ZA/UM is back. After five years of speculation, lawsuits, executive musical chairs, and the studio reorganization that followed the post-launch fallout from Disco Elysium, the Estonian developer's first new game since 2019 went live on Steam, Epic, and GOG this morning. ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies launched worldwide on May 21, 2026 for $39.99 on PC, Steam Deck Verified out of the gate, with a PS5 release window the publisher still has open for later this year.
It is not, ZA/UM insists, a sequel. It is not even a spiritual successor. ZERO PARADES is a completely new IP - an espionage RPG set in the fictional city-state of Portofiro, built on the studio's own narrative-driven RPG engine and starring a new protagonist with a new alias and a new pile of regrets to dig out of.
The pitch: Hershel Wilk, code name CASCADE
You play Hershel Wilk, alias CASCADE, a brilliant but tormented operant working out of Portofiro. Five years ago he led his team into the abyss and lost them all. ZERO PARADES picks up in the wreckage of that failed operation, with Wilk pulled back into the field by ghosts both literal and metaphorical, expected to decode the memories of dead spies and figure out what really went wrong in an operation that was supposed to be a clean extraction.
The systems sit somewhere between Disco Elysium's interior monologue and a more conventional CRPG. You build out Wilk's skill set, you fail forward through dialogue checks instead of combat, and the world reacts to the kind of spy you decide to be - the kind who reads people, the kind who lies to himself, or the kind who quietly burns his own dossiers when nobody's looking.
The launch package
The full English voice over is in the box on day one, with text localizations for English, German, Russian, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish (Latin America). Eight more text localizations - French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, and Turkish - are scheduled as free updates across the rest of the year.
Steam Deck Verified is a notable callout. ZA/UM ran the game through Valve's certification track ahead of release and confirmed the full controller layout, readable text at the Deck's native resolution, and seamless suspend/resume behavior. The launch build runs cleanly on the handheld without the manual profile tweaking that catches out most text-dense CRPGs.
The PS5 question
The console version is still on the board. ZA/UM has been deliberate about treating it as a separate launch rather than a delayed port, with the publisher's own posts framing the PS5 release as "later in 2026" without committing to a window any tighter than that. The CRPG community gets to chew on the May 21 PC build for a few months while the studio finishes whatever the console build needs.
What it isn't
It isn't Disco Elysium 2. Robert Kurvitz, Aleksander Rostov, and Helen Hindpere are not on the credits. The Estonian studio behind the original game went through a documented public split in 2022 and ZA/UM as it exists in 2026 is a reorganized entity carrying the engine, the brand, and a different roster. ZERO PARADES is the new shape of what the studio is going to be, and the question every CRPG fan was waiting to ask got its first real answer this morning.
The answer landed at $39.99 on Steam, Epic, and GOG. The PS5 build is still pending. And for the first time since 2019, ZA/UM has shipped.
