Frankly, I don’t like reading in games a lot, and Disco Elysium is the kind of game that conveys crucial information through a heap of text. However, from the beginning of the game, I fell in love with the style of the dialogue. Disco Elysium glued me to the screen and infected me so that I couldn’t let go until the story ended. And afterwards, I just kept thinking about how I would revisit that adventure.
This game is rarely at full price, so we decided to give it a review if you would like to get a copy.
If you are looking for more RPGs like Disco Elysium (although no game is similar to it, really), check out Super Mario RPG.
The Story of Disco Elysium
Disco Elysium is a detective story that may sound clichéd at first. Your detective wakes up with amnesia – he doesn’t remember who he is, where he is, or what year it is, and he needs to solve a murder case before more blood spills on the streets. It is a familiar scenario, but the loss of memory here is not a tool to identify the player with the protagonist in an unknown world. The detective is a very flexible person here, and it reflects on his methods of solving the case. He can be a lying nihilist, a clumsy drug addict, a theatrical communist, a sensitive rhetorician, a pumped-up racist, or something entirely different.
His personality changes how he gathers information, but his problems are always the same. He hit rock bottom when required to be in detective form, and he doesn’t even remember what exactly turned him into such a wreck of a man.
And then, poor, he follows the traces of his past in an unknown place where he found himself. And the city called Revachol is in an even worse situation. The revolutionary slogans were swiftly in the wind following a brutal uprising, leading to utter anarchy. However, a coalition of foreign forces intervened and effectively resolved the situation. The city ultimately lost its repressive system, and class communities took justice into their own hands. To make matters worse for the detective, the murder that occurred is not just a simple homicide; it has implications that could have catastrophic consequences for the already devastated Revachol. The consequences are inevitable; only the success of your investigation will determine whether they are colossal or livable.
The Worldbuilding
The world of Disco Elysium is full of memorable characters. You meet an obese manipulator who oversees the city from a container on a crane, a religious drug addict who practices parkour in the church, a bodybuilder with racist philosophy, a superstitious owner of a bookstore who is also a technophobe… The collection of these characters is captivating, and their narratives are exceptionally well-written.
For example, there’s a guy in the game called Idiot Doom Spiral, and his story is that he became homeless by locking himself out of his own house. These stories are just the surface layer of Disco Elysium; the main one unravels when you realize how many people were involved in the murder, what preceded it, and who the detective is who has to solve the case.
Disco Elysium is addictive in its story and wonderfully open to different approaches to gameplay. It requires at least twenty hours of playing from the player to solve the case, but since there are several different endings, I’m sure you’ll finish this game at least twice. Unfortunately, you’ll probably experience severe disappointment if you want justice in this story. The story’s ending was a cheap way out of a complex narrative that had impressed me until that moment.
It’s as if the game’s creators ultimately ran out of ideas for the last chapter. I don’t want to spoil anything for those who haven’t played the game, but I would like to explain my opinion to those who know what ending I’m talking about. Here’s the explanation in a spoiler tag, so read it with caution.
The Gameplay Of Disco Elysium
Disco Elysium has no combat – you resolve everything through a unique dialogue framework. That is, you can, in a particular context, hit other characters or shoot at them, but everything happens through selecting textual commands. Unlike most RPG games like Fallout, the system works differently. Critical statements or actions have so-called checks, two types: white and red. Both checks can fail, but you can retry the white ones if you upgrade the character’s skills, while the red ones are one-time only.
For each check, you have a displayed percentage chance of success, and this success depends on the character’s skills and a series of surrounding factors related to specific characters or situations. For example, you need to take a particular item from a machine; the check looks at the character’s physical fitness, and an additional factor that increases the chance of success is turning off the machine from which you’re taking the item. Also, you can dress your character in specific clothing that affects his success statistics.
The Inventory and General Use of Skills
Most equipment you use in Disco Elysium comes with both bonuses and negatives. This is particularly evident in the system called the Thought Cabinet. It’s a very innovative RPG element whose format cannot receive enough praise. Here’s how it works… Through conversations with people, you come across specific thoughts and issues. For example, when you encounter the idea of feminism, you can put that thought into internal development. During this development, you get a specific bonus and/or minus, in this case, a bonus to empathy. When you finish that thought after some time, you get a permanent bonus/minus, in the case of feminism, two points of authority over male characters.
The exciting thing is that you cannot know in advance what benefits each thought brings (unless you look up a list online). Once you decide to develop a thought, you cannot just give up on it – to forget it, you have to give up a point that you can spend on improving one of your skills that are important for the checks above. Moreover, out of 52 different thoughts, you can actively use only 12. Still, they are interlinked and affect the options offered during conversations or reward you with money, XP, resistance to opiates, etc.
What Are The RPG Elements Like?
RPG elements in this game are almost perfect, and practically every action has a particular implication. For example, there are several ways your character can find out his name, and none of them has a direct path to that information; each is tied to something else, whether it’s someone else’s blackmail, remembering what the character doesn’t want to recall, confronting shame, etc.
Playing specific roles in this game is genius. For example, you must pay 20 reals each day for a night in a hostel, the in-game currency. There are several ways you can get money. I took a plastic bag, collected empty bottles around the city, and then took them to recycling for a refund. On the other hand, you can become an ultraliberal, and money will come to you while you talk to others. Or, as a homeless person, you can sleep under an overturned boat and become a so-called Hobocop with an extraordinary sense of detecting the most valuable packaging in the city.
All of this sounds romantic, but as with most thoughts in the game, you have to “subscribe” to all of this – so you can dream on your own based on your choices. Here, the character won’t look different if he’s Hobocop, and animated events are a rarity.
The Look and Feel of Disco Elysium
The game’s visual style is specific, and everything looks like it was made with pastels. I was most impressed by the abstract illustrations for the Thought Cabinet, done by Estonian artist Anton Vill. Alongside them, the gloomy musical background fits perfectly, often sounding like… the suffering of miserable existence on a Monday morning or the melody of weltanschauung in the passing decadence of time.
The music of Disco Elysium is flawless, especially when listening with the XP-Panther Sky headphones. When you get the final cut, you will also experience the game with complete voiceover work, about a million words.
In Conclusion
To use religious vocabulary, Disco Elysium is a sanctuary of the RPG genre. With its innovative Thought Cabinet system and complex dialogue framework, this game has left an indelible mark and can rightfully be classified among the genre’s giants. The quality of its ending is debatable, but the overall story is worth discussing and will be taken as a new standard for detective adventures.
I think so many things aligned for this game that even its creators need to be made aware of how they created such an intriguing story and dialogue system, causing other games to look like second-rate products. And to end with a punchline – this is only the first project for this team so far!
Disco Elysium has an ESRB rating of M; we cannot recommend this to younger kids. However, if you see this gem for 10 euros or less, do yourself a favor and get this fantastic game.
Posted on 3rd Jan 2024 by igorthegreat