Disco Elysium

There are many video games published and labeled as “Mature”. They often feature gratuitous violence, strong language and/or sexually suggestive imagery. However these “Mature” games don’t seem like they are for mature audiences but instead are for testosterone-filled teenagers. Disco Elysium is one of the few games that truly feels like a mature video game. The writing is dense, upsetting and politically charged. It trusts the player’s intelligence to understand concepts like Socialism and Capitalism. The language is vile and offensive, executed with a gritty realistic nuance that doesn’t feel explicitly done for pure shock value.

Instead of mere sentences in other games, Disco Elysium features reams of text. The writing is excellent and never feels monotonous. The Final Cut version adds voice acting to almost every line in the game which makes the experience playing the game that much more enjoyable. The game has a glaring Achilles heel, [as of this review date] it is a technical mess. There are countless bugs ranging from the inability to use certain inventory equipment to incompletable side quests. The game also features frustrating dice roll checks and requires constant micromanaging of equipment. Disco Elysium has clear issues, but fortunately the narrative lifts it from video game mediocrity.

Disco Elysium takes place in Martinaise, a district in the city of Revachol under occupation by a capitalist force known as the Coalition. You play as an amnesiac man who wakes up naked and has absolutely no idea who he is, what is going on or where he is even residing. After collecting himself, he soon meets Kim Kitsuragi. Kim informs you that you are both cops, he is your partner and the two of you are supposed to be investigating a corpse hanging from a tree. From this part onwards, you are free to explore Martinaise and chat with the locals. The crux of the game is to figure out who you are, be the cop that you want to be and figure out the culprit(s) behind the hanging corpse.

The game makes for a memorable first impression with its skill system. The game begins like many western-style RPGs where you can allocate your points towards various attributes like Intellect or Physique. Where Disco Elysium differs is that your skills “talk” to you and “talk” with other skills. It is an ingenious mechanic that represents how your character internalizes his thoughts. As an example, the Electro-Chemistry skill will advise you to take drugs to enhance your senses while the Logic skill will argue that this is not a great idea. The frequency of one skill talking over another is dependent on how you specced your character. I had a character with a lot of Intellect Skills and as a result received a lot of extra dialogue explaining every new term I stumbled across. I would imagine the experience will be completely different speccing in the less vocal, Motorics Skills.

You explore the world of Martinaise from an isometric perspective. The district and its surroundings have a somber painterly quality that hints of a once great town that has seen better days. The player has a health and a morale bar. If either meter completely depletes, the game is over. There is no combat in the game and the health and morale are completely dictated on the choices made. For example choosing to kick a mailbox will reduce health, while telling your superiors that you lost your gun damages morale. Disco Elyisum is one of the few games I’ve played where there are consequences if you exhaust every dialogue option. Some dialog options are locked with White and Red Checks. These checks are dependent on your skills, where a higher skill level will grant a higher chance of success. White Checks are options that can be repeatable if failed, while Red Checks are permanent. Failing a White Check doesn’t mean you can immediately try it again, but instead requires you to unlock the check by improving your skills or revealing a secret dialogue hint. To improve your chances of succeeding these checks, you can temporarily augment your skills by equipping various items and taking drugs.

On paper, these checks are a great way to gate progress and organically encourage the completion of side quests. In practice, these checks completely stagger and ruin the experience. Each time I encountered a check, I would back out of the dialogue, micromanage my equipment to maximize my chances of success, then resume the dialogue. By the end of the game there are over 30 pieces of equipment and it becomes a tedious mess figuring out what combination of hat, shirt and pants to wear to buff the specific skill required. Even worse is that regardless of how high your skill level is, there is always a 3% chance of failure. Maybe I’m very unlucky because I had this scenario happen to me multiple times. One memorable failure was with a Red Check with a 97% chance of success where I failed, died and lost a half hour of progress. Of course save scumming is an option, but that approach ruins the whole point of having dice rolls in the first place since you are supplementing yourself with an unlimited number of rolls.

Another mechanic I was not keen on is the Thought Cabinet. Instead of spending a point to improve your skills you can spend a point to internalize a specific thought. These thoughts often cause a temporary debuff followed by a useful bonus once enough time has passed. The problem is that you do not know the result of the bonus until the thought has been completed; and there are only a limited amount of spaces in the Thought Cabinet. Once full, you can spend points to forget thoughts permanently. So unless you are using a walkthrough, it is possible to waste points spending time on useless/subpar thoughts or thoughts that contradict each other. As an example, I wasted two skill points when I had the Revacholian Nationhood thought which grants a bonus to Physique when drinking alcohol but then gained the Waste Land of Reality thought which negates all bonuses when drinking alcohol.

Disco Elysium does not run well, period. It is a technical mess, has frame stuttering even on high end PCs and has numerous gameplay bugs. Disco Elysium is not some Skyrim-level epic, with numerous moving NPC and physics simulations where jank is expected. There is absolutely no excuse why a game of this scope runs this poorly. Besides the framerate issues, there are numerous loading screens even for very small areas.

Fundamental gameplay mechanics are broken. The camera often gets misaligned and you need to zoom-in and out to recenter it on your character. The act of equipping cigarettes, alcohol and other drugs doesn’t immediately register and you need to unequip and equip it again. Even when the drugs are equipped, clicking on the hand icons is not intuitive because the icons are off center and the game would think that you want to walk to that location instead. Items would sometimes appear invisible in the inventory. The Map would sometimes disappear but reappear after you close and reopen the Map menu. Quick Travel is never explained and only works in certain areas. The game is playable and can be completed but I find it disappointing that even after two years of its release these issues have not been resolved yet.

My last qualm about Disco Elysium is that the writing sometimes gets in its own ass. The writing is esoteric and complex and throws new nouns and phrases at a lightning pace. The game sorely needs a dictionary or an encyclopedia reference. Disco Elysium is the sort of game that has to be played in consecutive sittings or else it becomes easy to lose track of the plot. The game never identifies which quests are important and there are multiple red herrings each with their own extended side-quests and pages of text to read. It is hard to filter out which information is pertinent to the investigation and which information is present purely for world building. I honestly skimmed about 30% of the text because of this. It feels like the developers were trying to flex their writing prowess. For example, there are numerous pages of text and voice acting devoted to explaining the various cockatoos in the world. It reeks of hubris especially when the developers could have used the time to fix the multiple game breaking bugs.

I did not enjoy playing Disco Elysium, yet at the same time do not regret the time I spent with it. Despite all the numerous bugs and troublesome gameplay mechanics, Disco Elysium is a wonderful story about the redemption of a broken man. I have not played any game that has such a fully realized plot, excellent world building and distinctly mature presentation all in one package. I will miss the fun and dumb banters with Kim, the conversations with the sharp witted Evart Claire and the scenes with the vile mouthed Cuno. The narrative is so strong that if given a chance I would read a book version of Disco Elysium because it is THAT good.