April 25th, 2021
Every so often there’s a video game that comes out that reminds you about the potential of its particular genre. I won’t give too many examples at the risk of starting a fight, but the last time I played a game like that for (western) RPGs it was Divinity: Original Sin 2 with its many branching paths to complete the same objectives. So many times it feels like RPGs are just checking boxes when it comes to quest design, with a completionist-embracing “do all of these things and then you get to move on” attitude that Original Sin 2 shattered by giving you alternatives to the things you need to do to push the story forward. Disco Elysium is, in many ways, another landmark in RPG game design in the same vein as Original Sin 2, only instead of revamping how the genre approaches quests the game instead does great things with character interaction and dialogue trees.
Let’s start with the basics of the story. You’re a middle aged man that wakes up in a hotel room after a week-long bender with no memory of who you are or what you’re doing here. After awkwardly gathering your clothes from your trashed hotel room you’ll eventually start interacting with other people in the building and realize that you’re a police detective that was supposed to be investigating a lynching that happened a week ago…and that the body is still hanging off the tree outside. From these ruined dregs of what has become your life you get to decide how you want to spend the rest of the game, though the murder will always be attached to you in some way thanks to your fellow detective, Kim, who acts as a voice of reason and clarity throughout your various antics.
And that’s essentially the game in a nutshell. You can spend your time solving the murder and making Kim happy or you can waste hours arguing political theory and the nature of the universe with every person you meet on the street. You can try to put the pieces of your life back together or you can continue your spiral of drug use and self abuse to bury your pain for as long as you can. The big thing that really contributes to your choices is the game’s in-game timer, which is consistently ticking down as you wander the city streets and talk to NPCs, a constant reminder that you’re on the clock and maybe should actually get around to dealing with that rotting naked body in the tree behind the hotel.
In some ways the game’s biggest flaw is having both feeling like there’s not enough time and then not enough to do. Early on the game feels like a race, presenting dozens of things to do with both investigating the murder and your own existence while the ticking clock hounds you at every turn. How thorough do you want to be with your examination of the crime scene? Should you take the time talking to EVERYONE or just people that were witnesses? Can you really afford spending eight hours getting into the mind of a man just to ask for a favor? However by the middle of the fourth day I found myself running out of things that I could do, and in some ways that’s by design. There’s a lot to do in Disco Elysium and the devs want to give you plenty of time to do it, but as well intended as this might be it’s also somewhat jarring to feel the pressure of everything only to suddenly need to read a bunch of books and magazines to kill time before you need to get to your next scheduled meeting.
But enough about the story, the real meat of Disco Elysium comes from the dialogue and narration, both between characters and with the voices in your own head. You’ll meet all sorts in the game, from store owners and dock works to street drunks and children selling books, and they all have interesting things to say and (in the Final Cut version of the game, at least) are all very well voiced. You can ask them all sorts of things, with or without Kim around to convince you to stay on task, but most conversations contain one or more skill checks and this is when the game’s contribution to the genre comes into play: the skill check modifiers. Most video games with skill checks just have the flat modifier that we’re all familiar with: “Hey you have 15 in persuasion so you can convince this guard to walk away” or “Your lock picking is 99, you can get in this door with ease,” but Disco Elysium takes it a step further where all sorts of things can contribute to making a skill check easier or harder.
Any big time example of how this works from the actual game would be a spoiler, so I’ll make one up. Say there’s a guy that you need a favor from but he’s really pigheaded because he doesn’t like that you’re a massive alcoholic and cops have treated his friends poorly in the past. You could try to pass the skill check on a 28% chance (or save scum and just spam the check over and over until you land it) or you could come back later on the advice of a voice in your head. So you leave and wander around the city, where you encounter a few people chatting. You ask them about people in the neighborhood and they mention the pigheaded man doesn’t like being talked down to, and that he just wants to receive the proper respect from people that ask him for help. Visiting the convenience store leads to you overhearing an argument between the store owner and a man that wants to buy alcohol, and rather than threatening either man you manage to distract them from their disagreement with a sad story about your own life and self worth in relation to the rest of the universe. Then you head back to the pigheaded man and find that your skill check is now 65% with +1 modifiers because you learned how to talk to him, you nonviolently broke up the argument, and you haven’t had a drink in the past eight hours, but unfortunately there’s also a -1 modifier because he heard about your pathetic story and respects you less as a man.
