As a Disco Elysium enjoyer, Friday evening was fraught with a lot of emotion for me – though, to be fair, most of that emotion was disbelief. Within the span of 24 hours, one after another, three separate groups of former Disco Elysium developers announced they had formed studios, all working on different projects. I was shocked by the first announcement. By the time the third one was made, I was entirely incredulous.
The fifth anniversary of the award-winning RPG was mere days away at the time, and presumably, one announcement precipitated the rest. Media coverage positioned every project as a spiritual successor, some with more legitimacy than others. Many jokes were made about Disco Elysium being a truly communist game because it spawned so many offshoots, all claiming to be the true successor. All of these projects were different from each other – already, people are speculating on which will be the best of them.
ZA/UM’s project, not one of the three announced last Friday, is largely considered a non-starter despite it being the original developer of Disco Elysium, given that it’s pushed out many of the key figures behind the original game.
Longdue Games Studios is making a “psychogeographic RPG” with a world and characters that shift depending on your narrative choices, and claimed to intend to “continue Disco Elysium’s award-winning legacy”. While it has unnamed ZA/UM devs working on the project, it also has others from Bungie and Rockstar, and offers the fewest details of the lot, despite claiming the strongest connection.
Dark Math Games, in comparison, seems to have decided to make itself as similar to Disco Elysium as possible. Its game, XXX Nightshift, looks just like Disco Elysium, with a practically identical UI, tone, and voice acting showcased in the trailer. Hell, it’s even about a detective. Notably, Dark Math Games lists Kaur Kender as a now resigned director – Kender was heavily involved in the legal disputes ZA/UM faced last year.
Then there is Summer Eternal, which unveiled itself with a blood red website, a manifesto decrying the exploitation of game developers by executives, and large language models as shoddy replacements for human thought. Like many of my colleagues, I can’t help but find myself most endeared to Summer Eternal – it’s much more metal to reveal yourself with a complete denouncement of all the worst things about the game industry than it is to come out saying you want to be a “spiritual successor” to Disco Elysium, and there’s a whole section about the collective’s worker co-op structure on Summer Eternal’s website.
A fifth studio called Red Info Ltd., helmed by Disco Elysium writer Robert Kurvitz and artist Aleksander Rostov, has not announced any projects so far. I’m fairly sure whatever it does announce will also be hailed as a spiritual successor. Red Info is reportedly backed by Chinese publisher NetEase.
But this article isn’t about which of these games is the most like Disco Elysium, or which is a true spiritual successor to the game, or which has the most legitimacy. It’s about what makes something a spiritual successor at all.
Everything Is Disco Elysium
Definitionally, a spiritual successor is something that is similar to, or inspired by, another piece of work, but isn’t explicitly a sequel. BioShock is a spiritual successor to System Shock 2, because EA blocked a third System Shock game. Stardew Valley is a spiritual successor to Harvest Moon, using many of the same mechanics. Every Soulslike is a sort of spiritual successor to Demon’s Souls, which in turn was a spiritual successor to the King’s Field series.
That last bit is crucial – sometimes, games have such a huge impact on the cultural consciousness that they create entirely new subgenres, or change the way we see games forever. Disco Elysium is one of those. It’s widely considered one of the greatest video games ever made, entirely singular in its vision and the execution of that vision. It’s surreal, hilarious, and profound, often all three at once. When it was first launched, there were very few games like it – now, we see its influence everywhere, subtle but ever present.
All of these games are being billed as spiritual successors, because they are. Others are more upfront about their desires to be seen as spiritual successors, while some assert the same politics that were made so clear in the original game. Every developer involved in Disco Elysium gave something to it, and took something from it – they all have different relationships to the final product, their time at ZA/UM, even the principles and values they had when making the game. In a way, these games are unavoidably spiritual successors, as long as they refer to any of that lived experience.
But many games are spiritual successors to Disco Elysium, because so many different things about it resonate with different people. Citizen Sleeper and Broken Roads have a lot in common with Disco Elysium, as do the upcoming Esoteric Ebb and Rue Valley. Players have said they felt Disco’s DNA in games like Pentiment and Norco. I find myself reminded of it while playing games that are, on the surface, nothing like it, such as Phoenix Springs and Alan Wake 2. What’s the value in a spiritual successor to a game that already has so much influence?
Nothing Is Disco Elysium
Following that argument, I have to pose a question: does it really matter which of these games is most like Disco Elysium? Can anything even truly be like Disco Elysium?
Disco Elysium’s uniqueness makes it impossible to replicate – at least, not without being extraordinarily obvious about it. Any game that jacks Disco Elysium’s whole deal, even if it uses different IP, will be very clearly just making a reskinned Disco Elysium. This isn’t a triple-A open world game that likely shares so much in common with other games that a reskin could still be viable. Disco Elysium will always be Disco Elysium, regardless of what particular ugly suit it wears.
Kim Kitsuragi And The Beauty of Mundane Queer Narratives
Disco Elysium tackles queer representation in ways that feel grounded in spite of its eccentric setting.
But aspects of it can be taken and reinterpreted. Dark Math takes its aesthetics, Longdue takes its concepts, and Summer Eternal takes its politics. All of these developers worked on the same game, but as I pointed out before, they will all have taken different things from the game and its development. There is no one creator of Disco Elysium – these people were all creators. The game was a product of a fusion of thoughts and ideas, not a single person’s. These people, separated and working in tandem with other artists and developers, cannot make another Disco Elysium.
They shouldn’t need to, either. There’s already Disco Elysium all around us for those with eyes to see. At this point, “spiritual successor” is just a marketing phrase.
Disco Elysium
Disco Elysium first launched in 2019 and sees you play the role of a detective investigating a murder. Critically acclaimed for its themes, art style, and largely combat-free gameplay, with a more complete version of the game, The Final Cut, launched in 2021.
