The studio Summer Eternal, founded by former ZA/UM staff including Disco Elysium writer Argo Tuulik, has announced its debut project: an RPG titled Red Rooster. The developers are explicitly positioning the game as distinct from Disco Elysium, aiming for a unique identity rather than a spiritual successor.
Red Rooster casts players as Redrick Roost, an inmate working as an arson investigator alongside an opiate-dependent mathematician. Their investigation into a series of arsons reveals a connection to Redrick's brother, who is the city's fire chief. The game is set in the "fractalised border archipelago" of the tri-partite city Arta-Tantor, featuring a political alternate history narrative with a science-fiction element. Its tagline, "Fight fires to get to the truth of your world. Start fires to get to the truth about yourself," hints at the game's thematic focus.
Summer Eternal describes Red Rooster as an "incendiary, physics-driven RPG combining the best of cerebral, worldbuilding-rich RPGs with the genetics of physics-driven immersive sims." A core design tenet is the game's full physics simulation, allowing players to interact with, move, and manipulate objects within the environment. The developers aim to create a reactive world where "scripted and emergent events" shape the urban landscape of Arta-Tantor. Building on Unreal Engine, the game will feature a three-dimensional world with dynamic camera movement, moving away from isometric perspectives.
The studio is targeting a "double-A production budget," drawing inspiration from projects with similarly sized teams. Red Rooster is reportedly nearing the end of pre-production, with an internal playable tech demo already developed.
Concept art reveals Redrick Rooster bears a resemblance to Disco Elysium's Harrier "Harry" Du Bois. Internally, the game features "The Coop," a system that echoes Disco Elysium's "Thought Cabinet" by housing roosters representing Redrick's various motivations and personalities. Inspirations for Red Rooster include games such as Exanima, Half-Life: Alyx, Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, and Planescape: Torment, alongside television shows like Fargo and Better Call Saul, and the works of Ted Chiang.
The game's announcement coincides with the release of the Summer Eternal Anthology, a 500-page physical book that serves as both a cultural and labor impact treatise on the game industry and a development journal for Red Rooster. The book includes interviews with economists Yanis Varoufakis and Richard Wolff, science fiction author Ted Chiang, and Bioware veterans Mark Darrah and David Gaider. The Anthology is available for purchase, with a Standard edition priced at €69 and a Deluxe Firestarter bundle at €99.
Purchasing the book grants membership in the Summer Eternal Players Non-Profit organization, which holds five percent of Summer Eternal and offers members a say in studio governance and the allocation of five percent of Red Rooster's profits. The studio emphasizes a commitment to a worker- and player-funded model.
Summer Eternal is one of several studios formed from the talent pool of the original Disco Elysium development. Other notable entities include Longdue and Dark Math Games. ZA/UM, the original developer, also continued operations, releasing Zero Parades: For Dead Spies before significant layoffs. The studio's history has been marked by legal disputes, with former directors alleging fraudulent acquisition of the studio and its intellectual property by its management.