I blew the whistle on workplace abuses at ZA/UM. In return, ZA/UM tried to defame me.

In February 2024, ZA/UM cancelled the standalone Disco Elysium expansion which was then known by its codename X7 and is now known as “Locust City”. At the same time, ZA/UM announced they would make nearly a third of their workforce redundant. I was on that list. As co-creator of Locust City alongside Argo Tuulik, I was approached by GLHF.gg for comment and issued a press statement about joining ZA/UM in 2022, which I likened to “being born into Yugoslavia in the ’90s: you’ve just missed the Party and now all you get is the bloodshed.”

In Spring 2025, Chris Bratt from People Make Games informed me that they would be interested to do a new documentary on ZA/UM and what’s colloquially known as the new Disco Elysium “successors”, part of which would cover the tragic ruin of Locust City. I agreed to give Chris an interview and shared a large amount of evidence of the trail of broken relationships and agonizing workplace conditions behind the project. Our interview was filmed in April 2025 and took around four to five hours to film in its raw form, and we also had many pre- and follow-up calls to establish the course of events. I also detailed how the cancellation of the project and the imminent redundancy was preceded by a nearly 80-page formal Grievance complaint I had filed to the studio’s HR, highlighting a range of systemic issues at the studio which of course, the studio and its Leads and Directors issued a blanket denial of.

When the documentary aired in August 2025 — and you should really watch it on YouTube if you haven’t already, Chris put an enormous amount of work and expense in the making — I was appalled but not surprised to find that ZA/UM had issued a number of false and unsubstantiated allegations against my character under guise of an anonymous corporate statement. I was never shown their statement or their allegations before they were broadcast, and I was not given a chance to respond and refute before the video was published. Therefore I am doing so now.

In short:

* ZA/UM made false allegations about things I never did in order to bring my character into question and distract from their shameful management failures,
* A mistake led to the publication of a statement that I had been placed under an “/external/ HR investigation”, which was never the case, but gave ZA/UM’s claims a false credibility,
* ZA/UM claimed they had found evidence against me in an internal HR investigation and leaked my supposed confidential HR documents to People Make Games, but no such investigation documents existed during my entire employment at ZA/UM nor were they provided to my trade union representative nor myself, which raises questions into the legitimacy of their claims, with the possibility of the investigation being either forged and backdated or dated after my departure and therefore unverified,
* and ZA/UM denied and covered up wrongdoing done by their leadership and management which I’ve previously raised and evidenced against them, attempting to further bring my credibility into question.
I truly hoped I wouldn’t have to write any more about this issue, but unfortunately ZA/UM’s management have left me no choice but to put an end to their unwarranted harassment and defamation of their former employees, which has now been going on for more than two years and has been reaching me through various sources.

ZA/UM is desperate to turn the story from one of corporate incompetence into one of petty office politics and interpersonal gossip, to turn the discussion away from the real corruption and violations of employment rights which consistently happen at ZA/UM, for which they conveniently do not want to answer:

* the crunch on X7 that caused people to cry in meetings,
* the unprofessional redundancy procedure* in which people’s dignities and employment rights were treated with disrespect,
* the issue of at least five known instances of women in senior professional positions (including Helen and myself) *frozen out of their roles* and driven out of the company under Tõnis’ management, who were then reputationally smeared and had their qualifications outright denied;
* the numerous HR complaints filed for bullying against Tõnis and a number of other company leads and directors, which went nowhere and were serially mishandled and hushed up by the former HR lead who was then promoted to Management Advisor,
* the management doing nothing about employees reporting feeling suicidal or burnt out due to workplace conditions or becoming medically unfit to work, and in fact humiliating and blaming them,
* the inability of women to reach any positions of creative decision- making on the projects,
* the non-transparency, the wage and role discrepancies,
* the double standards for promoting hugely unqualified members of the inner “boys club”,
* the absolutely rampant alcoholism and the culture of silencing, humiliation, bullying, retaliation, dishonesty, paranoia and fear which is perpetuated by the people who now sit in cushy positions, earning five figures /a month/, who were rewarded with privileged shares in a company created by other people’s work, blood and tears in exchange for disseminating vicious gossip and lies which were crucial to get people fired.

