PEN PUT DOWN AT THE END OF HISTORY
https://noescapevg.com/review-zero-parades-for-dead-spies/
Review: Zero Parades (For Dead Spies)
Play, Review
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Kaile Hultner
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May 18
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
—Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?“
Repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the singularity of any first time, makes of it also a last time. Each time it is the event itself, a first time is a last time. Altogether other. Staging for the end of history. Let us call it a hauntology.
—Jacques Derrida, “Spectres of Marx“
Whatever happens has already happened.
—PSEUDOPOD
spoilers, man. you know how I do. For a general explanation of the game’s first few hours and its systems, check this out.
The End of History
At several points throughout my playthrough of Zero Parades: For Dead Spies (Studio ZA/UM, 2026) I found myself cursing my knowledge of history, geopolitics and ideology. Not because Zero Parades is a particularly historically-grounded game, but because it found some way to take the horrors and indignities of the past (and let’s be honest: very much still the present) and depict them in a way that I could not shy away from or rationalize them. From the illicit shock therapies of college-age women in Canada in the 1960s and 70s through to the present-day dismantling and privatization of education all the way down to the totalizing force of US-Western cultural hegemony, I kept running into the consequences of these things. People whose lives had shattered a million times, trying to keep them from shattering once more. Kids dealing with a school system that prioritizes profit over their knowledge and growth. Beautiful cultural tapestries overwritten. My tears felt pathetic. Tears were all I could offer.
Zero Parades is a game that takes seriously the question and thought experiment: “what if Francis Fukuyama’s famous declaration of the end of history had really ended history?”
/.../
SCENE REPORT: PORTOFIRO
“It’s a bit shit, but it’s alright.”
—Pigeon
I spent several in-game and real-life days wandering the streets of Portofiro, a consequence of simply playing the game. There is a tram system, and a really easy-to-use fast travel system on the map menu, but I am a firm believer in getting to know the places I visit well enough that I don’t need to look up directions. I have run the length, width and breadth of Portofiro what feels like hundreds of times. And—listen, there likely will never be a video game city that matches the experience of watching Kamurocho change with each successive Yakuza/Like a Dragon title, but outside of that, Portofiro has become my favorite game-city. I can’t bring myself to simply say the clichéd line “it feels real,” but it does feel fully realized.
/.../
The trick about the end of history isn’t that history has really ended, but that the author—the supposed victor uber alles—has gotten too lazy to keep writing it. They put the pen down for anyone else to pick up, though they think no one else will. And this is how they are taken by surprise by any number of “small” actor, from terrorist cells to counterglobalization protests to the reactionary populist backlash. The truth of it all is that the end of history was simply history unrecognized by the official arbiters, one full of pain, conflict, stress and division. While economic advisors and heads of state ate delicious meals and discussed the steady dismantling and commodification of the world through the enforcement of structural adjustment programs, the world kept trying to live every day the best it could, and when things were no longer tolerable cried out in opposition to the very sensible policies put forward by the most very sensible technocrats to maximize economic output and minimize its input—an age of austerity that made no sense when surrounded by so much… stuff.
We are now reaping the fruits of these awful labors. Fascists are in power across the so-called “free world,” the old rules-based order is collapsing, and new polarities have started to form. Now is the time of monsters, indeed.
With Zero Parades, Studio ZA/UM found the pen put down at the end of history, and with it wrote a eulogy at its resumption.
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