On 11th October 2024, three video game studios announced themselves near-simultaneously as the creators of “spiritual successors” to ZA/UM’s mournful Marxist RPG Disco Elysium. First came Longdue, a conspicuously corporate operator who are making an untitled “psychogeographic RPG”. Dark Math Games followed around lunchtime - they’re making a sexy Antarctic ski resort mystery called XXX Nightshift. Finally, there was Summer Eternal, the mouthiest and Marxiest of the lot, who have set themselves up as a workers co-operative and have yet to announce a specific project.
]]>A spiritual successor to Studio ZA/UM’s RPG Disco Elysium is currently in development at the newly-formed Longdue. It's set in a world “conceived by the leads” of the canceled sequel.
A representative of Longdue told us that "the studio isn't ready to talk about specific names at the moment beyond the people mentioned in the press release, but they are looking forward to sharing more about the game and the studio in the future". They did, however, confirm that Disco Elysium's lead writer and designer Robert Kurvitz and art director Aleksander Rostov are not involved.
]]>Back in February, Graham wrote about potential redundancies at Disco Elysium studio ZA/UM following the cancellation of a standalone expansion to that game, codenamed X7. Now, PC Gamer’s Ted Litchfield has spoken to 12 current and former employees about the circumstances surrounding the cancellation, notably the details of the layoffs, the expansion, and the “humiliation campaign” suffered by writer Argo Tuulik as apparent retaliation for his participation in last year’s extensive People Make Games documentary. You can, and should, read PC Gamer’s report here.
]]>A standalone expansion for Disco Elysium, codenamed X7, has reportedly been cancelled and a quarter of developers at developers ZA/UM are at risk of redundancy. Around 24 employees are said to be affected, according to "sources close to the matter" who spoke to Sports Illustrated's video games site.
]]>If 2023 is remembered for one thing, it's that it was a 100% critical success year for the RPG. Role-players across the land have been feasting exceedingly well these past few months, what with the stonking success of Baldur's Gate 3 (and to lesser extents, Starfield and Diablo 4), so we thought it was about time to celebrate your favourite RPGs of all time. Your votes have been counted, your comments have been sorted, and the cream of the RPG crop has been assembled. But which of the many excellent RPGs have risen above all others? Come and find out below as we count down your top 25 favourite RPGs of all time.
]]>Often when we talk about "hype" surrounding a release, it’s in anticipation of shared cultural euphoria more than that of a great gaming experience. Either way, a great RPG game hits different. Recently, Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 have both been landmarks. Not to mention the enduring sweep of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and the Minesweeper-esque ubiquity of Skyrim. When studios get the RPG right, the end result inspires excitement and devotion in ways that feel utterly unique to the genre.
To this end I chatted to Dragon Age, Baldur’s Gate, and Mass Effect maestro Mark Darrah, some of the folks at Studio ZA/UM, and the minds behind the two definitive tomes on CRPG history: Matt Barton of Dungeons And Desktops, and Felipe Pepe of The CRPG Book. I wanted to ask these genere experts about all things choice and consequence, player freedom, and Baldur’s Gate 3’s phenomenal success. What turns a niche into a phenomenon? What goes into creating a great RPG? And what makes the genre so special to people? Turns out that last one is a big question to ask.
]]>Little-CRPG-that-could Baldur's Gate 3 has solved the Labyrinth, outwitted the Sphinx and ascended to the rank of Metacritic's highest-rated PC game of all time, knocking ZA/UM's Disco Elysium into second place. (OK, so technically they're both on 97, but I'm guessing the "score distillation" arithmetic behind-the-scenes puts Baldur's Gate 3 ahead - their positions were reversed last time I checked.) This follows a busy weekend for Larian's new game, which exceeded its own online player activity record on Sunday to the tune of around 875,000 players.
It's a terrific achievement for one of the richest and most rewarding D&D adaptations ever set to code. It's also only going to encourage those on the interwebs who are using Baldur's Gate 3's success as a stick to beat other developers with. As you've likely discovered for yourself, the new game is the centre of a raging discussion about what we should expect from today's "triple-A games", aka "biggest/shiniest". Some point to its lack of microtransactions or DRM, while others highlight its relative technical sturdiness and overall "quality". A few people go into specifics: I've read a couple of thoughtful comments comparing the bespoke, one-and-done nature of Baldur's Gate 3 quests with open world action titles and other genres that hinge on repeated quest formulas and reward systems.
]]>Whoooo we’re officially in the double-digits gang! We’ve somehow managed to make it to episode 10 of Indiescovery without going completely feral and wrecking the joint. I say that, but this week’s episode is a little, shall we say, unhinged? Rebecca, Liam, and Rachel hadn’t really had a proper chat all week so there’s a lot of Friday energy and catching up, and the energy levels only increase when we start to talk about our main topic of this episode: Eurovision! And indie games, of course.
