Disco Elysium

When I listed my top 10 favorite games of the 2010s back in June of 2020, I wrote I was doubtful there would be a need to add anything from the decade's games I hadn't yet played at that point. However, there was one game from 2019 that I was thinking would make the list once I got to it: Disco Elysium. I didn't want to drop anything from the list now so I have just added this masterpiece as a +1 to it.

An instantaneous Classic

Disco Elysium was developed by UK-based ZA/UM. However, their key people, or even majority, are (or were) Estonian. The studio's location was evidently due to discovering there being access to a wider talent pool in England. Disco Elysium was originally announced as No Truce With the Furies from the poem Reflection by R.S. Thomas. It turned out to be more of a working title, for which I'm glad: Disco Elysium is a much better title. It beckons a longing for the good old times of Disco -- and avoids constant "furry" jokes.

Some people used to say (and mayhaps still do) that Planescape: Torment is the best book you'll ever play. Disco Elysium is even more so. It's likewise a roleplaying game with the good old "isometric" (topdown) perspective -- the game world appears to be 3D despite the locked camera angle, though.

Planescape: Torment is an apt comparison because it was an intentional source of inspiration for Disco Elysium. You can tell that already from the typeface they chose to use: it is the same as in the old Infinity Engine games. The message box is in "portrait mode" on the side though. Disco is not the first game of this genre to have it so, and it makes sense to a degree -- more room on the side of widescreen -- but I'd still prefer it to be in bottom center.

Another big similarity is the protagonist having a complete memory loss -- a clean slate to build your character upon. You still have a past, of course. And that past will hit you full force in the face at every turn.

I am the law?

You wake up in a trashed hotel room after a serious-ass, probably a lifestyle bender. You have no recollection of who or where you are. Soon enough you'll learn you're a cop, though -- the character creation reveals that much already, really -- and that you're on a murder case. That could be a surmountable task for an amnesiac detective but luckily you will in no time meet your new partner from another precinct there to help you.

Kim Kitsuragi is an excellent wingman but he doesn't approve the silly antics you have plenty of opportunity to take part in. Lucky for Kim, I decided to be a boring cop. I got quite invested in the investigation in fact, aiming to solve it with as much professionalism as someone with a complete amnesia could. I even managed to avoid all close-to-death situations from health/morale loss up to the point I had to sit on the plastic chair in the toad man's office.

You really shouldn't avoid all the outrageous dialogue choices offered, though. You'll miss out on quests or just simply fun dialogue. And Kim doesn't mind unrelated side activities that much, at least if he comes to trust you. It feels so good to not let Kim down.

A fresh take on a skill system

You have 4 attributes -- Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics -- which govern 6 skills each. I went with a fairly even distribution with Intellect as my highest attribute and Logic under it as my focus skill. Early on I avoided Psyche and Physique skills because so many of them seemed like a rock star cop nonsense. But they can be useful: Drama, for instance, can help you tell when someone is lying.

Each skill is one of your inner voices which are a legion: whole 24 of them. You use the skills for active checks but they also get passive ones. Sometimes you see them failing a check and sometimes you don't get any message if your skill isn't high enough.

Some skills are quite unhinged. Physique's Half Light, for example, offers you some questionable suggestions. And there's also Physique's Shivers that can provide you visions of things you couldn't possibly be aware of. It reminded me bit of the madness a Malkavian character has in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. It is possible for the inner voices to get into a heated debate with each other although that didn't happen to me.

In addition to skills, events and picking same type of dialogue checks will give you thoughts that can be internalized into your Thought Cabinet. Once internalized, the thoughts will provide minor effects, bonuses, and possibly penalties as well.

The thoughts include political views. Some say the game will "call you out" on picking one but I don't think it's like that unless you were completely ignorant to the various flaws across the political spectrum. The game's criticism is well laid out and expressed.

The skills seem to be somewhat aligned with thoughts. When I discarded the communism thought without accepting it, Logic chimed in, saying it wasn't a realistic idea anyway. I went with the sensible, moralist ideology instead. Its ultimate quest was quite an endeavor, a pure centrist resolution.

The best audiobook you'll ever play

In 2021, Disco Elysium was updated to The Final Cut version which expanded voice acting to include all dialogue box text (excluding the silent protagonist). I don't personally think that a necessary addition: I read so much faster than someone can recite the lines. It really is just someone reading the text out loud because the character models aren't acting in any way most of the time. I can see the point of full VA for streamers and such, but otherwise I find the need perplexing. What do people even do when the lines are being read anyway? Read along?

