I thought I didn’t really like isometric RPGs. It turns out what I really didn’t like was how most isometric RPGs played. An endless slog of grids and turn based combat getting in the way of enjoying the roleplaying. Disco Elysium is an Isometric RPG. I love Disco Elysium.
This is a game that starts with you hearing from your ancient reptilian brain and your limbic system. And only gets more entertaining and weird from there. It’s the kind of game where I failed a skill check upon trying to take a necktie off a fan and suffered a heart attack because I wasn’t robust enough.
What I think I’m trying to convey here, and it’s incredibly important, is that Disco Elysium is an excellently written, deeply thought out, exceptionally funny and distinctly weird game about choosing and playing roles. It does that better than every other game this year.
Disco Elysium is an Isometric game about reading dialogue, selecting responses and occasionally making a skill check related to your choices.
Skill checks roll two six sided dice, add your skill modifier and try to beat a number between 1 and 20. Double Ones is always a fail, Double 6s is always a success.
Sometimes these are active. They’ll be you trying to use your physical instrument skill to break open a container, or persuasion to convince someone to help you.
Sometimes these will be passive. Your Encyclopedia skill has your brain pop in with an explanation of a world fact or feature. Your electrochemistry skills will pipe up and demand you flood your body with chemicals.
Did I mention you can have conversations with the nebulous parts of your psyche that govern these skills? Yeah, that’s important.
Conversation systems are the core of the game. Simply having certain skills opens up dialogue options in general. (Inland Empire for Police knowledge for example) But equally there are skill checks in conversations. Sometimes, if your skill is high enough, these can take over the conversation entirely, veering wildly off on a tangent as you impose your will.
Other times, many, many more times in most playthroughs, you’ll fail.
Failure is not the end. No, in Disco Elysium, failure is often access to some of the finest writing in the game as you bluster and panic and get tongue tied.
Overall, it’s a very generous system. Barring certain (clearly marked) checks, you can always come back and try again when you have higher skills.
Occasionally though, hard checks are put in front of the main plot. So if you’ve not gotten skill points in that area, you’re stuck till you can level up. There’s a kind of funnel in the final hours, where the game pushes the player to follow a specific thread of specific checks. This effectively halted my playthrough till I found the right combination of gear and enhancements to allow me to pass.
It does take some of the overall introspection and self definition out of the game when you have to meet such a specific target to progress.
Overall, it was a frustrating impediment. It slightly tempered my feelings before barreling through towards the (significantly stronger) end of the game and final moments in the world of Disco Elysium.
The outer world of Disco Elysium is given just as much care and detail as the inner world of your character.
The setting is compressed compared to most RPGs. Rather than spanning continents or planets, you’re a cop with about a mile of city to cover.
Revachol is a city in flux. The district of Martinaise where the game is set is best described as the waste product of that flux.
A union strike is shutting up the docks, the company is trying to shut them down. Everyone else is just trying to survive in a city still bearing the open wounds of a conflict that was brutally ended within living memory.
It’s a very specific feeling of melancholy. The world has collapsed, and never really recovered. The scars of history lie everywhere. Life goes on, and the city and it’s populace still exist. War veterans play petanque in the park. People are struggling in this city, to some degree or another.
The degree to which ZA/UM have been able to capture a post conflict society feeling is like very little else in video games.
As for your relation to this world, you play a detective. It’s a solid design choice for an RPG. It rather helps explain why you need to talk to every person in a mile radius while taking the opportunity to investigate every location for evidence.
The game helpfully reminds you that this is an immediate power imbalance in every interaction you have, and that will help smooth over any slightly odd ways the player might act.
It’s a very diegetic solution to an immersion problem that I think is very elegant.
As for what type of detective, well that’s up to you. There are only a few fixed points. You’re here to solve a case. You probably did in fact exist as a real person before you arrived here.
Then you smashed your psyche into tiny pieces through consistent and egregious applications of alcohol and other chemicals over a terrifyingly short period of time.
Amnesia is not a new starting point for RPGs. It’s a little old hat at this point. But Disco Elysium gives you the framework and tools to deeply engage with this trope.
The concept of the psyche breaking bender that the main character has undergone opens up infinite possibilities for roleplaying. Amnesia in player characters is well documented as a good way to allow you to make your own decisions about a place in the narrative. This is the extreme version of that, with the player character undergoing self assessment at every opportunity, attempting to get at the core of their identity and values.
