Earlier this month, Disco Elysium developer ZA/UM teased a new RPG known as Project C4. It described the game as “the next genre-defining RPG from ZA/UM, the studio behind Disco Elysium” and “a mind-warping story of espionage and team-building in an original yet achingly familiar setting.” The announcement was met with mixed feelings considering everything the studio has been through since the release of Disco Elysium.
Several important staff members critical to Disco Elysium’s development were reportedly pushed out of ZA/UM, and multiple projects were canceled. Now, the studio is reemerging and drawing direct connections to Disco Elysium to promote its next title — although it’s not a sequel — as former ZA/UM developers spin up Disco Elysium successors elsewhere. It’s an odd situation surrounding what should be a surefire indie RPG hit, so I was interested in seeing the game for myself at GDC 2025.
I got an overview of Project C4 from some ZA/UM developers and saw footage of the game in action. It looks like an expected evolution of the Disco Elysium formula with some creative ideas in how it plays with the objective versus subjective mind, and the realties of spy warfare and espionage. This isn’t the ZA/UM that brought us Disco Elysium, but the developers I spoke to seemed confident that Project C4 could deliver something similarly fresh.
Digging up the past
Like Disco Elysium, Project C4 is another RPG that mostly plays from an isometric perspective and emphasizes player choice and the use of virtual dice rolls to determine dialogue outcomes. While players controlled an amnesiac cop in an Eastern European country in Disco Elysium, Project C4‘s premise involves spies, espionage, and the objective and subjective.
Players control an “operant,” who is a spy called upon to do one last job with their crew in a vast fictional city with cultural influences from Portugal and South America. While franchises like James Bond or Metal Gear immediately come to mind when you hear about a game embracing a spy fantasy, Principal Writer Siim Kosmos Sinamäe says Studio ZA/UM wanted to take a more grounded approach to what spies do.
“We started looking at a variety of topics, and espionage caught our eye. Once we got further into it, we discovered that the truth of espionage is so much stranger than the fiction of it,” Sinamäe says. “The fiction of it is almost like a politically correct version of what spies actually do. But the realities of spies, how often they f*ck up, and how few of them are actually successful was something really interesting to us …The secret world of spies is very much like our own: dark, greedy, and it really doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
We’re able to talk about some other aspects of the human psyche that we can’t speak about if you’re being an alcoholic police officer.
Project C4 lets players fail forward through their choices. They might not get the expected outcome, but the game will respond to player success or failure accordingly. Artistically and narratively, Project C4 also wants to play around with the objective and subjective. The city where players explore, speak to others, and perform most of their actions is considered “objective” and features a more realistic, painterly art style to reflect that.
But the Conditioning Menu — Project C4’s version of Disco Elysium’s Thought Cabinet — embraces what ZA/UM calls a “subjective” art style as it’s also where players will grapple with their conditioning as an operant and embrace more subjective worldviews. That’s where the trippy art in the reveal trailer comes from. This division between the objective and subjective is one area in which Project C4 looks like it will be quite distinct from Disco Elysium.
Being distinct is inevitable, as only a few creatives who worked on Disco Elysium and Disco Elysium: The Final Cut remain at ZA/UM now. Sinamäe is one such person, and he’s choosing to look at Project C4 as an opportunity for ZA/UM to do things it just wasn’t able to with Disco Elysium.
“We’re able to talk about some other aspects of the human psyche that we can’t speak about if you’re being an alcoholic police officer. We’re able to tell the story in more meaningful ways because we have a more experienced team than Disco Elysium …We are much more aware of what are capabilities are, where we can innovate, and where we think it’s good enough for us.”
Ruudu Ulas, a Lead Producer who has been with the studio since its work on The Final Cut, chose to take an optimistic look at how ZA/UM has greatly evolved and changed throughout the three years Project C4 has been in development.
“As you know, our studio has gone through some challenging, difficult times over the last three years and our team has very much grown with us,” Ulas says. “We have some people who have been with us since we made Disco. There are people who joined us for Final Cut. There are people who joined us because they loved Disco Elysium. We have this team that has really grown together through these three years, and as I’ve seen the project evolve and the team evolve, it’s really exciting to see how we’re able to build on individual contributors’ strengths and include them in the building of the world, story, and how closely the world is linked together with the narrative.”
Just as the operants in Project C4 can’t escape their past, neither can ZA/UM. With many of the creatives who worked on Disco Elysium gone, Project C4 is shaping up to be a different take on the formula that made ZA/UM a known quantity in the indie space in the first place. Project C4 will likely never escape the shadow of people’s opinions on that, so it’s fitting that this RPG is so eager to pit objective against subjective.
