Disco Elysium

"Come down

Hurting

Learning"

 

Billie Eilish - Xanny

 

 

It's hard for a game to impress me these days, but Disco Elysium's very opening had me boggling at the screen wondering: who the hell wrote this? And for once I mean that in the best possible way! Its mechanics offer little new, a largely text-based affair testing that permeable adventure/RPG hybrid borderland where so many ambitious indie developers flounder. No grinding mobs, XP awarded for task completion and exploration. No grinding loot, just a reasonable cash flow. Quite a bit of stat keeping but no combat system. For a litmus test of its successful execution though, consider a much later cutscene, boating across a stretch of water... gradually, very gradually, at realistic speed, without any fast-forwarding.

Sad FM indeed

It's the sort of scene I've criticized a hundred times over as uninspired filler, yet here its uniqueness, timing, pacing, framing, atmosphere all contribute to a meditative effect rarely equaled. And the campaign hovers quite consistently near that level of quality, whether its mood is humorous, macabre, farcical, exploratory or diving deep into convoluted dialogue trees. The wealth of background exposition which slightly choked Technobabylon goes down smooth here, even if you won't feel pressured to memorize it. The introspection which tripped into irrelevant navel-gazing in Sacred Fire is here differentiated into varying attitudes your internal monologue can adopt. The RPG detective schtick that sputtered into irrelevance in Gamedec here gets true skill implementation and opportunities for failure depending on your stats and past choices.
 

This is itself to gain a modifier in an "authority" check

This includes some wildly divergent paths for your campaign as a whole. I refused to cooperate with certain NPCs, which led to me never finding a particularly important piece of loot, which led to failing the climactic event... yet nevertheless going on to solve the case by the weight of evidence and reaching a rather positive ending. I avoided all political ideals, as none of them aligned with personal freedom and intellectual progress... but they did give me lines like "Chaos is my method. I am its scion." to compensate. When starting out I even huffed in indignation that this is very much not a game for a teetotaling shut-in, given its heavy emphasis on substance abuse and popular movements. (I kept expecting someone to be selling a Perky Pat diorama set.) But though a handful of skill checks prompted me to save-scum a bit, their sheer density written into the script exceeds even Baldur Gate 3's staggering gamut, albeit in a shorter campaign.

Come on, a game where you can die by stubbing your toe kicking a furnace can't be all bad, right? Not to say it's all good, either.

The inventory system could've used auto-sorting by skill boost and slot.

24 stats do result in some unnecessary redundancy (endurance and pain threshold? savoir faire and hand/eye coordination?)

The "find the bullet traces" quest is incredibly poorly worded (2/3 parts are triggered by other events) and too many others rely on stumbling upon a solution in unrelated locations.

Displaying unsolved skill checks on the map is a great quality of life interface improvement, but not updating them when they become unavailable by opting out of them in dialogue (e.g. don't play along with Plaisance's ramblings) veers back into uselessness. 

I love any system in which not only do you gain XP by action and not grinding, but time passes by your own actions. That being said, openly standardizing/listing time requirements for various actions would let you plan out your day better, immersion aside.

And, most importantly, for a game so heavily dependent on narrative immersion, either openly advertise your biases or check them at the door. No concealed carry bigotry.

 

Coming out in '19, Disco Elysium carries some obvious politically correct baggage. The only word they censor is "faggot" and an inordinate amount of page space is dedicated to otherwise irrelevant racism. Naturally, negative traits are overwhelmingly concentrated in male characters while females are always wiser, kinder, more competent or clever, etc. than the men around them. The selective outrage is visible enough in examples like Kitsouragi portrayed as victim of racism, valid yet painfully naive given Japan's own entrenched racism, and the white mercenaries killing blacks can't help but mirror H.G.Wells' hand-wringing about "the negro police" in When the Sleeper Wakes in 1900. A tone shift doesn't make you any more enlightened... but 120 years should have.

 

Sure, they tried making the racism less unidirectional with Measurehead, they tried giving a woman a wrong opinion or shady motivation here and there, but in overall effect it's like seeing a Klansman trying to lighten the mood by telling self-deprecating jokes about his WASP friends... while burning a cross on your lawn. They went out of their way to justify women's duplicity or other misdeeds and to ensure no female character is ever verifiably guilty towards a lowly male. You can walk from one end of the game map to the other going straight from one dialogue to another and another all bashing men as stupid violent drunks while glorifying women as superior beings, and the protagonist's personal history includes no option that doesn't paint him as at fault and a complete loser... for being disregarded in the first place.

 

Still, that predictable brainwashing aside, Revachol's dashed hopes and tarnished ambitions make it one of the best backdrops for moral development since Planescape: Torment and Tyranny, and the decor and ambience flesh it out expertly. Normally I scoff at full voicing (and have criticized it as a waste of development time in Obsidian/Larian's products) but at least in Disco Elysium's "final cut" rework, everyone from Kim your calm and reasonable sounding board to your inner voices' self-conscious theatricality to Evrart's oleaginous bonhomie to Cuno's manic posturing go a long way toward making the otherwise limited campaign feel like a world. And the sheer wealth of detail, while sometimes indulgently derivative (I do believe they even managed to squeeze in a reference to Coma White and Coma Black) is expertly paced over the course of your adventures.

 

It would be fruitless (and spoilery) to anatomize all Disco Elysium's melancholy, but its recurring theme of intoxication, by substances, by ideas, by ambition, by emotion, and the absurdity of human behavior thus fueled carries through the smallest details of your decrepit surroundings, your grating conscience, the careful word choice drawing you into both despair and mockery of same, the grandeur and pettiness of idealism, the nobility or self-annihilating madness of devotion, the futility of existence and the conscious decision to fill or at least bridge the void. You could argue the game's validity from any number of points, but the very terms in which it must be described to even formulate such arguments cement its advancement of a still childishly fumbling creative medium.

 

Despite its flaws, a brilliant piece of work.