Disco Elysium - Review | A New Standard for Role-Playing Games

Disco Elysium is a role-playing adventure game from 2019 that takes heavy influence from isometric, point-and-click classics like Planescape: Torment and others of its ilk, but with a major twist being that it features no combat whatsoever. Instead, your character development and role-playing choices relate to the different ways in which you perceive and react to the world around you, with different skills granting you varying degrees of ability to empathize with other people, to deduce information through logical reasoning, to interpret dreams and premonitions, or to be able to dance like a badass disco king, among plenty of other things -- all of which will help you in different ways as you interact with NPCs and solve quests while exploring the fantastical-realist setting of Martinaise, Revachol. 

You play as a police detective waking up with a massive hangover from the night before, having partied so hard that you forgot literally everything, including who you are and even basic details of the world itself -- but you quickly come to realize that you were sent here to investigate a murder and team up with your new partner, Kim Kitsuragi, with whom you work together to figure out who killed the hanged man, and in the process prevent the city from erupting into a violent outbreak over the murder. All-the-while you're also trying to learn more about yourself in terms of discovering who you really are and what led you to drink yourself into oblivion, while also going around picking up the pieces from your drunken rampage the night before. Typical gameplay involves non-linear exploration of a small map searching for loot that you can equip to improve your stats or else sell for money that you can spend buying other equipment and healing items; rolling dice to perform active skill checks while interacting with NPCs and objects in the environment; and earning experience towards level-ups which will allow you to customize your character build by increasing various stats of your choosing. 

The thing that makes Disco Elysium so special, at least for me, is how it handles role-playing by really emphasizing character-based decisions, in terms of how you shape your character's personality; how you speak to other characters; how you internalize details about things happening around you; what options even exist for how you solve quests, or even what quests you're capable of triggering at all; and also just how your character thinks. These are aspects that I find critical for proper role-playing, that I feel have been under-represented in mainstream RPGs going on for a while now, where all too often they make their skill systems predominantly about what methodology you use to kill things with no other way to effect your character's background or personality through dialogue, or else with the scope of dialogue options being narrowly focused on a binary scale of some variation of "good or evil" with maybe a neutral option if you're lucky. That makes role-playing in those kinds of games feel a bit arbitrary and superficial to me, whereas Disco really leans into deeper aspects of how you play out your character, with several statistical systems and measurements that let you craft your own sort of character that will see and interact with the world differently than another.

The bulk of this happens through the skill system, which grants you 24 unique skills based on four primary attributes. These are a little different from what you would typically expect from an RPG, in that they tend to represent more abstract concepts, like how well you can interpret nuances in people's language to pick up on unintended meanings that might clue you into something important or else allow you to turn their arguments against them; or how good you are with both spotting and utilizing theatrics, to determine when or why someone is acting a certain way and subsequently being able to dramatize or embellish on certain ideas yourself in order to get people to cooperate with you. Other skills relate to concepts like your "fight or flight" response which helps you to know what to do in extreme situations, or your pleasure center that compels you to do things that make you feel good, or your impulse control that wants you to avoid self-harm, or your composure to help you stay calm under pressure, and so on. 

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All these skills represent different aspects of your character's Inner Being, acting out as essentially voices in your head that chime in whenever you're interacting with something, be that another character, an inanimate object, or even just your own thoughts. The game constantly runs passive checks against your skill levels, and if you meet or exceed the minimum requirement for any given skill check, then you'll get extra information about what your character is seeing or thinking, often with new and unique dialogue prompts to reflect that understanding granted from each skill. If your character doesn't meet the minimum requirement, then you typically won't see anything at all, and you'll never know that there was a hidden option somewhere, although the game does sometimes show passive failures for important situations and will shift dialogue responses from NPCs if your skills are below a certain threshold. You also get active skill checks where you roll two six-sided dice to add to your base skill level, with different modifiers to make the test harder or easier depending on other unique aspects of your particular character build, and what other actions you've taken previously.  

