This is a game I’d heard nothing but excellent things about and have been meaning to play for years, but the perfect storm of reasons finally got me to play it. Thing number one was my partner wanting to play it together (or rather, go through individually at roughly the same time) at some point this year, and the other point was it being down to just $10 on Steam. I was about to finish Super Hero Operations, and still had the ability to stay home and no-life the game if I wanted because it was still winter break, so now seemed like the absolute perfect time to go through it, and so I did. Over the course of 50.5 hours in less than a week, I finally played through Disco Elysium. It’s a game so dense and just full of stuff that it’s kinda hard for me to write about and not feel like I’m missing something, but I’ll do my best~.
DE sees you waking up from some kind of stupor, nearly naked in an upstairs hostel room. You pull yourself together and bump into a nice young woman in the hallway, and you’re informed that it’s year ’51 of the Current Century, you’re in the district of Martinaise in the city of Revachol, and you’re apparently some sort of policeman. As for you, all you remember is… nothing. You have no memory of this place, of your name, of your face. Even concepts like “money” or “government” are entirely foreign concepts to our Detective. You venture downstairs where you’re told you’re here to not only investigate a murder, but you’ve been here for three days already. The murder isn’t just a hanging: the body still hasn’t even been taken down after over a week. With no idea what your past or future have in store for you, you meet the man who will end up being your number one compatriot for this adventure, Kim Kitsuragi, and venture outside into the world of Disco Elysium. DE is first and foremost an adventure game, and a very player-directed one at that. If you’ve played Shenmue, it almost has that quality of “no objective markers. You wanna solve the mystery? Then you best get to detecting, Mr. Detective!”, though I’d say this accomplishes that style of self-directed gameplay in a much more well realized product than Shenmue (even if they’re not quite going for the same type of experience). It has the perspective of a Black Isle CRPG, but there isn’t any combat to speak of. The developers have been very forthcoming with how one of their old favorite games, Planescape Torment, helped inspire DE, but this game has the good sense to omit actual combat mechanics, unlike PT does. Even encounters you could call “combat” still take place within the game’s framework of dialogue trees. All that out of the way, DE is a very personal as well as a very political story with mysteries surrounding both topics. Martinaise is a constantly shifting and changing world over the days you spend there, with tons of NPCs to meet, locations to explore, and quests to find and do, or not. Figuring out just what kind of person your detective is going to be, even down to trying to learn what your name is or looking in a mirror to even get a picture of what you look like (if you don’t, your picture in the lower left will just be a cloudy haze the whole game), and that’s reflected in the game’s stats and mechanics. Detective has four primary, Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics that each contain six skills within them. These skills are not just skills however: They are aspects of his personality (you could even view them as members of his plural system, if that’s something you’re familiar with). A friend of mine described it as a kind of Greek Chorus (the theatrical term) with you at all times, so “the Chorus” is how I’ve taken to referring to the skills as characters. The higher level of points you have in a skill, the more likely you are to succeed not only active checks (some of which can be retried, others of which can’t) in the dialogue, but also passive checks both inside and outside dialogue. In fact, if you have a skill *too* high, then that Chorus member can outright take the spotlight from you and have Detective do things you otherwise wouldn’t’ve had him do. The sheer degree to which your skills are characters unto themselves is just one more thing that makes the world of Disco Elysium so much more engaging and interesting. There’s not only a rich outer world, but a rich inner world to explore too. The developers of DE are Estonian, and it really shows in how their world is constructed and how their narrative plays out. There are a lot of aspects to the world that will probably be pretty familiar to anyone who’s versed in Eastern European literature, but they do a lot to subvert those tropes as well. DE is not just a very political story in the terms of how its story has Detective working in very political situations to try and sort out the main murder mystery, but it’s also a very politically designed game in how it gets the player to try and analyze their own beliefs about the world in the process. The world of Elysium is one crafted to both be very evocative of the world we live in, but also one divorced enough from real life to let you view things from a fresh angle. From the money-focused “Ultraliberalism” to the likely more familiar “moralism”, the game does a lot to push you to view aspects