_{Table of Contents from my HR Grievance filed in December 2023}

I am retaining most of this evidence in confidentiality except when critical, due to not wanting to expose the privacy of co-workers. I will only show a certain subset of evidence which I feel ZA/UM have left me absolutely no choice but to share due to their continuous defamation campaign in which they have tried to discredit me and bring my character into question in retaliation for me raising these workplace concerns, which leaves me no choice but to clear my name. I have also shown a larger collection of evidence to Chris Bratt at PMG.

Here is a the list of questions I had submitted to ZA/UM at the end of my Discrimination Grievance in December 2023, as is recommended by ACAS (the Employment Tribunal mediation body in the UK). ZA/UM refused to answer the questions.

As an example of ZA/UM not taking employment law seriously, here is evidence that ZA/UM was hiring writers during the redundancy procedure, while they were laying off the entire X7 writing team. I also have evidence of specific people who were interviewed for or joined the writing team in the months following the redundancies, as well as job listings being opened in the months following the redundancies for positions which were recently made redundant. Within less than a year, ZA/UM’s team size ballooned back to a similar size it was before the redundancies, which could give grounds for a number of unfair dismissal claims.

Next, here is proof of HR complaints I made about the studio climate in 2023, of which there were more not listed here and specifically regarding managers and directors at the company, demonstrating an ongoing series of issues, and none of which were properly investigated or handled according to formal ACAS-recommended procedures by HR.

Here’s an especially concerning complaint I shared with studio production after two months of non-stop crunch, which caused me migraine attacks and having to be medicated. I also have plenty of evidence of other people complaining about crunch at production meetings.

Here is a large number of messages exchanged with colleagues about the physical, mental and health toll that crunch and consistent mistreatment from management was taking on both Argo and I throughout X7 production:

Here’s when I was rendered medically unfit to work because of months of crunch and bullying from ZA/UM management:

For pointing out these issues and more in my formal complaint in late 2023 which ended up totalling some 150 pages including the filed Appeal, ZA/UM conducted a retaliatory campaign against Argo and I, stoking discontent against us while we were busy crunching and working or on medical leave, and approaching various employees of the company to ask them whether they could contrive anything Argo or I had done that would be a fireable offence. Their effort was unsuccessful and they could not present us nor our trade union representative with any actionable evidence against us. Just six months before this, they were all too happy for Argo to be the public face of the company in PMG’s first documentary. Why would they have done this if Argo was a troubled employee all along as they now claim? Argo had been working in the company for seven years at that point.

Here are various former and current ZA/UM employees, whose identities are known to me, reporting that they were subjected to a fishing expedition in search of reasons to get us fired — and to scapegoat us for the death warrant management had signed for Locust City already a long time ago. Some of these people were called to testify on misconduct committed by Tõnis and a number of ZA/UM leads, however they claim that they were never properly questioned about ZA/UM’s misconduct, but were instead interrogated about Argo or myself even though we had never done anything wrong to them. All of these people who refused to testify against us and pointed out management’s hypocrisy were placed in the redundancy pool and lost their jobs. I have more evidence of this, but for brevity…

I never committed any fireable offence nor was there any evidence shown against me /for nearly three months /when I was ready to defend myself with my union representative. Instead, we were told the project is abruptly cancelled and that we, alongside more than 20 other people, were being made redundant. Even our union representative said it was a sham redundancy, as ZA/UM HR could not even answer simple questions on why the project is being cut, or why certain roles were redundant. Argo himself was told that he is redundant because his writing skills would not apply to C4, which is simply absurd, since the tools and pipelines were identical and we had started out as project C4 members 1.5 years earlier. Furthermore, every single writer on C4 was Argo’s junior whom he had interviewed for their jobs and mentored into their roles at some point. Remember, writers had just been moved from P1 to X7 six months earlier, despite these games being of radically different genres (a shooter vs a cRPG), so moving writers around was never a problem for the studio before.

The C4 directors, all of them with fewer years uninterrupted tenure than Argo, were rewarded with London wining, dining and privileged shares in the company for carving up this redundancy cake.