As you maneuver around the world, floating orbs will appear around your head. These provide commentary from your skills on specific features or events in the world, and can sometimes generate new objectives or quest lines depending on which skills you’ve focussed on. Equally, you may occasionally be stopped as the game challenges you on what you’ve been choosing as responses. You get to reflect and always choose whether you want to commit to an ideology. This often offers new thoughts, which function as permanent buffs after you spend some in game time developing them. It’s natural and player driven development, but always gives the player the final say.
Your ability to internalise and hold on to beliefs for game bonuses allows you to not just choose a +5 to melee attacks. You get to say, no, I want to be the kind of Cop who appreciates art. I want to be the kind of Cop who thinks finger guns are the height of cool. All of this being couched in the language and history of the setting of Disco Elysium and the world just helps the player submerge themselves in roleplaying.
The realistic yet slightly askew artistic style helps even further with this. The game looks like it’s made up of thick, claggy paint strokes. Every screen of the game is like oil paintings come alive in an Isometric view. Character portraits are literal. They’re highly evocative snapshots that convey a few simple codified features for each character.
As for the characters of that world, they’re fascinating and diverse. Even the bystanders of this world have something to offer, be it information or a slightly askew view of your case.
There are the usual detective tropes; femme fatales, cantankerous barmen, blustering police. There’s also a few that come off as a little more abrasive to the audience in how they’re presented. A positively corpulent union boss is one of the more compellingly written characters in the game, but still falls prey to cliched writing on his weight. There are capitalists and socialists written to the point of caricature. Racial politics sees racial supremacists on multiple sides too, which is something that is presented bluntly and openly.
It’s by no means a deal breaker as Disco Elysium features a world that’s mostly unlike our own. But it is something a player will have to decide for themselves how comfortable they are interacting with.
Then there’s Cuno. Who is maybe about ten, and quite possibly one of the most vile and layered characters in any piece of media I’ve seen in a while. Cuno is an amazing, foul mouthed road block to your investigation who will stand large in the minds of anyone who plays the game. How comfortable you are interacting with a drugged up child shouting homophobic slurs at you is something that should also be thought about before playing Disco Elysium.
I recognise that that these elements are unpleasant, and for some, mean the game is unplayable. For the most part, they are deliberate choices to get under the players skin and convey the unpleasantness of the world and the character in question. They may just be too effective in some cases in depicting the worst elements of society.
This is a fully fleshed out detective mystery, steeped in this world’s version of class politics and swimming in art, political and cultural theory. Disco Elysium makes the player feel smarter just for engaging with it.
Equally, it rarely makes the player feel like it’s their fault they don’t understand something.
Mostly though, this is a game about engaging with the square mile of city you’re dealing with. You’re (ideally) trying to do your best by the residents. What the game left me with was a sense of how small scale and important it could be. It’s astonishing human and nuanced. No game goes to the effort of showing a victim’s family being told of their death. Fewer still give you the option of delicacy or destructiveness as you deliver the news. It’s a choice the game allows you to make (see again the racial/economic politics earlier) but not without an important nudge towards a specific direction.
Finally, we come to the support that the rest of the game needs.
Your erstwhile partner in this detective game, Kim Kitsuragi.
Make no mistake.
Kim Kitsuragi is the benchmark for sidekick characters from now on. Accept no less.
Kim acts as a foil to your character. Offering asides to you about how to progress, how to engage with situations. You never have to do what he says, but working around his limitations offers a whole new challenge to engage within the game.
A straight cop, with no time for choosing sides. He’s with you to investigate crimes, protect people and do his job regardless of what’s put in front of him. Including you. Dryly witty, rules focused but compassionate with just enough charming foibles to keep him interesting.
But what Kim Kitsuragi is not is a pushover. Being a second generation immigrant, he’s got no time for racism. You can still do it, and subscribe to some awful ideologies. Just be ready for the disdain that it brings with it.
Equally, drinking on the job and other libations won’t be sanctioned by him. You’ll have to wait for Kim to be off the clock and away from you if you wanted to do something slightly unsavoury, like say, stealing the boots off a corpse.
Kim is the final piece of the puzzle of Disco Elysium.
The internal reconstruction of your identity, the external exploration of the city and case and the constant reflection of your partner.
This game wants you to not just play a role, but to choose a role in this world. To own the decisions you make and to be confident in how you portray your character, even when offered potential solutions.
You don’t need to have combat loops or hundreds of hours of side quests and dozens of huge locations to make an amazing RPG.
Sometimes you just need a tight focus, frankly incredibly open writing and a solid grasp of what you want the player to be able to accomplish. Disco Elysium is not just a game about playing a role. It’s a game that asks you what role you want in this world and why.
Disco Elysium by Za/Um is out now on Steam or on GoG now for PC and on Xbox and PS4 some point in 2020.