of our real world from a new angle. I could write or talk for hours about different analogies and metaphors that DE uses to different effects (and in terms of talking, I already have I assure you x3), but I’ll conclude this narrative section by stating once more that it really does it expertly. It’s hard to really say much more than that because of just how easy it is for one playthrough to be *so* different from another. The way your skills interact with the world, especially passive checks, are done so subtly that it’s almost impossible to realize what you even *could* be missing if your stats were just arranged a bit differently. DE is absolutely a game I intend to replay not only because of how much I know I missed, but especially because of how much I’m excited to discover how much I don’t know I missed. A lot of the mechanics of the game are wrapped up in its writing, so I’ve already covered most of the mechanical aspects, but I’ll elaborate on another few things here that aren’t quite so explicitly tied into the storytelling as such. You gain EXP by doing quests and gathering information, and a level up gives you another skill point to raise a skill by one. There are a lot of mid-conversation active skill checks you can try to do all manner of things, and raising a skill point (or learning new info diegetically that affects your skill roll) can give you another chance at those skill checks, as well as just generally making that skill stronger. The game uses a system of rolling 2 d6 + whatever your skill is to pass checks as trivial as 8 and as godly as 18, but a 2 is always a failure and a 12 is always a success. The game is very transparent about these active checks, and it’s really nice to see just how clear the game is in general with how its dialogue trees are put together. There’s never any ambiguity in terms of what a dialogue option will do when it comes to outright ending a conversation (or concluding a mid-convo topic) will do, and in a game where it matters *so* much what dialogue options you do and *don’t* pick, that’s a really good feature not to skimp on. There is also the “thought” system, where you can pick up “thoughts” to dwell on an “internalize” in your Thought Cabinet. After taking however many hours in-game it takes to think about those things, the associated bonuses (usually penalties) from dwelling on it will disappear and give you a new semi-permanent bonus (or penalty) depending on the thought. You can spend a skill point to expand your thought cabinet, or burn a skill point to get rid of a thought you particularly don’t like. Internalized thoughts can have all manner of bonuses, but there’s no way of knowing what that bonus will be until you finish internalizing it. This is the one aspect of the game I don’t so much like the implementation of. It feels a bit tacked-on compared to everything else, and while a lot of the bonuses are truly great and worth having, just how much in-game time (which is large, but not infinite) these take to complete makes them sometimes pretty serious investments. Time only passes when you’re talking to people, so undoing an internalized thought by loading an old save involves undoing a LOT of progress, most likely. That said, you’re also very unlikely to run out of time in the game. You *can* run out of time, but like a game like Fallout 1 or 2, you’d really have to be trying to do that for it to happen. At any rate, not knowing what internalized thoughts will ultimately do is an unwelcome level of opacity in design in a game otherwise very transparent and forthcoming with info, and I never felt that it complemented the rest of the game’s systems the way the other respective system do one another. The aesthetics of the game are very striking and beautiful. The whole game has this sort of painted aspect to how the graphics look, with details both 2D and 3D looking like they walked out of some twentieth century work of art. Character portraits are striking and give great insight as to who you’re talking to, and the voicework in particular is absolutely excellent. The most major addition that the Final Cut edition (which is basically the only version you can buy these days, and is the version available on consoles too) is fully voicing all dialogue, and damn is it effective. The music is also very good, with the game having a great soundtrack to underscore scenes of all sorts and set the tension appropriately. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Though this wasn’t the first game I beat this year, really, we’re starting this year off incredibly strong just like I did last year with Dandy Dungeon. Disco Elysium lived up to the hype and then some. It’s an incredibly well crafted thought provoking adventure game not to be missed. This is absolutely in the territory of “how will anyone, including the guys who made it, ever make something better than this?”, though I’m absolutely excited to see them (or anyone else) give it a shot! If it even comes close to this well crafted an experience, then my hat is truly off to them. Until then, the only question left for me at this point is not “if” I will replay Disco Elysium, but “when” x3
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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