Here’s the incompetent justification for the rushed X7 redundancy provided by the ZA/UM HR team on 20th February 2024, in response to a questionnaire sent by our WGGB trade union representative:

It’s worth noting that, for some reason, it was permitted for the formal X7 Narrative Leads Jim and Chris to transfer to C4 and become writers, despite having far less games writing experience than most of us on the X7 team, after conveniently having given testimony that claimed Tõnis was a wonderful person and denied witnessing his and Phil’s abusive conduct, which was recorded on tape. They never even once reached out to all of us who were about to lose our jobs, and in my case even my immigration status. I suppose this is the “true leadership” example Tõnis speaks about?

Here is how the people who got to keep their jobs described Tõnis Haavel (alias DH, Denis Havel) to the official investigator who was investigating him for bullying, harassment, gender discrimination and misconduct in January 2024:

Here are some examples of the dubious selection procedures and unprofessional leadership conduct during the ZA/UM redundancy process. There are many, many more:

Here’s information and discussion about the “privileged” ZA/UM shares which were secretly offered to all the Leads and Directors to buy their consensus just before the redundancy procedure was announced:

And how sensitive were ZA/UM management about the rushed and dubious redundancy process they were putting people through, you ask? Here’s Ilmar clumsily referring to people being made redundant as “shit” as part of some insane Estonian parable:

Numerous junior employees who testified affirmatively about the abuses and workplace issues at ZA/UM were also placed on the redundancy list — as well as known union members, members of the diversity committee, and disproportionately employees of colour and women. They were not informed of their rights. The IWGB tried to argue for a better and fairer redundancy process for everyone, and we tried to put pressure on management through the union and through the press. Most of the heavy lifting was done by some extraordinarily brave people from the redundancy pool. An incredible front was put up against Ilmar by the grassroots union, ZA/UM United — I wish their story would be told, too. Argo and I forfeited any redundancy, severance or notice pay, because we spoke to the press and constructively resigned from this charade — the most expensive interview I ever gave, and I don’t regret a penny.

Here’s the glorious journey of ZA/UM United, starting first with a post from an untraceable rogue Slack automation bot which sent ZA/UM management into total crisis management mode:

The “voluntarily” part above is intentional misrepresentation — I had by then announced I considered myself /constructively dismissed/, which in British legal terms implies that ZA/UM had so consistently breached our contract and put my health and safety in danger for so long that it was no longer possible to do my work. This had already been the case for months.

At that point, I had been discussing with a legal team and was gearing up to sue ZA/UM, and the funny thing is that it was Kaur Kender who advised me not to do it. He said the cost of finances, emotions, reputation and time is enormous even in the best of cases. But more importantly, he said if you try to accuse Tõnis and Ilmar of anything, they will say that *you* were the problem, that *you* had issues with people, they will mobilize their subordinates against you, and then put you in a position where you will have to defend your character to discourage you from pursuing your claims and distract from the topic at hand. He ended with, I quote: *“I know this because that’s what I would do, too.”*

And they /have/ done it before together, haven’t they? I’m sure I don’t need to point out history repeating itself, already as farce.

If it bears saying anything to disprove the completely baseless allegations ZA/UM presented against me in the People Make Games video, I never used the word “shit” or derogatory language to give feedback at work, this is simply not true and I have not seen evidence to the contrary. Giving feedback to peers and juniors was an incredibly sensitive process and I have evidence of people having positive experiences with my guidance, shown below. All of my interactions with Jim and others in the final 5–7 months of the project were recorded via dictaphone and it can be verified that we were amicable. In fact, I would say that it is the *opposite* of what ZA/UM claims happened, as *our last interaction was one where I cried confessing to Jim how badly I felt bullied by Tõnis and how hurt I felt that he didn’t defend me from it as team lead, director and older man. *I had never cried in a work meeting before in my entire life, but two years of insane corporate gaslighting at ZA/UM had worn me down. Jim apologized to me for going through it, seemed uncomfortable, then disappeared from work for weeks and ultimately resigned and never spoke to me again. Once more, I have evidence of this in the form of audio recordings, clear as day. Is this not critical context that is being left out of the narrative?

