At this point, you’ve probably heard about Disco Elysium.
The landmark detective RPG from ZA/UM took four categories at last week’s Game Awards, scored a perfect 10 from GameSpot (only the outlet’s 16th in its 23-year history) and generally has a lot of people saying a lot of very nice things. It’s the kind of game that appears on few people’s radars before release, then inspires such an outsized reaction that the rest of us are forced to pay attention.
That’s why you’re getting this review now, two months after the game’s October release. Disco wasn’t on my radar until reviewers, podcasters and my friends shouted its praises at me. I’m glad they did, and I’m glad I picked it up. So, let’s talk for a moment about why that is, and what this isometric RPG does that makes it so different than any other game I’ve played.
In Disco Elysium, you wake up in a filthy rented room with no memory of your life or really anything about the world. After throwing some clothes on and emerging from your room, you’ll quickly find out that you’re a detective dispatched to Martinaise, a decaying district of the fictional city of Revachol, to solve a murder. There’s a man hanging from a tree behind your hotel. He’s been there for days. You were supposed to get him down, but drank yourself into oblivion instead.
This complete and utter amnesia gives you room to create a character who is utterly yours, while still being deeply tied to a certain kind of personality. You can make your detective give up drugs and alcohol, but he will never be a purely noble knight in shining armor. He was sent to solve a murder and didn’t do anything but drink an apocalyptic amount of liquor for DAYS. It’s an interesting, character-defining twist on the amnesiac protagonist trope. On the one hand, it’s a convenient reason for you to ask basic questions about the world. On the other hand, there’s a unique weight of shame that accompanies these questions. Your memory is bad because you are bad. It’s a set-up that results in a stellar, funny, often heartbreakingly melancholy mystery yarn.
Before any of that, though, you’ll build a character. Your detective will always be a forgetful alcoholic, but he can be a smart one, a brawny one, an emotionally intelligent one or some combination thereof. The skills that accompany these archetypes are not typical RPG fare. Say goodbye to putting points into hacking or strength or stealth and say hello to “Inland Empire,” which boosts your understanding of the inner workings of the city and its organizations; to “Visual Calculus,” which increases your chances of properly assessing a crime scene; to “Electrochemistry,” which ups your tolerance for and knowledge of stimulating substances. Skills in Disco Elysium are as varied and strange as the skills we value and cultivate IRL.
Skills are joined by thoughts. As you are introduced to new viewpoints or read new information, you will occasionally be presented with a related idea which you can accept or reject. If you accept the thought, it becomes one option in your “Thought Cabinet,” a metaphorical bureau where you can internalize thoughts — a process that, to simulate the process of learning and accepting a new idea, takes several hours — and equip them. As you level up, you can use skill points to unlock more thought slots.
Disco Elysium is able to do this, to eschew traditional, combat-oriented skills, because it is not a traditional, combat-oriented game. Rather than building a world for violence, ZA/UM has created a world where fighting is seldom the most effective means to an end. Sometimes it is. For example, your detective, if he’s especially spry, might knock a racist giant out with a spin-kick, opening up a new area in Martinaise. But, if he’s more emotional or intellectual, he likely won’t stand a chance. Violence is a little messier in Disco Elysium; an outworking of its conversational mechanics, rather than a separate branch of gameplay.
So, instead of boosting your punches and shoots, Disco asks you to put points into developing your cop’s personality. While the skills are atypical, the way Disco Elysium implements them is even stranger. As in most RPGs, your skill level determines what you are able to do. You can’t spin-kick that racist giant unless you level up Physical Instrument, the skill relating to your strength. But, unlike in any other RPG I’ve played, your skills like to talk. In a fascinating simulacrum of how our personalities and interests determine the thoughts that occupy our brains, skills and thoughts in Disco Elysium have opinions and will attempt to convince you to do things their way. Each skill and internalized thought is a character with an opinion about how you should approach a situation. If you have high Physique stats, your brain will constantly tell you to solve problems with force. You don’t have to listen, but your skills will often provide extra options in conversations and, just as often, limit you. They will pipe up at the wrong times; stay silent when you need them.
