Longdue Games have shared the first gameplay image from Hopetown, their RPG “spiritual successor” to Disco Elysium, coming soon to Kickstarter.
First namelessly teased last October as part of The Great Disco Thrupening, then revealed last month, Hopetown was described as “merging the raw emotional depth and psychological intricacy of Disco Elysium with the philosophical richness and narrative complexity of Planescape: Torment.”
At the time, I hoped this tone and tenor of trying too hard was just press release guff. No such luck, if the writing shown off below is any indication.
But let’s first back up a moment, because it does look great. So great I’m having some difficulty believing this is what the game looks like, rather than just being concept art. It’s stunning. The purple and yellow palette. The painterly style, soft but sharp with detail.
Then you start reading. “Let me introduce myself,” says your character to a sweet old lady feeding pigeons. “I don’t shit in my own drinking water – though I see that’s not a deal-breaker”.
In Disco Elysium, your character could find a leather jacket with “Fuck The World” written on the back. If you tried hard enough, you could even convince your partner Kim to wear a complimentary jacket that read “Pissf****t”. Someone at Longdue evidently thought those jackets were a good baseline for character development.
Admittedly, I’m viewing this dialogue through eyes pre-exhausted by Longdue’s description of your character as “a chaotic, self-destructive provocateur who sees humanity as inherently selfish and cruel” and “unapologetically cynical and dangerously unhinged”. Disco Elysium was frequently self-satisfied, show-offish, and overly slick. But it wasn’t ever, you know, Nathan Barley on the bus.
The pigeon lady offers your character a loaf of bread. You’ve got three responses to that, one of which is categorised “Noblesse N’oblige”. I like that name. The dialogue itself is “I’d rather lick the bin [knock the bread from her hands]” – a jejune and obliviously mean-spirited interpretation of why the chaotic cringe comedy options in Disco were so much fun.
Your “Gonzo” option is: “Yeah, feed the masses! So let it be done. EAT UP, SKY RATS! (Take the bread)”. You ever see a sentence that reads like someone wrote the exclamation points first and worked backwards from there? The attempts at understated philosophy feel just as unconvincing: “They give the filth on the ground a fighting chance to touch the sky. That’s admirable”.
I don’t expect or even especially want a carbon copy of Disco Elysium from Hopetown, but if you’re going to piggyback off the imagination of people that have allegedly had their work stolen from them, apparently justified by the sole contribution of a lone systems designer from an outsourced studio (who I’m sure is excellent at their job and likely had no say in the “spiritual successor” marketing angle), I think you should probably make a more convincing attempt to better understand the spirit you’re succeeding.
Still, bloody gorgeous art. And, look, I’m obviously cherrypicking lines out of context from a single screenshot. I’d be very happy to be eat crow for doubting pigeons here. If not, there’s always two others anyway.