Games Like Disco Elysium: For the First Time There’s a Literal Answer
Yesterday, a worker-owned collective in Zagreb announced an RPG about an arsonist, a prisoner and a city on fire. The day before that, the studio that technically owns Disco Elysium was shipping a free Director’s Cut of its spy game. Somewhere in London, a third team is ninety days out from putting a playable build of a journalism RPG in front of people. All three are staffed by people who worked on the same 2019 game, and none of them is a sequel to it.
That is new. For six years this question had only one honest answer – nothing is like Disco Elysium, here are twelve games that share one trait with it – and now there is a family tree with actual branches on it. So rather than ranking titles by how much they resemble a game they cannot resemble, let’s sort them by relation.
Three generations. The direct heirs, made by the people who made the original. The cousins, which share the genes without the lineage. And the ancestors, which Disco Elysium itself was built from, and which its own descendants now openly cite.
| Studio | Who | The Game | Where It Stands |
|---|---|---|---|
| ZA/UM | Holds the Disco Elysium IP; founders departed after 2019 | Zero Parades: For Dead Spies | Released May 21, 2026; Director’s Cut free on PC since October 1 |
| Longdue Games | Martin Luiga, Olga Moskvina, Lenval Brown | Hopetown | Pre-alpha promised within 90 days; past 75,000 Steam wishlists |
| Summer Eternal | Argo Tuulik, Dora Klindžić, Aleksandar Gavrilović | Red Rooster | Announced October 14, 2026; PC first, no date |
Five studios came out of the original team’s collapse. Those three are the ones with something you can point at.
The Direct Heirs, in Order of How Soon You Can Play Them
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies – Out Now
The only one you can finish this week, and the strangest entry in the family because of who made it.
ZA/UM, the studio that still holds the Disco Elysium name, released Zero Parades on May 21, 2026 after cancelling its planned sequels and prequels. You play Hershel Wilk, codename Cascade, an Operant sent into the island city-state of Portofiro to work out what a dead crime boss knew. The writers have been clear that it is a spy story rather than a cop story, that it shares no setting or continuity with Disco Elysium, and that the main influence is John le Carré.
Mechanically it is the closest thing in existence to the original’s structure:
- No combat at all. Conflict resolves through skill checks against Hershel’s split psyche or against other characters.
- A stress economy the original did not have – you can spend extra effort for an additional die, at the cost of raising anxiety and other stress levels.
- Dramatic encounters, which are multi-step event chains built out of options and checks rather than single rolls.
- Three-way geopolitics between the Superbloc, the bank-run Developed World and the authoritarian La Luz, which does most of the thematic work.
It landed at 83 on Metacritic with roughly 87% of critics recommending it, in a spread running from a 5/5 at Eurogamer down to a 6.5/10 at RPGFan. The criticism that recurs is worth repeating plainly: several reviewers felt it tries too hard to imitate the game it is descended from, and RPGFan found the world less alive and the protagonist thinner.
The Director’s Cut arrived as a free update for PC owners on October 1, with re-recorded English voice work, a new dramatic encounter, a reworked inventory, ultrawide support, more accessibility options and a Backstage mode containing older versions of levels plus developer commentary. The PS5 version follows on November 3.
One piece of context the game itself cannot tell you: in July 2026 ZA/UM laid off 32 staff because sales were below what the studio needed. Whatever you make of the comparison, the commercial result was not what anyone hoped.
Hopetown – Ninety Days From Playable
Longdue Games in London, built around former ZA/UM people including writers Martin Luiga and Olga Moskvina and the voice of Disco Elysium’s narration, Lenval Brown.
The premise is the sharpest in the family. You are a journalist in a world reordered by The Flare, a solar event that wrecked global communications, investigating mysteries in the town of New Greenwich. Before anything else, you pick a writing style – investigative, sensationalist or vogue – and that pick shapes both your background and how you work.
What makes it feel like a descendant rather than a tribute is the interior cast: 21 internal personalities, each tied to a skill, commenting on what you do. That is the original’s architecture restated, applied to reporting rather than policing. The loop is interviewing people, photographing them, gathering evidence and writing up what you observed.
Where it stands right now: past 75,000 Steam wishlists, a gameplay teaser out since May, and an announcement this month that a pre-alpha playable build arrives within 90 days, alongside a non-GenAI certification for the project. No full release date.
Red Rooster – Announced Yesterday
The newest and the biggest swing. Summer Eternal is a Zagreb cooperative founded in 2024 by Argo Tuulik, Dora Klindžić and Aleksandar Gavrilović, with a genuinely unusual ownership split – creatives hold 50%, collaborators 25%, investors 20% and players 5%, with the players’ share held by a non-profit. It is the only one of the five successor studios that is both worker- and player-owned.
