Games where role-playing is actually, you know, playing a role, are few and far between. Sophisticated is choosing between “be a jerk” or “be a hero”. High-end offers an option that’s neither, but you also don’t get any sweet bonuses. In the end, it usually doesn’t matter that much anyway, except the flavor text. Disco Elysium is the opposite of all that: all that matters is the role you play and the choices you make, not “which colored ball do you choose to pick an ultimately disappointing ending?”
Disco Elysium
Developer: ZA/UM
Price: $40
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
You begin swimming in a sea of blackness, fighting the urge to wake up. Unfortunately, the taste of liquor and vomit appears on your tongue as consciousness relentlessly intrudes. You open your eyes and you’re alone, in your underpants, on the floor of your shitty hotel room, wondering why you keep doing this to yourself. Who HASN’T been there? Maybe I did have a drinking problem.
During character creation, you’ll find you have stats like a classic RPG, but it’s more things like your psyche and ability to remember things than a simple +2 Strength. You’ll find yourself wondering if you can make that Savoir-Faire check with your current Espirit de Corps or if you should save it for later. Your Conceptualization might argue with your Logic. Who knows who will win? Either way, your brain is fully occupied, your body frequently rebellious, and in one of the default builds, you might just go insane. LOVELY.
The “waking up with amnesia among the filthy shreds of your own life” plot fits nicely with this since it makes your first choices and conversations part of your character. You may be a cop…you’re pretty sure you’re a cop…but are you a bad cop or a good cop? Are you a hobocop? Do you have an inexplicable feminist agenda that you bring up at every opportunity? Or are you the more physical type that punches mouthy kids and slams yourselves into locked doors so hard you die? It’s the only game I’ve played where you can take damage trying to grab your necktie from a spinning ceiling fan.
It’s the kind of RPG where you spend most of your time talking to people since you’re investigating a murder. It’s like someone heard about Planescape Torment and decided to make a depressing Eastern European noir cop drama out of it instead of a fantasy adventure.
A game this text-heavy lives and dies on the strength of its dialogue and the dialogue in this one crackles. The characters have life. Everyone gives you shit about being a drunken degenerate cop. Sometimes it’s laugh out loud funny. They even manage to write in dialect without it seeming super racist or super tedious and that is a goddamned miracle.
While it’s possible to poopsock and powergame your way through and go through every conversation option, it feels wrong to do so. Not because the game punishes you, but because the game is role-playing in the truest sense, not the one involving monsters and treasure. I don’t want my rabidly feminist hobocop working through all the conversation options with a mailbox. I want to express my sympathy with the mailbox and move on to the next crime, the next dumpster, the next murder. And the dialogue choices have consequences, too. At one point, I gave up being a detective for social realism after my comrades at the department heckled me too thoroughly and threw me into a crisis of existential despair.
Now for the real key: The normal thing with games like these is a second playthrough isn’t all that interesting. A few dialogue options change and maybe you get a different ending, but that’s it. In Disco Elysium, a second playthrough is worth your time. You’ll pick up things you didn’t notice before. Your hulking beast of a physical cop will be able to win fights your brainiac couldn’t, but he won’t notice as much. But he’ll beat the hell out of things. The character may play differently. If you didn’t work through every dialogue option, it feels different. The terrain of the game seems different when you can bull your way through. I didn’t try every stat and skill combo, but I tried several, and the major beats didn’t exactly change, but the way the story unfolded changed.
The designers have described themselves as “the last living Soviet game designers,” and that may or may not be true, but it feels true. The aesthetic is distinctly Eastern European–your Pathologics, your Metros have a similar vibe–and the sense of humor is as bleak as a good Russian joke. Not everyone is going to enjoy being a drunken, broken cop tormented by existential despair and murder, but by god, they should.
The Final Word
Finally, a roleplaying game where you play a role instead of “press button, make the number go up.”
– MonsterVine Rating: 5 out of 5 – Excellent
