Steam Next Fest Is Live: ZA/UM's Zero Parades Haunts the Disco Elysium Demo Booth, Cicadamata Breaks Legs

Steam Next Fest is live through March 5th, and if you've been ignoring it, that's a mistake. Two demos in particular are generating serious discussion right now — one from a studio carrying an enormous amount of baggage, one from a team that seemingly came out of nowhere.

ZA/UM's Zero Parades: The Disco Elysium That Isn't

Let's get the uncomfortable part out of the way: ZA/UM is the studio that made Disco Elysium, one of the most critically acclaimed RPGs of the past decade. It's also the studio that reportedly fired its original creative team — the people who actually made Disco Elysium — and then faced allegations of fraud, civil and criminal charges from former employees, and the cancellation of the planned Disco expansion.

The people who made Disco Elysium are not making Zero Parades. That's not speculation — it's been extensively reported. The original creators left or were pushed out. What ZA/UM is shipping now is a game made by a different team in the same studio, in a genre and style extremely similar to Disco Elysium.

So: is Zero Parades any good?

Honestly, the demo suggests it might be. Rock Paper Shotgun's preview calls it "Schrodinger's Disco Elysium follow-up" — and that framing is accurate. It does the things Disco did: inner monologue as dialogue system, surrealist encounters, political ideology as character stat, the sense that the world is deeply broken in ways the protagonist can barely perceive.

The protagonist is Hershel Wilk — a spy rather than a detective, waking not to her own chaos but to her partner's. The opening hours invert Disco's structure deliberately: instead of an amnesiac trying to reconstruct herself, Wilk is composed, capable, and trying to reconstruct someone else. The twist is that she's apparently not as composed as she seems.

One of the inner voices — Statehood — shouts communist diatribes at random intervals. There's a monkey named KING OF TRADE who challenges you to ideological combat. The prose has the rhythms Disco established. Whether that's inheritance or imitation is the question the full game will have to answer.

The demo is free. The full game has no release date yet. If you can separate the work from the institutional wreckage behind it, it's worth two hours of your time.

🎮 Zero Parades on Steam

Cicadamata: The FPS That Crashed Someone's Work Laptop Three Times

The other standout from Next Fest is harder to describe because it resists easy comparisons.

Cicadamata — styled "CICADAMATA" — is a first-person shooter where you play as a bunny bot equipped with a flip-to-reload shotgun, collecting CORES across maps that look like enormous floating circuit boards. The art direction is simultaneously bright and foggy, crisp and distorted, with cockroach text scuttling across the HUD and damage states that make the screen blink like a jolted cable connection.

RPS's Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, who has been reviewing games for a very long time, called it "the most exciting FPS I've played in years." He also noted it crashed his Dell work laptop three times before he moved to his review PC. This is, weirdly, an endorsement.

The maps are open-ended with secrets above and below. You have a triple-jump and an air dash. There's ice physics on the ice level (your shotgun blasts slow to shoals underwater, so you have to lead targets). Omnipresent leaderboards for speedrunners. The demo comparison Evans-Thirlwell reaches for is magazine cover disc demos from the 1990s — the ones you'd replay fifty times trying to find every secret.

The Steam page copy: "i am joyeuse. i am not the weapon that failed. i have given everything to masters who forgot my name."

The demo runs through March 5th. Full game is out later this year with no specific date confirmed.

🎮 Cicadamata Demo on Steam

Why Next Fest Still Matters

Steam Next Fest gets a lot of skepticism. There are too many games, the signal-to-noise ratio is brutal, and most demos disappear into the void without a trace. But the events that break through — the ones that generate genuine conversation — still do something that no amount of trailer marketing can replicate: they let you actually play the thing.

Zero Parades and Cicadamata are both generating real discourse because they're playable right now, and they're doing things that feel genuinely distinct from the mainstream. One carries the weight of one of the most beloved RPGs ever made. The other has no comparable reference point in recent memory.

Both are free to try until March 5th.

While you're thinking about games that do something interesting with sound and rhythm: STIGMA, an upcoming indie with semi-auto rhythm combat and an exclusive EDM soundtrack, is the kind of thing Next Fest exists to showcase. That's the model — small team, distinct vision, no publisher safety net. Worth watching.

FAQ

What is Steam Next Fest February 2026?

Steam Next Fest is a recurring Valve event where upcoming games offer free playable demos. The February 2026 edition runs from approximately February 24 through March 5, 2026, featuring hundreds of demos across all genres.

What is Zero Parades and who made it?

Zero Parades is a spy CRPG from ZA/UM, the studio that made Disco Elysium. It features a protagonist named Hershel Wilk, inner monologue dialogue systems, and a surrealist world — similar in tone and structure to Disco Elysium. However, the original Disco Elysium creative team (Robert Kurvitz, Aleksander Rostov, and others) departed ZA/UM following a reported internal dispute, meaning Zero Parades is made by a different team. The game has no confirmed release date.

What happened to the original Disco Elysium team?

The original creators of Disco Elysium were reportedly fired from ZA/UM following corporate restructuring in 2022. Former developers subsequently alleged fraud at the studio and indicated civil and criminal charges were being pursued. A planned Disco Elysium expansion was cancelled. The situation remains unresolved legally. ZA/UM has continued development under new creative leadership.

What is Cicadamata?

Cicadamata (stylized CICADAMATA") is an indie first-person shooter developed by ✿ flowergarden. The demo, available through Steam Next Fest until March 5, features triple-jump and air-dash movement, open-ended level design with speedrunning leaderboards, and an abstract art direction described as simultaneously glitchy and crisp. The full game is planned for release later in 2026.

What is STIGMA?

STIGMA is an upcoming indie game featuring semi-auto rhythm combat, 100+ uniquely illustrated agents, and an exclusive EDM soundtrack by UNFINISH. It combines tactical decision-making with precision timing, set to an electronic music backdrop. More information is available at unfinish.io/stigma.