Disco sets itself apart from other typical RPGs by making the decision space just much more interesting in general, with so many unconventional ways to approach situations. Whereas many games would give you just a single, generic "persuasion" ability to solve problems through diplomatic means, maybe at most also offering an "intimidation" option as a viable alternative, Disco has you persuading people through virtually all of your skills in different ways. In one situation, you might need to use your Empathy to get someone to patch you through to the authorities due to how desperate you are, but in another, you might need to use Logic to convince someone that their friend may be involved with some shady business. You might need Conceptualization in another scenario to get someone to invest in a financial plan by coming up a with an idea that's sure to pique their interest; and then in another, you might need Half-Light to make someone give you their sweet-ass jackets by rapidly escalating the intensity of the situation; the list goes on. All of these skills have some other, greater purpose besides persuading other people, but it goes to show how much nuance there can be in such a system, where different skills might be able to help you in different ways, and where you can't rely on just a single catch-all mechanism to support one, singular objective.  

The game further subverts typical genre conventions by giving skills tradeoffs, where you can't always trust them to do right by you, and where higher-level skills aren't necessarily better than average or lower-level ones. Each skill is essentially its own character in the game, capable of making mistakes in judgment or steering you down the wrong path from what you ideally should be doing; if you invest more points into a given skill it will become more likely to chime in, which can make you more likely to heed its advice, but doing so can actually backfire in unintended ways. A skill like Half-Light, for instance, can be useful as a sort of survival instinct by helping you make decisions under pressure, but focusing on it too much can turn you into an unhinged maniac; A skill like Authority, for instance, can be useful for getting people to respect you so that you can command them to do certain things, but relying on it too much can make you out to look like a power-hungry maniac; likewise, Encyclopedia helps to inform you about background lore and trivia, but listening to it too much can derail conversations or make you look like a snooty know-it-all; likewise, Conceptualization helps you to come up with ideas and understand abstract concepts, but at high levels it can turn you into a pretentious snob. Low skill levels are usually bad by preventing you from doing something positive, but they can also be good in some instances, such as if an enemy doesn't perceive you as a threat or if someone takes pity on you. That leads to more interesting decisions as a player, where you can choose to embrace those flawed aspects of your character by going all in on certain skills while completely ignoring others, or otherwise spread your points more evenly in order to avoid extreme highs or lows. And when multiple skills chime in with conflicting advice, it then causes you to actually think about what approach you should take and which input you value more, as opposed to just blindly picking your supposedly "best" skill every time, or mindlessly sticking to one particular type of option to max out your alignment on an arbitrary karma meter. 

Beyond the actual skills themselves, the game also keeps track of what you pick in dialogue and then uses this information to shape subsequent interactions, like with how often you select responses corresponding to each of the four primary character archetypes or the four political alignments, or how many times you choose to behave honorably, plus others that aren't explicitly tracked through the journal screen but which cumulatively contribute towards different Thoughts, which are additional ways you can spend skill points customizing your character. These are literally just things that your character thinks, effectively allowing you to further shape your character's background and personality through fun descriptive flavor text, but they're triggered by specific actions you take and serve as another way to reinforce particular role-playing decisions, by turning narrative choices into mechanical traits, which will grant new dialogue options and edits to your skill thresholds, plus a few potential gameplay changes like allowing you to zoom out further, or granting extra experience or money from certain actions, among other things.

