The PC version of Disco Elysium has got a collage mode. After teasing it with a few Valentine’s Day-themed tweets, Studio ZA/UM has dropped a fun diorama tool that lets you custom create your own diorama with beloved characters from Revachol with added flair like filters, magnification, stickers, and more. Allows you to set the scene. The free update weighs in at around 300MB and can be accessed from the main menu. It also includes “bonus secrets to find” related to Martinez’s history – locations in the game – a new voiceover from deep-voiced narrator Lenval Brown, and five new unlockable Steam achievements. The news comes amid an ongoing legal dispute between the creators of Disco Elysium and studio ZA/UM.

Unlike a photo mode, Disco Elysium’s collage mode doesn’t allow you to pause the game to take screenshots that can be edited. Instead, it lets you create a setting from scratch – you can drag and drop characters, choose locations from the game, adjust weather conditions and time, add filters and frames, and even You can also add text. The game is set on a two-dimensional isometric plane, on which every object appears to be hand-painted. Think of it as a scrapbooking tool with cutouts that you glue on to create your own scenes. Drag-and-drop controls let you place dozens of assets wherever you want and even zoom in to make characters comically large. You can set them in daft poses such as a backflip, curled up in a ball, dancing or even making out.

There’s also a sticker collection for added style, ranging from item images of Disco Elysium’s inventory to custom-made, emoji-like content. It goes without saying that playing with collage mode before you finish the game may reveal some spoilers – at least in terms of characters and environments. Heck, I discovered two new characters myself that I never met in my six complete plays of Disco Elysium! Time to hunt ’em in my seventh, maybe? There’s also a dialogue reel that you can enable to input some wacky lines for your own detective story. The tool serves as a nice break from the game’s heavy-hitting narrative, as you can just mess around and create art while Sea Power’s beautiful music plays in the background. The images you create can also be saved locally on your PC or in game for later use/editing.

Reaction to this update has been mixed, with some loving the content, but others unable to show support for it, due to the ongoing legal dispute over Disco Elysium. At the end of last year, Martin Luiga, co-founder and secretary of the “ZA/UM Cultural Association” in a Medium post, confirmed that Disco Elysium’s main producers, designer Robert Kurwitz, artist Alexander Rostov and writer Helen Hindpere, would appear at the end of 2021. Not working in the company since. “…his departure from the company was involuntary. This will be bad news for fans who have been waiting for the Disco sequel in love.” “The reason for disbanding a cultural organization is that it no longer represents the ethos on which it was founded. People and ideas are eternal; Organizations may well be temporary. Luiga served as an editor on the game.

Studio ZA / UM react To this it had “no further comment” other than claiming that Disco Elysium “was and still is a collective effort” and promising a new project from the team. Note that the above ZA/UM Cultural Association and ZA/UM Studio are being treated differently. Kurvitz and Rostov then issued an open letter to fans, in which they claimed that the studio’s new owners had taken control through fraud and reiterated that they were forced out of the company. Estonian businessmen Ilmar Kompas – who is now CEO at ZA/UM – and Tõnis Haavel hit back, arguing that the employees were fired for misconduct and creating a toxic work environment. Meanwhile, former executive producer Kaur Kender launched her own legal battle, claiming that she too was fired after the new management came in.

Earlier this week, studio ZA/UM said its ongoing legal battle with Kender had been settled, but in a new statement to Eurogamer, Creative Kurwitz and Sander Tal disputed much of the claim. “The press release quotes Kender as saying that it has filed a ‘misguided’ lawsuit against ZA/UM in late 2022. We disagree. Kender’s lawsuit is an attempt to protect ZA/UM’s funds (€4.8 million) by the majority shareholders. was based on the abuse of [and new owners] Kompas and Howell will increase their stake in the company.

“In the press release, Kompas and Howell acknowledged this abuse by arguing only that the money had been ‘paid back to ZA/UM.’ However, returning the stolen money does not undo the crime; Here, it does not undo the illegally obtained majority in ZA/UM by Kompas and Havel.”