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Summer Eternal
“Red Rooster is an incendiary, physics-driven RPG combining the best of cerebral, worldbuilding-rich RPGs with the genetics of physics-driven immersive sims. Play as Redrick Roost, a white-collar inmate thrust into the role of an arson investigator and partnered up with an opiate-dependent mathematician to investigate a mysterious string of arson that all seems to connect to his brother, the city’s fire–chief,” via the Red Rooster website.
Full article follows.
After Disco Elysium studio ZA/UM came apart at the seams, many of its developers—who put together what’s basically one of the best RPGs of all time—splintered off into different studios, a move that’s both a great shame but also deeply unsurprising for the passionate whims of ZA/UM’s collective of passionate auteurs.
You can see a full write-up of who those studios are and what they’re making courtesy of our resident schism expert Ted Litchfield, but today we’ll be focusing on Summer Eternal. This particular studio has Argo Tuulik, one of Disco Elysium’s writers, on board—as well as Lenval Brown, who did most of the game’s narration.
It also feels like one of the splinters that’s kept the revolutionary spirit of itself most intact—and you can feel that energy held like an excitable promethean fire in the palms of the site for Red Rooster, its finally-announced debut videogame.
As quoted above, Red Rooster seems to be yawing away from Disco Elysium’s predominantly visual novel stylings and into the realm of physics-driven immersive sims, which has me, a PC Gamer writer, contractually obligated to vibrate in my seat like an over-excited puppy.
Especially given the esoteric nature of its plot: While it’s clearly trying to set itself apart from Disco, it does have a lot of the hallmarks. “A political alternate-history setting with a strong science fiction undercurrent” could describe both games, after all.
Image credit: Eternal Summer
Image credit: Eternal Summer
Image credit: Eternal Summer
Image credit: Eternal Summer
However, the surrealist elements are turned up. You’ll be playing Redrick Roost, an inmate turned arson investigator—and instead of Kim Kitsuragi, you’ll be getting “an opiate-dependent mathematician, Dr Astrid Albers, and a nunchaku-wielding truth-activist, the district bus driver Rico.” God. We’re so goddamn back.
The major point of divergence—aside from an emphasis on 3D physics, which cites “Larian’s Divinity Engine games and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic” as an inspiration—is in its tone and theme. The site very plainly states that “this is not the ‘end of history’, but rather the ‘beginning of the future’ in the tripartite city of Arta-Tantor.”
That “end of history” line feels like an indirect nod to Disco Elysium and the philosophical bedrock it was built on—the nihilistic representation of an end-point of societal evolution, represented, (as folks far more well-versed in this sort of thing have posited) in Disco Elysium by the Pale and the oppressive pressure of the Moralintern. To quote the game directly:
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“Centrism isn’t change—not even incremental change. It is control. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.”
Basically, in drawing this line, Summer Eternal seems to be distinctly saying its new setting will be altogether more lively. More optimistic? Maybe not. The protagonist has a dark and brimming set of alter-egos in a psychological “chicken coop” and the game takes place in the hottest summer on record. But even just looking at the artwork, there’s less of an emphasis on slow, harrowing decay and more of a thumb on the wildfires of psychedelic revolution. Needless to say, I am very, very excited.
