Aleksander Rostov

Biography

Aleksander Rostov (pseudonym) is an Estonian artist, a founding member of the cultural group ZA/UM and the main artist of the video game "Disco Elysium", whose bold brushstrokes have been called the element that holds together the aesthetics of the game by fellow artist Kaspar Tamsalu who worked on the project. Fully hand-painted (vs. 3D generated) PC games were a rarity at the time of Disco Elysium's release, Rostov has mentioned his disapproval of hyperrealism when explaining the expressive visual language used in the game, explaining that the art is more a reflection of the relationship between the main character and the world: "Their [side characters'] homes are actually meant to be extensions of those portraits. In a sense, the game is a portrait -- the writer invents the characters' habits and beliefs, the voice actor conveys it through tone of voice and word stress, while the artist and animators can convey their faces and body language." The game's art reflects the effects of the ongoing destruction of the world of Elysium (most of the world that ever existed has already been destroyed, and the process is accelerating), which in one way or another is reflected in the psychology of each character. When creating the art of the game, Rostov was based on the paradigm of modern oil painting. Also during the time of the ZA/UM blog, Rostov was engaged in the analysis of the psychology of painting or the form of video games in text form, and during the completion of "Disco Elysium" he wrote on the TIGSource forum as a chronicler of the game's development process.