There are now as many ZA/UM successors as there are Workers' Internationals, appropriately enough.
How many Disco Elysium successor studios is too many? Trick question, no such number has yet been invented. For the second time today (and the fourth time total) a gaggle of former ZA/UM devs has announced they’re coming together to boot up a new studio. This one is called Dark Math Games, and it’s working on XXX Nightshift, which looks, huh, a little like Disco Elysium.
No, we haven’t accidentally published the same story twice. The other Disco Elysium successor studio announced earlier today was Longdue, which is also a studio boasting DE vets that says it’s working on an RPG inspired by the 2019 classic. Dark Math joins that studio, as well as Red Info and ZA/UM itself, as a pretender to the Disco crown. Did I sometimes get these studios mixed up writing this piece? Mind your own business.
Dark Math is based in the UK, and pitches itself as “a breakaway group from the original
development team of Disco Elysium” and has a team of 20 devs right now. Just which ZA/UM vets it has on-staff it is a little hard to say, though. The press release announcing the studio’s existence only names Timo Albert—former ZA/UM motion graphic designer—as one of the studio’s four founders, with everyone else going unnamed.
But maybe there’s a reason for that: A quick glance at the Companies House entry for Dark Math lists Heiti Kender as a current director, and his brother Kaur Kender as a now-resigned director. If you’ve not followed the drama that’s engulfed ZA/UM proper in recent years, Kaur Kender is one of the figures at the centre of it.
In court documents filed by Robert Kurvitz (ZA/UM founder and DE lead writer) and Alexander Rostov (founder and DE art director), the pair alleged that they were forced out of the studio with actions tantamount “to criminal wrongdoing punishable by up to three years imprisonment” that “were perpetrated by Ilmar Kompus and Tõnis Haavel with support from Kaur Kender” in the messy aftermath of DE’s release. Kender himself withdrew a lawsuit against ZA/UM’s majority shareholder and CEO in 2022.
So perhaps it’s none too surprising that the PR surrounding Dark Math doesn’t draw attention to that drama by mentioning any names beyond Albert, who says the goal with XXX Nightshift is “innovating the traditional RPG mechanics” to “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.”
It really does look like Disco Elysium, mind you, right down to the presentation of its dialogue in a strip along the right-hand side of the screen. Plus, you’re a kind of cop called a “Patrol Operative” and the game calls itself a “true detective RPG.”
Which, hey, I’m definitely keen to check out, even if I still have a few questions about Dark Math’s staff and their role in the fallout around ZA/UM. The dialogue trailer makes it look intriguingly moody, and the premise—you’re a cop stranded at a luxury Antarctic ski resort—is precisely the kind of weirdness I could see myself getting very into.
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