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Goddamn it, now I feel compelled to play Disco Elysium.
Being trans was enough to predict me loving Fallout: NV and Celeste, so I’m assuming Disco Elysium will become my favourite game of all time.
I’m not usually into this kind of game (I dig platformers and open worlds to give you an idea) and I was absolutely blown away by the experience. It’s really an rpg in the purest sense of the term. It has a unique, very specific mechanic, and the writing is phenomenal. It’s obviously a very very personal work of art. After playing you might want to read the artbook, it’s easy to find on the web. Have a good one,
I can’t stop preaching about Disco Elysium. It’s “straight” (lol) up one of the best games OAT, it carries the ex-soviet depression perfectly but at the same time is one of the most hopeful games I’ve ever played.
Also nothing comes close in terms of writing, background research and storytelling. There is no way back TBH
For like 2 years after finishing it all I did for fun was watch other people play it, chasing the dragon of that first time experience. As long as we’re okay with calling it a “game” and not a visual novel I’m pretty fine with calling it the best game of all time.
Visual novels are games, imho
The Venn Diagram is a circle.
I haven’t actually played it despite those things being true…
What’s the gameplay like?
It’s basically an RPG without the combat and half the characters are just different voices in your head. It’s great and there’s very little media that has made me feel the way Disco has.
If you do play it, don’t buy it and give ZA/UM money. IRRC, there’s a build of it on the Internet Archive.
It’s an isometric point-and-click RPG, with a lot of focus on skill checks and player choice and no real combat to speak of. The writing and world-building are excellent. As the other respondent implied, it was written as a novel but the ideas were adapted into a truly excellent – if not a little too brief – game. The art is also top-notch.
Unfortunately, the studio had a hostile takeover and any purchase of the game now does nothing to benefit the original ZA/UM creative group that developed it.
The briefness of the game really bummed me out honestly. The beginning felt like I was about to go on an absolutely insane hundreds of hours quest, and then it was just over.
The thing is, it was just supposed to be a small introduction to the world of Elysium (hence the “Disco”, which means “I learn” in Latin). It shows us a miniscule part of one of just one city in just one region of a vast world
The gameplay is pretty simplistic. The player’s choices really drive the story, with die rolls thrown in to arbitrate outcomes. Success or failure at any given task is determined by rolling 2d6, adding the appropriate modifiers from your skill and situational factors, and comparing that to a target number. Of course the computer does all that math for you and just tells you the likelihood of success. It is not very crunchy at all.
Various thoughts will float through your character’s head in different circumstances. You can choose to internalize a thought to gain the associated benefits (and sometimes drawbacks); this is the game’s equivalent of a perk system. For example, your partner might tell you that you need to get your shit together after you vomit all over a crime scene. That unlocks the Volumetric Shit Compressor thought, which requires at least an hour to internalize. Once your shit has attained a level of togetherness approaching the density of a black hole, it becomes a lot easier to deal with disgusting situations and not throw up. You have a maximum number of thoughts that can be internalized at any given time.
Aside from that, there aren’t a whole lot of gameplay mechanics to learn. There is no separate system for combat; if you get into a fight, it will play out similarly to dialogue or investigation sequences and you’ll use the same system of skill checks I described above. Inventory management is as simple as dragging clothing and items onto the detective to make him wear or hold them. You get a health bar and a morale bar; if either of them reaches zero and you don’t have any healing items available, you lose. That’s about it.
I should also mention that each skill has a personality of its own, representing some facet of the detective’s physiology or psyche, and will speak to you directly. The higher a skill, the more passive checks you will succeed in the background, and the more that skill will dominate your internal dialogue. The game does a good job of presenting the detective’s subjective experience of reality in an organic manner. You will experience the world differently if you have (for example) extremely high Perception than if you have extremely high Logic. When you combine that with the choices you can make about the detective’s personality and political beliefs, as well as the activities you choose to complete in the limited time available to you, it makes for a highly replayable experience.
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Like an interactive narrative game, or legitimately it’s a book?
I tend to call it “barely a game” personally, for a handful of reasons. First, while it has game mechanics in a sense, these are primarily used as narrative devices rather than for actual gameplay. For example: you have Health and Morale bars, but resource management and making sure you’re not dying to damage isn’t really a prominent part of the game. Instead, taking health or morale damage in dialogue is used as a sort of narrative emphasis or punctuation. There are skill checks with dice rolls, but they are there to play into the overarching theme of failure rather than as a challenge to overcome - which is why failures often give superior outcomes to successes. There are skill points and a trait or feat system, but it’s there to customise your character portrayal in a roleplaying sense rather than for minmaxing.
But maybe more importantly: the dialogue choices do not behave the way we are conditioned to think RPGs work. From experience, we think that picking “wacky” dialogue options will be punished - however this is not the case here. This isn’t a game where the challenge is picking the “right” dialogue option. You can pick what you want to roleplay and/or consume more or less of the content, that’s it. It’s better to think of it as an interactive book where the dialogue options are pages you can read in any order.
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Guess I’m not communist enough, then. I absolutely hate those kind of games. Especially if there’s more dialog than gameplay.
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Why you do me like that
Never played it.
Never even heard of it until now. I thought it was 1970s Saturday Night Fever copycat film, but apparently it’s a video game?
Yes
