•Summer Eternal, the worker co-operative founded by former developers of Disco Elysium, has shared details of its upcoming 3D real-time third-person RPG Red Rooster, described as a spiritual successor to Disco Elysium that draws on the traditions of Planescape: Torment and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines while also citing Baldur’s Gate 3 and 다크 Messiah of Might and Magic for inspiration.
The studio sent the writer of this report a roughly 500-page anthology earlier this month detailing Red Rooster, which is set in Arta-Trantor, a “magic realist” river city described as “our-world-adjacent”, divided and highly flammable. Built with Unreal Engine, the world contains what the studio calls a “physics-powered sandbox of objects you can individually move, manipulate – and burn”.
The game follows Redrick Roost, a convict serving a life sentence after accidentally rendering thousands of people catatonic through an “auto-meditation” headset. Like Disco Elysium’s protagonist Harry, Redrick contains a world of characters within his mind: a hallucinatory vacuum shop or “chicken coop” full of alternate selves called “roosters”, who compete for dominance as the game progresses and influence dialogue options and abilities.
Recruited by government agents, Redrick’s central task is to identify an arsonist working at a fire station run by his own hero brother. He has one week before his parole hearing. Among his colleagues is Dr Astrid Albers, “a mathematician with an opiate problem who wakes up one day to find that mathematics has Gone Wrong”.
The anthology is split into two parts. The first chronicles the formation of Summer Eternal and situates it within today’s video game industry and culture, containing essays on aesthetics, generative AI and the difficulty of pursuing anti-capitalist game development while needing to compromise for funding.
It includes open-ended interviews with former BioWare developers Mark Darrah and David Gaider, sci-fi novelist Ted Chiang, Marxist economist Richard Wolff and union organisers at United Videogame Workers-CWA. The studio also thanks the writer of this report and Mark Warren in its acknowledgements page for prior online coverage.
The book is presented as evidence that Summer Eternal is “the most Marxist of the post-Disco studios”. It contains a double-page spread depicting the eponymous red rooster striking down “the vulture of venture capitalism”, while studio founder and former ZA/UM narrative designer/principal writer Dora Klindžić criticises “bourgeois virgins who administrate their battles from office desks”.
“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.”
The second half of the book is a pitch document and lore bible for Red Rooster, which sits in the “early pre-production phase” with an estimated three to four years before release, provided Summer Eternal can secure funding. The studio divides shares between creatives and investors, with a small portion set aside for fans.
The Red Rooster section opens with a fictional university essay on the history of Arta-Trantor, described as roughly three cities or “member-territories” nested together after centuries of war, rivalry and overseas exploitation under a broad theme of fire versus water. Factions include heavily armed game wardens and couriers, alongside a long-suffering fire service that originally consisted of slaves and now mixes professionals, amateurs and prisoners doing community service.
The book details the histories of Redrick and Astrid. Redrick’s parents died in a house fire; at age 12 he was seduced by a school science teacher who was later imprisoned not for statutory rape but for commandeering a postal vehicle. As an adult he fell in with the inventor of the “auto-meditation” device, which capitalised on his infamy for marketing.
When the Baku headset malfunctioned and induced “mass mental fracturing”, it also created the Coop, Redrick’s inner sanctum modelled after a vacuum shop where he once worked. Players spend XP to modify their build while interacting with Rooster-selves who may form factions as they seek dominance over Redrick’s persona.
Possible Roosters include a “Rooster-Raconteur” unable to stop debating people, a pathological gambler and an “Overkompensaaator” who wears sunglasses indoors. 더보기 will appear as the game progresses, with players deciding whether to admit, strengthen or repress them to alter Redrick’s stats and dialogue options in a manner similar to Disco Elysium’s Copotypes.
“Repression” is described as an actual dice-driven encounter with several potential outcomes besides victory and failure. Repressed or rejected Roosters can also push through and hijack the Coop if players continue behaving in ways that lean into their archetype.
Astrid, a maths prodigy working at a local research institute, teams up with Redrick after being caught overdosing on opiates and forced into state-supervised rehabilitation. Her role is to watch over him while he searches for the arsonist. She is defined by her claustrophobic relationship with an overbearing novelist father, her tendency to lie, and her realisation that the laws of mathematics have somehow altered “right down to bones of the prime number system”.
The book notes Astrid’s visual inspirations include Patti Smith and Gollum. Both characters will use a “rhizomatic clothing system” in which players set up fashion synergies on a grid rather than using a conventional equipment screen categorised by body part.
Game director Argo Tuulik frames the manipulable object world as key to Red Rooster’s 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 allow players to throw and break objects with different weight, fragility and elasticity, from chairs to bike tyres. A “simplified but realistic real-time fire simulation” spreads between surfaces according to material properties, with acts of arson used to pursue certain subplots and revelations.
The world changes independently of player activity: lightbulbs burn out, falling leaves cover staircases, trash bags are emptied, and local sculptors slowly turn hunks of stone into statues. These occur within a web of “terrain factors” imposed by Arta-Trantor’s political culture, set on a “topologically complex map where international borders criss-cross the streets, bisect buildings and bedrooms, and create enclaves and counter-enclaves within the same neighbourhoods”.
The developers say players move across numerous “soft borders” while exploring. Examples include crossing a street to enter a different jurisdiction and throw off a cop, passing through a bar at 10pm to continue drinking in a territory where alcohol sales run until 2am, or using a window to circumvent a revised border policy.
The developers stress that Summer Eternal remains “far more pitch for a game than a game”, much of which may change as they continue raising funds. A copy of the anthology can be ordered via the official website.
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