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What number of Disco Elysium successor studios is simply too many? Trick query, no such quantity has but been invented. For the second time at this time (and the fourth time complete) a gaggle of former ZA/UM devs has introduced they’re coming collectively besides up a brand new studio. This one is known as Darkish Math Video games, and it is engaged on XXX Nightshift, which appears, huh, just a little like Disco Elysium.
No, we have not by accident printed the identical story twice. The opposite Disco Elysium successor studio introduced earlier at this time was Longdue, which can also be a studio boasting DE vets that claims it is engaged on an RPG impressed by the 2019 traditional. Darkish Math joins that studio, in addition to Pink Information and ZA/UM itself, as a pretender to the Disco crown. Did I typically get these studios combined up penning this piece? Thoughts your personal enterprise.
Darkish Math is predicated within the UK, and pitches itself as “a breakaway group from the unique
growth workforce of Disco Elysium” and has a workforce of 20 devs proper now. Simply which ZA/UM vets it has on-staff it’s a little arduous to say, although. The press launch asserting the studio’s existence solely names Timo Albert—former ZA/UM movement graphic designer—as one of many studio’s 4 founders, with everybody else going unnamed.
However possibly there is a purpose for that: A fast look on the Firms Home entry for Darkish Math lists Heiti Kender as a present director, and his brother Kaur Kender as a now-resigned director. For those who’ve not adopted the drama that is engulfed ZA/UM correct lately, Kaur Kender is among the figures on the centre of it.
In courtroom paperwork filed by Robert Kurvitz (ZA/UM founder and DE lead author) and Alexander Rostov (founder and DE artwork director), the pair alleged that they had been pressured out of the studio with actions tantamount “to felony wrongdoing punishable by as much as three years imprisonment” that “had been perpetrated by Ilmar Kompus and Tõnis Haavel with help from Kaur Kender” within the messy aftermath of DE’s launch. Kender himself withdrew a lawsuit towards ZA/UM’s majority shareholder and CEO in 2022.
So maybe it is none too stunning that the PR surrounding Darkish Math does not draw consideration to that drama by mentioning any names past Albert, who says the objective with XXX Nightshift is “innovating the standard RPG mechanics” to “convey one thing recent to the desk. You will note. And naturally, a number of much less phrases. And some extra bullets, maybe. In complete: lot extra enjoyable.”
It actually does seem like Disco Elysium, thoughts you, proper right down to the presentation of its dialogue in a strip alongside the right-hand aspect of the display screen. Plus, you are a form of cop known as a “Patrol Operative” and the sport calls itself a “true detective RPG.”
Which, hey, I am positively eager to take a look at, even when I nonetheless have a number of questions on Darkish Math’s workers and their position within the fallout round ZA/UM. The dialogue trailer makes it look intriguingly moody, and the premise—you are a cop stranded at a luxurious Antarctic ski resort—is exactly the form of weirdness I may see myself getting very into.
