Review: Disco Elysium Is a Shrewd Whodunit and Marvel of Open-Ended Design

The game is a fascinating, unique, and fulfilling portrayal of the human mind.

Disco Elysium
Photo: ZA/UM

The first dialogue exchange that occurs in Disco Elysium isn’t between you and another person, but with yourself. More specifically, it’s with “Ancient Reptilian Brain,” which speaks in a husky, swaggering snarl in an attempt to lure you back to the depths of being blackout drunk. Eventually, your limbic system chimes in. Even after you open your eyes to find an amnesiac old detective with a ghastly fashion sense staring in the mirror, you never stop talking to yourself in Disco Elysium. This is an extremely insular game, devoting as it does vast amounts of text to your internal thoughts, and in doing so it offers one of the most fascinating, unique, and fulfilling portrayals of the human mind.

On the surface, playing the game seems traditional enough. It’s presented as a top-down role-playing game where you wander around the city of Revachol and, on its outskirts, a snowy coast with a ramshackle fishing village and an abandoned church. You, the detective, are in town to solve a murder as well as (hopefully) the mystery of whatever prompted you to go on a catastrophic bender, which blasted all memory of everything and everyone from your brain (dialogue options include asking about things like the concept of money). As in a pen-and-paper RPG, the detective’s various skills are measured against certain actions; for one, a high Endurance gives a better percent chance of not vomiting at the scent of a rotting corpse.

And the skills have voices, too, that nudge into your conversations and internal thoughts. They’re always bouncing around in your head, some skills louder and more trustworthy than others, to offer commentary and observations or even give advice; a high enough Empathy skill means you pick up on facial expressions and infer emotions, which can then inform your dialogue choices in a conversation. The Authority skill helps boss people around but also demands petty displays of fealty and respect for your occupation, while the Inland Empire skill dispenses nonsensical feelings and hunches that tend to make sense down the line: “Love killed me,” says a decomposing corpse if you pass the Inland Empire stat check to carry on a conversation with it, and hours later, further investigation reveals it to technically be true.

Advertisement

Playing Disco Elysium feels like having an angel and a devil on your shoulders, only you’re not sure which one is which and there’s so many of them that you don’t have nearly enough shoulders to contain them all. Maybe they’re all devils. Perhaps inevitably, the game’s pace can lag as you sort through various thought processes. There’s no traditional combat system, and much time will be taken up by simply carrying on conversations or going through actions like procuring a necktie from a ceiling fan. Things frequently spiral out of control as conversations devolve into a hilarious soup of skills screaming at you alongside a list of dialogue choices you’d rather not say—barring, perhaps, a lone thought that may go something like, “These are all ridiculous, and I don’t want to say any of them.”

The player character is an abject disaster of a human being, a man who has essentially melted his personality into primordial ooze only to have it unceremoniously cobbled back together in some vague shape of a person. Part of the fun here is failing certain skill checks, or the sense of just skirting by based on some absurd hunch. And the type of disaster you play is open to multiple interpretations. For one, apologizing to everyone for drunken behavior might label you as the dreaded Sorry Cop, one of many equippable thoughts that provide additional effects or increase skills. And sorting out the Communism thought and equipping it will provide bonus experience points when choosing left-wing dialogue options.

Of course, you don’t have to be Communist, nor do you need to be sorry all the time. The game is a marvel of open-ended design, where one set of skills might net a wholly different outcome or provide additional context. The system of skill checks and dialogue choices is always branching off in different directions, and it never feels like you’re missing opportunities so much as forging a new path; a character built around physicality, for example, may traipse through entirely different dialogue options and actions than one made to visually dissect crime scenes. Rather than some jack-of-all-trades route that lets you be the boss of everything, there’s instead an ever-unfolding series of alternate routes and methods of expression.

Advertisement

Disco Elysium feels almost futuristic in its design, eschewing so many of the typical story and design hang-ups of video games. It’s a bold, ambitious work that’s stripped of world-ending conflicts, while taking place on a dense yet relatively small map. Despite all the different pathways and the 30-hour playtime, it’s content with interpersonal relationships, moments of shared history and pain rather than scores of bodies left in your wake. The characters are as memorable as they are varied, from your put-upon but encouraging partner, Kim Kitsuragi, to a mysterious person known only as “the Pigs,” to the 12-year-old drug-dealing hellion throwing rocks at the corpse outside the hotel where you sleep.

Disco Elysium’s tone is relentlessly sardonic, as a reflection of its setting and the characters who inhabit it. The game is snide about everyone and everything, and sometimes it can feel aimlessly unpleasant, as in the aforementioned child whose vocabulary seems mainly devoted to (censored) homophobic slurs. But when everything clicks, it makes for an odd combination of sadness, beauty, and humor. The places you visit in Revachol are still torn apart by a long-past war, ravaged until there’s nothing left. The ideologies have fallen away and there are only disaffected people scrambling through the ruins of a society reticent to commit to anything anymore. It’s a desolate maelstrom where you learn, slowly, to exist again among people and their flaws, searching for mutual understanding with voices outside your own head.

The game was reviewed using a review code provided by Dead Good PR.

Score: 
 Developer: ZA/UM  Publisher: ZA/UM  Platform: PC  Release Date: October 15, 2019  Buy: Game

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.