Here are the two things I enjoyed most about visiting Istanbul a few years ago. One: the comingling of millennia of history and a patchwork of cultures at the meeting point between Asia and Europe, a city that has more compacted history in a square metre than most places do in a square mile, an endless festival of artistic and culinary pleasures. Two: there are like a billion cats everywhere.
Pera Coda—a Disco-Elysium-inspired "surreal narrative mystery" from Turkish studio Elyzio—promises to capture at least half of that: it's "set in Istanbul, a city of beauty in chaos," and offers "a surreal rendering of one of the oldest cities in the world, featuring iconic real-world locations." I will be staging a one-man riot if there isn't a new cat every few feet, though. Standards are important.
Art director Ahmet Kazanci promises Pera Coda is both "a love letter to our city" (yay) and "a universal human story about guilt, regret, and the search for peace" (uh oh). The game will put you in the Florsheim shoes of Deniz, an Istanbul attorney "trapped in a subconscious state between life and death, as he becomes the judge and defendant in the reckoning of his own soul." Very much Anubis-weighing-your-heart-against-a-feather territory.
From its announcement trailer, Pera Code looks very Disco Elysium indeed. We've got the isometric(ish) camera, the painterly art style, scenes of unglamorous, working-class city life, and the accusatory, perhaps hallucinatory tones of an unseen woman as she narrates a scene of profound violence.
It looks lovely, and I'm curious to see if it can pull the Disco Elysium inspo off. ZA/UM's opus is in a bit of a weird spot in the landscape, I think—it was almost universally beloved and yet you don't tend to see too many devs claim it as direct inspiration. I wonder if that's a product of Disco's quality, more than anything. It would take an almost ludicrous confidence to claim kinship with a game so narratively brilliant: setting your game up for comparisons in which it would almost certainly fall short. But Pera Coda's willing to take that risk, and I'll be paying close attention to see if it pulls it off.
