Zero Parades is, if you ask its creators ZA/UM, a lot of things. It is an espionage CRPG. It is a character study of Hershel Wilk, the burnt-out, fallen-from-grace spook you’ll be playing as. It is, as I’m told before being shown some very early footage of the game in motion, "a story about failure, and about crippling regret."

It’s also, quite nakedly, a Disco Elysium successor, perhaps the most overtly Disco-y in what’s set to become a bizarrely crowded field. Some will like that, I imagine. But it’s odd to see Zero Parades cling to the past, while so explicitly asking you to confront it.

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I think my big problem with the proliferation of Soulslikes as a genre is twofold: one, that so many games get labelled as such despite not being such, and two, they're all much too similar. There might be mechanical differences, but there's no big thing that clearly sets them apart from what FromSoftware already does so well, not even an aesthetic overhaul. That's part of why I quite liked Lies of P, and why I'm curious if cautious about Valor Mortis.

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Despite many others disagreeing with this stance, I am of the opinion that it's completely fine that we'll likely never get a "classic" 3D Zelda game again. By that I mean, the whole Breath of the Wild/ Tears of the Kingdom format is definitely the direction Nintendo will continue to go in, they've just been too popular. However, I understand the desire for such an experience all the same, and I think Demi and the Fractured Dream might be able to scratch that itch.

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