasping narrator’s voice crawls across the words, as if she’s scratching to get out of CASCADE’s psyche. It’s an active choice to be patient, to listen to the dialogue as one would an audiobook. It’s unapologetically dense at times, and sometimes apologetically too, but it rewards the intellectually curious gamer with musings on everything from art to economics. The best diatribes are delivered by the most absurd characters: the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas doppelganger Dr Gonza, the perpetually drunk agent of the free-state Oskar Metamoto, the ALL CAPS monkey.
As in any game, the best NPCs have a carefully constructed identity; what makes them memorable is their originality, their absurdity, those little hooks that make them tick and sink their way into the player’s subconscious well after the game has finished.
Which brings us to Hershel Wilk, Operant CASCADE herself.
In media, spies are usually one of four archetypes. A beautiful young women designed to seduce the enemy, the ultra-serious senior female handler, the dashing tuxedo clad runabout, or the cragged man of the world holding a headphone casket to one ear. Where does a middle-aged woman fit into this identity?
At first, I thought she didn’t. I considered it a flaw of the game that the main character didn’t have a perceived identity for the player to latch onto. There was no permission slip for outlandish behaviour, nor was there a nudge towards seriousness. CASCADE is as you make her.
As I thought about this more, I was struck with an epiphany.
Where does a middle-aged woman fit into any identity?
We don’t see middle-aged women in video games much. Female protagonists in video games are often 20-30-something trauma competents: capable professionals with emotional baggage. I can see the developer meetings now: guys, the trauma makes them interesting. It’s like putting a scar on a beautiful character design and calling her “edgy.”
In media, middle-aged women are often relegated to their roles as mothers. They are the ones who heroically die, catapulting the orphaned hero on their journey.
What is a middle-aged woman without children, except for an absence?
She fits no story, we have no story to give her. She is a blank slate melding to whatever the situation calls for. CASCADE can be brutal, professional, cringeworthy, illuminated, cantankerous, deceptive or truthful. She can be purple-haired poetry in motion, a technoflexing uber-nerd, or a paper-bag wearing basketcase. She is haunted by her past, but how she is haunted is up to you.
For this moment, she is everything and nothing, and she is a spy.
Art: soft-power or power tool?
Those expecting a straight spy story from Zero Parades might walk away bamboozled by the metaphysical aspects of this world. There’s few games where the plot revolves around techno-necromancy, a first year university reading of Francis Fukuyama, and a phone sex hotline that could bring down an economy. But metaphysical agents are nothing new; you only need to look back to G.K. Chesterton’s 1908 novel The Man Who Was Thursday to know they’ve always been there.
If you’re willing to open your mind to the weirdness, Zero Parades is a deep meditation on the use of art as a tool of totalitarian soft-power. The Luzian techno-fascists utilise the latest fashions and melancholy tones of pop-star Ultra-Violetta to reinforce their power. The cartoon Sixty-Six Wolves isn’t just a kids’ show, it’s a form of indoctrination.
At one point, you are given the task to evict two musicians, Un and Deux, squatting in the former Palace of Culture. The condemned building is about to be demolished and might collapse on them at any point. Instead, they’re in there trying to make independent music. They ask you, CASCADE, if you can hear the sounds of the building. Depending on your skills, maybe you can. Maybe you can’t. It’s the job of an artist to articulate the unheard.
Local moron Kurt bemoans that:
“Time is out of joint, the future has become now… tomorrow’s problem became the problem of today. But what became of today’s problem?
“It HAUNTS the Palace of Culture…”
Whether we should take philosophical advice from a character idiotic enough to get a loan for a designer jacket, there’s still a point here. This crumbling centre for the arts, once a centre for cultural control, is a victim of time. Like memories occupying our mind, dragging us back to the past, the building occupies physical space in Portofiro.
It got me thinking: we are all squatters in the Palace of Culture.
Sitting in the ruins of a lost state, reflecting on the recreated memories of the past, trying to create art that articulates the present. Listening to the sounds of the world around us, trying to capture that magic and communicate it to a wider world.
Sometimes creating art outside of the popular hegemony feels dangerous; as dangerous as sitting on the teetering ruins of a moon-missile silo.
Zero Parades feels timely in a world where technology threatens the existence of truth. Where people are disenfranchised from economic systems and democratic institutions. Where art is getting harder to create, at a time where human-created art is more important than ever.
But if you know how to wield it, art can also be used against the powers that be.
