Disco Elysium
PC
An unflinching portrayal of society at its worst, which sometimes strays across the line into nihilism
Developer/publisher ZA/UM Studio Format PC
Release Out now
They descend on you as you struggle to wake, bloodied and hungover, in the ruins of a hotel room: a barrage of voices, like pirate radio stations competing for the same frequency. In ZA/UM’s brilliant, crackpot hybrid of alternate-1970s whodunnit and Black Isle-era CRPG, your character traits are themselves characters who live inside your head. A vast chunk of the game’s million-word script is given over to interjections only you, a self-destructive amnesiac detective, can hear – interjections that range from advice through good-natured heckling to frothing contempt.
Some voices urge you to be methodical, to show restraint when interviewing suspects, or think twice about somebody’s testimony. Others encourage you to throw punches, spout sexist invective or chase invisible insects. Inspired by the monologues of hard-boiled crime novels and the group storytelling of pen-and-paper roleplaying, Disco Elysium’s skill system is a marvellous reworking of calcified genre conventions. In Baldur’s Gate – another RPG set in one corner of a larger world – you must gather your party before setting out. In this game, your character is the party, and there are plenty of companions you might wish you could leave behind.
Some skills, like Perception and Reaction Speed, are intuitive. Others must be figured out in the course of play, as you pursue a murder investigation while putting together the pieces of your past – many scattered across the game’s mournful, painterly world, which changes from day to day according to an overarching script. Shivers, for instance, is your sensitivity to the social rhythms and forgotten histories of Revachol, the crumbling fantasy metropolis in which you wake. Like the narrator in a China Miéville novel, Shivers cuts through the urban texture to deliver visions of unseen spaces and the bloodshed of a backfiring revolution, decades before. Inland Empire, meanwhile, measures your susceptibility to psychic forces (or at least, your level of superstition) and allows you to converse with inanimate objects, from corpses to neckties.
The skills chime in continually during dialogue according to automatic background dice rolls, shaping the conversation options in a way that, while often overwhelming, is always fun to unravel. Levelling up a skill gives it more say in the proceedings, for good and ill. Your Physical Implement stat, for instance, is a bit of a bully – assign it too many points, and you’ll be harder to scare off but also too brutish when delicacy is required. There are also less frequent manual skill checks with a chance-of-success percentage, some of which can be attempted more than once: catching a pair of thrown dice, for example.
Failing a skill check isn’t necessarily cause for a reload. Much of Disco Elysium is devoted to what happens when things go awry, and there is a fatalism to Revachol, a city marooned between the failures of communists and monarchists, which makes your own comic missteps feel like part of the pattern. Level-ups aside, you can boost your skills by wearing the right clothes, typically without much regard for taste. After a few hours of play we looked like we’d been dressed by unruly children, with a tatty mesh vest to emphasise our sagging musculature and a bow-tie for theatricality.
That cobbled-together wardrobe reflects your character’s confusion about his identity. Amnesiac protagonists are ten-a-penny in RPGs, but here the approach is transformative: your amnesia extends to basic principles of society and even reality. This creates room on the one hand for a slightly exhausting amount of world-building, and on the other for a pleasant dose of devil’s advocacy. Do the police exist to protect society or maintain an unjust status quo? Is money a necessary evil? Some concepts can be preserved and ‘researched’ in your character’s Thought Cabinet, to varying long-term effect. Redefine yourself as a prophet of the apocalypse, for example, and you’ll unlock additional dialogue options while undergoing a permanent cut to Rhetoric, because everybody thinks you’re mad.
Disco Elysium is an unflinching portrayal of society at its worst, and it sometimes strays across the line into showy nihilism. You’re free to utter homophobic slurs and even embrace the concept of racial supremacy in your Thought Cabinet, albeit with an ulterior motive. The writers are good at satirising such bigotry, however, and they reserve equal mockery for those who refuse to take sides: there are some vicious jokes about the prevalence of non-committal third or fourth dialogue options in RPGs. If the game has a moral compass, it’s Kim Kitsuragi, a dependably withering fellow officer who accompanies you during the daytime (you can slip out at night if there are things you’d rather he didn’t witness). Some of Disco Elysium’s best moments are those in which he and you work a crime scene, bouncing speculations off each other – speculations you’ll revisit, hours later, as each day throws up its share of surprises.
The story has one fixed outcome, but there is huge variety in terms of how you get there, with many hours of optional quests to dig into. The writers do a sterling job of conveying the impact of each choice. Perhaps the most engrossing scene sees you attempting to prevent a shootout, in what becomes an anatomy of your findings thus far. By the end of the game you’ll have conducted a similar anatomy of Revachol itself. The role of the homicide detective in fiction is rarely just to crack the case; it’s also to illuminate the world around that case. You’ll never shrug on the mantle of a Chosen One in Disco Elysium, but there’s something powerful about how it lets you trace the links between the matter at hand and the immensities of history, reducing that opening tumult of voices to a single signal.