Dossier: three Faculties, fifteen skills, Grey Matter selected

About this game

Developer: ZA/UM · Publisher: ZA/UM · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Painterly illustration · Screen type: Character / Unit Detail

More ZERO PARADES: Director's Cut screens in the Gallery

What to study

ZA/UM's answer to the character sheet, and the clearest statement of what ZERO PARADES takes from Disco Elysium and rebuilds: the skills are again faculties of a mind, but the presentation is a spy's dossier, not a psyche. Fifteen skills sit in three boxed faculties, Action, Relation, Intellect, each faculty carrying one of the game's three pressures (FTG, ANX 16, DEL) as a segmented bar in its own colour, the same three readouts that ride the exploration HUD. Skills are drawn as enamel pins: grey line-art while they are weak, flooding with colour as they grow, so a glance at the grid reads as a portrait of who this agent has become. The selected skill leaves the grid entirely and becomes an object, a sleeved ID card with a value, four diamond pips and a modifiers ledger, while the left margin keeps a flayed anatomical figure for status effects, the body filed alongside the paperwork. Frame at about 1:03 in the ZERO PARADES - Features and Gameplay Trailer video (Steam), a pipeline scene-change survivor (candidates/v0_0017.png at 63.4s).

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

panel-grid stat-panel detail-card

Components

Parts on screen.

Card Tabs Menu Journal Map Button prompts Badge

Screen inventory

• top tab bar shared by the whole menu system: DOSSIER (active) / INVENTORY / CONDITIONING / MAP / JOURNAL
• three boxed faculty groups, FACULTY OF ACTION (FTG 12, magenta segment bar), FACULTY OF RELATION (ANX 16, amber bar), FACULTY OF INTELLECT (DEL 7, violet bar), each with its own colour that recurs in the HUD
• fifteen skills as enamel-pin badges in pentagon/rounded frames: line-art grey when unremarkable, full colour when developed, Coordination, Doppelgäng(er), Instincts, Sensors, Shadowplay; Blueprints, Cold Read, Nerve, Personalism, Statehood; Entanglement, Grey Matter, Poetics, Records, Technoflex, each with its value typeset under the badge
• right rail: the selected skill as a physical card in a plastic sleeve, GREY MATTER, value 2 with two of four diamonds filled, MODIFIERS ledger below (status modifiers 0, clothing modifiers 0), and its flavour text: 'Deductive and inductive reasoning. The rational side of your mind. Finds the order in everything.'
• left margin: a flayed anatomical figure under STATUS EFFECTS with a leader line to a lung icon, the body itself is part of the sheet; bottom-right reads EXPERIENCE 5 / 100 XP, 2 SKILL POINTS, and a HOLD TO RAISE SKILL prompt

Top 3 colors

#020202 22%#191718 20%#070707 18%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© ZA/UM, ZERO PARADES: Director's Cut screenshot: ZERO PARADES - Features and Gameplay Trailer / Launch Trailer (English) videos (Steam), shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by ZA/UM.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-21. verified 2026-10-21: pipeline scene-change frame (candidates/v0_0017.png, 63.4s) inspected visually at full resolution (1920x1080 native), a settled, fully legible menu screen: all fifteen skill badges, the three faculty bars and the Grey Matter detail card are sharp, no transition, trailer typography or letterbox overlays the frame

no published policy found (checked 2026-10-21); fair-use study use, takedown honored within 48h

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.