Locust City, the spin-off of Disco Elysium, revolved around the tale of two grubby kids and a crate full of bugs.

It is time once again to shake our fists at the sky over the untimely, messy splintering of Disco Elysium as a cultural phenomenon. Yesterday, Youtuber Jamrock Hobo leaked a presentation for Locust City – An Elysium Story, an abandoned project that would have expanded the original RPG’s detective odd-couple premise by having you control two returning characters simultaneously, each with their own furiously personified skill tree and Thought Cabinet of percolating ideas.

Cancelled in February and hitherto known as Project X7, Locust City was to star Cuno and Cunoesse, a pair of foul-mouthed kids from the streets of Revachol. I spent minimal time with the pair when I reviewed Disco Elysium, because they are vicious brats, but like every character in the game, they have many facets – it’s possible to get on Cuno’s good side and even recruit him as an ally. As such, I’m intrigued to see how his and Cunoesse’s story might have proceeded in Locust City, and sad that I will almost certainly never get to play the game.

Locust City was seemingly called Locust City because one of Cuno’s treasured in-game possessions was to be a locust city in a cardboard box. According to the leaked presentation – which dates back to around nine months before the cancellation, and features commentary from now-departed ZA/UM writer Dora Klindžić – the box was to serve as an evolving allegory for his emotions and values. It was also something of a town management subgame: Cuno could put stuff in the locust box to create buildings and facilities, altering the chemistry of his insect world, and potentially fomenting civil wars.

The game outside the box is described as a “single player cooperative” experience. You’d have controlled Cuno and Cunoesse simultaneously, picking one as leader during exploration, terrain interaction and dialogue, and swapping between them to make use of their different capacities. Each character was to receive their own Thought Cabinet, with familiar unlocks such as Mazovian Socio-Economics, and set of RPG skills, including old Disco Elysium standbys like Half Light and Electro-Chemistry. As with Disco Elysium, these skills would have been presences in dialogue, and each character would have had their own voiced narrator – there’s a sample of the voice-acting at the end of the video.

The pair would also have picked up on different aspects of their surroundings, extending into the audio design – the presentation gives the example of Cuno overhearing the turning of a book page, while Cunoesse is preoccupied with the gushing of a fountain. As for how you might use their skills in tandem, they would have shared an inventory and been able to combine skills for certain skill checks, but the more fascinating dynamic is that they would have developed their intellectual lives in response to each other. The presentation broaches the prospect of “chain thoughts” about specific topics, triggering further interactions and affecting their overall relationship.

I’m likely falling into the trap of having only glowing things to say of a game I’ll never get to analyse, but it sounds like a terrific elaboration of Disco. It takes H.D.B’s multitude of garrulous self-manifestations and stretches them precariously between two skulls. I’m also interested to experience the not-unhopeful, post-revolutionary dystopia of Revachol through the eyes of lost children, rather than a perma-hungover amnesiac.

It’s possible some of the thinking here lives on at the three “Disco Elysium successor” studios formed in the wake of acrimonious ZA/UM firings and subsequent legal action – that’s Dark Math Games, Longdue and especially Summer Eternal, who appear to have the most former Disco Elysium developers (including Klindžić) on their books and appear closest in their values to the original development team.