By the way, the only other female member of the team who was asked for her opinion in the gender discrimination investigation stated that the arrangement surrounding my position on the project in favour of Jim was *“absurd”. *After this investigation into gender discrimination in the studio, every single female member of the team was laid off.

I wish I had been allowed to speak to Jim and I wish this and other relationships could have been mended. Instead, ZA/UM management instructed all of us to keep apart and often even enforced confidentiality by HR procedures, so that they would have an easier time controlling people’s opinions. I believe this relationship was weaponized by ZA/UM from a mutually respectful and healthy relationship into one which could be used by Tõnis to drive irreconcilable rifts between what used to be friends, and was then dredged up in public by ZA/UM as a smokescreen when it was time to remove the discussion from ZA/UM’s real systemic issues and failures.

ZA/UM claimed I was harsh or unwelcoming towards the P1 writers who newly joined the project… Here is what our relationship and communications were /actually /like, even during the days when I was suffering bullying, conflict and abuse in the meetings with Management. If you compare the date below with the dates of those HR complaints, you’ll see that this was one of the most upsetting times on the project, but I gave no indication to the people who had just had their project cancelled. I regularly concealed my own mental and emotional crises for the sake of keeping the team feeling reassured.

ZA/UM also claimed that I unfairly criticized C4 and that I “refused” to work on it, in order to paint me as rude and insubordinate, which is completely false.

It’s worth noting that every single piece of criticism I had for C4 was ultimately implemented during the first year of the project, including my concerns about sexist depictions, so my concerns were thus not unfounded. My criticisms about M0 and Collage Mode were also confirmed by press reviews once they were released. Both of these things are easily verifiable. I also never criticized C4 publicly in front of the team, as ZA/UM falsely claims. Conversations among leads and seniors, where more frank discussion must be had, sometimes got strongly opinionated but never spilled over onto the team, and presenting it otherwise is dishonest. I also never refused to work on C4 but was instead removed without anyone on the team being given an explanation, for which again I have evidence shown below. I even later received apologies from the company in 2023, from both Tõnis Haavel, Ed Tomaszewski and Chris P. (the latter in writing, documented below), who all expressed that our removal from C4 was unfair to us and destructive for the team. Was this what they truly felt, or was it just one more example of the kind of selective truth, broken telephone, lying interference which the ZA/UM management drips into various ears around the studio?

Here is the opening of the actual feedback document I sent to C4’s Narrative Director Justin Keenan at the inception of C4 around June 2022. The reason I had to do this in writing was because I had just moved into a new house and the lack of internet connection made it impossible to have a long call. For reference, I was slated to take on a leadership role under the Director and was the most senior writer on his team except for Argo, so critiquing concepts as equals was an established part of my role by then. As a senior discipline specialist, I felt expressing my professional opinion of the subject matter was warranted and not unusual, especially when there were such strong quality concerns at such a delicate time for the team, and other teammates were approaching me with worries about the project. I did so in private. I obviously emphasized several times that I wasn’t opposed to undertaking a new project and believed “we can make a masterpiece together”:

I was mostly worried about the writing team as a whole losing credibility and motivation in the eyes of the larger project team, because of the unsatisfactory quality of the project pitch which was shown to the studio before we had been given a chance to improve it together. I especially felt disappointed that the description of the female protagonist perpetuated offensive stereotypes about women. I would later be informed by the Narrative Director that this feedback of mine was considered “personally frustrating” to studio management. Regardless, this is what I wrote to one of my co-writers on the team, who was also feeling doubts about the project. I defended the Narrative Director and promised that I “wouldn’t rather be anywhere else or with any other people so I’m ride or die to the end”:

Up until the morning I was removed from C4, I still operated with the assumption that we would all continue working on it, I showed up to every call and every meeting, even flew to New York to discuss direction and mend the tensions despite being sick and on antibiotics, therefore there was nothing that could be considered “insubordination”, as ZA/UM management so ominously put it. I now understand that any form of criticism or questioning of management’s toxic and disruptive practices is in their eyes “insubordination”. I still had strong concerns about the direction and everyone was in emotional turmoil due to such a significant change of project, but the intention was to spend two weeks brainstorming together. However, on 3rd July 2022, Argo and I were still abruptly removed from the project, told we have no choice but to take a flight back to UK and were asked to keep confidentiality about it from the rest of the team. We received a voice message from one of the members of the writing team that he’s not sure what we’ve done, but that the Narrative Director was instructed by Tõnis and Kaur to “put his foot down” in order to consolidate his authority and the new direction and that the Narrative Director has said “something /needs to be done/ about Dora and Argo”, precisely in those ominous terms. Once we flew back to Europe, Kaur called Argo and throughout the conversation, repeatedly told him: *“Everyone is replaceable,”* a favourite ZA/UM management refrain we would also later hear from Tõnis. When he was later asked about it by an investigator, Tõnis (alias DH, Denis Havel) claimed:

We didn’t know what was going to happen next. You can see that even 10 days later, we still had no idea what our status was, as we were suddenly and unceremoniously removed from all the Slack channels by production without allowing us to talk to our colleagues, and people were told we had abandoned the project of our own will. This marked the beginning of many, many months where we were isolated inside the company and forbidden from communicating with the majority of our colleagues with the purpose to conceal the impression that there was any instability in the studio, which had a horrible mental and emotional effect on us.

It was apparent that the C4 Directors still held grudges against Argo and I even seven months later, because in February 2023 an incident occurred where the C4 Art Director verbally attacked us in a meeting, accusing us of poaching people from his project, when in reality the person in question had been the one to ask *us* to join our project and requested a transfer themselves. This wasn’t the first time people had requested transfers off C4 and onto X7 entirely by their own will, because they had felt similarly disappointed in C4’s early direction. Each time this had happened, the Narrative and Art Directors of C4 became bitter and aggressive and made accusations that Argo and I were somehow orchestrating these departures and called it “poaching”, which is an absurdly adversarial term for two projects under the same roof. The Art Director did not listen, and instead viciously cussed and kept interrupting me with accusations. I ended up crying after this call and HR had to be called.

The incident led to Tõnis Haavel himself later visiting our Brighton home in February 2023 and apologizing to us on behalf of the company, claiming that we are “stronger” than himself for what we had been through since the C4 split, and that what the company had put us through was wrong. (The art director would later be asked by Tõnis to apologize to us — follows below.) Apology call was organized 2 months later:

I was asked how I felt about this by Chris P., who was my lead at the time and who helped mediate this situation. I explained to him how unfair and traumatic the C4 rift was in my life, and how bad of a time I had been having at ZA/UM, and he apologized that I had to go through it at the company. I’ve always felt Chris was among the gentlest and most empathetic people at ZA/UM and I really appreciated this interaction. The communication from ZA/UM about my removal from C4 was uniformly apologetic and agreed that I was wronged, including HR, management and leads. This is why I am now surprised that ZA/UM is making a convenient “180” and claiming I was actually the problem all along.

I was never placed under any performance improvement plan, disciplinary nor an external investigation, nor was ZA/UM ever able to present any documentation, statements, or evidence to me or my trade union representative regarding any alleged interpersonal misconduct on my part during my entire employment at ZA/UM. There was never an external investigation, only a sham internal investigation which never went anywhere for 3 months, conducted last minute by the same group who have already had good practice at manufacturing consensus to dismiss and silence employees who were personally distasteful to management.

A large number of people involved were all named in my Grievance document as being parties to cover-ups of management misconduct themselves, and the investigation never produced any actionable document or evidence in nearly three months that they could have done so. Imagine my surprise when I learn that ZA/UM are now claiming that allegedly legitimate confidential records about my HR investigation indeed exist and are sharing them with third parties. It is neither legal within privacy laws, nor very convincing, nor in line with employment law procedures, for ZA/UM to distribute unverified HR documents to press. It is also certainly cowardly. Nothing was ever provided to me or my union representative for us to exercise our right to review or refute or even to confirm its legitimacy. My understanding is that this unverified “investigation” was conveniently assembled /in absentia /after I constructively resigned from the company at the direct advice of my union representative, as no documentation was shown to exist during my tenure at the company.

