Disco Elysium
Where does one even start, when discussing a game like Disco Elysium, there is no precedent, no comparison to liken it to, to measure it against. Disco Elysium is weird, wacky and wonderful from start to finish and is like nothing else you have ever played. It’s not conventional to provide a conclusion in your opening paragraph, but this isn’t a conventional game, so in keeping I will say, stop reading this and go and buy it.
Still here? Fine, I’ll do my best to convince you.
Disco Elysium, developed and published by ZA/UM is a ROLL Playing Game at it’s core (emphasis on the ROLL), in the familiar guise of a point and click adventure. With DE, table top gaming has been brought directly to your screen and my what a smooth transition it is. Think Dungeons and Dragons, but your Dungeon Master dropped 2 tabs of Acid and watched an all night History Channel special on the socio-political strife during the pre and post cold war era of Russia, before planning your grand adventure.
The start of the game see’s you assume the role of an amnesic police detective, said amnesia brought on by what you soon find out was a drug and alcohol binge fest through the streets of Martinaise, the fictional town you find yourself in. The following 10-15 hours are comprised of you trying to piece together the jagged shards of a seemingly unsolvable case, the plot thickening like congealed custard with each twist, whilst simultaneously trying to work out what kind of detective you are (a Disco Cop perhaps?), in the midst of what is an all consuming existential crisis (or is it just withdrawal?).
The mechanics driving DE’s story telling and gameplay will be instantly familiar to fans of D&D and similar Roll Playing experiences, but in a completely unfamiliar setting, instead of putting points in to skills like Arcana, Wisdom and Intelligence, you will find yourself with 24 Skills to choose from, ranging from Visual Calculus to Electrochemistry, you are an aging, manically depressed and drug addled detective, after all, not a Rouge Wizard wielding fiery magic against encroaching hordes of Goblins.
These 24 skills are separated in to 4 columns, Intellect, Psyche, Physique and Motorics. At the very beginning of your journey you will have to choose between 3 preset distributions of skill points, each favouring one of the above 4 columns over another (there is a 4th option to custom build your starting allocation, but I wouldn’t suggest doing this on your first play through). Choose carefully here, as although you will be able to add points to weaker attributes as you level up, certain skills will be capped based on the columns you favoured least.
For example, you could choose to lean heavily towards intellect, this would result in you being the archetypal “Sherlock Holmes” detective, think the Robert Downey Jr rendition, socially awkward, largely hated but imbued with an inexplicable knack to see the unseeable in crime scenes, to sniff a lie from a suspect doused in limited edition “I swear to God Officer” parfum. Make no mistake though, this skill set doesn’t make you the best detective, all 4 have their distinct advantages.
It can be a little overwhelming to begin with, especially for those players who are completely new to the ROLL playing genre, even then, how can you possibly predict the value of a skill named “half-light”, “Electrochemistry” or “Shivers” before seeing them played out. The short answers is you really can’t and this can be off putting to begin with, it’s only when you begin to sink your teeth in to DE that you truly experience all the nuances of your choices and their limitations.
Their are ways to increase your weaker attributes throughout the game, other than levelling up and gaining skill points, you could take speed, drink alchohol or smoke a cigarette to gain a temporary boost to a certain attribute, but beware, consuming these nefarious substances will also have consequences. You can also customise your ensemble with various items of clothing you find littered around Martinaise, each offering you various buffs and debuffs. Dressing for the occasion has never been a more apt sentiment than in DE, find yourself facing a risky dice roll because your Drama skill is low, no problem, leave the conversation, don your silk kimono and roll those dice, baby.
