"We are here to give you something to believe in": the former Disco Elysium devs of Summer Eternal reveal new RPG Red Rooster, a game of fire, water and alternate selves

Earlier this month, the former Disco Elysium developers of worker co-operative studio Summer Eternal sent me a 500-page anthology describing their new game Red Rooster. It's a 3D, real-time, third-person RPG you could broadly style as a spiritual Disco successor, working in the tradition of Planescape: Torment and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, but which also owes much inspiration to Baldur's Gate 3 and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. It takes place in a magic realist, "our-world-adjacent", mightily flammable and divided river city called Arta-Trantor, created with Unreal Engine and housing a "physics-powered sandbox of objects you can individually move, manipulate – and burn."

Here, you will live out the story of Redrick Roost, a convict serving a life sentence after accidentally rendering thousands of people catatonic by means of an "auto-meditation" headset. Much like Disco's Harry, Redrick has a whole world of characters in his head – a hallucinatory vacuum shop or "chicken coop" full of alternate selves or "roosters", who vie for dominance as the game goes on, affecting your dialogue options and abilities. Redrick's broad goal, having been recruited by government spooks, is to identify the arsonist working at a fire station run by his own hero brother. You've got a week to pull this off before your parole hearing. Your colleagues include Dr Astrid Albers, a mathematician with an opiate problem who wakes up one day to find that mathematics has Gone Wrong.

Much like that last paragraph, the Summer Eternal book is a dense, knotty, wild-eyed thing. It's divided into two parts. The first is an account of Summer Eternal's formation that aims to situate the new studio within (and often, against) today's videogame industry and culture. There are essays on aesthetics, generative AI and the difficulty of pursuing anti-capitalist game development while being obliged to compromise a little for the sake of funding. There are open-ended interviews with several well-known game developers, including former BioWare devs Mark Darrah and David Gaider, together with sci-fi novelist Ted Chiang, Marxist economist Richard Wolff, and union organisers at United Videogame Workers-CWA. Also a chat with those scruffy apparatchiks at indie journalist outfit Aftermath... and an acknowledgements page in which Summer Eternal thank myself and Mark Warren for our previous online coverage of the studio's founding. Look, we hacks have got to get some limelight now and then.

The book is further evidence that Summer Eternal are the most Marxist of the post-Disco studios. Put it this way: there is a double-page spread in which the eponymous red rooster is pictured striking down the vulture of venture capitalism, while studio founder and former ZA/UM narrative designer/principal writer Dora Klindžić decries "bourgeois virgins who administrate their battles from office desks".

At the risk of being branded a bourgeois virgin, I do think that Marxist writers can always benefit from some tactical self-deprecation – Disco Elysium was very good at seeing the funny side, and still had teeth as a political document. Still, this is a manifesto for a studio, not a piece of fiction, and I genuinely got a bit tearful about Klindžić's visions for a studio run for the benefit of workers and artists, in a universe that is being strangled by finance and cannibalised by LLMs. "We are preparing a conflagration, an end to mourning, an end to the poison fog of demoralization and the apathy tears of the mentally imprisoned," she writes. "With charred fingers, we are here to give you something to hope for. We are here to give you something to believe in."

More specifically, they are here to give us an RPG. The second half of the book is a massive pitch document and lore bible for Red Rooster, a game that is in the "early pre-production phase", with 3-4 years to go before release... providing Summer Eternal can pull together the funding. Obviously, the funding situation is a concern: I'd like to write more about the studio's structure, which divides shares between creatives and investors with a small portion set aside for fans. In the meantime, I'll say that Red Rooster sounds fascinating.

The section on Red Rooster opens with a lengthy fictional university essay about the history of Arta-Tantor, which is sort of three cities or "member-territories" nested close together - the result of centuries of war, rivalry and overseas exploitation with a broad theme of fire vs water. The city's factions include groups of heavily armed game wardens and couriers, together with a long-suffering fire service that originally consisted of slaves, and is now a mix of professionals, amateurs, and prisoners doing community service. Another, redacted in-world memorandum hints at a psionic organisation of some kind.

