ZERO PARADEs: FOR DEAD SPIES
Blowing the cover of 2026’s biggest CPRG
THE mission
As ZA/UM Studio’s follow-up to their legendary CRPG Disco Elysium, ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies carried high expectations and a great deal of scrutiny. Launching with a vastly expanded team and into an entirely different release context, the title required specialised support on numerous fronts. Across my seven months working on ZERO PARADES, I provided project management, event PR support, creative consultation, and mock review services.
THE WORK
The first stage of our collaboration meant helping deliver ZERO PARADES’ world premiere at Gamescom 2025. With a planned appearance as part of Opening Night Live’s main show and dozens of press appointments happening behind closed doors, ZA/UM required an on the ground presence that they could trust implicitly.
As well as accommodating journalists and standing ready to field any potentially tricky questions, I also helped secure last minute meetings and interviews with key press, addressed last minute hurdles, and coached the on-site ZA/UM developers in maximising presentation impact.
Shortly before the game’s launch, I joined Sven and the We Are Reach team on location in Bath, UK, to film two days of live action content with members of ZERO PARADES’ voice cast. Across a pen and paper RPG “one shot” campaign and a series of “LADBIBLE-esque” pieces, I aided in providing live creative feedback and branding input, helping the team deliver a crop of content that was at once authentic, entertaining, and accessible.
My final task was producing a mock review to grant the team a picture of the game’s likely reception across press and gaming audiences. Following a playthrough, I produced an in-depth, eight-section document, including likely areas for praise and criticism, potentially controversial narrative aspects, messaging gaps and opportunities that could be taken advantage of, and a prediction of where ZERO PARADES’ overall Metascore would land.
As a studio in the midst of delivering their greatest project to date, ZA/UM also needed the trackable accountability and workload visibility brought about by an organised ticket system.
Working closely with ZA/UM’s Marketing Director Sven Paluch, I delivered a ticketing framework across the marketing team’s JIRA system comprising hundreds of entries, including retroactive ticketing to provide visibility on prior actions. This system extended to the delivery of marketing for Disco Elysium’s core and mobile releases, as well as ZA/UM’s high-end fashion line Atelier.
THE RESULTS
ZERO PARADES’ presence at Gamescom led to it being the 8th most wishlisted game of the show and the 3rd most wishlisted new IP.
Its marketing footprint went far beyond industry standard for a title of its type, with coordination across all disciplines resulting in a cohesive, high-impact campaign. On release, ZERO PARADES placed fifth overall on Steam’s Global Top Sellers list.
The mock review document I produced was highly praised internally at ZA/UM, helping shape the final stages of ZERO PARADES’ development and accurately predicting the overall metascore that the game would receive, as well as many of its likely areas for praise and criticism.