DE isn’t afraid to deal with the somewhat uncomfortable topic of mental health, in fact it would be fair to reason that as well as being manically depressed, our protagonist is also a schizophrenic, with Dissociative identity disorder (multiple personalities). This unfortunate affliction is the conduit for DE’s most poignant, hilarious and downright weird moments but it’s also the most novel mechanic it boasts, adding a never before seen element to dialogue driven games. During your quest, you will sporadically have “thoughts”, that appear above your head like a Eureka light bulb moment. Clicking on these will sometimes open up an internal dialogue, where you literally talk with yourself. For example you might be walking along a lonely boardwalk when “Shivers” chimes in, detailing an abstract scene of a radio controller fiddling with buttons, miles away. Sometimes these interjections can be pertinent, often they are simply benign but intriguing digressions.
The most interesting use of this mechanic, however, comes when you are engaged in conversation with one of the many memorable characters in DE. You may be interrogating a suspect when “Drama” rudely interrupts, suggesting that you should perhaps tell them you are karaoke superstar. Logic might then interject, advising that this might be detrimental to your ability to glean information from the suspect, as they will lose respect for you. The frequency and nature of these most welcome interruptions are derived from which attribute you level up more. Invest in to “Encyclopedia” and you will be the recipient of torrent of background information, a citizen of Martinaise may be detailing the sound of a gunshot and “Encyclopedia” will chime in explaining that this could only have been created by a very specific firearm, thus opening a new line of questioning or even a new lead in the investigation. The choice is always yours though, you can choose to ignore the cacophony of infighting in your head, or let them run rampant, influencing your every choice (the latter is certainly more entertaining).
These interjections are the outcome of “passive rolls”, essentially Die, perpetually rolling in the background of every conversation, when a roll succeeds, you might get a new option for dialogue or perhaps an unnecessary tidbit of information, it’s incredibly clever and intuitive. Of course the more pivotal moments in the game come down to you making choices and these choices inevitably have good or bad consequences based on the outcome of a dice roll. There are two types of these “checks”, White and Red. White checks can be retried, if you fail once, simply put another point in to the relevant attribute and you can return to the conversation and retry it at your leisure. Red checks, however, are much less forgiving and failing any one of these can have disastrous consequences, indelibly changing your stories trajectory.
“Difficulty” is hard to quantify in a game like DE, DE thrives in the gray, there are very few “wrong” decisions that result in a “game over” screen, however there are some ways you can lose, 3 in fact. Run out of health, run out of “morale” or make a decision that results in your immediate demise. You have two bars, one for health and one for Morale, at the beginning of the game (depending on your skill attribution) you can start with as little as one point in each, depleting either of these without the means to replenish them will result in your untimely and rather ignominious death. This is where one of DE’s rare, almost elusive flaws crops up, at the very start of the game this can be incredibly frustrating. You won’t really start finding medicines to prevent these critical losses until an hour or two in to the game (later these resources are fairly obtainable for the diligent looters among you). The real crux of the issue here is the bizarre and unforeseeable ways in which you can lose health and morale (morale especially), you might find yourself sitting in a particularly uncomfortable chair, so uncomfortable in fact that it sucks the very life essence from you. You may even find yourself choosing a rather self deprecating dialogue option before plummeting in to irreparable moral despair. DE does have an autosave function, but it is incredibly sporadic and during some of the longer conversations you could easily spend 30 minutes between autosaves. Inevitably at the beginning you will find yourself replaying some sections as you forgot to save or found yourself inexplicably losing health or morale.
This brings us to DE’s second and perhaps only other flaw, even then, it’s a flaw buried in what is otherwise perhaps one of DE’s crowning achievements. DE’s lore is rich, caviar eating, champagne drinking, chartering private jets rich. You find yourself in Martinaise, a dilapidated island town set in Revachol, the disgraced former capital of the world, divided into zones of control under foreign occupation, half a century after a failed world revolution. Communism had it’s heyday and capitalism now rules unopposed, but vestiges of the old Marxist way of thinking remain in this backwards town and there is a simmering unease in the air. You arrive in the midst of a labour strike between “The Union” and Wild Pines, the former a self appointed governmental body that has bestowed itself with the responsibility of caring for (and policing) Martinaise’s citizens and dock workers, the latter an off shore logistics company, responsible for collecting the majority of the cargo docks profits. You work for the RCM, Revachol Citizens Militia, formed by the Moralist International, a coalition government established to bring unity and peace and most importantly to encourage a free market and capitalistic gain.
