Even after ZA/UM's messy breakup, the writing team still has a cadre of sad communists—but you won't have to play Zero Parades as one if you don't want to

A screenshot of Zero Parades key art from the September 2025 Sony State of Play gameplay trailer. A short-haired woman in a bright red trench coat looks toward the viewer. A collage of gloomy black and white heads surround her with an orange background peeking through at the bottom.

Disco Elysium is, and you know I mean this as a compliment, perhaps the most commie goddamn game I've ever played. The melancholy Marxism comes off it in waves, and no wonder: so many of its now-departed writers were some flavour of radical, with lead writer Robert Kurvitz describing aspects of the game's story as "essentially Soviet".

But Kurvitz, along with a lot of Disco Elysium's other foundational creatives, exited ZA/UM spectacularly in 2022, so you gotta wonder: will the studio's next game, Zero Parades—which also talks a lot about communism—have the same ideological bones? Are there still mournful commies at ZA/UM? When our Wes Fenlon asked at this year's GDC, writer Honey Watson's answer was immediate and emphatic: "Yes!"