Even after ZA/UM’s messy breakup, the writing team still has a cadre of sad communists—but you won’t have to play Zero Parades as one if you don’t want to

Disco Elysium is, and you know I mean this as a compliment, perhaps the most commie goddamn game I’ve ever played. The melancholy Marxism comes off it in waves, and no wonder: so many of its now-departed writers were some flavour of radical, with lead writer Robert Kurvitz describing aspects of the game’s story as “essentially Soviet”.

But Kurvitz, along with a lot of Disco Elysium’s other foundational creatives, exited ZA/UM spectacularly in 2022, so you gotta wonder: will the studio’s next game, Zero Parades—which also talks a lot about communism—have the same ideological bones? Are there still mournful commies at ZA/UM? When our Wes Fenlon asked at this year’s GDC, writer Honey Watson’s answer was immediate and emphatic: “Yes!“

“We do have some,” agreed Zero Parade’s principal writer Siim Sinamäe. But as in Disco Elysium, that does not necessarily mean you have to play the protagonist as a red-in-tooth-and-claw commie. “You are a spy for the communist Superbloc,” said Sinamäe, “but people spy for ideology, for money, for self-actualisation, [or] for something different.

“You can either embrace post-historical materialism or you can sweep it under the rug. That’s up to you.”

Watson drew a distinction between Disco Elysium’s amnesiac protagonist and Zero Parades’ Hershel Wilks, whose memories are very much intact. “You can play through Disco as a process of radicalisation, but with Zero Parades, Hershel has her memories. She grew up bourgeois and then defected to a communist state… she felt very strongly about the communist cause—she took a bullet for it—but you can question this over the course of the game.”

That’s not too different from Disco in broad strokes, of course. You’re more than welcome to play Harrier Du Bois as a centrist, an ultraliberal, or a fascist if you don’t want to play him as a commie, and it sounds like you’ll be able to take Hershel in lots of different directions too.

What interests me, though, is what the perspective of Zero Parades itself is going to be. If you ask me, Disco Elysium is a game whose perspective on the world is fundamentally at least Marxisant if not outright Marxist (and, honestly, I think it’s the latter). You can play other political ideologies, and Disco may even treat you somewhat sympathetically if you do, but its position on them and critiques of them (and its critiques of communism, actually) feel deeply coloured by perspectives forged in the crucible of Capital reading groups.

Will Zero Parades feel the same? I guess it depends on ZA/UM’s remaining communists.