Disco Elysium And The Rise Of Disco-Like Games

In a popular post on the Disco Elysium subreddit about a year ago, a fan going by the handle u/rTacoDaddy made the following prediction: “The sequel to Disco Elysium will be a hundred thousand stories with a hundred thousand creators.”

This phenomenon will be known in future gaming history as the rise of the Disco-like: a new subgenre seamlessly meshing RPG and adventure elements through the unique and innovative dialogue system developed by former ZA/UM developers in the groundbreaking detective RPG released on October 15, 2019. Today is its fifth anniversary.

Five years later, the Disco-like is becoming something more than a burgeoning indie niche. Former ZA/UM developers, involuntarily removed by the studio’s corrupt upper management, have come together to make up two—no, wait, (so far) three separate indie studios developing their own spiritual successors.

One of these studios, Dark Math Games, has released an official announcement trailer for their debut title: XXX Nightshift, in which you play a “Patrol Op” called Dinorah Katz, who finds herself stranded at a ski resort in Antarctica set in the year 2086.

Disco Antarctica: XXX Nightshift is Like New Wave Science Fiction

Dark Math Games touts an “original science-fiction setting” in this Antarctic resort that “shouldn’t exist,” where your player-character will interact with “people that you shouldn’t know” living through an “endless polar night covering a multitude of sins.” This setting and setup seem to evoke the dystopian futuristic landscapes of J.G. Ballard. It feels like the kind of story or novel he might have written during the SF New Wave movement in the 1970s, satirizing the rich and powerful techno-elites. The time for Ballardian Disco has finally come.

The trailer feels like a surreal dialogue rendition of how we wake up from sleep. It’s a universal animal process where we are to some degree always half-aware of our environment as we drift from sleep to wakefulness. We postpone the moment to get up and get to work, knowing we’ll have to face our problems and the ever-increasing difficulties of life in a “world devoured in its pain,” as the Smashing Pumpkins song goes. But in XXX Nightshift, instead of waking up to the foul hangover odors of Harrier Du Bois, you wake up wrapped in chinchilla fur blankets to a delicious aroma in the biggest bed you’ve ever woke up in. Color me intrigued.

The developers promise a “deep single-player role-playing experience” in a layered gameplay design that seems to follow the Disco-like model closely, based on first impressions of the trailer. They also tout a “unique companion dynamic,” though the writers will likely find it difficult to one-up the character design and development of the inimitable Kim Kitsuragi, one of the most adored companion characters in the history of gaming. Still, we should keep an open mind, even if we believe these characters cannot be replaced.

Disco Elysium Studios: Longdue and Summer Eternal

The two other Disco-developing studios that were announced on this Day of Disco are called Longdue Games and Summer Eternal. Neither studio has announced a game, but you can already sign up for their newsletters to know firsthand when they do. Their studio philosophy seems to overlap on several counts: Longdue Games promise “agency-driven storytelling” and “narrative-first, psychologically deep” RPGs where the focus is depth at all levels: characters, environments, and storytelling. Complex moral dilemmas are also on the menu. Choices-and-consequences (C&C), also known as reactivity, are at the core of Disco Elysium and its revolutionary approach to speech checks, where failure can be just as meaningful as success—and often more entertaining to watch.

Longdue and Summer Eternal clearly intend to respect “the legacy of foundational story-driven RPGs” and hope to step into the shoes of ZA/UM in the aftermath of its official dissolution. Summer Eternal’s website includes a manifesto that will literally make you see red—by that I mean the very strong background color used on the website, which made it hard to read through it, but the message is powerful and definitely written with passion. A “Game Studio / Art Collective” was also the overarching cultural project of ZA/UM, and it’s good to see these developers keeping that flame alive.

The most notorious writers and the art director from the original ZA/UM team, Robert Kurvitz, Aleksander Rostov, and Helen Hindpere are not involved in any of these projects or studios. The last we heard from Kurvitz and Rostov on the news was last year’s announcement of ZA/UM resolving its legal dispute with the producer Kaur Kender. This prompted a statement from Kurvitz and Rostov (under the alias Taal, according to ZA/UM), which was followed by a response from current ZA/UM management, challenging them to settle the dispute in court and accusing them of “refusing to do their jobs, creating a toxic workplace, demeaning colleagues, and attempting to misappropriate Studio IP.” This is unlikely to be the last of the dispute, but no other development has been reported since.

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The Legacy of Disco Elysium and The Promise of a Thousand Discos

Disco Elysium has been compared favorably with dozens of popular and acclaimed games since its release for its writing and unique dialogue. Its legacy will continue to influence millions of creators of all stripes, even in the event of a poor sequel made without the original developers. This might be inevitable, and we can name numerous IPs that have been held hostage by nefarious actors, and numerous franchises that may never top their original game. As Alan Moore put it in V for Vendetta, “ideas are bulletproof”. Disco Elysium is an idea more than a game franchise or IP; an idea and a paradigm for storytelling in conjunction with art and music in a symbiotic relationship.

Other indie studios unaffiliated with the original ZA/UM team have already become somewhat popular: Clam Man 2 is on my list of most hilarious and inventive upcoming indie Disco-likes where you play as a clam man who takes up stand-up comedy. I also had a chance to review the steampunk Disco-like Sovereign Syndicate last January (as an independent reviewer) and found that it has a lot of potential for sequels. Then there’s Esoteric Ebb, a comedy D&D RPG with some wacky skill checks. I would not be surprised to find out that there are many more Disco-likes in development and still unannounced.

I fully believe that right at this moment, Disco-likes are being conceived by hundreds of idea-guys who would be thrown out of pitch meetings for threatening to shoot themselves in the head if the executives didn’t agree to publish their games. But I pray most of all for a cryptozoologist Disco-like where we’ll be able to communicate with other species such as the Insulindian Phasmid, so we can witness once more the “violent and and irrepressible miracle” of such encounters with cryptids and the dialogue with other characters who seek them. I still tear up when I remember my first encounter with the Phasmid, and I don’t think anything will ever top that feeling.

The future of Disco-like RPGs and adventures is full of potential, almost like an entirely different genre has been conceived out of the combination of previous ones. This potential could also turn into saturation, but indie developers will continue to drive innovation. We all wanted ZA/UM to succeed and to develop many sequels with the original team, but perhaps its success was also its downfall. They grew too much, too quickly, became too mainstream and commercially viable (Amazon Prime deal included), which confirmed its own prejudices on the ability of capital “to subsume all critiques into itself”. What it cannot subsume, however, are the creators themselves.

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Released

October 15, 2019

Engine

Unity

ESRB

M For Mature 17+ due to Blood, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, Use of Drugs, Violence

How Long To Beat

23 Hours

Metascore

89

PS Plus Availability

Extra & Premium

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