“Zero Parades is ultimately about identity,” explains Kaspar Tamsalu, art director at developer ZA/UM. “The conflict between what you subscribe to as an individual, as a private person outside of the professional sphere, and then how that mixes with what your vocation is.”Your vocation in ZA/UM’s latest RPG is espionage. Hershel Wilk, your protagonist, is a spy for The Superbloc, a union of left-wing republics. She was born bourgeois before ending up spying for the communists, a background story intentionally filled with blanks to allow you to shape Hershel as you see fit. “Just because she's from a communist country does not mean that she subscribes to the ideology,” says Siim "Kosmos" Sinamäe, Zero Parades’ principal writer. “This is up to the player to decide. Spies can be spies for ideology, for money, for a sense of accomplishment, or because they are batshit insane and want to do things like that.”Sinamäe quickly offers an example of the latter: “I'm going to subscribe to this thought called Unguided Missile Strikes, because I want to say violent things to people. I want to threaten people with nuclear strikes, because that's the type of spy I am.” When Sinamäe says “subscribe to this thought”, he’s referring to Zero Parades’ Conditioning system, which reformats Disco Elysium’s Thought Cabinet for an espionage setting. When exploring the world and talking with characters, you’ll encounter new ideas and concepts you can “subscribe” to, rewriting your personality to unlock new dialogue options and roleplaying opportunities. But where ZA/UM’s previous game explored what it would be like for an alcoholic amnesiac detective to soak up ideas like a sponge, Zero Parades approaches the mind of a spy like a collection of masks. Which one is required for today’s task? This required a new method for thought subscription. “You get the choice about whether or not you want to reinforce or punish the thought,” explains Nicolas Pirot, Zero Parades’ lead technical artist. “You have a branching option of, ‘I don't like this. I don't want that to be a part of myself. I was always a violent spy. I no longer want to be a violent spy.’ You can resist that, and then that'll have a different impact on the way you do things.” “It's really framed as this violent reordering of your mind,” he concludes. It’s All in Your HeadThat violent reordering is viewed through the flickering glass screen of an old CRT television. Much of Zero Parades’ in-world technology is modelled after the gizmos and appliances of the 1990s – down at the Bootleg Bazaar, you’ll find vinyl records housed in plastic cartridges in an analogue echo of Sony’s old MiniDisc format. This approach extends past the boundaries of reality and into Hershel’s psyche. The art team needed something functional but flawed to represent this spy’s troubled mind – a mind that could tune itself into dangerous thoughts and settle into uncomfortable programming. And so the Conditioning system’s menu sits inside that box of cathode rays.“It's in an imperfect state,” explains Maeve Bonefacic, a technical artist at ZA/UM who helped create the system’s look and feel. “In the sense that [the television] works, it does, but there's a slight imperfection to that tool. We worked a lot on the particular glitches and effects that a CRT might have.”I want to threaten people with nuclear strikes, because that's the type of spy I am.The CRT is just one example of Zero Parades’ fascinating, two-pronged approach to art design. There’s the physical – the environments you explore, the people you meet, the items you acquire – and then there’s the creations of Hershel’s mind, represented by the wild art cards assigned to each quest, the disturbing televised thoughts assessed through Conditioning, and the badges assigned to your sentient skills. ZA/UM describes this approach as representing the two realms that Hershel exists in: the objective and subjective. The subjective side of Hershel’s reality is spearheaded by lead illustrator Anton Vill, who created the surrealist artwork for Disco Elysium, including its grotesque Thought Cabinet. Once again, he took inspiration from the work of David Lynch, particularly the ominous tone of Twin Peaks’ dark forests, reflecting the messed-up thoughts of a broken character in his bizarre, twisted, emotionally heavy artwork. In one example, a collection of five, cigarette-smoking Hershel doppelgangers face each other in an unnerving pentagon as words of insecurity, such as “abandoner”, “liar”, and “f***ing spy”, hover above them on flowing reams of paper. “I'm a huge fan of this kind of mysterious, dark, inner world of a person,” says Vill. “I think that shines through [in Zero Parades’ subjective artwork] and I think it’s perfect for the game.”The Portofiran IdentityWhile the art team understandably wanted to create a sense of warped darkness for Hershel’s interior thoughts, it needed to create a complementary vibe for the physical world. It would need to be via different techniques, though, so that subjective thoughts didn’t merge with objective reality. “We try to subtly inject this unease for the players,” says Tamsalu. “There is a lot of detail that we put into the game, but the way we have textured these [details], and how we approach lighting for the scenes and set up these situations, there is this underlying current of something brewing.”This thing that is brewing is, of course, why Hershel is in the city of Portofiro. But her job is very unlike that of Disco Elysium’s disaster cop protagonist, and the espionage story Zero Parades tells had a significant influence on the way the city was designed.