By Alice McIntyre
The 2019 role-playing game “Disco Elysium,” developed and published by ZA/UM, is phenomenal.
This column has been, and will continue to be, essentially a place for me to gush about media I like and think CPJ readers ought to check out. On this occasion, though, I really do mean it, if you can’t tell from the sense of urgency in the title.
My affection for this game stems primarily from the themes it explores—being a recovering f—up, criticizing institutional power… you know the drill. But here, I want to focus on the actual mechanics of the game, the means by which those themes are conveyed to the player.
First, for context, “Disco Elysium” follows a post-bender amnesiac cop named Harrier “Harry” DuBois (or, for those inclined towards fancy things, Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau). Your task is to investigate the death of a hanged man in the backyard of the Whirling-in-Rags hostel, with a dockworkers’ strike raging in the background.
How you navigate that task is entirely up to you. If there’s one thing above all that “Disco Elysium” excels at, it’s player choice. Many role-playing video games suffer from the painful obviousness of their constraints, especially as the player interacts with other characters. Dialogue options often boil down to a formulaic dichotomy between good, neutral, and bad options. Here I’m reminded of latter-day BioWare games in particular, or “Fallout 4.” But in “Disco Elysium,” where dialogue is the core mechanism for the player’s interactions with the world, these constraints not only seldom seem apparent, but feel natural when they do. What is essentially a wall of text sprawled across a fairly small in-game map becomes, in tandem with the game’s beautiful art style, a world of its own.
The driving factor in why Martinaise feels as large as it does, and why the possibilities for the player feel limitless despite their limitations, is due to the sheer volume of content that fits into the space you’re given. In the game’s branching dialogue trees, the player becomes meshed in a fluid set of neural pathways, capable of reacting to and providing content for whatever the player does. The game in fact encourages you to try making unconventional choices, reminding you that your institutional power as a police officer grants you significant leeway. The whole process feels quite similar to having a good Game Master in a tabletop RPG—the very thing so many games strive for and fail to do. Instead of expanding the physical space the player explores, the “Disco Elysium” team instead expanded the space of decision you operate in. This also extends to smaller pieces of worldbuilding, such as books you can find and interact with. Whereas the “Elder Scrolls” games have hundreds of books that very few read and operate in a static manner which contrasts with regular gameplay, books in “Disco Elysium” operate in the same way the player interacts with the world at large, making them feel just as vibrant as the rest of Martinaise.
Much of the game’s narrative is also self-reflective. As opposed to just being numbers that determine the difficulty of tasks, each skill in “Disco Elysium” is its own persona. Conceptualization dreams big, sees the art in the world, and verges on ostentatious. We all know someone like Conceptualization. Or, on the flipside, Half-Light is raw, reactive, easily slighted, and ready to pounce. And not only does the player interact with the skills, these aspects of themself, but they often interact with each other. In the case of Inland Empire, passing a check towards the game’s beginning allows your Horrific Necktie to become a character of its own, offering its perspectives on the goings-on.
Another key component of “Disco Elysium” is the fact that actions have consequences. This is natural in a game with so many choices, and “Disco Elysium” does it beautifully. One of my favourite moments happens close to the game’s beginning, in the Whirling-in-Rags. The manager, Garte, asks you to cover the 130 reál in damages inflicted upon your room in your drunken stupor. Confronted with this task, and having zero money, you can choose to attempt an escape from the Whirling—and in my most recent run of the game, I failed. My, uh, disco moves didn’t do me any favors, but I did laugh my ass off, and that was worth it. Some of the game’s most entertaining or interesting content comes from failures.
Again I return to the subject of tabletop RPGs. It’s no accident that the worldbuilding for “Disco Elysium” started as a tabletop setting. Recreating the experience of tabletop gaming is something that role-playing video games, from D&D adaptations like “Baldur’s Gate” to the first two “Fallout” games and beyond, have strived to do since their inception. “Disco Elysium” hits the mark closer than any I’ve ever seen. Don’t get me wrong, I love a lot of other games that try to replicate tabletop. But the unique, narrative-centered mechanics “Disco Elysium” brings to the table give me a feeling that beautifully resembles the best moments of past D&D campaigns. Interacting with a world that felt living despite being dice, maps, miniatures, and the human imagination; cracking up at fumbled rolls; acting unconventionally just to see what might happen; you name it, it’s there. I haven’t even, and due to length constraints can’t, even begin to talk about the characters and story—which are fantastic.
In short, try “Disco Elysium.” It’s well worth your time.
Verdict: 9.9/10. So good it made me return to numerical ranking for just this article. It’s not a 10 because 10s aren’t real.
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