When composing their latest offering, the creators of the futurist communism-flavored spy adventure Zero Parades: For Dead Spies had to reckon with three proverbial elephants in the room.

First, their studio’s first game, Disco Elysium, was an instant classic and critical darling that revitalized the genre of Computer Role-Playing Games (CRPGs) and set sky-high expectations for their sophomore effort.

Second, they aren’t actually the creative talent responsible for Disco Elysium, but the businesspeople who took over studio ZA/UM and fired most of its founding talent, completing its transition from an Estonian artists’ collective to a subsidiary of a for-profit company.

Third, the game’s themes, which set the ideologies of communism, neoliberalism, and techno-fascism against each other, are becoming much more salient in the political world. The U.S. government has rediscovered its zeal for hunting communists at home and abroad and revived its longstanding obsession with Cuba, billionaire tech-men are attempting to achieve immortality, various trends associated with the People’s Republic of China are trending on U.S. TikTok, and remaining neoliberals continue to tinker around the edges as Rome burns (good riddance, but still).

These looming realities create a central irony at the core of Zero Parades, which was released on PC this May. While it attempts to comment upon ideologies that are increasingly relevant in the real world, it does so without the intellectual grounding in those ideologies that the original creative team brought to the table for Disco Elysium. Instead, the new ownership ape the style and basic subject matter of their first game without fully understanding the political substance that made it compelling. In this way, ZA/UM’s new owners have taken the crystallized output of a decade of labor from a Marxist artists’ collective and repackaged it for private profit, garbling their message in the process.

The warping of the first game’s distinct perspective is apparent in the opening of each game. In the first five minutes playing Disco Elysium, you are confronted with a labor strike, hints at racism in society, and anti-police sentiment directed at your character, a detective. Meanwhile, in Zero Parades, the initial framing suggests that political change isn’t driven by the streets or the shop floor, but by the elite, secretive machinations of spies and assassins.