"You need to turn away from the ruin."

Image credit: Summer Eternal

Back in 2024, we heard about the formation of Summer Eternal : a new studio composed of Disco Elysium writer and world-builder, Argo Tuulik, and other veteran ZA/UM staff such as Dora Klindžić, Anastasia Ivanova, and Michael Oswell. Aleksandar Gavrilović, secretary of the Croatian Game Development Alliance, and Lenval Brown, Disco Elysium's narrator, are also part of the crew.

Since then, we've heard nothing from the new collective, but earlier this month, the studio got in contact with me to gauge interest in the Summer Eternal Anthology, a 500-page physical book that's part-treatise on the cultural and labour impact of the video game industry, and part-development journal for its newly-announced "incendiary RPG", Red Rooster.

In Red Rooster, you play as Redrick Roost, a white-collar inmate thrust into the role of an arson investigator who partners up with an opiate-dependent mathematician.…