If, for instance, you come up with an ostentatious French name when introducing yourself, and continually decide to stick with it, even after finding more concrete evidence about what your actual name is, then a Thought will appear where you have the chance to fully integrate that identity into your character; doing so will grant you permanent bonuses to your French-sounding Savoir Faire and Esprit de Corps, because you *totally* know what those words mean, and they represent the same fancy sophistication as your new name. Or, say, you repeatedly pick fascist dialogue options and then choose to embrace that Thought, you can become a sad, self-destructive drunk, with bonuses to your physique when consuming alcohol and new dialogue options to reflect your proud Revacholian Nationhood, but picking those will cause you to lose morale because of how depressed you are over how much better things used to be under the old King's rule, before the revolution changed everything for the worse. The actual subject of these thoughts can vary from thinking about details from your past to try to learn more about who you are, like where you live or why your jaw makes that weird clenching movement every time you introduce yourself as "the law," or else they might be different aspects that you want to incorporate into your personality, like becoming obsessed with cryptozoology and thinking you can hear totally real, non-fabricated creatures that only exist as sound waves, or deciding that you're now going to be an art critic and claiming to have an actual art degree in future conversations, or wanting to sober up and get your shit together while forgoing more fantastical thoughts to be a more straight-laced detective. 

Through these thoughts and skills, the game really allows you to feel like you're creating a unique character who will literally perceive and react to everything differently, and lets you dig deeper into the character's personality and psyche then virtually every other RPG out there. Deciding how you want to talk to people, what subjects you want to focus on, how you behave, how you come to certain solutions, what you notice in the world around you, what aspects of your backstory will be important to you, why your character is the way that he is, and so on, is all much more interesting to me from a role-playing perspective than simple things like deciding whether I'm going to kill things with a warhammer or longsword, or whether I'm going to open a door by picking the lock or breaking it down -- which is unfortunately about as much depth as some RPGs offer in terms of crafting your own character, where you often end up playing the exact same type of person from game to game in terms of how you actually depict your social or mental identity on account of there not being any real way to effect that kind of role-playing on the actual, in-game characterization. 

 

In contrast, the dialogue options and descriptions that present themselves in Disco can be very different from playthrough to playthrough based on how you've chosen to play the character, since characters with low skills or missing thoughts will never notice, comment on, or be able to do certain things that a character with certain thoughts and high-level skills would. The inverse holds true as well, where sometimes low skills will trigger unique outcomes that a player with high skills would never see. Thus, two characters interacting with the same exact thing, for the same exact purpose, can ultimately come away with vastly different experiences just based on how those characters are at their core. And it's not just a matter of picking a different option from the list the next time you play to see something different; it's the cumulative effect of your past decisions all contributing towards entirely new options that wouldn't have even existed in the other playthrough with a different character built around different thoughts and skills. It feels much more custom-tailored to your particular build, like you're not just carving your own unique path through the game's preset branching options, but more like the game is creating entirely new branches on the fly to match your character through a much more reactive and adaptive process. The catch, of course, is that you won't realize just how much depth and variety exists in all the different ways you can encounter things until you replay the game with a completely different build, since many of the game's alternative options will be deliberately hidden from you if you haven't already met some prerequisite condition, so you won't even know that they were a possibility. 

At first glance, it might therefore seem like your choices don't matter all that much, and I guess technically in the grand scheme of things, they really don't, since the game is designed to allow you to progress forward no matter what you do. The game uses a sort of "fail forward" system where failed skill checks will often lead to the same or sometimes even better result as if you had succeeded, whether that be by your partner Kim stepping in to handle things for you, or by giving you a more practical reward for your efforts, or else just by telling a more interesting and amusing story based on your character's bumbling ineffectiveness. Additionally, many failed checks can be straight-up retried if you fail the dice roll, so long as you invest skill points into the associated skill or think certain thoughts to re-open the check again, so it's pretty rare that you'll ever be completely locked out of seeing optional content through those active skill checks. The main quest itself likewise has a lot of hard convergence points where the story will inevitably hit the same major beats every time you play, with a lot of leeway in making sure you can reach those critical moments no matter what choices you make. So for example, it doesn't really matter if you choose to read a mysterious note found in a secret compartment of your old police ledger, or if you choose to listen to your instincts and throw it away without reading it, since you'll likely wind up at the same end resolution for that sub-plot regardless -- but it offers a unique perspective on the overall story in terms of what it all means for you and your character, while still playing an important role in shaping your character's background through your literal thoughts and actions, which will affect your stats in some way.

