Disco Elysium Review
DISCLAIMER: This review is entirely based on my subjective, personal opinion. You are entirely allowed to disagree with me. I believe games are a form of art and therefore the way each of us experiences them is mostly subjective. Feel free to comment if you disagree on anything or would like to discuss my point of view. Also, I try my best to avoid major spoilers in this review.
INFO
Played from January 4th to January 12th on PC
Gameplay time: 32 hours, 23 minutes
Genre: RPG
Status: Finished (all opened Tasks completed)
Think about it. What’s the point of a story-based game? Books have been telling us great stories for thousands of years and movies have been doing it for more decades than games have. But these mediums lack an essential characteristic in games: interactivity. In story-based games, you get to make choices and define how the story will unfold.
But does a great story, by itself, make a game great? I don’t think so. Let’s take a step back and think about what makes a game great. I think it’s a great game design, which encompasses mechanics, level design, challenges and such. I mean, Tetris has fantastic game design and it still keeps being a great game even without a story or fantastic art. It keeps being great even when you play it on mute. All of these things (art, music, story) help make a game great, but if you lack good game design, no story, art or music can make your game great. Maybe just beautiful or good, but never great.
But hey, a story-based game has a story as an essential component, right? So it makes things a bit harder because you need these two things (story and game design) being good and in sync to get a great game. Well, Planescape: Torment is considered by many the best RPG game ever made and I simply couldn’t make myself get to the end of it. It has, indeed, a great story, but its mechanics get in the way of the story instead of enriching it. Its combat and exploration are messy and a central part of the game design.
To get a great story-based game you need a game design that enriches the story and makes it even better, telling it in a way that could never be done in any other medium. That’s the whole point of story-based games. Otherwise, you could just write a book with it and have the same effect. It’s by combining a great story with great mechanics that enrich it that Disco Elysium is a masterpiece. Let’s see why.
THE GOOD STUFF
The story and mechanics do so many things well that I’ll separate them in different subtopics.
Story — Mystery
You wake up in a hotel room with no memory of where you are or even of who you are, but you’ll quickly learn that you are a detective in charge of solving a murder case. As the game progresses, these two mysteries slowly unfold, the mystery of your identity and the murder case. It might be said that there’s even a third mystery, of the world you’re in, but I don’t think it’s as important to the game story as the other two are.
All of them unravel in the same way: you talk to people and learn important bits of information about everything. It really fits your job as a detective since you slowly get information that leads you to the answers you need. Sometimes, you get important information from the least likely sources, while, at other times, you might not learn as much as you hoped from sources you thought would be very helpful.
There are a few plot twists that make things incredibly interesting, but I will certainly not spoil them for you.
Mechanics — Quest system
The quest system truly helps to keep the mystery. Instead of getting a list of Main quests and Side quests, you only have a list of Tasks organized by the date you got them. Which one you should do first is entirely up to you. Some tasks that might seem irrelevant to the case at first may end up giving you crucial information and you’ll only find that out by actually doing them.
Also, there’s no mini-map pinpointing the NPCs’ locations. You gotta pay attention to the conversations to learn where you gotta go and, eventually, you’ll have to search for the place or character you need. It’s a refreshing contrast to modern RPGs that give you every bit of information you might possibly need to solve your quests and it also fits with your job as a detective.
Mechanics — Skill system
The skill system is probably one of the most innovative mechanics of the game. You get 24 skills divided into 4 attributes. All of them appear in the game as “voices” in your head that show you different thoughts from your head.
Let’s say you are talking to a person that is blatantly lying. Your Empathy skill might “tell” you that the person is lying by feeling it, while your Logic skill might pick some inconsistencies in what the person has said. Inland Empire, on the other hand, might believe the lie and tell you to go along with it because it wants to know more about the story. It’s like a shoulder angel, but instead of having an angel and a devil, you get 24 different skills telling you what to do, but not all at once, thankfully. This gives great variety and replayability to the game because each dialogue will unfold according to your skills and what each one of them is telling you or picking up from the conversation.
But skills are not only important in dialogues, but also in exploration. As you explore the scenario, a small circle might appear above your head if a certain skill has picked up on something. Shivers, for example, is a skill that connects you to the city. If it starts raining or you get to a new area, a small circle will appear above your head and many thoughts about your surroundings will come to you. But only if you have the skill on a high enough level. Another skill that’s really important for exploration is Perception. Having a low level will mean you will not see hidden items or passages, while a high level will improve not only will improve your sight but your hearing, giving you very valuable information.
Each and every skill has its uses for specific situations. I created a character focused on Intellect and Psyche skills and having a high Perception level. Empathy, Rhetoric and Logic often gave me really thoughtful options in dialogues, while Drama, Inland Empire and Espirit de Corps gave me some more interesting ones. That makes me interested in replaying the game focusing on Physique and Motorics skills just to experience things in a different manner, which I find amazing.
Story — Introspection
Now all those voices in your head are not only there for gameplay purposes. They’re directly shaping the story you are experiencing and allow for unique ways of getting to know your character better.
When your character is thinking, this happens as a dialogue between “you” and your skills. The Encyclopedia skill, for example, will be constantly giving you bits of trivia about stuff that you see and hear from people. You can ask the skill for more details or even make questions to it. But in fact, that’s just your character thinking, which is highlighted when you have long conversations with your skills in the middle of a dialogue with another character, he’ll tell you that you just stood there silently.