I have a particular distaste for constantly present narrator voices. I find it quite irritating. I don't need someone else's voice for descriptions. For actual character dialogue, VA is not as annoying, though again quite unnecessary apart from an occasional voiced line, which is exactly what the classic VA game setting does.

Based on what I've observed, The Final Cut kept original voices to some degree. I have to say that wherever applicable, the new actors are better all around. That includes the infamous redheaded gremlin Cuno whose dialogue is one place where having full voices on might be worth it even for me. It can be so balls to the wall absurd. But I did laugh out loud even without full voices.

You can't say that, mate

Cuno and his sidekick (or more like his shoulder devil) are a rather rowdy pair of kids, throwing all manner of expletives at you. I wonder if the studio's location and British writers helping the lead writer Robert Kurvitz with the language are the reason why faggot is censored in the game. There was a myth going around that some thought (probably meaning the Homo-Sexual Underground one) would uncensor it but that is not the case. The Pissfaggot jacket too will always be covered by asterisks. It's just art censoring itself -- fucking cowards.

The funny thing is though how Cuno and Cunoesse use a select few Finnish words and one of them is fägäri, which is the same as the faggot slur in English. There's also banaanipoika (lit. 'banana boy') which I'm not sure if I've ever heard but its meaning is obvious in the context. Now, there's a chance the words are also Estonian because the language is so close to Finnish but I'm pretty they're just Finnish -- for whatever reason. The world of Disco Elysium is not our real world despite being (at least initially) grounded in reality. Its people and nationalities are an amalgamation of the real world ones.

Disco Elysium's active skill checks are based on chance, which is the kind of dialogue checks I don't like. Making them straight up static might be a problem in this game, though. One would be able to figure out some boring 100% route. Disco tries to avert the temptation to save scum by having white checks be repeatable once you have increased the skill in question or some other event has unlocked the check after a failure.

It's only red checks you have to reload in case of a failure. (The game could use a slightly more frequent autosaving...) At some failed red checks Disco tries to keep you going with a workaround. There are also two, maybe three, red checks in the game that cannot ever be passed despite the game telling you there's a chance -- double sixes (3%) are supposed to always succeed. It's kind of mean to put such traps in there.

There is some gear shuffling involved as well: clothing pieces have skill bonuses. There was less of it than I expected, however; it wasn't that huge of a hassle. Although, in the endgame, you can have so many different items that finding the one you need from your inventory takes more time than I would have liked.

High quality presentation all around

Disco Elysium's writing is so brilliant that scenes can be outright magical. I got absolutely ensorcelled by some of the longer ones like the field autopsy and the interrogation of certain suspects. There's also a side mission that involves delivering a death notification. I reckon you can fuck it up royally but completing it with tact felt so damn rewarding. The game does such a masterful job at portraying a detective's work.

Writing is not the only aspect Disco Elysium excels at. An English alt rock band Sea Power composed a fitting, emotions-evoking music for the game. And the art style is beautiful; I see a touch of impressionism (and expressionism) in there. The game runs on Unity, which didn't cause too many issues this time: the game did lock itself up once and another time I had a character model disappear after a save reload. Menu interfaces get maybe a bit lost in the art too: it took me hours to discover you can unlock more thought slots.

Where Disco Elysium falters, in my opinion, is the explosive finale and the following, kind of an epilogue where you finally solve the case. About nothing in the whole last part of the game had the same magic. The discussion with the murderer was lengthy yet completely dull -- no drama or energy in it. And then there's the final encounter with your precinct's other cops. It seemed like everything you say just worsens your own case. That "satellite officer" Jean Vicquemare is an unreasonable asshole. At least Kim's final judgement of you, a defense speech really, redeemed the ending. I had, in the end, done a terrific job in spite of the pre-amnesia disasters.

I think Disco Elysium will replace Planescape: Torment as the game I visit every few years. I kind of turned every stone in the latter when I 100%'d the Enhanced Edition on Steam a couple of years back. But Disco still has a whole lot of stuff I haven't seen.

A sequel or something appears unlikely to happen because in 2022, ZA/UM got themselves into an internal legal mess. Who knows what was really going on in there due to the conflicting statements. But apparently the key people that worked on this game are no longer in the company.

Edited 2024-02-12: Added a note about the working title.
Edited 2024-04-11: Corrected a typo.