On October 14, 2026, it announced Red Rooster, described as an incendiary, physics-driven RPG. The headline departure is that it is not isometric. The team has moved to a 3D world with a dynamic camera in Unreal Engine, built on a fully physics-simulated environment where objects can be moved, manipulated and burned.
The setup: you are Redrick “Rooster” Roost, serving a life sentence for negligence after a publicised device failure. Shortly before a parole hearing, a government agency offers a pardon if he infiltrates the fire station run by his brother, the fire chief, and finds a serial arsonist. He is accompanied by Dr Astrid Albers, an opiate-dependent mathematician, and Rico, a bus driver and nunchaku-wielding activist.
The setting is Arta-Tantor, a tripartite city in an alternate history with a science fiction undercurrent, drawing on 1980s Yugoslav coastal culture alongside Eastern Bloc, Ottoman, Scandinavian and Dutch colonial influences, during an unusually long summer of heatwaves, power cuts and wildfires while the city hosts the 13th triennial Continental Summer Games.
The psychological layer carries over as dark alter egos living in a mental space Redrick built, which pull him toward destructive urges. The tagline is: fight fires to get to the truth about the world.
It was announced through a 500-page physical book, Anthology Volume One, shipped to backers, with a deluxe edition carrying a 10-inch vinyl. PC first, with PS5, Xbox Series and Switch 2 to follow. No date.
Games Like Disco Elysium You Can Actually Play Tonight
The heirs are one release, one pre-alpha and one announcement. If you want something finished this evening, you want the cousins – and the useful way to pick between them is by asking which part of Disco Elysium you actually fell for, because almost nobody loved all of it equally.
| If What You Loved Was | Play | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Dice deciding who you are | Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector | Dice placement, stress that physically damages your dice, three classes |
| A town on a countdown | Pathologic 3 | Twelve days, a plague, and a rewind bought by shattering mirrors |
| A historical world rendered as text | Pentiment | Obsidian’s illuminated-manuscript murder mystery, 2022 |
| The voice in your head | Hopetown, when it lands | 21 internal personalities, one per skill |
| Place as the real protagonist | NORCO | Southern Louisiana point-and-click, heavy on atmosphere |
| Travel, scarcity and text | Roadwarden | Illustrated text RPG about a lone rider surveying a peninsula |
Citizen Sleeper 2 is the one I would reach for first. Jump Over the Age released it on January 31, 2025 across PC, Switch, PS5 and Xbox, with a Switch 2 version in June 2026, and it carries Metacritic scores of 86 on PC and 90 on PS5. The system is the draw: each cycle you roll dice and place them on tasks, crew members bring their own dice and a Push ability that builds Stress, high Stress damages dice, and a die damaged three times becomes unusable until repaired. Fill your Stress entirely and you may gain a glitch die – an 80% chance of the worst outcome and a 20% chance of the best.
That is a different answer to the same design question Disco Elysium asked. Both games make failure generative rather than punitive. Neither has combat worth the name.
Pathologic 3 launched on January 9, 2026 and is the closest thing to Disco Elysium’s dread. You are Daniil Dankovsky, a doctor from the Capital arriving in a steppe town hunting the secret of immortality, with twelve days before a plague destroys the place. The rewind mechanic is remarkable – you travel back to earlier dates, and you buy that ability by shattering mirrors, each of which adds Amalgam and extends how far back you can go. Some past dates stay sealed until you learn something that opens them.
The free prologue, Pathologic 3: Quarantine, was pulled from Steam in October 2025, so if you do not already own it you start with the full game.
The Ancestors, Named by the Heirs Themselves
Here is the detail that makes the family tree framing more than a conceit.
When Summer Eternal described Red Rooster’s design influences, the three nonlinear RPGs they named were Planescape: Torment, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and Arcanum. For the physics side they cited Exanima, Larian’s Divinity engine games and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.
Those first three are exactly the games people have been recommending to Disco Elysium fans since 2019, usually with a slightly apologetic tone about their age. It turns out the people who made Disco Elysium would recommend the same three, and are currently building from them.
So the ancestor recommendations are not a consolation prize. They are the source material:
- Planescape: Torment (1999) remains the deepest dialogue RPG ever shipped, and the one Disco Elysium most obviously answers.
- Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (2004) is where conversation-as-gameplay and a city you inhabit rather than traverse both got figured out.
- Arcanum (2001) is the nonlinearity argument – a world that genuinely lets your build change the story rather than the dialogue colour.
Play them knowing their age. All three are rough in ways modern games are not, and all three contain the ideas their descendants are still mining.
