The Bootleg Bazaar in Portofiro feels like a coming-together of post-Soviet bloc leftovers that have fused into a lively showcase of battered, second-hand capitalism at full throttle. This idea first stuck with me through films, TV, and books—and also through a deeply thorny Russian roommate in college, who thought it was hilarious to throw knives at his closet door for entertainment (last I heard, he’s married and runs a paper plant).
In Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, the bazaar is carefully built around the city of Portofiro: an Iberian-tinged stretch of a fake-European continent that still makes room for blunt, left-versus-right ideologies. Still, at a larger scale, this kind of marketplace—fading as a trade hub, and at odds with itself, its surroundings, its people, and even modern life—shows up everywhere. I know it well, though mostly from my own corner of the world, where Western visitors arrive to grab cheap, mass-made souvenirs and local crafts, alongside aging curios and questionable DVDs. It’s a place where tourists and locals alike act as if they’re playing a contest with each other, even though, in the end, capital walks away as the real winner.
Put simply, it’s the perfect setting for trying the Zero Parades demo—an efficient entry point into an atmosphere that feels instantly, anxiously familiar, packed with jittery momentum. ZA/UM’s much-anticipated new game, its first release since Disco Elysium, centers on Cascade, a professional spy who’s been hauled out of “retirement” to deal with uncomfortable leftovers from their past—things that are, in all likelihood, Cascade’s fault. Yet this whole Portofiro mess might also be a chance at a small kind of redemption. I’m a quick, platinum-haired mystery—half-responsible, half-worn down, and noticeably on edge. I’ve reached Portofiro to meet my partner on behalf of the Opera, a Superbloc espionage group that doesn’t hesitate to sever its own compromised branches and burn the evidence for good measure.
Right now, I’m in the bazaar hunting for wolf cups. I’m told these cups come from La Luz—a massive technofascist surveillance apparatus that once marched against its own colonies—and that they’re extraordinarily scarce, highly prized collectibles from the animated Luzian series Sixty-Six Wolves (credit where it’s due—Sixty-Six Wolves is classic anime). There are six cups, and I have to get them, even if it means potentially depriving real children—sweet, trusting kids—who paused their episode in the bazaar to tell me about the plot and the wolves. At one stage, I’m handed a wolf cup and asked to pass it along as a gift from one of her long-time fans to a very warm-hearted woman. So what am I supposed to do?
I drift through this messy corner of the city, collecting clues for my assignment (or at least for the version of it I’d prefer, since my previous partner isn’t available) and for the wolf cups I’m about to assemble. On a screen at the Foto-24, I catch a commercial for The Reality Situation, an unusually awful daily TV show hosted by a fervent figure who wears a paper bag over his head. Bagman goes on at length about, among other things, lunar conspiracies—specifically moon-baffling programs—along with invisible aircraft and weaponized nostalgia.
The idea lands hard across this stretch of the game as I comb through the bazaar and what it has to offer. Weaponized nostalgia is essentially what the wolf cups are built on. Both Cascade and the physical me are drawn in by the comfort of collecting—and by a shared fever-dream of pointless capitalist hoarding.
I end up having a long conversation with the music stall owner, Petre, about the state of the media and the arts—he’s, to put it gently, not thrilled. You can learn a lot about a place through imports and exports, but hearing Petre complain about La Luz’s hollow cultural worth really sharpens the “uncanny valley” feeling for me. La Luz is a marketing-savvy nation that’s turned pop culture into a tool for building soft power. Petre personifies the bitter purist archetype: he isn’t entirely wrong, but his stubborn abrasiveness makes it hard to give him any goodwill, even when he’s right. To him, the typical pop-culture fan is nothing more than a “replayer,” consuming trends and disposable culture in a loop of mindless re-consuming. Even Luzian pop that’s wildly catchy is just one item in the state’s toolbox; there’s a reason technofascism and cookie-cutter media tend to travel together, and a lot of people quietly ignore that connection in order to enjoy what they can—while they’re still living and able to pay for it.
The Zero Parades demo doesn’t last long—a couple of hours—and it leaves out some elements you’d expect in the complete game, especially the Conditioning system. That feature kicks in during crucial moments using an elegant, abstract visual cue. The biggest takeaway for me is how this rickety, battered bazaar is taking on something genuinely substantial. It’s laying the groundwork for players to think about nostalgia and what it’s worth—not only in the visible piles of retro cosmonaut memorabilia and the constantly tacky party outfits, or in the 80s-flavored anime collectibles and obscure music formats that eventually become glossy objects of devotion. Nostalgia exists in other forms too: the kind of story a player expects from a faded spy narrative, a character held back by their own mistakes, or the baggage that comes with being ZA/UM’s second title. Nostalgia can be toxic, and often is. Still, I think Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is ready to confront that problem—so long as players are willing to engage with it.