]]>We’re one episode away from being in the double digits, folks! Whoop! But for now, let’s dive into episode nine of Indiescovery. This time we're chatting about our biggest Steam sins. That’s right, we’re revealing it all: shamefully ignored indie gems, outrageous playtimes, and games that we promise we’ll return to one day, honest! We also get into what we’ve been recently playing and then end, as always, with our hyperfixations.
]]>This week on the Electronic Wireless Show podcast we bite off more than we can chew by trying to make sense of the timeline of the Studio ZA/UM firings, lawsuits, and alleged fraud/toxicity, an ongoing and complicate mess that, as of this week, shows no signs of ungoing. We kind of end up on an "who tf knows?" but do manage to boil it down into a cowboy metaphor that helps us get a grip on things.
We talk about all that stuff for so long that we end up overrunning and don't have time for A Good Day To Ware Hard, or Nate's Tower Of Jocularity - although he promises a titanic one next week. We do get in our what games we've been playing this week, and it's a varied selection.
]]>The already troubled goings-on at ZA/UM - the studio that developed Disco Elysium - have gotten messier than Harry’s own apartment. Last week ZA/UM announced that one of its legal disputes had been resolved and that they expected the rest of their legal troubles to "fall apart." But fired game director Robert Kurvitz and art director Aleksander Rostov took the oppurtunity to double down on their lawsuit and dispute the studio's claims, calling them "wrong and misleading in several respects."
]]>Despite lawsuits and other messy goings-on at Disco Elysium studio ZA/UM recently, things are starting to look a little sunnier for this troubled RPG maker. Three of its lawsuits with former employees have been resolved this week, and today marks the arrival of a new mode in the game called Collage Mode, a daft and very entertaining screenshotting and diorama tool that lets you arrange Revachol's many, many inhabitants in all sorts of weird scenes, poses and sizes. And yes, that is a giant Kim and Kuno up top there tormenting your tiny detective protagonist. What of it?
]]>It seems my working days must now begin and end with Disco Elysium, which feels quite Disco Elysium. In a statement to GamesIndustry.biz, ZA/UM - the studio that developed Disco Elysium - confirmed the reasons several employees were fired last year. These include "limited to no engagement in their responsibilities", "creating a toxic work environment", "verbal abuse and gender discrimination", and attempting to sell ZA/UM's IP to other companies.
]]>Just over two weeks ago I predicted the ZA/uM situation would only get messier, so slap my face and call me Mystic Meg. Disco Elysium's game director Robert Kurvitz and art director Aleksander Rostov have, at least partially, offered up their side of the story on why they were fired from Disco dev studio ZA/UM in a Medium post titled 'TO FANS OF DISCO ELYSIUM, CONCERNING THE SITUATION AT ZA/UM'. Short answer is: they allege fraud.
]]>Alright folks, bear with me, because it doesn't look like this one is going to get less messy. As reported by Tech News Space, it appears that Robert Kurvitz, the lead developer and writer on Disco Elysium, is suing Studio ZA/UM, the development studio of Disco Elysium, via his own company Telomer. Kotaku AU seem to have corroborated this, finding a record on the Estonian Ministry of Justice's website showing Telomer has filed an application against ZA/UM Studio to "obtain information and review documents", which you can see for yourself here.
This comes after Martin Luiga announced (in a frankly kinda weird post) the dissolution of The ZA/UM Cultural Association, and that Kurvitz, writer Helen Hindpere, and art director Aleksander Rostov were no longer working at Studio ZA/UM.
]]>Core developers of Disco Elysium were allegedly "fired on false premises", according to Martin Luiga. Luiga, who worked on the game in its early days, made the comment in a new interview in which he also says that he believes "fans had a right to know" about the developers' departure from the studio.
]]>One of the founders of Disco Elysium studio ZA/UM has revealed the “involuntary” departure of three staff from the company in a blog post. Martin Luiga said that designer and founder Robert Kurvitz, writer Helen Hindpere, and art director Aleksander Rostov had ceased working for ZA/UM at the end of 2021. Luiga described their departure as “bad news for the loving fans that are waiting for the Disco sequel”.
]]>Disco Elysium’s developers ZA/UM are looking for artists to work on their next game, which sounds very much like it could be heading to the stars. Whatever the project is, ZA/UM’s reference to Shakespeare’s play Hamlet in the job listing certainly suggests they’ll stick with the keen intellect of their last RPG. If you’re not familiar with Disco Elysium’s blend of ideology and role-playing then watch Astrid’s (RPS in Peace) video below.