Replayability is oblivion
Art is deeply connected to the temporal in Zero Parades. It is a game about the past, the future, and the now: nostalgia, vision, and contemporaneity.
Yet at one point, you encounter a deranged copper salvager who believes the flow of time to be false. I later re-articulated this fear to the two musicians. Deux’ response: “If it’s false then you can do with it as you wish.”
This is the reality of games; time always flows falsely. Whether that’s the the short, controlled 24 minute days and nights of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows or the real-world time limit of a burning torch in Shadowdark.
There’s often an unspoken agreement that time in games is malleable, that this quest will wait for days or weeks while we pursue others. We get frustrated when games impose a non-communicated time limit. There is no imposed time limit on CASCADE’s operation. Perhaps this is a detriment to the compulsion of the story; I didn’t feel drawn back to the game with a sense of false urgency created by time limited missions. But it’s understandable when a key part of the mission is finding out when something will take place.
While I try to accept my choices as the product of my playthrough, there have been times where my mouse has clicked into that save file menu, re-loading a save from several hours ago, giving more hours of my life to repeat missions until I get it right. I have ignored the game’s imposed time limits, and in return, I have sacrificed my own time to remedy that mistake.
It’s false thinking, because there’s never a right or a wrong way to play a game. There are only choices and consequences. In fact, Zero Parades rewards you for committing to these choices. The game imitates the tabletop experience, rolling die for skill checks. These checks can be modified by your own skills, knowledge gleaned through spycraft, clothing, or reinforced thoughts.
Despite being able to wear a paper bag on your head to increase your nerve, the most interesting modifiers are the reinforced thoughts, internalised on a fritzing in-menu CRT television screen. While each thought brings positive reinforced effects such as skill increases, making choices that contradict the thought constitutes a violation, and gives you negative modifiers. Think of it as an internalised belief system for your character, born from your own in-game choices.
For example, it was easy to pick up the Primitive Accumulation thought, which allows you to steal money from vending machines. The negative side of this? When you work a side-job, you lose your reinforced effects and gain a ‘Relation Disadvantage’. Easy to manage: steal things, don’t work.
But late game, I uncovered the reinforced thought “Single-write Only”. The anti-save-scum thought: no manual saves, only choices. You violate this thought whenever loading from the pause menu (or if you die and have to reload, as I found out while sampling some delicacies from Dr Gonza’s mysterious stash…). But the benefit of this thought can’t be ignored with a +1 bonus to all red checks.
Single-write Only’s caption reads:
A wise man once said that whatever happens has already happened. Now it looks like someone’s been keeping track. Welcome to the rest of all possible worlds.
Games are implied multiverses, but despite the plethora of choices, there is only one world. As Petre, the Format Fetishist comments on music that can only be listened to once:
As in life, everything happens only once. Replayability is oblivion. The end.
Like all media, there is only one first time; in replaying, we cannot recreate the wonder of the new. After deeply considering it, I committed to Single-write Only.
Derrotado, pero inclaudicable
And now, we arrive back at the question of time.
I’ve been playing games a long time. My earliest memory of games was born from terror, a three-year-old watching my father point and click his way through the black and white dungeons of Scarab of Ra.
Nearly forty years later, I sit confronted by the choices that have led me to this point. I wonder how many more years of gaming I have left. I wonder whether the thousands of hours spent in digital worlds have been worth it.
There’s something profound in playing a middle-aged woman watching the cascading impact of her actions, when you’re a middle-aged woman watching the cascading impact of her actions. Time has passed in Portofiro, day has turned to night, the credits have rolled. Yet as I step away from the computer, my time is not yet up.
I like to think I’ve made good choices in life; I write roleplaying games for a living, something that teen playing Baldur’s Gate 1 would never have thought possible at the time. I get paid to make art, a once-rare occupation made rarer by technological advances and the devaluation of words.
Then there are the choices I regret. The consequences still play out in my daily life, whether it is the cloud of anxious approval hanging over my relationships or my fear of entering poverty again.
But you can’t save-scum life. Because replayability is oblivion.
And those cascading choices over time have made me who I am. The passcode given to CASCADE rings true: Derrotado, pero inclaudicable. Defeated, but incapable of surrender.
Or maybe instead of melancholy, I should take some advice from the Opera’s most paranoid spy: HOLOCENE. He says, “It’s just time, CASCADE, no need to take it so seriously.”
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