These sorts of things happen all the time in Disco Elysium. A book you read might inspire a tactic that you can use in a negotiation, an offhand remark from a snotty little boy may give you the confidence to make a difficult jump, and introducing yourself the wrong way to someone can sabotage any attempt to get them to do what you want. This also means that running down a full list of conversation topics may not to be the best thing to do in a given situation, unlike what Bioware games have trained us to believe, and the way that you make these choices can impact the way your discussions go in sometimes unexpected ways. It’s great to have this level of depth in something as mundane as in-game dialogue, and I hope that other game devs are taking notes for the RPGs of the future.
Another thing the modifier system does is help you feel like a real detective. Much like an investigator you can use things that people said earlier in the conversation against them later, pointing out the inconsistencies in their stories or the nervous twitches they do when you bring up something they’d rather you didn’t discuss. This is aided by the voices in your head that I mentioned earlier, with every skill in the game assigned their own personality and opinions about what you’re doing at all times. The logic part of your brain may supply useful factual information to support or contradict what your targets are saying, while the perception part might notice that the wind has gotten colder and the empathy part wonders if you should give the poor man your jacket. It all pairs together in a nice, if somewhat chaotic, pattern and, just like my earlier point about how every conversation choice may not be the right thing to say, it’s not always a great idea to listen to the voices in your head either. And that’s the other great thing about these skill checks: they’re not always the right thing to do. Generally in your Mass Effects or your Fallouts if you’re given a charm check or a repair check or whatever you can normally be content in knowing that what you’re doing will benefit you in some way, but sometimes in Elysium you’ll just end up sabotaging yourself even further by listening to that little voice that says you should attempt this 80% skill check because it’ll “totally” impress everyone watching. The line of what you want to do and what you shouldn’t do is in a consistent blurred state because of this, and sometimes it can just feel good to let go and do the crazy dance move your brain has been saying will help solve the case, even if you’re not sure why. Who knows, maybe it will?
And that leads into something that I can’t emphasize enough: regardless of if you pass or fail these skill checks there’s a lot of fun to be had in Disco Elysium from the absurdity of it all. I knew I was playing something special when I failed a skill check that tasked me with skillfully running away, but instead of just simply failing to move my character broke into a sprint that ended with him accidentally body slamming an old woman. Then I went outside and had a conversation with a mailbox, cheering myself up by empathizing with its pain, and moved on to debating the merits of opening a shipping container by just talking to the door until it opened. And that was all a good twenty hours before my favorite part, which I won’t spoil, involving a rickety ladder. A lot of games try to have a mixed up, confused relationship between the main character and reality but I haven’t played any that have grasped it quite as firmly or stuck this landing quite as well as Disco Elysium, though your relationship with the game’s supernatural elements may vary if you don’t have points in the proper skills.
That note about skills is the start of the “downer” part of this review, since despite the brilliant and hilarious design choices in the dialogue system the rest of the game has a few issues that nibbled away at my enjoyment as the experience went on. The first is the game’s “Thought Cabinet,” the game’s answer to a perk or feat system that you might find in FPSes or other RPGs. As you progress through the game, making certain dialogue choices or seeing certain things, your inner voices might bring up an observation to you about the nature of reality, and if you pursue that line of thought you’ll unlock the ability to do a deep dive on it in your Thought Cabinet. Each of these deep dives takes a certain amount of time to process and you may suffer from penalties as thinking about a given topic distracts you from the world around you, but once you’re done processing you will gain a new perspective on things and some benefit from the time you invested…in theory.