]]>Detective RPG Disco Elysium is not short on words, and now that text is a little more inviting. A free update yesterday added the option to display text in fonts which are intended to be easier to read for some people with dyslexia. The popular OpenDyslexic typeface is used for many languages, while Russian and Korean have their own fonts. I have a touch of the ol' dyslexia myself and do find this font helps me a bit.
]]>Amazon Studios are considering making Prime shows and films based on video games, signing a first-look deal with the production company currently planning adaptations of games including Disco Elysium and Life Is Strange. This will give Amazon the first opportunity to snap up anything DJ2 Entertainment might be making, if they want to. This is not, however, an announcement that Amazon will make these specific shows. These shows still might never get made, by anyone. But maybe it's enough of a step forwards for you to start daydreaming about what such shows could be?
]]>Strange and wonderful detective RPG Disco Elysium launches on Xbox and Nintendo Switch today, which is good for them. That's good for you too, person who wants to talk about Disco Elysium all the time but finds pub conversations waylaid by platform unavailability. And hey, it's good for PC peeps who haven't yet bought the game either, because it has a tidy 45% discount on Steam for the next week. Win-win-win.
]]>October is shaping up to be a busy month on Steam. Earlier today the latest game demos event kicked off (here are the 13 best Steam Festival Demos) and later this month they'll be running another Digital Tabletop Festival. Like last year, it's a sale and livestream celebration of games inspired by and adapted from board games. This year the event will lean into RPGs, including a chat with the folks behind both Disco Elysium and Baldur's Gate 3 when it kicks off later this month.
]]>A question that crosses my mind from time to time is why there aren’t more horror RPGs. Certainly, RPGs are more than capable of generating psychological terrors, and horror games are as popular as they’ve ever been. But outside of a handful of classics like Sweet Home, System Shock 2, and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, it remains a fairly under-developed area within the genre.
I posed this question to veteran developer Brian Mitsoda, who has a long history of working on unique RPGs like Alpha Protocol, having most recently been the narrative designer for the seemingly ill-fated Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2. Mitsoda replied. “When it comes to RPGs, [executives] are going to look at what is the most popular genre for RPGs. And what is the most popular genre for RPGs? It’s fantasy. [...] If your RPG is just focused on horror, it’s probably going to turn off a lot of RPG fans. They’re going to go back to something that’s more comfortable.”
]]>Each time I play weird and wonderful amnesiac detective RPG Disco Elysium, I fall in love with language all over again, and get properly jazzed up to spill some fancy words. In this case, I've played the new Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, an updated version of the game that has loads of new voice acting and even some new quests. So I’ll pop a cork in my impulse to use words like 'ekphrastic', at least a bit, because I imagine you’ve come here with one of two questions.
Those are: "should I finally get around to playing The Large RPG?" or, if you’ve already played it loads, "is the Final Cut reason enough to do so again?" Please, enter the slide in front of you, and glide, like a graceful brick, into the answer pool below.
]]>A lovely thing about sifting through heaps of text at your own pace is you get to luxuriate on the details and flourishes that catch your personal fancy. A drawback is that sometimes such fixation comes at the expense of pertinent detail. For example, in my previous runs of Disco Elysium, I think I may have gotten distracted by talk of tightrope walkers and hand grenades, and completely glossed over a line telling me that the game takes place in spring.
That's no longer an issue thanks to Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, a free update that adds voice acting to the game's dialogue.
]]>Fascinating detective RPG Disco Elysium today becomes bigger and fancier with its Final Cut, released as a free update. The Final Cut adds voice acting (one million spoken words, they claim) as well as new quests and heaps more newness. A fine time to return to Revachol.
]]>The Australian Classification Board are at it again with their strict rules, and this time around the detective RPG Disco Elysium is on the chopping block. The game's new edition The Final Cut is set to launch on March 30th, adding new quests and additional voice acting. However, unless developers ZA/UM make a few changes to censor or cut the content Australia don't like, it won't be released down under.
]]>Mid-life crisis detective RPG Disco Elysium was a favorite of mine, and a lot of other folks, when it launched in 2019. It's about to get even better, thanks to The Final Cut edition that's adding new quests and lots and lots of additional voice acting. ZA/UM have announced via a new trailer that the free update will launch on March 30th.
]]>Flee, gentle reader, for she has come again! It's not too late for you to escape her: Horaszdóttir the Endless, she of the big boots and bear fur. Alas, our fate is sealed. She visits us every winter to split open turkeys from her eldritch flock, and soothsay our most anticipated game releases for the year to come.
