DISCO ELYSIUM
Have you got the skills to be The Bill?
“COMBAT TAKES THE FORM OF DIALOGUE TREES AND SKILL CHECKS.”
FORMAT PS4 / PLAYERS 1 / PUB TBC / DEV ZA/UM
Waking up with no memory after a nasty bender you quite quickly realise you’re a police detective come to Martinaise, a particularly squalid part of the bustling city of Revachol, to investigate the hanging of an unidentified man behind the hotel you’re staying at. It’s easy enough to figure that out because he’s still hanging there. You haven’t done anything about him despite having been on the job for a few days already.
Like a guardian angel Kim Kitsuragi awaits you downstairs. Even though he’s from Precinct 57 and you’re from Precinct 41 (he tells you this), he’s your partner on the case. He’s surprised you’ve done nothing about the body, but takes it in his stride as he helps you kick off your investigation. He’s not the only ally who you can bounce ideas off and learn about the world from, however. You can also rely on your own skills, quite literally. Depending on how you spec your character initially and which skills you choose to level up, they’ll chime into your thought processes with dialogue as if they’re complete characters.
As you walk around and talk to people to unpick the mystery a thread at a time (often getting derailed by “Side Things”, as your character defensively calls them to Kim), skills like Encyclopaedia might tell you a half-remembered fact about the strange futuristic dystopia you find yourself in, Perception might pick up on a suspect’s visual tic and encourage you to push further, or Inland Empire will give you strange gut-instinct insights that come from somewhere deep within.
TRY, TRY AGAIN
You encounter various skill checks as you play, many of which allow you to move forward immediately in your mission if you pass them. Skill checks come in red and white varieties, and you can attempt the latter more than once as long as the skill has levelled up. Not got enough Endurance to get close to the hanging corpse without throwing up? Gain some XP and come back to try it again.
Thanks to things like this it genuinely ends up feeling as though you’re staggering your way through your own version of the case. At the beginning of our time with the game, many sections give us the impression they could allow us to progress threads of the case much more easily than we end up doing. We fail most opportunities to get the body down, and eventually we resort to requesting assistance from the harbour. Unfortunately, it’s closed due to a union strike. How we gain access to it presents several other options we can explore, depending on how we want to focus our character, and whether we want to compromise our morality (nod along with a racist, and he might allow you through, for instance).
Plenty of Side Things await, some of which might end up helping you out with the greater case, and some of which seem to conclude somewhat aimlessly (which leaves us wondering
“What if we’d approached this with different skills?”). For example, the hotel is part of a mostly abandoned shopping complex, which the owner of a bookshop claims is cursed. Could there be truth to the rumour? Besides the crime, strange things to be happening in Revachol.
BEAT COP
While the game is mostly laid-back (there’s no combat that doesn’t take the form of dialogue trees and skill checks), you constantly sense the passage of time. Over the course of the days you can spend on your investigation the impression builds that events are escalating and getting worse, and that something on the horizon might be inescapable. As you interact with people, time on the clock passes, so you’re constantly trying to juggle the tasks you have for the day with the time available, blocking out your investigation to make the best use of being in certain districts.
As your access to the map expands, you need to take care to make the best use of your time to ensure you not only solve the case, but also work out who you are and why you lost your memory. You also have to decide whether to be a benefit (or a terror) to those around the city who need help. Even just playing the first few in-game days, we can tell it’s packed with things to uncover, and a case that rapidly comes to feel like our own. With a gorgeous art style, clever dialogue that’s easy to parse, and a constant sense of mystery, it makes us feel the way classic-styled RPGs always did (though in truth a lot of them back in the day were pretty janky). While this RPG is confirmed to be heading to console, no release date has been set yet – but it’s an unmissable story.