Disco Elysium successor XXX Nightshift is sick of your jokes about its name, announces it's called Tangerine Antarctic and it's a 3rd-person RPG now | PC Gamer

Artwork of two women, one with grey skin and pointing a pistol offscreen.

(Image credit: Dark Math Games)

Hey! Remember XXX Nightshift? That was one of the five (count 'em) Disco Elysium successor games that made headlines last year. It was an isometric game where you play a cop stranded at a luxury Antarctic ski resort when a bunch of murders happen, with dialogue presented in a strip down the side of the screen in a style strongly reminiscent of, well, Disco Elysium.

Remember it? Great. Please forget it. It's not that anymore. In an announcement earlier today, the devs at Dark Math Games announced that they've had some sort of Damascene conversion and have decided to retool the project as a third-person RPG. Oh, and it's called Tangerine Antarctic now, a real shame for all those Vin Diesel jokes I was hoping to make in the review.

Dark Math justifies the course-correction thusly: "Set at the World’s End ski village at Mount Hope, British Antarctica, Tangerine Antarctic is the name of the in-game hotel, designed by renown Estonian architect Kaur Stőőr, where most of the games’ action takes place," so I guess it'd be sort of like naming Disco Elysium Revachol, or perhaps Whirling-in-Rags. "This is where you are stuck because of the blizzard and must solve the mysterious murders. And Tangerine Antarctic is one of the important characters of this true detective's RPG."

Which, sure, I guess that makes sense, and XXX Nightshift was an all-timer bad name. Still, I can't help but feel that the shift to third-person is to attempt to differentiate itself—at least a tad—from Disco Elysium, a move that's complicated just a bit by the fact it still has a profoundly Disco Elysium-esque plot and a title that sounds like it came from an online Disco Elysium name generator.

So I'm a little sceptical still. Then again, I'm sceptical of every one of Disco Elysium's many successor projects, which all sprouted after the-studio-that-was-ZA/UM splintered into myriad fractions, all claiming to be DE's true inheritor. No, we're still talking about videogames, not Trotskyist groups, but I understand your confusion.

A woman stands in her underwear staring at a wall full of stars. Down the side a Disco Elysium-style dialogue window crawls. — (Image credit: Dark Math Games)

So I'm reserving judgment on Tangerine Antarctic (née XXX Nightshift) until I actually see some of it. I'll give it one thing right now, though: that art is real damn nice.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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