Disco Elysium was a singular experience when it dropped in 2019. There was really just nothing else like it: Most people who wanted to compare it to something reached back to Black Isle's 1999 masterwork Planescape: Torment, because such intricate, hyper-verbose RPGs that work so well are genuine rarities.
That's less the case these days: Esoteric Ebb "is the best game like Disco Elysium that anybody's made since Disco Elysium" in the words of Disco superfan (and PC Gamer editor) Ted Litchfield, Tangerine Antarctic (formerly XXX Nightshift) bears echoes of its forebear, and others are on the way. All of these games owe some amount of debt to the success of Disco Elysium—so how does the team making Zero Parades, the next game from ZA/UM, feel about the sudden uptick in competition in its very specific market?
