Hey! Remember XXX Nightshift? That was one of the five (count ’em) Disco Elysium successor games that made headlines last year. It was an isometric game where you play a cop stranded at a luxury Antarctic ski resort when a bunch of murders happen, with dialogue presented in a strip down the side of the screen in a style strongly reminiscent of, well, Disco Elysium.
Remember it? Great. Please forget it. It’s not that anymore. In an announcement earlier today, the devs at Dark Math Games announced that they’ve had some sort of Damascene conversion and have decided to retool the project as a third-person RPG. Oh, and it’s called Tangerine Antarctic now, a real shame for all those Vin Diesel jokes I was hoping to make in the review.
Dark Math justifies the course-correction thusly: “Set at the World’s End ski village at Mount Hope, British Antarctica, Tangerine Antarctic is the name of the in-game hotel, designed by renown Estonian architect Kaur Stőőr, where most of the games’ action takes place,” so I guess it’d be sort of like naming Disco Elysium Revachol, or perhaps Whirling-in-Rags. “This is where you are stuck because of the blizzard and must solve the mysterious murders. And Tangerine Antarctic is one of the important characters of this true detective’s RPG.”
Which, sure, I guess that makes sense, and XXX Nightshift was an all-timer bad name. Still, I can’t help but feel that the shift to third-person is to attempt to differentiate itself—at least a tad—from Disco Elysium, a move that’s complicated just a bit by the fact it still has a profoundly Disco Elysium-esque plot and a title that sounds like it came from an online Disco Elysium name generator.
So I’m a little sceptical still. Then again, I’m sceptical of every one of Disco Elysium’s many successor projects, which all sprouted after the-studio-that-was-ZA/UM splintered into myriad fractions, all claiming to be DE’s true inheritor. No, we’re still talking about videogames, not Trotskyist groups, but I understand your confusion.
So I’m reserving judgment on Tangerine Antarctic (née XXX Nightshift) until I actually see some of it. I’ll give it one thing right now, though: that art is real damn nice.
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