And then there's the cast. The book tells you a lot about Redrick and Astrid, including some details I'd rather you discover for yourself. Redrick's history is complicated, to say the least. His parents died in a house fire. At the age of 12, he was seduced by a school science teacher, who was later imprisoned not for statutory rape but commandeering a postal vehicle. As an adult, he fell in with the inventor of the aforesaid "auto-meditation" device, who capitalised on the infamy created by his "affair" for marketing purposes.

When the Baku headset malfunctioned, inducing "mass mental fracturing", it also gave rise to the Coop, Redrick's eerie inner sanctum, which is modelled after the vacuum shop he once worked in. Here, you'll spend XP to modify your build, while interacting with various Rooster-selves, who may form factions as they seek to dominate one another and shape Redrick's overall persona. Possible Roosters include a "Rooster-Raconteur" who can't stop debating people, a pathological gambler, and an "Overkompensaaator" who wears sunglasses indoors. More Roosters will appear as the game goes on, and you'll get to decide whether to admit, strengthen, and repress them to alter Redrick's stats and dialogue options, similar to the Copotypes in Disco Elysium. "Repression" is an actual dice-driven encounter, with several potential outcomes besides victory and failure. It's also possible for repressed or rejected Roosters to push through and hijack the Coop, if you continue to behave in a way that leans into their archetype.

Redrick's initial companion character Astrid, a maths prodigy working at a local research institute, isn't quite as messy, but she isn't exactly Miles Tails Prower either. She teams up with him after being caught overdosing on opiates and forced into a state-supervised rehabilitation program. Her job is to keep an eye on Redrick while he searches for the aforesaid arsonist. In the book, Astrid is defined by her claustrophobic relationship with her overbearing novelist father, her tendency to lie, and her realisation, one day, that the laws of mathematics have somehow altered, right down to bones of the prime number system – an event that might have something to do with an on-going heatwave.

There is much to say about Astrid, but all I'll add for the moment is that her visual inspirations include Patti Smith and Gollum. She has stage presence for lightyears, while Redrick is characterised as earnest and apologetic and not-quite-there. Both will get to make of a rhizomatic clothing system where you set up eerie fashion synergies on a grid, rather than the usual equipment screen in which clothing is categorised by body part.

If these characters are absolutely the kind of people you'd expect to meet in Disco Elysium, Red Rooster cleaves from that inspiration with its unhealthy interest in physics. There's a chapter in the book where game director Argo Tuulik frames the game's manipulable object world as a key point of differentiation: "this visceral connection, developed through a myriad of small interactions that form the all-encompassing connective tissue, is the holy grail. The missing physical counterpart to the ultra-reactive psychological role-play. The logical next step in the RPG genre. It is the most important pillar of Red Rooster."

The game will, amongst other things, allow you to lob and break objects with different weight, fragility and elasticity, from chairs to bike tyres. A "simplified but realistic real-time fire simulation" plays out Redrick's torturous relationship with fire, spreading between surfaces according to material properties: by the sounds of things, acts of arson are how you'll pursue particular subplots and revelations, though not everything in the world can burn.

The world is also subject to change and entropy, independent of your activities: lightbulbs will burn out, falling leaves will cover staircases, trash bags will be emptied, local sculptors will slowly turn hunks of stone into statues. These unfolding phenomena sit within a web of 'terrain factors' imposed by Arta-Trantor's weird tripartite political culture, with a "topologically complex map where international borders criss-cross the streets, bisect buildings and bedroms, and create enclaves and counter-enclaves within the same neighbourhoods".

The devs say you'll move across a multitude of "soft borders" as you explore, which creates bizarre possibilities and constraints. You might cross a street to move into a different jurisdiction and thereby throw off a cop. You might cross a bar when the clock strikes 10pm to carry on drinking in a territory where it's legal to sell booze until 2am. Or you might have to make use of a window to get around a revised border policy, rather than opening the front door.

I'll end by stressing that Summer Eternal is still far more pitch for a game than a game. Much of the above may change, and the developers make no secret of the fact that they're still raising funds. But they've certainly sketched out some wonderful, macabre territory. I'm especially keen on all the hypnotic rhetoric around fire, as somebody who's written a bit here and there about procedural fire systems in videogames. I'll likely be diving back into the book for more stories. In the meantime, you can order a copy yourself via the official website.