Sunless Sea and Cultist Simulator designer Alexis Kennedy has announced Travelling At Night, which he describes as a "dialogue-driven choices-matter combat-free CRPG" that's not a million miles away from the likes of Disco Elysium.
In an announcement post on his studio Weather Factory's official website, Kennedy says that while he's been "making narrative games for fifteen years", he's "never made a traditional isometric CRPG", likening doing so to a composer "hav[ing] a go at opera".
Rather tantalizingly, Kennedy says he was once contracted as a narrative consultant on a "really promising and heavily NDA'd RPG for a developer [he admires] and on a franchise [he likes]". Of course, he doesn't name what that RPG is, but he does say its cancellation made him regret not working within the genre.
If you're thinking that Travelling At Night looks an awful lot like Disco Elysium from the screenshot above, then you're not wrong, and it's a game Kennedy himself brings up in the game's announcement post.
He says that while he and his partner Lottie Bevan considered using the word "discolike" to describe their game, they didn't want players thinking they were pursuing Disco Elysium's "distinctive nihilistic funny sex'n'drugs'n'disco vibe".
However, Kennedy and Bevan did incur a "creative debt" to Disco Elysium, and Travelling At Night is aiming to find the same "audience for something CRPG-esque with really unorthodox creative choices".
As such, while Weather Factory isn't one of a number of studios currently operating out of the ashes of Disco Elysium developer ZA/UM (including ZA/UM itself), you can consider Travelling At Night another contender for the Disco crown.
With regards to the production cycle, Kennedy says he estimates Travelling At Night will take "between two and four years", and that he's hoping for a day one Steam Deck launch as well.
He describes the game's art direction as "determinedly non-realistic" while still being "plausibly CRPG", and confirms that Travelling At Night won't have an "intentionally inchoate player-cipher" character, but instead a defined protagonist by the name of Spencer Hobson.
We'll bring you more on Travelling At Night as soon as we get it. In the meantime, you can read our review of Weather Factory's last game Book of Hours right here.
