Hopetown’s ‘from the team that brought you Disco Elysium’ pitch is a bit fuzzy

Disco Elysium was wonderful — so wonderful, in fact, that several studios have sprung from the smoldering wreckage of original developer ZA/UM in an attempt to cash in on its prestige. One such studio, Longdue Games, shared a single screenshot and some advertising text on March 6 for Hopetown, its ostensible spiritual successor to Disco Elysium, and what do you know, it looks and sounds like pretty much the same game.

“Hopetown is a game where words are weapons, and every choice leaves its mark,” the project’s Kickstarter reads. “Set in a mining town teetering on the edge of collapse and reinvention, you play as a rogue journalist — a chaotic, self-destructive provocateur uncovering buried truths, exposing fragile systems, and unravelling a world shaped by ambition and decay. Will you spark chaos as a gonzo journalist, twist events as a conspiracist, or reveal brutal truths as a calculated investigator?”

Longdue has also been quite coy about who from the Disco Elysium team is working on Hopetown. So far, the studio’s only given one person major billing: Piotr Sobolewski, an engineer who refers to himself as “co-creator of the highest rated PC game of all time according to Metacritic” on Linkedin. That game, just to be clear, is Disco Elysium.