As for their claim that they went “above and beyond” to investigate my own complaint externally and found it unsubstantiated… The external HR company they contracted for the task has an advertising blurb on their website where they are being promoted by the same legal company which represents ZA/UM. It’s also worth noting that at that time, at the advice of our trade union representative, neither Argo nor I had revealed to ZA/UM the extent of incriminating audio recordings we had of the abusive and disgraceful conduct of their leads. I wanted to give them a chance to show how honest they are. I was also at that time preparing to meet them in court, and so the demonstrable lies they gave during their investigation when they thought I didn’t have evidence would prove useful when compared against the recordings. You would be surprised how many players in this story who represent themselves as honorable denied ever witnessing conduct from Tõnis and his subordinates which I have recorded them witnessing.

I’m not at all hesitant to show evidence for my claims. People Make Games couldn’t safely publish covert audio recordings as it would have given legal recourse to ZA/UM to attempt to take their content down. I would rather not be forced to release the recordings, as I want the ZA/ UM workers to be able to work in peace on their new project, and for ZA/ UM to let me work in peace myself, so I hope ZA/UM will refrain from making any further statements about me and let the matter rest.

I fought for more sustainable working conditions on X7 and I fought for our team. The kindness and respect of our colleagues who were actually boots on the ground and were since laid off, means more than the vitriol of leftover leads who now continue to smear us in a desperate attempt to better the commercial chances of their future products.

Here are numerous messages Argo and I exchanged with our X7 team, about all of our shared hardships, pains, challenges and loves:

If you’re wondering whether ZA/UM was aware of the hardship that the entire team was going through due to crunch and demoralization, this is one excerpt from my Grievance, which they completely ignored and made everyone in question redundant:

Argo will also issue his own response in another Medium article, which you can read here . I’m not here to speak about or redeem his actions, but only mine, which were always carelessly bundled together with someone else’s whenever ZA/UM hurled accusations, the same as in Helen’s case. I simply do not think ZA/UM management perceive women as complete people — they certainly never perceived me, continuously degraded and diminished my professional competence for making complaints. They even forcibly reduced my role and left me out of critical review processes, even when I was more qualified /by measurable metrics/ as a writer and game developer than others in the conversation, and even when the project suffered for lack of review. This entire saga is documented to the forensic degree, and what has been shared here barely scratches the surface. I don’t expect it to change the opinion of those who are deep in the echo chamber of ZA/UM, but if there’s one wish I have, then it’s to be a cautionary tale to others who work in any professional field anywhere to know what exactly it means to try to stand up for yourself in an environment such as this.

If you’ve been sick of reading this — you cannot imagine how sick I am of writing this, and finding out new ways every few months in which ZA/ UM have desperately tried to run professional interference against their former employees, because apparently they have such low confidence in the success of their own teams that they need to tirelessly work to undermine both ours and Red Info’s professional connections. (Remember that time, Ed, you personally called Tim Cain to ask him not to work with Robert?)

Here’s how much ZA/UM management cares what you think, by the way:

It’s also unfortunate that due to legal risks for the good people at PMG a number of other evidence could not be shown on screen — such as a very telling message from Kaur Kender where he claims that ZA/UM’s President Ed Tomaszewski, of “Kerbal Space Program 2 Takeover” fame, is offering to pay Riaz’s legal costs if he goes into litigation against their former employees. There are also the extensive recordings and messages in my possession where Riaz himself brags about signing an NDA with ZA/ UM management and talking with Ed, Ilmar and Tõnis to engage in information warfare about their former employees in exchange for ZA/UM letting him promote his own startup as *the* Disco Elysium successor. Maybe you guys should have known this guy is a liar and a leaky sieve before you started scheming with him? That’s okay that he fooled you though, I guess we have one thing in common.

On a final note, a private company which is >70% majority owned by one single person, who is also acting as CEO and who came into power under disputed circumstances, who rejected with a laugh his workers’ proposal to convert the company to a co-operative, now claiming to “empower teams, not individuals” and preaching that “success is shared, not vested in one person”, is absolutely hilarious hypocrisy and possibly the first genuine line of comedy I’ve seen ZA/UM put out in five years. Ilmar, now that you’ve forced out every single writer who ever wrote on Disco Elysium and Locust City, perhaps you should pick up the pen yourself?