If I’m known for anything, it’s my incredible fashion sense. ‘Josh!’ cries the baying mob, ‘tell us where you got that 10-pack of t-shirts of indiscernibly different dark hues for like £15! Tell us how you look so good in all those identical pairs of black jeans! Wearing a jacket today? Daring!’
My fashion secrets are mine to keep, but you can still look good, so long as you define ‘looking good’ as ‘looking just like that guy from The Alters.’ The game has launched a hot collabo with ZA/UM Atelier, of $165 plastic bag fame, to bring you a real-life version of the tracksuit that HVAC astronaut protagonist Jan Dolski wears in the game. Also, a bag shaped like a sheep, which I don’t think Jan has, but I suppose I’ve not beaten the game.
Gotta say, they do look nice. Or they look nice adorning the supernaturally beautiful models ZA/UM and 11 Bit enlisted to market the merch. They’re all made to order and, though it doesn’t explicitly say on the clothes’ store pages, are presumably hand-stitched in Estonia on some kind of magical, ancestral loom much as the Disco Elysium gear is. The jacket will set you back €399, the bottoms are €289, while the sheep bag is a mere €169. They’re also water repellent, in case you find yourself shipwrecked or stranded on Manaan. Altogether, the tracksuit will set you back about $800, in Ameri-bux, while the sheep-bag is about $200.
The collaboration itself could come at a better time though, couldn’t it? ZA/UM’s carcass—which creative faces like Robert Kurvitz, Helen Hindpere, Alexander Rostov, and other devs have long-since departed in the wake of a bitter dispute with the company’s money-men—is firmly in Disco Elysium fans’ bad books these days. When the Atelier put out that very expensive shopping bag earlier this year, fans quickly tore into it as “the level of greed that they talk about in the Bible”. To be fair, the bag was made of some kind of stronger-than-Kevlar material, for the next time someone shoots you in Tesco.
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11 Bit and The Alters, meanwhile, were doing pretty well for a while. The game is reportedly very good indeed, with PCG’s own Alters review scoring it 90% and fan sentiment being very hot in general. Then 11 Bit had to go and spoil it all by seemingly sneaking in some gen-AI garbage into the game’s background and translations without disclosing it.
It’s not a fatal blow for the game, of course, it’s just a bad taste in the mouth—like biting down midway through a delicious meal and cracking a tooth on something. But hey, it really is a very fashionable tracksuit.
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