“When you’re a police officer looking into a crime, anybody who's in the vicinity is a potential suspect and expected to speak with you,” Tamsalu explains. “And in a spy game, it's kind of like the inverse of that. You don't want to stand out. And because of that, we needed to create a slightly busier backdrop. That's why you have these characters that go about their own business, and you have your own covert business as you navigate through that.”While capturing the heart of spy fiction has been an important part of the project, ZA/UM has been very intentional with how it has approached a genre filled with tropes, staples, and conventions. As you’d expect from the studio, this isn’t a James Bond or Jason Bourne adventure, but nor does it aspire to be a John le Carré novel repackaged as a video game. This had to be a fresh take on this shadowy world, and so a number of rules have been set in place. For instance, Herschel is an “operant”, rather than an agent. Her mission takes her “in-theatre” rather than in the field. And her employer, the communist Superbloc, flips the typical capitalist nation perspective of classic Cold War thrillers. “We wanted to avoid the obvious spy themes,” says character artist Liis Väljaots, who explained how this philosophy extended into the art. “One of the things we wanted to avoid was making the world look too noir-y and too oppressive, to kind of contrast the subject matter, which is quite serious.”“There are a lot of trench coats in the game, though,” she laughs. “That's undeniable.”Roll PlayYour choice to wear a trench coat or not is just one of many decisions that shape the kind of spy you are – clothing, as in Disco Elysium, provides stat modifiers that boost or inflict penalties on your skills. That pool of skills has been reduced (now 15, down from Disco’s 24) with the idea of making each attribute more prominent and viable. They’ll also be tested with much more frequency. “We have a skill check every 3,000 words, compared to Disco Elysium’s every 6,000 words,” reveals Sinamäe. “We feel this makes the player more engaged with what they're doing and what type of spy they want to be.”As I explored in IGN’s hands-on preview of Zero Parades, skill checks have deeper mechanical complexity this time around thanks to the Pressures system. Each of your skills fits into one of three categories – athletic, psychological, and intellectual - and those categories have corresponding “health” bars that measure your fatigue, anxiety, and delirium levels. Fail a psychological skill check and your anxiety bar will fill. Max the bar out, and you’ll take a permanent stat penalty. Things are made even more interesting by the ability to “exert” a skill check – you can roll an extra die to increase your chances of passing the check, but at the cost of purposefully damaging the skill’s corresponding pressure bar. “It's like, how much more can the player take?,” says Bonefacic. “Can I afford to, for example, exert a dice roll? Am I allowed to do that? Do I have the resources to do that? I think it has added an interesting element of strategy.”That strategy wouldn’t work if there were no method for reducing your pressure gauges. By default, a bar will reset after taking so much damage that you endure a stat penalty, but that’s hardly an approach to build a self-care system around. Instead, you can have Hershel perform a ritual. “Rituals are a system that we have where you can reduce your pressures by doing all kinds of small things in the world,” explains Pirot. “It can be sitting on a bench and watching the sunrise that might lower your anxiety. It can be smoking a cigarette, having a cup of coffee, or yelling at someone in the street. These very small, very immersive moments, that are available in different parts of the world at different times, that can help an incredibly stressed out, anxious, fatigued, or delirious spy to keep their sanity more or less in check.”Rather than, say, the classic health potion of other RPGs, which are clearly labelled and a genre staple, you’ll need to discover these rituals through exploration and experimentation. They also unlock further roleplay opportunities – yelling at someone in the street doesn’t exactly sound like a traditional remedy, but for an operant boiling over with rage, it may be very cathartic. “By the player making a build choice of, ‘I want to be a very violent spy’, they would naturally seek out the rituals that complement that,” says Pirot. Rituals, mental masks, blending into busy cities, and threats of nuclear armageddon. These are all important aspects of Zero Parades’ spy fantasy, and each is manifested within the game by a different team at ZA/UM. Writing works alongside artwork and system design to produce a world through which you can observe, bargain, and bully. A world in which you can roleplay the type of spy you think can change the world. Or, at the very least, change their place in it.Zero Parades: For Exclusive StoriesGet a deeper look into the world of Zero Parades. Check out all of our stories, based on extensive hands-on play sessions and exclusive interviews conducted with members of ZA/UM Studio:Power, Comic Books and Zero Parades for Dead Spies: How ZA/UM Found Its Disco Elysium SuccessorZA/UM’s New RPG Is Similar To Disco Elysium Because ‘We're Still the Same People’Zero Parades and Disco Elysium Developer ZA/UM on AI: ‘We Don’t Use It’Zero Parades Writer Hopes ZA/UM ‘Never Becomes a AAA Studio’Zero Parades Hands-On Preview: A Complex Spy RPG Hiding in One Giant ShadowMatt Purslow is IGN's Executive Editor of Features.