ZERO PARADES wiki

Loose Ends

Loose Ends is the catch-all task for everything you’ve noticed but haven’t placed yet. Optional details, things you walked past, small leads the game doesn’t want to lose track of. If a piece of information has no obvious home, it goes here.

The useful trick: things that look unrelated when you pick them up often turn out to be the load-bearing detail in another task. Loose Ends is partly a notebook and partly a long bet.

Acquisition[]

This task covers optional, miscellaneous tasks or details that can be pursued or ignored. Some details may connect to other tasks and will be automatically moved to them once their relevance is established. Loose Ends are picked up from various sources over the course of the game.

Objective[]

Information that might be useful later.

  • Your double was listening to a red disc marked ‘Ultra Violeta - You But From A Dream’ in the music player at Foto 24. Relevant to What’s Wrong, PSEUDOPOD?

  • There was no sound on the disc, but listening to it felt strange. Relevant to What’s Wrong, PSEUDOPOD?

  • You made a note of the call-in number for Bagman’s TV show, the Reality Situation.

  • Strange noises are coming from an unmoored houseboat by the southern shore.

  • A boy in the bazaar is wielding an imported toy sword, which has a glowing blade and can produce sound effects.

  • You made note of the Miracle Line’s unique identifier.

  • The ex-pilots reckon the guy hogging the Miracle Line every night works for EMTERR.

  • The Miracle Line is a Renotel payphone. It should be connected to a terminal somewhere in Portofiro.

  • You’ve removed the pelota ball from the emergency door.

How the task actually works

Loose Ends is not a single objective you complete. It is a rolling notebook of observations that the game keeps in case they turn out to matter later. Whenever you hear, see, or pick up something that seems off but doesn’t fit another active task, it lands here.

Two specific behaviours to know:

  1. Items can graduate. Once a Loose End becomes provably relevant to a main task, the game automatically reassigns it. The two red disc bullets above are already marked as graduating into What’s Wrong, PSEUDOPOD? — they were Loose Ends until the evidence chain made them not.
  2. Some never graduate. Plenty of bullets here are flavour observations that just stay on the list. The toy sword, the houseboat noises, the call-in number for Bagman’s TV show — they’re the texture of the Backways. Not every detail needs to be a clue.

Why the design is worth noticing

Most spy games treat optional content as a separate side-quest list. Zero Parades treats it as something closer to a real intelligence officer’s notebook: write everything down, sort it later, accept that most of it will turn out to be nothing. The task design says, out loud, “this might matter, this might not, you decide”.

For a player, that means:

  • Don’t ignore Loose Ends bullets. They are the cheapest hooks the game gives you. Reading them sometimes flags an item as suspicious that you’d otherwise have walked past.
  • Loose Ends double as world-building. The fact that the Miracle Line is a Renotel payphone, that the guy hogging it works for EMTERR, that the pelota ball was jammed into the emergency door — none of those facts have to be true for the plot to move, but every one of them tells you something about Quisach.

Picking which to chase

A practical read of the current list:

  • The red disc bullets feed straight into the PSEUDOPOD investigation.
  • Bagman’s TV show call-in is a flag for paying attention to Subcomandante Bagman — he’s visible only through the safehouse TV but does have a hand in city events.
  • The unmoored houseboat / strange noises is a separate environmental thread, possibly tied to Dr. Hugo’s clinic.
  • The toy sword is the Sword-Wielding Child’s Sixty-Six Wolves merchandise — folds into the Collect Them All quest economy.
  • The Miracle Line ties to Renotel, Pigeon and the other ex-pilots, and the EMTERR rumour. Three threads at once.
  • The pelota ball door fix is a self-contained Backways problem you’ve already handled.

Skills that earn extra Loose Ends faster: Cold Read, Sensors, Records. Anything that notices what other people miss.

What’s confirmed vs. unknown

Confirmed: Loose Ends is the catch-all bucket, observations are picked up from various sources, items can automatically migrate into main tasks when proven relevant.

Unknown to the player at start: which observations will graduate. The whole tension of the task is that you don’t know yet which detail will turn out to be the one that explains what put PSEUDOPOD on the cot.