She shows us many a game in those birds, reader, and we must impart the dread knowledge to you. We've already done strategy games; what hideous vision of the future is forced on us today? Ah yes, of course. It is the time of the storytellers, the quests and levelling, the congress with aliens. RPGs!
]]>The writer of Disco Elysium has revealed more about the mysterious new quests coming with the detective RPG's big Final Cut update. Four "political vision quests" will explore the game's ideologicial alignments (that's communism, fascism, moralism, and ultraliberal), with consequences that might change the world or even your UI. I think I've already suffered enough consequences from my actions, thank you very much. And in the game, wahey.
]]>Many of you are by now bathing in twinkling neon ravelights and swooning into the metal arms of Cyberpunk 2077's humourless unhunks, who stalk the streets of Night City like animatronic pizza restaurant mascots gone feral. That is fine. There are worse places to find oneself in the labyrinthine hell of video games. Places such as these. Here are 9 neighbourhoods you wouldn't want to bring up your children in.
]]>A big ol' free update is coming to Disco Elysium in March, developers Za/um announced today. 'The Final Cut' will expand the remarkable detective RPG's voice acting to fully voice every character, which sounds a real treat, as well as add a new area, quests, and more. See (and hear!) more in the trailer below.
]]>Whether you like wizards, sword-and-board warriors, the irradiated wasteland, vampires, or isometric text-heavy stories, the RPG is the genre that will never let you down. Accross the dizzing number of games available where you can play a role, there's something for everyone - and we've tried to reflect that in our list of the best RPGs on PC. The past couple of years have been great for RPGs, so there are some absolute classics as well as brand spanking new games on this list. And there's more to look forwards to, with rumblings of Dragon Age: Dread Wolf finally on the horizon, and space epic Starfield in our rear view mirror. Whatever else may happen, though, this list will provide you with the 50 best RPGs that you can download and play on PC right now.
]]>"It'll be easy," I thought to myself, when it was suggested someone do a nice, timely little post on the new-ish Steam Points system, and the various new goodies on offer through it. "Sure, no problem," I said, when Matt refused to write it because he thought Steam Points were "pointless", and I was the only other writer on the call with Graham. Matt was being negative, I figured, and I'd show him the error of his ways with my happy-go-lucky, anything-goes, good times attitude. I'd breeze onto the Steam store, have a browse of what points-purchasable things were on offer, and do a quickie piece highlighting some of the most chuckleworthy.
Well, turns out Matt was right, and I was not.
]]>Well, betcha you didn't expect to read that headline today any more than I expected to write it. Dark 70s detective RPG Disco Elysium is being spun off into a TV show, assuming that the production company partnering with ZA/UM studio are successful in assembling a team of writers and pitching it. Seriously, who'd have thunk it?
]]>Down it, down it, dowwwn it, yeeaahhh! Nice one, you skulled that pint of fizzy water and lemon like an absolute legend, mate, well done. I always knew you were a top enjoyer of a wild night on the tiles, on the rip, on the slosh, on the tear, on the floor, on the bathroom floor, no listen you’re on the bathroom floor mate, for real, get up. I think that San Pelegrino went straight to your head. Maybe just go home, lie down, and play some RPGs. You can always simulate the reckless abandon of a big night in one of these, the 9 best nights out in PC games.
]]>Guerrilla Collective, the upcoming online showcase for indie developers, has been postponed until June 13th in support of Black Lives Matter. Originally due to start on the 6th, Guerrilla Collective is one of the many not-E3 digital events due to take place over the next couple of weeks, with lots of mystery announcements from a range of devs and publishers like Paradox Interactive and Larian Studios.
]]>If you wanted to get your melon twisted by Disco Elysium but your PC, like its star, was too weak and crumpled in the face of the slightest pressure, good news: the developers have optimised the heck out of it. They've managed to cut the surreal detective RPG's system requirement a whole lot, meaning more people should be able to play it now, and those who already could will have a better time of it. Scamps that they are, developers Za/um call this the "Working Class Update". They also got a load of translations in the works.
]]>I was just a tad sad when E3 organisers announced that they wouldn't be doing their own big digital event after cancelling the physical conference amid the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. Not to worry though, we lose one E3 and get like, five to replace it apparently. A bunch of indie developers and publishers have all squaded up to do their own thing which they're calling Guerrilla Collective, from June 6-8.
]]>Delightful detective RPG Disco Elysium now has a official Mac version, inviting more folks to bumble disgracefully through a murder mystery in a strange seaside city. No more fiddling about with Bootcamp and that. For all newcomers, Mac or Windows, it has a 25% discount on Steam for the next few days too.