The skill system allows for greater character introspection than I’ve ever seen in any game and make the mystery of your identity even more interesting to solve since most of the missing pieces of the puzzle are inside your own head.
Mechanics — Dice rolls
“That’s why people like role-playing games. You can be whoever you want to be. You can try again. Still, there’s something inherently violent even about dice rolls. It’s like every time you cast a die, something disappears. Some alternative ending, or an entirely different world…” — Disco Elysium
The way skills work is by dice rolls, similar to classical pen and paper RPGs. Each test has a difficulty that goes against your skill level plus a roll of two dice. Your skill level can be improved not only by leveling up but by bonus from clothes and other stuff. So if you have an Empathy test that has a difficulty of 18 and you have 7 points in that skill plus 5 points from bonuses, you still need at least a 6 in your dice roll. You only have 73% of chances of success, which means you can still fail. And as classical pen and paper RPGs, getting a dice roll of 2 means a critical failure and a 12 means critical hit, so it’s impossible to get neither a 0% nor a 100% chance of success.
This might seem odd to people whose experience with RPGs only come from games where having enough skill points in a certain skill means a certain success, but for us pen and paper enthusiasts, this is a really refreshing mechanic that gets things more interesting and unexpected.
Without any spoilers, there’s a lengthy scene at the end of the game that I’ve reloaded about 8 times because there are many dice rolls and mine were being unlucky, meaning something undesirable was always happening. Eventually, I decided that I’d accept whatever fate the dice would give me and go with it. It made the outcome extremely more interesting since I stopped being in complete control of the situation. Whatever happened in the situation seemed to be unavoidable and even more impactful.
Story — Worldbuilding
The adventure is set in the year of ’51. That’s it, that’s all you get. 1951? 3051? There’s no way to tell. The countries’ names don’t reflect any real country either. So you just can’t tell if it’s a game set in an alternate history, a futuristic setting or in another dimension. There are certainly many parallels with our world, but enough to say that Disco Elysium is set in a world of its own.
That said, it’s a very rich and deep world with its own unique history, politics and natural phenomena. As you play, you get to learn how the city you are in was shaped by wars and political events. And it’s all done superbly.
As for natural phenomena, I’ll avoid spoilers and only say that I’d love to play a game entirely focused on the concept of the pale. Now for what the pale is, I’ll give you nothing.
It’s worth mentioning that Disco Elysium takes place in the same world as “Sacred and Terrible Air”, a novel by its lead writer, Robert Kurvitz. Unfortunately, it’s not available in English yet, but ZA/UM said it might be released later this year. I’ll surely read it.
Story — Characters
Not only the world in which you’re in has great depth, but also do its inhabitants. The ensemble of characters is big, but some of them you’ll get to know more than others.
For these ones, I highlight Klaasje, Titus, Ruby, Kitsuragi and Cuno. Again avoiding spoilers, I’ll only say Ruby is a very important character to the plot and has one of the best voice acting in the game, which made me really happy when I met her.
Now Kitsuragi is your partner who keeps following you around throughout the game. You can wait for him to go to sleep to talk to other characters, but apart from specific situations that you really need to be alone, I’d advise against it. Kitsuragi often brings incredible insights into conversations.
Art
I’ll admit that the first videos and screenshots I saw of Disco Elysium made me sneer at the art style. However, when I started playing and was immersed in it, I started really appreciating it. It feels as if it comes from an impressionistic painting and it most definitely fits the loss of identity theme. If you still haven’t seen any video about the game, check out its trailer below.
THE BAD STUFF
I’ll keep this section with this title for the sake of keeping all my reviews in the same format. But there are no bad stuff in Disco Elysium, only things that could have been better.
Voice acting
I mentioned Ruby’s great voice acting before, but unfortunately, many characters have mediocre voice acting. It’s not really bad, but it’s not great either. I really understand that an indie studio can’t hire the best voice actors around, but the voice acting often felt unnecessary.
Music
Perhaps my perception of Disco Eysium’s music was biased because I recently played Nier: Automata, which has fantastic music. Still, I couldn’t say I got into the game music and the soundtrack often passed unnoticed by me.
No one song felt truly memorable. They fit the scenes they appear in and they do a decent job of being background music. But they’re only that: background music that your brain will often stop noticing. There are one or two songs that don’t fit into this description, one of them even having a whole quest related to it. But I really felt like the game could have greater music. Perhaps the Boombox item could have more than one song that you could alternate. I think that would certainly make things better.
Walking
Again, not a bad point, but a suboptimal one. You walk by clicking where you want to go and double click to run there. It’s all fine for the first hours, but after a while, it gets boring to keep clicking again and again to get to places.
That really gets things tedious when you’re at the end of the game and have to cross the whole map to finish Tasks. You are walking the same path you’ve already walked several times listening to the same background music you’ve listened several times and double-clicking here, double-clicking there, double-clicking over there… It would make things simpler if we could just move the character with our standard WASD.
Score
4.5/5.0
Disco Elysium is a masterpiece of the RPG genre that will certainly impact other games in the future. It does what it aims to do in the best way possible, that is to tell a story. It’s an engaging, thought-provoking and incredibly satisfying experience that I’ll certainly remember for a good while. Still, it could have been a bit better by doing a few things differently. Considering it was ZA/UM’s first game, I’m excited for what they do next.