As a result, the roleplaying in Disco Elysium goes far deeper than Paragon or Renegade, Sith or Jedi. As in this year’s The Outer Worlds, your detective can be a revolutionary communist, a fascist strongman or a squishy centrist. But, unlike in The Outer Worlds, there are ample opportunities to spec your character in weirder directions, give him unusual interests — like an undue fascination with a mythological bird — or hide secrets from his partner.
Doing that last thing will probably make you feel guilty, by the way. Kim Kitsuragi, a detective from a neighboring precinct sent to work the case in Martinaise alongside you, is one of the best characters of the year. Disciplined, yet gentle; no-nonsense, but warm, Kim is the perfect foil to your nightmare amnesiac. As I played, I enjoyed seeing Kim react to new developments, watching the depths of his character revealed in small moments. I felt legitimately guilty when I did something morally dubious behind his back. Your detective’s past may pull you toward debauchery, but Kim is a tug in the other direction: a kind hearted friend who treats you far better than your actions warrant.
But, Kim is just one character in a world replete with them. The chunk of Martinaise you have access to is small — roughly the size of a city block — but surprisingly dense. Every character you meet has pages and pages of text that will help you better understand them and the world you’re living in. Disco Elysium’s world has existed in lead designer Robert Kurvitz’s mind for over a decade, first manifesting itself as a tabletop RPG and then in a novel and now as a video game. That long gestation period has given rise to a world that feels fully-formed, and playing Disco Elysium is almost always a rich, fulfilling experience as a result of its text-heavy gameplay.
The game’s reliance on storytelling — above combat or set pieces — results in an approach to quest design that entirely sidesteps the tedium that has long plagued other open-world RPGs. Across 30 hours with the game, I never encountered a single “go here, kill 10 monsters, come back” quest. Instead, ZA/UM has drawn on ‘90s point-and-click adventures to create quests that are individually interesting and devoid of filler. The puzzles that form the center of those games are often replaced with skill checks. So, to open a door, rather than puzzling out a wild combination of unrelated objects, you may just need to increase your endurance. This generally works extremely well and results in quests that play out in different ways depending on the character that you’ve built. Quests accentuate your role playing choices in often compelling ways.
However, the fact that many quests are solved with a skill check — which ostentatiously plays out in a virtual dice roll — occasionally hampers the roleplaying, instead of bolstering it. Rather than selecting the skill that fit the character I was building, I was sometimes pushed to pick the ones I needed to increase to retry a skill check. This was especially true when I considered unlocking additional Thought Cabinet slots. I wanted to internalize more thoughts, but couldn’t justify it when I knew I would need to boost a skill to advance the story. In fact, the Thought Cabinet began to feel increasingly ornamental the longer I played.
Another of the game’s best assets, its textual density, becomes a liability as it heads into its final hours. Its wordy richness does wonders for building a world, but isn’t quite as successful at bringing a story to a satisfying conclusion. To the end, I remained intrigued by the murder mystery at the game’s heart. But, while there are fascinating twists toward Disco Elysium’s end, the game struggles to conclude and mostly just peters out. The story is excellent as a whole, but fails, in the end, to climax with the electricity you might expect from such a confidently written whodunnit.
Any problems I have with Disco Elysium, though, are dwarfed by the things that the game does so well. This is a groundbreaking RPG that introduces fascinating new systems that will likely influence the next 10 years of RPG design while simultaneously fixing the major structural issues that have hampered RPGs for the last 10. Disco’s ambition may occasionally get in its way, but most of the time, this game just absolutely rules.
Disco Elysium review code for PC provided by the author.
Disco Elysium is out now on PC, and will release on PS4 and Xbox One in 2020.