So in effect, a lot of Disco's choices and consequences are just narrative flavor in how the story will be told, but it's still ultimately based around mechanical systems associated with your stats and skills -- in other words, it's not just about what you (the player) would want to do, but it's what the character knows, thinks, or wants to do, since your thoughts and skill levels determine what options will even exist in the first place, in addition to how well the character will perform. That's an important part of role-playing as far as I'm concerned, since the ultimate point of RPGs is supposed to be that you're playing a different character than yourself, who acts somewhat independently from the player -- it's not about your dexterity as a player to manipulate the controls just right to execute actions in a timely manner, or your intelligence to pick the smartest, most accurate solution to a given puzzle, but it's how well the character would perform in those situations. After all, that's arguably the entire purpose of RPGs using random chance through dice rolls to determine your successes; it's meant to create a distinction between the player and the character, with mechanical rules and systems to determine how the character would actually fare while executing your decisions. In that way, Disco plays like a more traditional RPG than the usual action-hybrids that have come to dominate the market over the last 20-some years. 

So it's worth noting that Disco is pretty light on raw gameplay, in terms of what you actually do in the game as a player. Pretty much all you ever do is move the character across the map, click on things to observe or interact with them, and make choices in the dialogue window, with a lot of time spent reading text since most scenes and imagery are merely described to you through written text -- or, if you're playing the Final Cut update, with optional voice-over narration reading that same text aloud. The script is supposedly over one million words long, and there are multiple conversations with single NPCs that can last over an hour just by themselves. But while the game can be perhaps overly wordy at times, it's delivered in a fairly snappy way that's easy to digest, thanks to the narrow formatting that limits the amount of back-and-forth strain your eyes have to make when scanning for the next line, and by always presenting strings of text in smaller, more manageable chunks. 

The writing itself is pretty good overall, perhaps approaching the quality you would expect from a good novel, but at the very least a clear step above typical video game writing; it's often clever, inventive, and evocative, in ways that you don't typically get from other games. Yes, the background imagery is completely idle for most of what you do in the dialogue window, but the ample descriptions for scenery and actions bring those images to life more vividly than what could be shown through simple visuals -- like when probing your finger through the throat and into the skull of the hanged man, where the ample descriptions let you know all the precise detail of what the inside of the man's brain feels like to your fingers. After all, some sensations literally cannot be depicted through visuals alone, like smell or taste or touch, and so Disco's descriptions give you the chance to perceive some sense of that information to really understand and internalize what's going on better. This is of course not unique to Disco since it applies to all other games with lots of written descriptions, but it can provide a tremendous enhancement to the game's immersion if you're able to engage with all the written text, and in this case, the text itself is good enough to be entertaining all on its own. 

There is more to the gameplay than just reading text, however, since you still have non-linear exploration and questing; character progression through experience, level-ups, and skill point allocation; active skill checks and saving throws; resource management through money and healing items; an inventory system with buying and selling goods; equipment selection to modify your stats and abilities; searching environments for hidden loot; and so on. In fact, it's almost identical to the classic point-and-click RPGs of the past, except without any real combat, but since I'm a huge fan of that era of computer RPGs and frankly felt like the combat was a severe detriment to Planescape: Torment's overall enjoyability, describing Disco Elysium as "Planescape: Torment without the combat" is like a win-win scenario as far as I'm concerned. 

Going beyond video game comparisons, it's also pretty close to what you do in straight tabletop RPGs, which in my experience is predominantly about you wandering around while a GM describes things to you, and then making decisions and rolling dice to see what happens. I would even say that Disco is the one video game that, in my experience, has come closest to capturing that core essence of tabletop role-playing, which is what I have always considered to be the standard for how I judge computer RPGs. As I see it, the better a computer RPG simulates the freeform, adaptive style of role-playing that you experience in tabletop RPGs, the better it is as an RPG. That's not to say that necessarily makes for a better video game, since I do appreciate active combat systems and rewarding gameplay elements in my computer RPGs, but the fact that Disco *feels* so much like a tabletop role-playing experience lends it a certain purity that I admire, and that I believe should deserve a lot of respect for achieving what it clearly set out to do, given that the game actually started its design as a literal pen-and-paper RPG system. 