]]>When my brother and I were young, we would often harass my parents to spare a few quid for the arcades. Coins in sticky hands, we would immediately run-up to the first Time Crisis machine we saw and proceed to blow away terrorists to our hearts' content. It was amazing just how much power those little blue and pink plastic guns made us feel.
I have always had a deep affinity for games with excellent guns. From modern military shooters to fantastical sci-fi space operas, if there is a gun to be shooting, I am all in. And clearly, I am not alone. But of course, in the real world, guns aren’t as simple as holding right-click and spamming left. Real guns come with responsibility, unreliability and enormous consequences (which of course may all be reasons why we enjoy the fake ones). Enter: Disco Elysium.
]]>Right after A Short Hike won the Independent Games Festival Awards grand prize last night, the Game Developers Choice Awards declared Untitled Goose Game the game of the year. Other games to win prizes Dev Choice Awards include Disco Elysium, Control, and Baba Is You - some good stuff. They also handed the Pioneer Award to Roberta Williams, the Sierra co-founder known for adventure games from Mystery House to Phantasmagoria.
]]>Last week, the haunting and hilarious Disco Elysium added an extra difficulty setting called ‘Hardcore True Detective Mode’. On the surface, it seems like a fairly standard set of tweaked parameters. More demanding dice roles to shaft dear old Harry Du Bois at every opportunity.
If you take time to read the update notes though, it becomes clear that these new changes are storytelling devices as much as adjusted sliders. Since there are no monsters to make tougher, it’s your wallet and psyche that take the hits. It’s had me thinking about how ZA/UM’s surrealist cop odyssey, and other games, express poverty through their systems. Games that invert the traditional power curve of farmhand to godhood, or make us try twice as hard to get half as far. Far from being a detached add-on, the update is a deft application of mechanics-as-metaphor that wouldn’t work if desperation, isolation, poverty, and addiction weren’t already stitched deep into the fabric of Disco Elysium’s fiction.
]]>Children, life’s great copy-paste. Adorable, drooling idiots with no self-control and a habit of yelling embarrassing facts to the entire supermarket. In our everyday lives, human children are a snotty emblem of hope, vulnerability, and aspiration. In videogames, they are a cursed harbinger of escort missions, narrative roadblocks, “cutesy” voice acting, and precocious dialogue. They are annoying. But hold on, that’s the point. Many of them are meant to be that way. So here is a list of the 10 most annoying children in PC games. And perhaps, the best annoying?
]]>What've we got here, eh? Some sorta proper Poirot type, are you? A real Miss Marple? Well, I've got a case here that'll make you look like PC Plod. Political police thriller Disco Elysium reckons it's been going easier on you, and now flaunts a tough new Hardcore True Detective mode to really test your smarts. Try solving a murder when you can't afford a sandwich, tough guy. Pull off some sweet karaoke tunes when you're killing off a hangover. See how far that gets you, copper.
Oh, and you can play it with a really, really wide monitor now. Case closed.
]]>Disco Elysium was by and far my own game of the year for 2019 and it made RPS's list of best PC games of 2019 as well. Its gritty, ugly characters are memorable and its plot, despite quickly getting convoluted, is as hard to look away from as the latest original series from your TV subscription of choice. Rather than other text-heavy RPGs, though, lead writer Robert Kurvitz says that Twitter was what ZA/UM felt they were competing with for players' attention.
]]>2019 was a great year for PC games - aren't they all? - but you might not yet know what the very best PC games of 2019 were. Let us help you.
]]>Winter brings out a part of me that immediately seeks a mountain of blankets in which to burrow. Even in my seasonally confused state of Texas, the weather has tended towards the chilly and left me with little excuse not to have a kettle boiling interminably as I layer on socks and pull the biggest comforter from the top of the closet. But this presents a problem likely familiar to other cozy connoisseurs: how does one game while properly bundled?
I will admit it does limit possibilities considerably. That's why I've curated a small selection of games perfectly playable while your other hand keeps coffee or tea always within sipping range.
]]>In the yard below, a corpse hangs from a pine tree.
It is my failure and my shame for all to see, rotting in plain sight.
Martainaise, the broken-down home of Disco Elysium’s broken-down police story, is an excoriating light shone not just upon its broken-down policeman, but also upon me, and my failure to be the person I thought I was. It is my mid-life crisis writ in grey rainfall, my dread realisation that death is coming and I’m not who I ever meant to be.
In the yard below, a corpse hangs from a pine tree. Decaying in the rain. It’s been there for days. Everyone sees it, no-one mentions it.
]]>The results are in! The links between the longevity of Steam Charts and the decreases in violent crime, the improvement of sanitary water supplies, and sudden global drops in serious health issues, are no coincidence at all!
