One of 2026’s Best-Rated Games Is Basically Mass Effect With Spies
ZA/UM's espionage-thriller gives us a taste of what Mass Effect: Universe might have been like
This week's news that EA was shutting down Mass Effect developer BioWare and canceling the next game in the series was a blow to the industry. It was made all the worse when a leaked trailer for the game, known as Mass Effect: Universe, showed exactly what we would all be missing: Mass Effect meets James Bond. That sure is an enticing pitch, and while BioWare will never be able to deliver on what the trailer teased, that also describes one of this year's best games.
Released May 21 for Windows PC, with console versions planned for November, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is the sophomore game from Disco Elysium developer ZA/UM, though the team quite controversially did not include a number of key staff who worked on the studio's debut title. Like its predecessor, Zero Parades has largely been billed as a heavily political and philosophical isometric RPG. The game puts players in the shoes of Cascade, a disgraced spy recalled to action for a mission in the very setting of her greatest failure five years ago. Its literary inspirations range from John le Carré to Thomas Pynchon, but the overarching structure of Zero Parades is almost exactly that of Mass Effect 2.
The bulk of the game revolves around Cascade's attempts to gather a crew, largely made up of former allies, in preparation for what is all but guaranteed to be a suicide mission. Such is the predicament of Commander Shepard in the second, and most acclaimed, Mass Effect game. By replicating the structure of Mass Effect 2, ZA/UM also embraces the ensemble dynamics that made it so great. The pressure of an impending problem, whether the Collectors in Mass Effect 2 or an attempted assassination in Zero Parades, is set-dressing for stories about how people's lives persist even when it seems like the world (or galaxy) is about to end.
The need to find the best people for the given job motivates the player to engage with Zero Parades’ cast in a way that not even Disco Elysium was able to match. Each crew member's story is both intimately specific to their relationship with Cascade and somehow also a microcosm of a much larger issue that plagues the city-state of Portofiro. Ramses is one of the best examples of how ZA/UM deftly tells these stories. A member of Cascade's original crew whom she left for dead five years ago, Ramses has been the one to pay for the consequences of Cascade's (and her government's) actions. Rather than death, he's faced something much worse. The authorities have erased his existence from all records, meaning he cannot leave and — more importantly — cannot get a prescription for essential medication. This has left Ramses in something that feels worse than death, something Cascade must cope with on what becomes her big apology tour across Portofiro.
How people move on in your absence is a major theme of Mass Effect 2. Shepard piecing together her old crew after a couple years is not an easy thing, and not everybody is happy to see her. It's a conflict made worse by the fact she now works for Cerberus, an organization not known for being well-intentioned in its actions. Shepard, while on a mission to save the galaxy, is essentially a tool for people with more power, the real movers and shakers. As nothing but an operative, Cascade is similarly a weapon to be aimed but whose trigger is pulled by higher-ups. The cast of Zero Parades must reconcile that perhaps Cascade is not a friend, but only a tentative ally that can help accomplish a shared goal. But while most of the crew are from Portofiro, Cascade is an outsider whose end goal is to preserve the interests of her nation.
One of the most beloved aspects of Mass Effect 2 are its loyalty missions, quests focused on each party member. Zero Parades restructures an entire game around this format, as collecting the crew is almost all you do before the game's final mission. This pushes the storytelling to new heights. The wonder of a BioWare game is always in how the studio breathes life into its characters but also the world in which they live. Portofiro, and even the nations we do not see, are so well-realized that the stakes never feel anything but high. Failing a crew member is an emotional gut punch when it happens, and it will happen. It is in Cascade's nature. Thus, it is in yours.
As a spy story, this willingness to show the hero as something less than perfect makes Zero Parades shine. It also only makes the possibility of an espionage tale within Mass Effect more compelling, as one of the series' only pitfalls is in its fairly black and white approach to morality. The spy genre also propels Zero Parades's climactic suicide mission to even greater success than Mass Effect 2's.
Players are inevitably tasked with choosing a crew to accomplish the final mission. Whereas Mass Effect 2 brings the whole gang along and makes you assign them to given tasks throughout the mission, Zero Parades only lets you bring three (of a possible six) people. Character dynamics also play a role in this, with some characters refusing to work with each other. This internal strife of the group is another iteration on the still unmatched way Mass Effect 2 allows its characters to interact and disagree with each other. This puts Cascade, and the player, in an ethical dilemma. It is likely that everyone will die, regardless of whether the mission is completed or not. Should you pick the people best suited to the job even if it means you are sending them to their deaths? Or do you let emotions get the better of you and risk compromising the mission?
Zero Parades is by no means Mass Effect: Universe, but it is proof that BioWare's impact on the industry has outlived it. There are Mass Effects everywhere for those with eyes to see.
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