This Isn’t Disco Elysium, But Award-Winning Studio ZA/UM Is Serving Us Plenty of Mystery
We now know the vibes of the troubled studio's sophomore game.
We are told from a young age to aim to succeed. Failure is not encouraged, even if it’s occasionally tolerated. But what about spies? They have a notoriously high failure rate. It’s this idea that indie European studio ZA/UM is picking up to explore, in an upcoming role-playing game that promises to give players decent outcomes even if they don’t succeed.
Best known for making BAFTA winning game Disco Elysium, adapted from an Estonian novel, ZA/UM just announced its sophomore game will explore the idea of spies, inspired by John Le Carr’s spy fiction and Urusula Le Guin’s sci-fi.
“This is not Disco Elysium 2, this is C4,” says Siim "Kosmos" Sinamae during a Discord presentation.
ZA/UM as a studio has completely changed in composition since the days of Disco Elysium’s initial release. Sinamae and Ashilevi are two Disco Elysium writers who stayed with the studio past the mass layoffs and turnover. And in Monday’s presentation to journalists, ZA/UM demonstrated that it still could have a little bit left of the secret sauce.
We are told from a young age to aim to succeed.
The new game hearkens back to award-winning Disco Elysium even if it’s not a direct sequel. It has all the same trappings — you play as an agent, this time, unraveling greater conspiracies that you serve as an unwitting pawn in. The boss you serve is of dubious morality. (In Disco, you were, similarly, an alcoholic cop with severe amnesia, a cog in the larger machinations of others.) And just as before, it sounds like you can do substances and drink to alter your state of mind, and receive temporary benefits — in what the writers are calling “a new mind-warping espionage RPG.”
“My mind is eating itself, 100 intelligence agents caught between its teeth,” an unknown, perhaps female narrator says, as the trailer opens up on dark, surreal illustrations that blend digital art and traditional painting.
Players will roll dice to pass checkpoints, just as they did in Disco, Dungeons and Dragons, Baldur’s Gate 3, and other similar RPGs. They’ll get engrossed in conversations with a colorful cast of characters, and face high-stakes encounters where their luck needs to be right.
The difference is that so far, ZA/UM’s protagonist has been a self-loathing loser. Failure is, in fact, the default.
“We make failure a joy in itself, validating player choice where other games may deny it,” says lead voiceover director Jim Ashilevi. “We all know nobody fails more than spies.”
“My mind is eating itself, 100 intelligence agents caught between its teeth,” an unknown narrator says.
While we didn’t get to see any gameplay in the studio’s briefing, the two writers went into detail about the influences they drew on while making the game. In terms of novels: Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, John Le Carr’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honorable Schoolboy, and Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. As for film and TV, they named Apple TV’s Slow Horses and Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy.
We also just have the smallest hint that we’re not entirely done with the world of Disco Elysium, which saw its sequel get canceled. The last line of the press release reads, “Players must steel themselves with whatever comfort they can to survive the violent canvas of the real.” ZA/UM, famous for its leftist political bent, mentions the real plenty of times in its first game, and it seems, still has plenty of material left to explore around it.
“But at the end of the day, we are making a video game, and video games are about stupid unconscious fun,” Sinamae says.