To quote from the paper recently published in Nature, "Causal links have been shown connecting Rock Paper Shotgun's Steam Charts articles to a remarkably number of positive worldwide trends, with strong suggestion that a global dependence on the column has been established, such that its weekly appearance is vital to humanity."
]]>The first proper obstacle in amnesiac police RPG Disco Elysium, if you don’t count your ceiling fan, is a small child who has taken a lot of speed. He stands outside your hotel, chucking stones at your corpse. Your case’s corpse. The one you need to investigate. This won’t do.
]]>So Disco Elysium is an RPG, yes? And you have to solve a murder, because you're a cop. Except you also can't remember anything whatsoever, including your own name or where you badge and gun are (how are you supposed to hand them over to your chief when you break the rules to get results??) or even, initially, that you're a cop.
This creates the blank slate, on which you can paint the kind of cop you are. Blank ish, anyway -- you're still a middle aged, overweight, late stage alcoholic man, but by gosh you can choose how that man solves crimes and views the world. At EGX this year, developers Helen Hindpere and Robert Kurvitz talked about how they wanted people to really get into the role play -- to buy a pack of cigarettes, and smoke one every day in the same place at the same time, because that's a ritual their character has. I developed a ritual. But it wasn't as cool as smoking a lone cigarette, gazing off into the distance with a thousand yard stare. My obsession was not philosophical or well thought out, and it didn't even really make sense. But let me tell you about my cockroaches.
]]>Don't come any closer, pal. I've got a gun. Oh wait, maybe I don't, because I pawned it when I was extremely drunk, and I didn't do a deal with the corrupt union boss to get it back. Oh dear, now a voice in my head that says it's Electrochemistry is trying to convince me to get drunk. I must be in bleak but lovely RPG Disco Elysium.
]]>The Schwarzschild radius of the Steam Charts continues to shrink as the effects of the Universal Collapse take greater impact on our daily lives.
Read on if you want to know how to protect your family from complete atomic devastation.
]]>Existentialism. A word with baggage, and about it. Philosophers have deployed it to cover many different things, but they're all concerned with the baggage of being alive. The urgent dilemma of existence, as beings without apparent purpose. The concept fascinates me. It's what I get up for in the morning.
Based on the opening minutes of detective RPG Disco Elysium, so does ZA/UM. It's clear from the moment your ancient reptilian brain laments your return to consciousness. "The limbed and headed machine of pain and undignified suffering is firing up again", and there's nothing you can do about it.
"It wants to walk the desert. Hurting. Longing. Dancing to disco music.”
]]>People, I face a dilemma. (Great cars, them Dilemmas. - Ed) This week Destiny 2 takes up an astonishing five out of ten spaces on the Charts. So what's a professional games journalist of 20 years experience to do? Write ten octopus facts in less detail but with more jokes, or six more involved entries perhaps better celebrating our cephalopod friends? I've opted for the latter, and I hope you'll endorse me in this decision rather than join the inevitable social media backlash.
]]>You don't need your deals herald to tell you that wordy isometric RPG Disco Elysium is finally a thing you can buy, did you know that to celebrate the release of ZA/UM's intriguing debut, GOG are giving away a free copy of Stygian Software's equally word isometric RPG UnderRail with every purchase? I thought not. Hurry, though, as this deal won't last for long. Read on for more details.
]]>So, then. Disco Elysium, like Planescape: Torment, or even Fallout or Arcanum, is an isometric RPG with a lot of text. You, an alcoholic, probably drug-addicted cop in early middle age, wake up to face a new partner, a lynching that needs solving, and an apocalyptic hangover that has wiped your memory. So, you start the work of learning... well, everything.
I managed to stumble through solving a murder as an amnesiac alternate-'70s detective in much less than the 60 hours ZA/UM have set as their "back of the box" number for a complete run, although I don't doubt that there are that many hours of entertainment (and more) to be had in it. Just not all during one playthrough.
]]>The Disco Elysium Thought Cabinet is one of the game's defining features. And that's saying something, considering the many different ways in which ZA/UM have deviated from the traditional RPG structure. In Disco Elysium, it's not just tools and clothes that you can equip but also Thoughts that you can mull over and adopt, almost always with both positive and negative results.
Our Disco Elysium Thoughts guide will explain the Thought Cabinet as clearly as possible, from how you gain access to different Thoughts to how you can use them, and how they change the game for you in return. It's a bit of a head-scratcher at first, but stick with it and you'll come to realise the benefits of this novel system.
]]>The Disco Elysium skills and character creation system, much like the game itself, is big, brilliant, bizarre, and bewildering. With the four primary abilities of Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics each influencing a set of six distinct secondary skills, there's an enormous amount to learn and figure out before you even begin to delve into the story itself.