The game's "fail forward" mechanics, for instance, are right out of a live Game Master's playbook in trying to accommodate everything a player might try to do by saying "Yes, and" or "No, but" so that the player's decisions are always valid and always feel like they're contributing to the forward progress of the adventure and story. With the skills chiming in in different ways, often offering different approaches to a situation, it's a bit like having an entire party of players and characters all sitting around a table discussing what they want to do before coming to a decision as a group. And every time the game references something you did previously, be that establishing a running joke, or commenting on some of your consistent behaviors, or triggering a new thought bubble, or adding extra modifiers to an active skill check, is a sure sign that the game is actually paying attention to what you do and crafting an emergent narrative around your actions -- which again, feels like something a live GM would do in a tabletop RPG, where they respond to your decisions in a positive feedback loop of continually reinforcing actions and outcomes, while only ever showing the parts of their design intentions that become directly relevant to your character's unique actions and statistical configuration, thereby effectively tossing out the interactions and progression that they had planned in favor of improvising off of what you've been unexpectedly doing as a player. 

With that being said, it's still a video game, so it's of course going to be much more restrictive than anything you can experience with a human Game Master improvising everything on the fly -- after all, you're still playing a premade character with an established past, and the options you can choose from to role-play that character are still based on certain preconceived archetypes, with a hard limit to just how many options can exist in the first place. But the amount of options that are available to you at any given time are wide enough to give a strong sense of freedom of choice; whereas other games often give you just two or three preset ways to play the main character, Disco gives you four primary archetypes with numerous sub-types that can run in parallel, with an entire second axis for your political alignment. So you can play as a Sorry Moralist Hobocop, or a Communist Art-Cop Doomsayer, or a Boring Fascist Lawbringer, or an Ultraliberal Superstar Honor Cop, or any other combination thereof, with 53 different Thoughts and 24 skills that you can combine to create all kinds of unique builds. 

There's also a lot of non-linear freedom to decide what order you'll explore the map and complete quests; the main investigation has numerous leads to follow from the very beginning, and you're free to decide for yourself what leads you want to prioritize and which ones you might even want to skip altogether, but the game will make it work no matter what you do. Sometimes this means confirming information you've already learned elsewhere so you can be confident in what you know, or it might mean skipping right to the solution on one quest and avoiding a bunch of extra legwork if you find a viable shortcut, or it might mean being surprised when you learn new information that you could have already learned by that point which then re-contextualizes your understanding of the case in new ways. This, combined with the deeply layered considerations for what all you've actually done in the world before each decision point, in terms of determining what options are available to you, what outcomes and consequences will play out, and how your success rates may be modified, all do a good job of masking what bits of linearity do exist in the main story, to make it feel like your input is actually having an effect on how the story gets from Point A at the very start, to Point B at the very end. 

This is most true in your first playthrough, but your mileage may vary on replay, since the story itself is ultimately the same thing the second time around. There will always ever be one murderer and a handful of suspects that you have to investigate in turn, with a few linear choke points along the way towards figuring out "whodunnit," with essentially the same core ending every time where you successfully track down the killer, learn the "how" and "why" of it all, and then reconcile this information with the rest of your police department. Likewise, portions of every conversation will be the same each time, especially ones that deal with exposition and world-building where the whole point is for other characters to dump tons of information on you while you go down the list sequentially asking them about each subject until you've exhausted everything. And if you have any overlap in your character build whatsoever between playthroughs, like if you have moderate-to-high psyche both times, then you're going to see a lot of the same dialogue from your psyche skills with the same kind of options to pick from. So in short, this isn't really a game with heavily branching narratives and tons of mutually exclusive quest-lines like you might get from some other RPGs where the second playthrough might feel more distinctly brand new. 

