Saturday is a strange day to think about inheritance. The week's releases have already landed, the weekend players are settling in, and the news cycle is trying to decide what it wants to remember. This week, two games pulled that feeling into focus: ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies, which arrived on May 21 from ZA/UM, and Hopetown, which showed a new gameplay teaser the same day from Longdue. Both sit in the long shadow of Disco Elysium. Both are being talked about as descendants, successors, arguments, or proof that the old magic might still have somewhere to go.
I do not know if that is fair to either game. It is probably too heavy a coat to throw over a new thing before most people have even played it. Still, games carry ghosts. Sometimes the ghost is a studio. Sometimes it is a mechanic. Sometimes it is just a sentence you remember five years later with uncomfortable clarity.
When a game becomes a place people keep returning to
The funny thing about Disco Elysium is that a lot of people do not talk about it like a completed RPG. They talk about it like a city they once visited while sick, tired, too online, or newly aware that a game could sound like that. Revachol became a place in the head. The thought cabinet became a joke and also a private language. The skills were voices, sure, but they were also permission. A game could be messy and literary and funny in the exact same hour. It could let you fail forward without sanding the embarrassment off.
That kind of affection is hard to inherit cleanly. If a new game says it is from the creators of something beloved, people arrive with hope already clenched in one hand. If another studio says it is made by some of the people behind that same beloved thing, people arrive with a ledger. Who wrote what? Who designed what? Which team has the real line back to the source? It gets a little courtroom, which is funny given how much the original game cared about broken institutions and bad evidence.
The r/Steam post that surfaced the Hopetown teaser framed it plainly: "From some Disco Elysium devs." That is the whole modern problem in five words. Some. From. Devs. Enough to make people look. Not enough to settle anything.
The release-day pileup matters less than the aftertaste
On paper, this was news about dates and trailers. ZERO PARADES released on Steam on May 21. Hopetown dropped a teaser that same day, with coverage describing it as a narrative-first RPG tied to former Disco Elysium talent. Metacritic's weekly release list put ZERO PARADES near the top of the week's notable games. YouTube's release-watch channels were already looking past May toward June, with big roundup videos pulling hundreds of thousands of views.
That is the normal shape of games now. A release arrives, a trailer lands, ten other things elbow into the same day, and by Monday the whole conversation has been filed under "busy week." The machine is very good at first contact. It is less good at memory.
What I find more interesting is the quieter question underneath: what do we do with games that arrive already tangled in a story bigger than themselves? You cannot play them with a blank mind. Maybe nobody ever does. You bring old save files, old forum arguments, old interviews, old disappointments. You bring the version of yourself who played the earlier game and thought, briefly, that nothing else sounded like it.
That is not a bad thing. It might be one of the reasons games stay alive. A new release is not only a product on a calendar. It is a test of what you remember caring about.
The danger of asking for the same feeling twice
I have a bad habit with spiritual successors. I want them to be new, but not too new. Familiar, but not obedient. Brave, but in a way that confirms I was right to love the old thing. This is an unfair little trap, and I have sprung it on plenty of games.
You see it whenever a beloved studio fractures or a genre-defining team disperses. Fans start tracing bloodlines. They make charts. They learn names they did not know when they first played the game. They talk about writers and combat designers and composers as if art can be reassembled from a parts list. Sometimes that attention is deserved. People make games, not logos. But it can also turn every new work into a referendum on an older wound.
The thing I hope for ZERO PARADES and Hopetown is simple: room. Room to be judged for what they are. Room to be weird in their own direction. Room to disappoint people in specific ways instead of failing some mythic obligation to restore a lost era.
That sounds generous, but it is also selfish. I want more games that take language seriously. I want more RPGs that understand shame, politics, jokes, fatigue, and the terrible comedy of being a person. I do not particularly need them all to be Disco Elysium again. One of those was enough, partly because it was not trying to be a category yet.
A journal helps when the discourse gets loud
This is where a gaming journal becomes useful in a way a store wishlist usually does not. A wishlist remembers that you were interested. It does not remember why. It does not remember that you saw a teaser on a Saturday morning and felt curious, suspicious, and a little protective of an old favorite. It does not remember that you wanted to wait for friends to finish the first act before reading too much. It does not remember that you were not ready for another dense RPG this month because you still had three unfinished games making eye contact from the home screen.
That is one of the reasons we are building Perthro as an iPhone-first gaming journal rather than a cleaner spreadsheet. You can track what you are playing, what you have played, what you plan to play, and what you shelved. You can rate a game, write a review as long or short as you like, and keep a backlog or wishlist with a next up view. If a game like ZERO PARADES catches your attention today but belongs to some later version of your year, that is a real kind of note. Not everything has to become an immediate purchase.
The social part matters too, but quietly. Following players, seeing activity, reacting and replying, all of that works best when it helps you notice what people actually felt. A five-star rating is neat. A messy paragraph from a friend explaining why a game irritated them for four hours and then ruined their evening in the best way is better.
The lineage is personal, not just historical
When we talk about a game's legacy, we usually make it sound public. Awards, studios, critical reception, influence, sales, successors. That stuff matters, but it is not the whole record. The private version is stranger. A game becomes part of your own timeline. You remember the room. You remember the machine you played it on. You remember who recommended it, or who you tried to recommend it to, badly, because you could not explain why the writing worked without sounding like you were pitching homework.
I have games in my head that are not great games. Some are barely good. They still hold a season. They still know where I was. That makes the idea of a successor complicated, because what I sometimes want back is not the game. It is the weather around it.
No studio can ship that. No trailer can promise it. A new RPG can have sharp writing, clever systems, gorgeous art, and the right names in the credits, and it still cannot return you to the exact night you first wandered through Martinaise. Good. It should not have to. If it is lucky, it gives you a new place to misremember later.
Let new games earn their own old stories
So yes, this week's Disco Elysium adjacent news is worth noticing. ZERO PARADES is out. Hopetown is showing more of itself. People are already comparing, hoping, doubting, and sorting the lineage. That is normal. It is also a little exhausting.
I am trying to be more patient with games like this. Put them on the list. Write down why they caught my eye. Wait for the noise to settle. Play when I actually have room for them, not when the internet says the argument is hottest. If they matter, they will still matter in a month. Maybe more.
The best games do not only ask for attention. They leave a mark that becomes easier to read later. Sometimes the right move is to stop refreshing the discourse, make a small note, and let the game arrive when it is ready to become yours.