TheRetroArcade
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Joined: Feb 2026
Disco Elysium was one-of-a-kind when it came out in 2019, but that won't be the case for ZA/UM's upcoming Zero Parades.
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Disco Elysium was a singular experience when it dropped in 2019. There was really just nothing else like it: Most people who wanted to compare it to something reached back to Black Isle's 1999 masterwork Planescape: Torment, because such intricate, hyper-verbose RPGs that work so well are genuine rarities.
That's less the case these days: Esoteric Ebb "is the best game like Disco Elysium that anybody's made since Disco Elysium" in the words of Disco superfan (and PC Gamer editor) Ted Litchfield, Tangerine Antarctic (formerly XXX Nightshift) bears echoes of its forebear, and others are on the way. All of these games owe some amount of debt to the success of Disco Elysium—so how does the team making Zero Parades, the next game from ZA/UM, feel about the sudden uptick in competition in its very specific market?
They feel pretty good about it, it seems. "We make games, but we also like them," Zero Parades writer Honey Watson told our man on the scene Wes Fenlon at this year's Game Developers Conference. "So good games are always gonna be something that we enjoy."
Fellow ZA/UM writer Siim "Kosmos" Sinamäe first expressed wonder that "something we started making in Estonia, in a fucking squalid flat" has had such an enormous impact, particularly in a creative media that's still quite young. "You know, we are on the cutting edge of human culture with these videogames, right? We've had, for 30 years, narrative in videogames. We had movies for 100-plus years, plays for hundreds and hundreds, thousands of years."
But while it's good to celebrate that success, he continued, the studio doesn't want to rest on its laurels, seemingly suggesting that the competition ZA/UM now faces, which wasn't present for Disco Elysium, will help keep it on its toes.
"As they say in the stock market, past performance is not an indicator of future returns," Sinamäe said. "We try not to get stuck on, like, 'Oh, we did this once and now we are there.' No, we have to challenge ourselves constantly and daily, right?
"They have a saying in Russia: When going fishing, there are no czars, because you're only as good as the last fish you caught. There's no use saying, "Six months ago, I caught this, I got this really big one from the river.' We're there today."...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?
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Every Thursday
GTA 6 O'clock
Our special GTA 6 newsletter, with breaking news, insider info, and rumor analysis from the award-winning GTA 6 O'clock experts.
Every Friday
Knowledge
From the creators of Edge: A weekly videogame industry newsletter with analysis from expert writers, guidance from professionals, and insight into what's on the horizon.
Every Thursday
The Setup
Hardware nerds unite, sign up to our free tech newsletter for a weekly digest of the hottest new tech, the latest gadgets on the test bench, and much more.
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Once a month
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Disco Elysium was a singular experience when it dropped in 2019. There was really just nothing else like it: Most people who wanted to compare it to something reached back to Black Isle's 1999 masterwork Planescape: Torment, because such intricate, hyper-verbose RPGs that work so well are genuine rarities.
That's less the case these days: Esoteric Ebb "is the best game like Disco Elysium that anybody's made since Disco Elysium" in the words of Disco superfan (and PC Gamer editor) Ted Litchfield, Tangerine Antarctic (formerly XXX Nightshift) bears echoes of its forebear, and others are on the way. All of these games owe some amount of debt to the success of Disco Elysium—so how does the team making Zero Parades, the next game from ZA/UM, feel about the sudden uptick in competition in its very specific market?
They feel pretty good about it, it seems. "We make games, but we also like them," Zero Parades writer Honey Watson told our man on the scene Wes Fenlon at this year's Game Developers Conference. "So good games are always gonna be something that we enjoy."
Fellow ZA/UM writer Siim "Kosmos" Sinamäe first expressed wonder that "something we started making in Estonia, in a fucking squalid flat" has had such an enormous impact, particularly in a creative media that's still quite young. "You know, we are on the cutting edge of human culture with these videogames, right? We've had, for 30 years, narrative in videogames. We had movies for 100-plus years, plays for hundreds and hundreds, thousands of years."
But while it's good to celebrate that success, he continued, the studio doesn't want to rest on its laurels, seemingly suggesting that the competition ZA/UM now faces, which wasn't present for Disco Elysium, will help keep it on its toes.
"As they say in the stock market, past performance is not an indicator of future returns," Sinamäe said. "We try not to get stuck on, like, 'Oh, we did this once and now we are there.' No, we have to challenge ourselves constantly and daily, right?
"They have a saying in Russia: When going fishing, there are no czars, because you're only as good as the last fish you caught. There's no use saying, "Six months ago, I caught this, I got this really big one from the river.' We're there today."...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?