A second Disco Elysium spiritual successor has been announced from a different "breakaway group" of devs who worked on the original RPG

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A second Disco Elysium spiritual successor has been announced from a different group of developers from ZA/UM.

In a remarkable sequence of events, today, Friday, October 11, two separate studios made up of former Disco Elysium developers have been announced, and they're both working on follow-ups to the acclaimed 2019 RPG. We already covered the first one and interviewed new studio Longdue, so we're mainly going to be talking about the other new studio, Dark Math Games, and its debut project, XXX Nightshift (stylized XXX NIGHTSHIFT).

You can watch the very cryptic three-minute trailer just above, which shows off some decidedly Disco Elysium-esque visuals and centers a conversation between the player character and someone named Rivers Dark. "It was inevitable," she can be heard whispering at the start. "Why?" you ask. "It's on," she replies.

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Without any contextual clues, it's hard to decipher much from the conversation, but it goes on for another couple of minutes before we see a partially obscured character resting in a massive bed. "Many chinchilla fur blankets cover the biggest bed you've ever woke up in, and it really does smell good in here," the narrator says. And that's the trailer for XXX Nightshift!

Thankfully, we know from a press release that the game is set in 2086 and that you play as a Patrol Op, Dinorah Katz, who is stranded at a luxury Ski resort in Antarctica, which "shouldn’t exist with people that you shouldn’t know with the endless polar night covering a multitude of sins." Dark Math says the game "will deliver a deep single-player role-playing experience with many tools and layers of gameplay."

There's also a new companion dynamic that Dark Math says will add "more fun" and even more paths to solve cases. A unique companion dynamic adds more fun and offers different paths to solve cases.

"The innovative and powerful role-playing system respects your time and trusts your intelligence with seismic choices," says Timo Albert, one of four Dark Math founders. "It’s up to you to decide how your story unfolds—and how it ends. Additionally to innovating the traditional RPG mechanics, we’ll bring something fresh to the table. You will see. And of course, a few less words. And a few more bullets, perhaps. In total: lot more fun."

You're guaranteed plenty of fun playing something from our list of the best RPGs.

After earning an English degree from ASU, I worked as a corporate copy editor while freelancing for places like SFX Magazine, Screen Rant, Game Revolution, and MMORPG on the side. I got my big break here in 2019 with a freelance news gig, and I was hired on as GamesRadar's west coast Staff Writer in 2021. That means I'm responsible for managing the site's western regional executive branch, AKA my home office, and writing about whatever horror game I'm too afraid to finish.