Yes, the big problem with the Thought Cabinet is that you have no idea what sort of benefit or penalty you’ll receive once you’ve finished your eight hour introspection on anything from what your age is to your thoughts on whose fault it is that the world is in the shape it’s in today. You may get a sweet +3 bonus to a skill or you may just get a -1 instead because thinking about this thing for as long as you have has made you so mad that your hands won’t stop shaking. These thoughts then stick with you until you spend a skill point to remove them from your head, which is a nice enough undo button but I really wish there was some indication about the benefits or drawbacks of the thoughts before you think them. I will say I appreciate the “realism” of this feature, both the “you’re so distracted thinking about this that you can’t focus on other things” and the way that sometimes you don’t know where a thought process will lead you until you get there, but on the other hand this is a freaking video game. I think a little note that says something flavorful while still being informative wouldn’t be out of the question, perhaps a thought that gives you a negative score would say something like “may give you a clearer perspective on the inner workings of the human mind, for better or worse.”
The game is also rather constrictive at times when it comes to things that it lets you do, specifically when it comes to skill checks that you try to do “too soon” for the game’s narrative purposes. The most relevant example happens early in the game where you may want to look out a window, but when you click on it there’s a skill check with a -10 modifier on it and a note that says “it’s not time yet.” The reason why “it’s not time yet” becomes clear once it becomes “time,” since you wouldn’t necessarily understand what you see out the window until you hit that point in the game, but surely there are better ways to prevent the player from looking out the window than an arbitrary modifier? Like, a curtain for example? Say a nice curtain has been pulled over this window and then once it’s “time” the curtain has been pulled aside. Easy, not fourth wall breaking, and can make all sorts of narrative sense. I also didn’t like how the dialogue will sometimes steer conversations into extremist political stances for no reason. The amount of times I was having a perfectly reasonable conversation with someone only for my next dialogue choices to be “let’s eat the rich,” “let’s eat the poor,” “let’s get a king to tell us who to eat,” “let’s let the free market tell us who to eat,” or “I’ll see you later” are too numerous to list here, and the game actively criticizes you for being a boring person if you don’t pick one of the choices that leans hard in a given direction. Not every conversation needs to lead into an instance of “critical thought,” no matter what Disco Elysium would have you believe.
This point leads into the final “criticism” of the game, and perhaps the one that it’s most known for: words, words, words, words, words, and words. I consider myself to be a person that enjoys reading, and if you’ve gotten through the last twenty-five hundred-plus words of this review I’d imagine you’re someone who likes reading as well, but almost every conversation in Disco Elysium is a book in and of itself. This is why the Final Cut version of the game is a godsend, because now almost all the dialogue and seventy percent of the narration is voiced where before almost none of the game was, which makes getting through the avalanche of words a lot less daunting. Even so, I’d occasionally find my eyes glazing over as I encountered what felt like the twenty-seventh person that wanted to tell me everything anyone would ever want to know about the history of the city and world we lived in. To be clear I willingly dragged myself into these conversations (after all, who knows when learning a firsthand account of where the king’s son was on the night of the revolution would give me a +1 on Drama check?) but I would be lying if I didn’t say there was a lot of clicking through exposition and the world’s socioeconomic history until the next time I had more than one dialogue choice to respond with. It’s definitely something to be aware of going in, but if you really love world building (and I mean REALLY) then there’s a lot to sink your teeth in here.
Disco Elysium is one of the strangest games I’ve ever played. It is both easy to grasp and incredibly dense, nuanced in its execution but blunt in the way that it sets you on your path before you know what you’re in for. Above all, it’s the only game I’ve ever played where as soon as it ends I’ve both immediately wanted to replay it while also never wanting to touch it again, due to the allure of what a more destructive, drug-addled playthrough would look like but knowing the amount of political exposition I’d have to dig through to get there. The best thing that any of us can hope for is that this game’s approach to skill checks and its humorous relationship with reality may be adapted by others, but until then if you can handle the heavy emotional weight of the subject matter and enjoy a game with a lot of talking then you should give Disco Elysium a shot. The addition of voice acting has definitely made the game more accessible and there really isn’t anything else like it.