In Disco, the differences come in all the smaller details that I've already mentioned earlier, with how your skills will offer different insights to shape your character's perception of the story a little differently, or how your Thoughts will change the flavor text for your character's background to let you get into a different headspace when role-playing that character with different dialogue options. That's in addition to also doing things in a different order while using alternative methods to achieve certain objectives to see how the story will adapt itself to accommodate those differences. Depending on what skill checks you passed or failed on your first time through, you might also notice some minor deviations in the plot or find some bits of optional side content through white checks that you were never able to complete the first time around. There might even be entire quest lines that you missed. And by playing with a completely different character build you might discover wholly unique character interactions that didn't exist before. The ending may be largely similar for all playthroughs, but there are a couple variables that determine what you experience in the final stretch, in terms of who else might be there with you, what dreams you have when you sit down to rest, and whether you'll achieve enough evidence of certain discoveries to prove yourself. Meanwhile, the cumulative effect of all your role-playing decisions will influence how your police department reacts to your solving of the case, with them either welcoming you back in open arms or putting you on probation. 

So there is definitely replay value to be had, here, but the macro experience is going to be pretty similar every time you play since you're still going to be doing a lot of the same things each playthrough. Personally speaking, I didn't enjoy my replay nearly as much as the first time through, because I already did pretty much everything I wanted to do in the way that I wanted to on that first playthrough, which made picking deliberately opposite choices the second time around feel like a chore since I was basically just forcing myself into an arbitrary build that I wasn't naturally drawn to. It probably didn't help matters that I played as an apocalyptic superstar member of the remote viewers division with a talking necktie, who alternated between supporting communism, ultraliberalism, and moralism while picking all the eccentric weirdo options the first time around, which was immensely fun for me, and then played as a sorry boring fascist dimwitted brute the second time, which I would say was decidedly less fun. Also, with this being such a heavily story-driven game, the journey of discovery plays a strong role the first time through when you're learning all about the world and the characters, and actually solving the mystery with each piece of the puzzle that you acquire; when you already know all of that stuff on replay you lose some of that magic, where going through all of that feels more routine and less intriguing. In my case, I wound up just skipping past a lot of dialogue the time second time around because I already knew all the world-building and didn't need to hear the exposition all over again. 

Besides just learning about who killed the hanged man and why, you also learn more about the history and culture of Martinaise, Revachol, as well as your character's background, since your character has amnesia from his chaotic bender the night before and has forgotten literally everything. That serves as a useful mechanism to be able to play an established character but while giving the player freedom to role-play him in whatever way you want, but it also works to put the character in the player's shoes as basically a newcomer to this world who doesn't know or understand anything, so that you can be along for the same journey as your character. That adds even more mystery and discovery to the equation, just learning about all this backstory, which helps to make exploring the world even more engaging. The world itself is slightly unusual in that it generally reflects our modern society but with a lot of idiosyncratic, almost anachronistic differences, which can make it feel a little uncanny to explore your first time through. It's almost like an alternate history where technology and culture developed a little differently from our own -- for instance, this world has a version of computers and the internet, but it happens over call-in radio networks. Cars exist, but they look more like old motorized carriages with a quasi sci-fi industrial twist on the cab, plus an entire sub-culture of Speedfreaks and Torque Dorks who customize and race these motorcars (although it's debated whether people watch this sport for the purity of the cars and the racing, or if people are just secretly hoping to witness exciting car wrecks). You can also explore aspects of art, architecture, entertainment, history, politics, socioeconomics, and all other such subjects that make this world feel thoroughly fleshed out beyond just simple video game set dressing. I mean, there's an entire skill dedicated towards telling you little bits of lore surrounding all the various things you might interact with. But there are also supernatural elements at work, most notably with The Pale -- a colorless fog that permeates all space between continents, and which causes people to go mad who travel through it. The mystery, here, is in trying to learn more about what it actually is, how humanity manages to navigate it and how they use it for different purposes, what causes it, and what might be in store for the future with theories that the Pale might actually be expanding over time. With all these different elements, the literal world-building is strong enough to provide a compelling element all on its own; I for one was constantly fascinated just exploring everything so I could learn more about the world itself.