Our Disco Elysium skills guide will walk you through how character creation in Disco Elysium works, before explaining each of the 24 skills at your disposal and how each one can change your story - for better or worse.
]]>I am still figuring out what I think of Disco Elysium, but I can say with some certainty that it is the first game where I have done a small fistpump and thought to myself, "Yeah, you really nailed telling that woman you found her husband's body! Nailed it! Best cop ever!"
Disco Elysium is a very dense RPG, where you play an amnesiac alcoholic detective trying to solve a) a murder and b) his identity. As part of the latter quest, the game takes note of your words and actions, and uses them to build an outline of your personality traits. Then it suggests a "copotype" that you roughly adhere to. Until quite recently it suggested I was a "Boring Cop". I was, as you can imagine, livid at this.
]]>When visiting ZA/UM's studio, I had to take my boots off. This is because their studio, where they are putting the final touches on open world RPG Disco Elysium, is also a flat in a townhouse in Hove, where several of them live. It has nice wooden floors, unbelievably high ceilings, and a big bay window cradling some workstations. There's also a bookshelf full of many different tabletop RPG rules and expansions, and other tabletop games.
Artist Mikk Metsniit makes black coffee in the kitchen, and Robert Kurvitz, lead designer and writer, proudly shows me all the miniatures for Kingdom Death (pointing out, in particular, the Flower Knight), and a set of display stands for Arkham Horror: The Card Game that they'd ordered specially from Etsy. Kurvitz collects TRPG rule books and other "nerd shit" both as a stress reliever and as research. This checks out, because Disco Elysium has its roots in almost two decades of Kurvitz's nerd shit.
]]>While the fascinating surreal detective RPG, Disco Elysium should come to a tidy conclusion when it launches this month, developer ZA/UM say that should they get the possibility to make a sequel... well, they have some ideas. Chief among these is the option for a pregnant woman as a second protagonist, which sounds potentially wild in a wordy RPG where your inner thoughts and physical body claim a presence far greater than numbers on a character sheet. Our Alice Bee chatted with with ZA/UM about that and more when she recently visited them, and has oh so much to tell us about that soon. For now, have a snippet of sequel chat.
]]>Do you like hearing indie devs spilling the beans about the secrets of game design? Would you also like to see the lovely faces of RPS coaxing said developers to spill those beans at the same time? Well then, you better get yourself over to the Rezzed Sessions stage on Friday October 18th at EGX 2019, as we'll be hogging the stage from 2.30pm onwards as we grill some friendly developers that just happened to walk into our big indie dev net. From the making of NoCode's space horror game Observation to how to make an RPG like Disco Elysium, here's the line-up for the second day of EGX 2019, which runs October 17th-20th at London's ExCeL.
]]>Surreal detective thriller Disco Elysium sounds too good to be true, so weird and clever and fascinating that I've been happy for it to live in the dream space of what might be rather than face it in the real world as an actual concrete game I can actually play and potentially be disappointed by. That bliss will soon end, as developers ZA/UM today announced a release date of October 15th for the game formerly known as No Truce With The Furies. God, I hope it's truly glorious. It might just be. Here, see a bit more in this new trailer.
]]>New year, old friends. The boys and girls of the RPS podcast have not been reborn, they have no resolutions, no ambitious goal to learn German or eat more spinach. They just want to play more videogames. Unbelievable. So let’s listen to them chat about the shooters and RPGs that have them most excited. That’s what they do on these podcasts, you know, they just talk nonsense. And they get PAID for it. It’s outrageous, if you ask me, a nameless publication byline.
]]>A good writer should know when to deliver an old cliché or familiar idiom, and when to hold them back. They can give the reader a sense of comfort, a lifeline to cling to in a sea of unfamiliar or complex verbiage, or be the anchor that drags them down into boredom.
I knew I was going to like Disco Elysium, because people I trust told me I would. And I did very much enjoy the first spin wash of vomit on the laundry of alcoholism that is being the lead character in this detective-em-up RPG. But I felt that I had still to unlock what was special about the game. This happened when I played it for the second time, on the EGX show floor last week, because the second time I played Disco Elysium I found my missing shoe. The first time I played I only found the first one.
So you could say that the other shoe... confirmed an expectation I’d been waiting for.
]]>As we stare into the weary, craggy face of the final quarter of 2018, there is still a glimmer of hope. The games are not yet done. They will never be done. And the impending release of them, some close, some a little further away, stirs something within us. The delicate, easily crushed butterfly of excitement. We may catch it yet, to keep in our collection of emotions - the sharp pin of time pushed through and through it into the cork of eventual disappointement.
