If there is anything that is concretely true about the upcoming Disco Elysium follow-up Zero Parades, it is that it is certainly a new RPG from ZA/UM. Everything else, well, that depends on who you ask, and where they lie in the messiness that has been in and around the studio these past few years, but a ZA/UM game in name it is. And now there are two opportunities for you to form a more direct opinion about Zero Parades, and its quality therewithin.

The first, which is the quickest and most easily available option to you for the moment, is a good dash of gameplay, about 20 minutes of it to be precisely imprecise. What this collection of minutes shows off is a slice of the opening section of the game, and to wholesale steal from James (sorry James, you just wrote too good a headline), Zero Parades sure does look like Disco Elysium in glasses and a moustache.

That painterly, flirting with impressionism art style is present, there are internal monologues recited by voices you don’t commonly hear in mainstream video games (British), you can wave your mouse around to find a bunch of things to click on that prompt yet more lines of taciturn monologues. It even starts out in a room with a puzzling set of surroundings, with little context to push you in the right direction. A formula is being followed, up to the point you are offered the opportunity to lower a skill point to soothe your anxiety.

Really, there isn’t all that much that helps make it clear what is truly different this time around, but I suppose only 20 minutes of the beginning of a game won’t do that. In any case, I best mention that second opportunity for you to enact your judgement upon Zero Parades: as part of the upcoming Steam Next Fest, a demo will be available to peruse with a couple of quests to complete, a handful of side stories to explore, and a number of characters to meet.

That demo will be available February 23rd through to March 16th, by the way, a healthy amount of time to get any bits of discourse you’re interested in posted to Bluesky or ResetEra. You can check it out on Steam here.