"Since the last round of EMTERR ‘stabilisation’, they’ve been trying to force us lifers out," the phantom line engineer tells Zero Parades protagonist Hershel Wilk. "We can’t be fired, not easily, but they can take away the work that made us stay in the first place,” he continues. “I have two options. I could falsify my reports and declare line 9 safe for construction anyway, or I could quit. Either way, the company can’t lose."

Approximately 15 minutes later, I’m talking to a monkey sat atop a pile of goods in a random abandoned house. "YOUR PRESENCE IS WEAK. FATE DELIVERS ME AN UNWORTHY ADVERSARY," it says, before declaring its name to be the KING OF TRADE. Immediately, one of the voices in Herschel’s inner chorus, dubbed Statehood, starts shouting back about needing to defeat the forces of capitalism.

Both of these are scenarios I ran into while playing the Next Fest demo of the spy CRPG finally emerging from ZA/UM, following years of reported bad times and discord at and around the Disco Elysium studio. Both of them feel simultaneously like encounters you could plausibly have run into in the original Disco, and like they could just as easily be pale imitations dressed up to resemble that first game’s much quoted trenchcoat of surrealist detecting.

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Last June, Jagex - the developers of medieval MMO Runescape - found themselves at odds with players after deciding not to create any new content for Pride Month. Disputed internally at the studio before the discussion then leaked online, the decision appeared to be a retreat in the face of a world turning on minority groups.

Following up in September, Games Industry asked Jagex CEO Jon Bellamy if he stood by the call to simply re-run existing Pride-themed quests and events. "Ultimately, my job is governance and protection as much as anything else, and so sometimes those kinds of harsh decisions have to be made to protect the imminent future of the game," he told them. "If there are tough decisions to be made next year, we'll make them. If the world has changed a bit and the environment is different, we will react accordingly."

Five months on and with this year's Pride Month on the horizon, we've asked if the environment is different.

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I wake up at 3AM. Do 50 pull-ups on a halberd wedged in the door frame. Do 50 push-ups on the cold stone floor. A servant hands me my protein mead and a wine frappamachiato. I violently double fist the two beverages. I don't eat breakfast, because food that isn't flavourless cup gruel is the enemy of productivity. Then, I'm dressed in my robes for the commute to the throne room. The magic starts. It's 5AM in Crusader Kings 3 and I'm on my medieval monarch grindset.

I pull out Paradox's latest dev diary. Oh, look at that, they're working with a mystery modder on bringing exactly the sort of big number tables to the strategy game that I need to tell at a glance whether I'm out-grinding my inbred wealth-creating cousins who rule other nations across the world.

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Saturdays are for putting your hand in a bucket of ice, swallowing a mouthful of honey and lemon, and breathing a sigh of relief. All that practice you put into your welcome handshake and 'Here comes trouble!' paid off. Almost every member of the treehouse has been successfully greeted home.

All bar one. But I'll get him. I'll get him good.

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