The Bootleg Bazaar in Portofiro is a chimera of ex-Soviet bloc organisms that have nestled together in a robust show of scrappy, second-hand capitalism at its finest. It’s an entity I have mostly understood from movies and television and books, and a fairly problematic Russian neighbour in college who enjoyed throwing knives at his closet door for fun (I believe he is now married and owns a paper factory).
In Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, the bazaar is specifically coded to the city of Portofiro: an Iberian-inflected corner of a pseudo-European continent that still speaks in sharp ideologies of left and right. But on a higher level, this type of market – a decaying trade hub in conflict with itself, its surroundings, its denizens, and modernity itself – is universal. I am deeply familiar with its role and myriad idiosyncrasies, albeit in my own region of the world where westerners come to buy cheap mass-produced trinkets and indigenous crafts, mixed in with historical kitsch and questionably-produced DVDs. This is a place where both tourists and locals think they’re playing 4D chess against each other when the real winner is capital.
It is, in short, the perfect place to meet the Zero Parades demo – a streamlined introduction to an uneasily familiar world running on restless, kinetic anxiety. ZA/UM’s much-anticipated new game, its first since Disco Elysium, follows Cascade, a career spy who has been unceremoniously plucked out of “retirement” to deal with some thorny old things from their past – things that were maybe, probably, definitely Cascade’s fault, but this whole Portofiro situation may actually be their chance to claw back a crumb of redemption. I am a lithe, platinum-haired cipher – a little guilty, a little washed up, more than a little antsy. I have arrived in Portofiro to meet my partner at the behest of the Opera, a Superbloc spy operation that doesn’t hesitate to sever its own compromised limbs and burn them for good measure.
Today, I am in the bazaar to find wolf cups. The cups, I am told, are from La Luz – a vast technofascist surveillance state that once marched on its own colonies – and are extremely rare, extremely coveted bits of merchandise from the animated Luzian television series Sixty-Six Wolves (let’s call a spade a spade – Sixty-Six Wolves is good old-fashioned anime). There are six cups, and I must have them, possibly at the expense of denying them to literal children – eager, guileless children who took the time to stop watching said show in the bazaar, and explain the plot and all of the wolves to me. At one point, I am entrusted with a wolf cup to deliver to a very nice lady as a gift from some of her longtime admirers. What’s a girl to do?
I wander around this ramshackle pocket of the city, scraping together clues for my mission (or at least, what I want my mission to be, since my erstwhile partner is indisposed) and my impending wolf cup collection. On television at the Foto-24, I watch an ad for The Reality Situation, a spectacularly godawful daily TV show hosted by a virulent nutjob who wears a paper bag over his head. Bagman is rambling about, among other things, moon conspiracies – lunar obfuscation programmes, to be precise – and invisible airplanes and weaponised nostalgia.
The latter reverberates powerfully throughout this portion of the game, as I comb through the bazaar and its offerings. Weaponised nostalgia is the wolf cups incarnate. Both Cascade and flesh-and-blood me are being drawn in by the sentimentality of collection and a shared fever dream of pointless capitalistic hoarding.
I have a long conversation with the music stall vendor, Petre, about the state of the media and the arts – he is, to put it mildly, not a fan. You can learn much about the world from imports and exports, and listening to Petre talk about the hollow cultural capital of La Luz – a marketing-savvy state that has weaponised pop culture to accrue soft power – is where that uncanny valley feeling kicks in the most for me. Petre is the kind of bitter purist who isn’t necessarily wrong, but so rigidly abrasive that it’s hard to cede any grace to him even when he’s correct. To him, the average pop culture enjoyer is a “replayer,” feeding off fads and disposability in a cycle of mindless reconsumption. Impossibly catchy Luzian pop is just one weapon in the state’s arsenal; there is a reason why technofascism and formulaic media go hand in hand, and most people prefer to avoid examining that relationship in favor of enjoying what they can, while they’re still alive and can afford it.
The Zero Parades demo isn’t long – a couple of hours – and doesn’t include all the features that will ship with the full game, notably the Conditioning system, which is triggered at key moments in the form of an elegant abstract visual prompt. The most striking takeaway for me is how this shambling, dilapidated bazaar is doing something very important. It is laying the dialectical groundwork for the player to chew on the idea of nostalgia and its value, not just in the physical piles of old cosmonaut memorabilia and eternally tacky party costumes, or 80s-coded anime collectibles and obscure music formats that inevitably end up becoming plasticky objects of worship. There is nostalgia, too, in what a player might expect from a washed-up spy story, a character stifled by their own mistakes, or the baggage of being the second ZA/UM game. Nostalgia is often poisonous. But Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, I think, is ready to take on that challenge, if the player is ready to listen.
