Longdue Games Studio has officially announced Hopetown, its spiritual successor to the hit RPG Disco Elysium. Developed by ZA/UM Studios and released in 2019,Disco Elysium was widely praised for its groundbreaking twist on the detective RPG genre, featuring innovative, thought-provoking mechanics and an irresistibly engaging story. After it took home four Game Awards and a BAFTA, all eyes were on Disco Elysium's creators as rumors of a sequel-successor reached a fever pitch. But conflicts at ZA/UM instead led to legal struggles and multiple different splinter studios. One of those, Longdue, has just announced its first game. 304v6w

Rumors of a Disco Elysium sequel, spinoff, or spiritual successor have been circulating since before the game was even released. The surreal, politically charged detective RPG met with near-universal acclaim at launch, going on to take home no fewer than four trophies at The Game Awards 2019, and three BAFTAs. With its humble beginnings as a tabletop system, Disco Elysium relies on traditional dice rolls to tell its groundbreaking, genre-defying story. It revolves around a dilapidated detective who drinks himself into a stupor so potent that he forgets the very nature of reality, waking up with a festering body and a murder to solve.

Apple's macOS isn't the first platform associated with gaming, but it does have a solid selection of great games to suit any player's taste. That's due in no small part to recent efforts by Apple to bring popular, award-winning titles to their platforms, like Resident Evil Village on iOS.

PlayStation Plus' October 2023 offerings for its Extra and tiers are exactly what one would expect around the Halloween season. Several horror titles such as Outlast 2, Dead Island: Definitive Edition, Alien Isolation, and The Dark Pictures Anthology's third entry, House of Ashes, are d as the subscription's major draws for the month alongside the DC superhero title Gotham Knights, but there is another title that's been added that shouldn't be overlooked: Disco Elysium.

The gaming world received devastating news when it was revealed that key of the ZA/UM staff who developed Disco Elysium, including the game’s lead writer, left the company involuntarily, effectively putting an end to the dream of a sequel, since there is no true Disco Elysium 2 without its original authors. Disco Elysium was a landmark for the gaming industry, and its success was entirely due to the strength of its writing. The game certainly had an evocative art style and competent tabletop RPG mechanics, which were novel in the way Disco Elysium paid homage to non-D&D RPGs. Still, pleasant-looking throwbacks are commonplace among indie games, as are clever video game mechanics inspired by tabletop board game and RPG concepts. What made Disco Elysium truly rise above even the most acclaimed AAA games was its writing. Without that unique authorial voice, there is no Disco Elysium, and the distinct identity of studio ZA/UM is gone nearly as soon as it was established.

Unity is one of the best engines for game development. It's not that it's photorealistic or complex, like Unreal or Source, but its appeal comes from the fact that it's easy for newcomers to game development to use. Plenty of great games like this year's Pac-Man World Re-Pac, Digimon Survive, and The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe used this engine.

AAA blockbuster video games are expectedly what get the most attention, especially with highly-anticipated titles like God of War: Ragnarökand The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdomon the horizon, but there are plenty of top-notch games in the indie space. By nature of being labeled an indie game, these titles are made on tighter budgets with typically smaller-scale development teams, but that's often led to some truly imaginative premises.

With plenty of highly anticipated video game remakes such as the Resident Evil 4and System Shockupdates, it's obvious that players want to see older games ported to modern consoles, which often results in better graphics, updated gameplay mechanics, and new content. On the other hand, there are many players who want to see demakes instead. Demakes re-imagine newer games on older or more technologically limited consoles.

Those who played Last Stop would be forgiven for thinking it was from Telltale Games, but its absence of meaningful choices proves just how impressive Telltale’s titles were at their peak. Last Stop was made by Variable State, a UK-based developer whose previous work was the Twin Peaks-inspired game Virginia, and it was released last year. Where Virginia used a throwback lo-fi polygon style, Last Stop features stylized characters in realistic environments, evoking the aesthetic of most Telltale products. It was also a story-based experience, but where Telltale offered numerous branching choices in its games, players quickly discover in Last Stop that any choices are illusory. Aside from a single decision at the end which determines the ending, Last Stop's story is a one-way ride. While not a bad experience, it's more akin to a linear visual novel with limited gameplay segments rather than Telltale's classics.

Computer RPGs like Disco Elysium owe a lot to old school text adventures like Zork, classic tabletop roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons, and a non-linear genre of literature called "Gamebooks," the classic example of which is the Choose Your Own Adventure series. These analog forms of interactive fiction introduced and refined many of the concepts core to modern video game storytelling – branching narrative routes based on player choice, multiple endings, and so on. Early works of interactive fiction like the Choose Your Own Adventure novellas or Steven Jackson's Fighting Fantasy gamebooks also acted as a testing ground of sorts for text adventures and similar video games, teaching game writers how to give players story choices that were meaningful and satisfying.