Anything “Elysium” from ZA/UM is inherently fraught.
Disco Elysium studio ZA/UM announced a “reimagining” of the groundbreaking CRPG for mobile devices. Instead of the original top-down perspective, this version of the game will rely on semi-animated frames of art from more cinematic angles—like a hybrid of Myst and a visual novel.
Before getting into its wider context and a retread of the ZA/UM saga so far, let’s break down the game itself: It’s not gacha microtransaction Disco. ZA/UM may have an adversarial relationship with its game’s own fans, but I don’t know if even the most cynical, 2011 EA-brained composite of the worst publishing exec imaginable could have been that out of touch. It’s set to be ad-free, on the Google Play Store (not the Apple App Store as of yet), and will offer two free chapters as a demo.
The idea is pretty good in a vacuum. If it manages to preserve all of Disco’s reactivity and RPG depth from a new perspective tailor-made for mobile devices, that is a genuinely impressive creative and developmental lift. As a lover of this setting and story, I’d be thrilled to see familiar scenes and areas from a closer perspective.
What’s more, it’s a fairly clever way of expanding Disco’s potential audience. There have been mobile ports of PC RPGs like Beamdog’s Infinity Engine remasters or the Knights of the Old Republic games, but there’s just an inherent compromise to trying to fit a traditional game on a touch device—that shitty little transparent touchscreen gamepad you so often see is the stuff of nightmares to me.
I don’t think I could ever convince my mom to sit down and play a CRPG with a mouse and keyboard, or even a gamepad, but with a phone? That’s a way I could conceivably get a lot of people I love to experience this story and world that I care about, and I can’t deny that the idea stirs something in me.