]]>There's just one week left until a borderline-biblical plague of developers descend upon Birmingham to showcase their up-and-coming games to all. This great gathering shall be known as EGX 2018 and starts on September 20th, running until the 23rd.
There's going to be hundreds of games on show there across all platforms, featuring developers of all shapes and sizes - both physically and business-wise. While I'll be sadly missing out on the fun (someone's got to man the news desk), here's a few choice PC games that'll be at the show, and everyone should be checking out.
]]>Disco Elysium (formerly known as No Truce With The Furies) is shaping up to be ridiculously good. It's an upcoming RPG that slips you into the shoes of a detective in a hardboiled urban fantasy world, where combat happens through dialogue and your internal monologue can be both a hindrance and a help. Your skills have their own personalities and sometimes wrestle control away from you, while you can choose to internalise certain thoughts, thus changing who your character is and what they can do.
It's absolutely fascinating, and I mean it when I say the hour or so I've played also contains the best writing I've ever seen in a video game (several other RPSers are thrilled by it too, as discussed on our recent podcast). To find out more about Disco Elsyium's special sauce, I sat down with design and writing lead Robert Kurvitz at Rezzed to chat about its pen and paper origins, encouraging tenacious behaviour, rewarding players who want to fail and why most other RPGs do quests wrong.
]]>The combat engine is so often the heart of an RPG, even in the tabletop sphere. Characters shuffle around a battle-grid, attacks are tabulated, armour classes are defined, hit points are shaved away until only one side is left standing. Not so for upcoming police-drama RPG Disco Elysium. In their latest development blog, Studio ZA/UM go into detail on combat in the game including why it's so rare, and how deeply intertwined it is with the dialogue and thought-inventory systems.
]]>It’s a podcast special! Astrid Johnson takes us through the halls of London game show EGX Rezzed, on a search for oddities and weirdness. And she finds plenty of both. There’s Stereopolis, a game projected onto a disc of frosted glass, or Wobble Garden, which is played entirely by twanging a bunch of springy door stoppers (pictured above).
It’s an overview of the show for those who couldn't make it this year. We also learn about the plane tinkering of Above, two-player sausage-dog cooperation in Phogs, and Disco Elysium, an isometric RPG featuring an alcoholic detective having an unconscious argument with his lizard brain. And then there's the tale of Fernando's chicken...
]]>Oh no. Somebody sound the “journalists discussing journalism” klaxon. Rattle it as loudly and furiously as possible, because the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, is talking about how being a critic changes the way we play. Don’t blame us, blame listener Aleksei, who sent in the theme as a suggestion. But please also forgive Adam, because it’s his last showing on the podcast (he’s leaving RPS next week) so he deserves a bit of self-indulgence.
]]>Disco Elysium is my secret side infatuation in 2018. First the game was operating under the name "No Truce With The Furies" which the devs didn't think stood out enough (!!) and then each new look I get at the game reveals a more complicated and exciting RPG about crime solving and I just want to be playing it now. Not even for first play-though; I want to be on my third play-through where I'm deliberately trying to break the game. Bonus: there's an original score by the rock’n’roll band British Sea Power. What isn't to like here? Well, depending on how upset you are by complicated moral choices, this new set of skills listed for player development might be your cut-off point -- because it gets dark.
]]>While debate over its recent title-change remains heated, the upcoming alternate-earth detective RPG Disco Elysium continues to be a game well worth talking about for far less spurious reasons. For example, the highly creative skill system at the heart of the game.
ZA/UM Studio have already given us a peek at the Intellect skills, defining the mental faculties of your character, from their ability to recall minutia to identifying lies through your own knack for improvised dramatics. Psyche skills are a far more esoteric ball-game, as these stats determine your emotional makeup, and may even keep other stats in check.
]]>Are you going to the glittering Imperial city of London next month for games show EGX Rezzed? I’m not. I’ve got a stag weekend in Madrid where I’m expected to play Gaelic football with a crowd of storming drunks. Trust me, you’re better off in the bright glass hallways of Tobacco Dock, especially now that six more games have been added to the line-up, including Disco Elysium, the surreal isometric adventure formerly known as No Truce With The Furies.
]]>The past year has been such an amazing time for RPGs that I had almost forgotten about No Truce With The Furies, a surreal 'procedural cop RPG' that claims Planescape: Torment and Kentucky Route Zero as equal inspirations.
Studio ZA/UM reckon that the title - weird as it was - didn't stand out quite enough, so they've officially rebranded the game as 'Disco Elysium'. I am baffled, but I can't help but like the sound of it. It's a satisfying title to say, and a lot easier to type.
There's also a shiny new trailer for the game, dense with ideas, style and weirdness.
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