Two Disco Elysium spiritual successors made news on the same day this week. ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies, from ZA/UM, released on Steam on May 21. That afternoon, Longdue showed a new gameplay teaser for Hopetown, a narrative-first RPG from a team that includes former Disco Elysium developers. The r/Steam thread that surfaced the teaser summed up the pitch in five words: "From some Disco Elysium devs."
"Some" is carrying a lot there. It's enough to make people look and nowhere near enough to settle anything. We think both games deserve more room than that framing gives them.
Why Disco Elysium casts such a long shadow
A lot of people don't talk about Disco Elysium as a finished RPG. They talk about it like a city they once lived in. Revachol stuck in people's heads. The Thought Cabinet became a private language. The skill voices were a mechanic and also a kind of permission: a game could be literary, messy and very funny in the same hour, and could let you fail without making the embarrassment any less embarrassing.
That sort of affection doesn't pass cleanly to anyone. When ZA/UM releases a game, people arrive hopeful and wary. When a different studio says it includes some of the original developers, people arrive with a ledger: who wrote what, who designed what, which team has the real claim. It gets a bit like a courtroom, which is funny given how much the original cared about broken institutions and bad evidence.
The trouble with wanting the same feeling twice
We have a bad habit with spiritual successors, and we suspect we're not alone. We want them to be new, but not too new, familiar but not obedient, and brave in a way that proves we were right to love the old one. It's an unfair test, and plenty of good games have failed it.
It's worst when a beloved team splits up. Fans start tracing lineages, making charts, and learning names they never knew when they first played. Some of that attention is fair, since people make games, not logos. But it can turn every new release into a vote on an old wound, and art doesn't reassemble from a list of credits.
What we'd like for both ZERO PARADES and Hopetown is room to be judged as themselves, to be strange in their own direction, and to disappoint people for specific reasons rather than for failing to bring back a lost era. We want more RPGs that take language seriously and understand shame, politics, jokes and exhaustion. We don't need all of them to be Disco Elysium again. There was only ever going to be one, partly because it wasn't trying to start a genre.
(If you want the critical picture once reviews landed, our ZERO PARADES review roundup covers how critics handled the comparison.)
You can't play a successor with a blank mind
Nobody comes to a game like this fresh. You bring old save files, old forum arguments, interviews and disappointments, and the version of yourself who played the earlier game and thought nothing else sounded like it. That's not a bad thing. It's part of why games stay alive: a new release is also a test of what you remember caring about.
It does mean the timing of when you play matters more than usual. Launch week is when the comparison is loudest: every review, every thread, every clip is about the lineage. A month later the noise has thinned out and the game can be heard on its own terms.
What we're doing about both games
Our approach with ZERO PARADES and Hopetown is pretty simple:
- Put them on the list, with a reason. Not "Disco Elysium successor" but something specific: "want to see if the political writing lands without Revachol," "curious about the spy framing."
- Skip the lineage debate. Who worked on what is interesting, but it's not a review.
- Play when there's room. Dense RPGs need attention. If you've got three unfinished games open, the fourth can wait until one of them is done.
- Write something afterwards. Especially if it surprised you in either direction.
We keep that kind of note in Perthro, where a plan-to-play entry can carry a line of context and a friend's messy two-paragraph review is often more useful than any score. A wishlist would do too, as long as it remembers why.
The part a successor can't give you
What people sometimes want back from a successor isn't the game. It's the time and place around the first one: the room you played it in, who recommended it, the season it filled. No studio can ship that, and no teaser can promise it. A new RPG can have sharp writing, clever systems and the right names in the credits, and it still won't take you back to the first night you wandered through Martinaise.
It shouldn't have to. If it's good, it'll become its own memory, and a few years from now someone will be complaining that the next game isn't as good as that one.