Games Like Disco Elysium That Only Share One Gene
A short honest section, because recommendation lists tend to overstate resemblance.
Most games sold as being like Disco Elysium share exactly one of its properties, and knowing which one saves you a refund:
- Heavy text volume is not the same as good text. Plenty of games are long-winded without a single line worth rereading.
- No combat is a removal, not a design. Disco Elysium replaced combat with something; many imitators simply left the hole.
- Skill checks on dialogue exist in a hundred RPGs. What was unusual was skills that argue with you and lie to you.
- Political setting is the easiest trait to copy and the hardest to earn, and a game can be about ideology without having anything to say.
- A broken protagonist is now close to a genre default, and a man with a drinking problem is not automatically Harrier Du Bois.
The property almost nothing has reproduced is the one that made it work: a protagonist whose internal faculties are separate characters with their own agendas, who are frequently wrong, and whom you can level into dominance over yourself. Hopetown’s 21 personalities and Red Rooster’s dark alter egos are the two projects aiming squarely at that, which is the strongest reason to pay attention to both.
What to Do With All This?
Practical ordering, given that the family is in three very different states.
- Tonight: Citizen Sleeper 2 if you want systems, Pathologic 3 if you want dread, Pentiment if you want a world made of handwriting.
- This month: Zero Parades, with the Director’s Cut already free on PC and the PS5 version on November 3 – go in expecting a le Carré spy novel rather than a sequel.
- Within 90 days: Hopetown’s pre-alpha, which is the first chance to feel whether the interior-voices system survives the transplant.
- Unscheduled: Red Rooster, which is the most ambitious of the three and the furthest away, and whose move to 3D and physics makes it the hardest to predict.
- Whenever: the ancestors, and specifically Planescape: Torment, which the heirs are still citing twenty-seven years on.
One sober note to carry through all of it. ZA/UM laid off 32 people in July because Zero Parades did not sell enough. Longdue funded Hopetown through Kickstarter. Summer Eternal is self-funding Red Rooster partly through a €69 book. This kind of game is not a safe business, and the single most useful thing a fan of it can do is buy the ones that ship.
FAQ
What is the closest game to Disco Elysium right now?
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, from ZA/UM itself. It has no combat, resolves conflict through skill checks against a split psyche, and released on May 21, 2026 with a free Director’s Cut on PC since October 1.
Is there a Disco Elysium sequel?
No. ZA/UM cancelled its planned sequels and prequels, and the three successor projects are all original settings with no connection to Elysium.
What is Red Rooster?
Summer Eternal’s debut RPG, announced October 14, 2026 – a physics-driven, 3D Unreal Engine game about a prisoner infiltrating a fire station to find an arsonist in the city of Arta-Tantor. PC first, with PS5, Xbox Series and Switch 2 planned, and no date announced.
When can you play Hopetown?
A pre-alpha playable build has been promised within 90 days of the October announcement. There is no full release date, and the project has passed 75,000 Steam wishlists.
Which finished game has the best dice system?
Citizen Sleeper 2, where stress physically damages your dice and a fully stressed Sleeper can gain a glitch die carrying an 80% chance of the worst outcome.
Is Pathologic 3 a good entry point?
It is a good game and a punishing one. It released January 9, 2026, runs on a twelve-day clock, and its free prologue was pulled from Steam in October 2025.
Which older games should you play?
Planescape: Torment, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and Arcanum – the three nonlinear RPGs Summer Eternal named as influences on Red Rooster.
A Family Argument, Conducted in Public
What strikes me about this whole situation is how legible it has become.
For years the answer to this question was a shrug and a list. Now there are three teams from one credits roll, building three games that each take a different thing from what they made together – the spy novel precision, the interior chorus, the simulated city you can set on fire – and openly naming the same three ancestors while they do it.
None of them has produced the second Disco Elysium, and it is worth saying that Zero Parades got criticised specifically for trying. The interesting projects are the ones taking one organ rather than the whole body.
So pick by organ. Dice and consequence, Citizen Sleeper 2. A town with a deadline, Pathologic 3. A chorus of voices who disagree with you, wait for Hopetown. A city as a physics object with politics attached, wait for Red Rooster and expect to wait a while.
And if you have never played Planescape: Torment, the people currently building the future of this genre would like a word with you.
If this saved you from another list that puts the same twelve games in a different order, pass it along on X, Reddit or whichever thread is already arguing about which successor is the real one – small writing teams travel by word of mouth and nothing else. Bookmark it as well, since Hopetown’s pre-alpha lands inside 90 days and Red Rooster has no date yet, and we revise this page rather than filing a fresh one each time the family grows. And if creative or commercial collaboration brought you here, write to the T-Minus team directly – our internal voices are in agreement for once.