Throughout the course of DE, you will come to learn more about the turbulent history preceding current events and will often be asked to provide your thoughts and feelings on the matter, are you a moralist, a communist, a socialist? Thanks to the help of your inner “Encyclopedia” as well as a host of chatty characters you encounter, you will likely know more about this fictitious worlds history than you will your own. This level of depth and thoroughness in story telling ins truly commendable, but at times it can feel incredibly laborious. This is a dialogue driven game, the biggest revelations, funniest moments and progressions in solving the case will inevitably come from talking to people, so whilst the option is often there to not provide an opinion on said history or to cut someone off as they prepare to bombard you with their take on the socio-economic state of Revachol, you will often find yourself afraid to do so, in case you miss something important.
That being said, the writing is sublime, it can be high brow, crass, colloquial, abstract, metaphoric and several other adjectives that would probably be better listed by the writers of DE, their grasp of story telling and engaging writing is equal to any great novelist of the last century, which is a damn good thing considering this is a game where you will spend at least 50% of your time reading. Lines like “Real darkness has love for a face. The first death is in the heart." and “Thick, warm smoke gets sucked down into your lungs. Immediately you feel a warm nostalgia fill your head, body *and* soul. A nostalgia for *yourself*, the man you were in your youth. Johnny Thundercop is back. And he's chill as balls.” are prolific and almost unremarkable in a script full of ever increasingly witty and intelligent quips and observations.
This union of stellar writing coupled with sporadic but equally stellar performances from voice actors (some dialogue is spoken, especially at the beginning of conversations, but subsequent responses need to be read) leads to the conception of some of the most memorable characters, perhaps in gaming history. I personally challenge you to play through the game and not hear Cuno’s prepubescent scouse voice calling you a fuck pig. One of the most notable characters in the game is Kim Kitsuragi, your bespectacled partner in crime prevention. He is somehow derisive yet complimentary to you, both enamoured with you and appalled by you and by the games end it’s impossible to not feel a real connection with him.
What immediately stands out in DE and continues to impress throughout is it’s artistic design, every area you stagger through in a semi catatonic state has been painstakingly hand painted. It’s like watching a water colour painting in motion. The map itself is very small, it’s possible to run from one side of the map to another in less than 3 or 4 minutes, but the level of detail is staggering. Each area of the map is layered and as you progress through the game, you will open up sections of the map you didn’t know exist, providing further exploration.
On top of the incredible design you have a very real and impactful night and day cycle, as you go about your duties a clock int he bottom right corner ticks away ominously, eternally mocking you and your lack of progress with the case. Of course with the morning comes light, sun pouring across the dishevelled streets of Martinaise and the unsavoury citizens littering them, rain sweeps in from the seas, washing away the dirt of the day before night blankets you in darkness and quiet. Aesthetically, the passing of time is incredibly pleasing to watch, but it has it’s mechanical uses too. Some night owls can only be spoken to after 9 PM, sometimes you will have to wait till the following morning for information to come back to you via your precinct and sometimes you might want to call it a day, before sneaking back out to do something you know your partner Kim would not approve of. It’s a fantastic element that instills a sense of urgency to your investigation, without ever making you feel rushed.
Disco Elysium is nothing short of a masterpiece, breathing new life in to a genre that long existed before we had the means to even communicate our thoughts electronically. Roll playing has never been more meaningful, more poignant, more rooted in very real and relatable despair and somehow simultaneously more removed from reality and normality, you will laugh out loud, be quieted, be shocked, but most importantly you will be left thinking long after the credits roll, until of course you hit the New Game button.