You’d be forgiven for thinking only one Disco Elysium spiritual successor made partially by people on the original team was announced on Friday. Turns out, there were three revealed, all with the hope of following up on one of the best games of all time.
First up is Dark Math Games, which announced its game XXX Nightshift on Friday. The studio is described as a “breakaway group” from the original team in a press release. While XXX Nightshift looks very much like Disco Elysium in early footage (which you can watch below), the studio says it will include a “unique companion dynamic,” a deep RPG system, and multiple ways to solve a mystery at a ski resort in Antarctica set in the year 2086.
The studio is being led by Timo Albert, a former motion graphic designer at ZA/UM, along with three other founders. There are 20 people working on the game, but whether there are other former Disco Elysium team members on the team wasn’t disclosed — just that they were “trained” on the award-winning CRPG.
“Additionally to innovating the traditional RPG mechanics, we’ll bring something fresh to the table. You will see. And of course, a few less words. And a few more bullets, perhaps. In total: lot more fun.” Albert, who is now an art director at Dark Math, wrote in the press release.
Next up is Longdue, a small team of around a dozen developers, including some that worked on the classic indie. They’re making a game that will “continue Disco Elysium’s award-winning legacy and represent a bold new artistic endeavor that aims to trailblaze in the narrative-first CRPG space.” There’s no title just yet, but a press release claims it’ll have a “groundbreaking ‘psychogeographic RPG’ mechanic,” which is just a fancy way of saying your choices can shape the world in a complex, constantly moving way.
GamesIndustry.biz confirmed that former designer Robert Kurvitz and former art director Aleksander Rostov are involved. they are two of the former ZA/UM members who left the company involuntarily in 2022, around the time the ZA/UM Cultural Association was dissolved. A later GamesIndustry.biz report claimed the ousting was due to “misconduct.”
Finally, there’s Summer Eternal, which flat-out stated which Disco Elysium writers and artists are on the team in a series of blog posts published on its website Friday. The list includes writers Argo Tuulik, Olga Moskvina, and Dora Klindžić; art director Aleksandar Gavrilović; concept artist Anastasia Ivanova; graphic designer Mitchell Oswell; and even narrator Lenval Brown for good measure.
Summer Eternal is set up as a co-op where the full-time members “should always retain control over the means of their creation.” Their goal is to continue the work, both technical and creative, that began with Disco Elysium.
“I believe that the last time around, we made something genre-breaking. Discipline-transcending. Something entirely new. I am not ready to give up on that,” Tuulik said in a post. “So we went back to the drawing board with one goal in mind — let’s do it fresh from this start, but this time let’s not f**k each other the moment the checkered flag drops.”
This is an appropriate quote considering what happened to ZA/UM following Disco Elysium‘s surprising success. It started on PC, got ported to just about every console, and won a lot of huge end-of-year awards. It was later reported that Amazon would be working on a potential adaptation for Prime. Unfortunately, internal fighting and a messy legal battle have stopped a proper Disco Elyisum sequel in its tracks (although ZA/UM is still working on another project).
Summer Eternal hasn’t revealed any information about its game, but the vibes are very inline with Disco Elysium in its politics, more so than the other two studios. The website begins with a full manifesto about the state of the video game industry, the move to generative AI, and the constant churn of capitalism. “We make games because we have to. It is our calling,” it reads.