The character's backstory plays into this as well, since there's a reason he tried to drink himself into oblivion, which you can guess from the beginning might be related to the "ex-something" that the ancient reptilian part of your brain teases while you're blacked out. This ends up being a major plot thread that runs in parallel to the murder case, eventually culminating in the big reveal near the very end, with your character randomly stumbling into Thoughts and Memories about his past, often in completely unexpected instances, which progressively reveal the actual details that led to his breakup with the ex-something and why it had such a strong impact on him. All-the-while your volition and other skills are warning you not to go down this line of questioning, and urging you to just forget about it because remembering will cause you to experience that pain all over again. But such is the nature of mystery that being told not to look into something only makes it more intriguing, and so I found it extremely alluring trying to hunt down all those little clues and interpret everything. It's a pretty effective mystery in that way, with only ever revealing small hints through ominous foreshadowing, usually just enough to make you wonder what it means while never spelling it all out completely. Some of it is even laced in heavy metaphor that you don't realize is foreshadowing that specific sub-plot until you reach the climax and can finally start to re-contextualize all the symbolism you were seeing before. In a way, this could be interpreted as the real point of the story ultimately being a journey of self-discovery and recovery for the main character, with the murder investigation just being the structural pretext to get you involved with everything. For some people -- myself included -- it might even be a more interesting story than the murder case because of that personal connection to the main character, and all the direct control you have as a player in shaping its effect on the character. 

As far as the actual main quest is concerned with regards to solving the murder, it's probably not among the best video game stories ever told in terms of anything to do with the ultimate plot, since it is effectively a straightforward murder mystery, but it touches on some interesting themes and brings them to life through excellent world-building and characterization, which I'll touch on in a moment. The plot itself, however, centers around a labor dispute between the Wild Pines Shipping Group and the Dockworkers Union, who've been on strike for the last two months before the Company sent in a new negotiator with an armed security detail, thereby escalating tensions between the two and leading to one of the mercenaries being apparently lynched, supposedly by a group of workers, according to rumor. Your job as the police detective on the case is to figure out what actually happened and who did it, which involves a series of objectives like investigating the crime scene for signs of evidence, getting the body down from the tree so that you can perform a field autopsy, searching for witnesses who might have seen anything suspicious that night, interviewing people about evidence you've collected, and eventually questioning suspects to try to suss out everyone's motives. 

This aspect of it is decently engaging, the structure being built from a non-linear web of quests that each give you a partial piece of the puzzle you're trying to assemble, with different leads you can follow and opportunities to rule out theories and cross-reference information. Not to mention plenty of red herrings and double-crosses and twists and climactic confrontations to keep you engaged the whole way. It's not really a mystery that you're meant to solve as a player, however -- like, it's not the type of plot where clues are dropped in for astute observers to piece together a working theory so that you can solve the case through logical deduction before the truth is finally revealed. In fact, it's literally impossible to identify the killer until the very end because, for some reason, the game just won't let you pursue a particular line of investigation, even though it had clearly set up an alternative possibility that any good detective would want to rule out before making assumptions and jumping to conclusions. So in the end, when the real killer finally gets revealed, the "twist" ends up feeling a bit contrived and unearned, because the plot wasn't really setting up that specific character as an option, and there was no way you could have ever predicted their involvement. Unlike the mystery of the ex-something, the murder mystery doesn't have much clever foreshadowing that makes you go "aha, that makes sense" once you know all the details, but instead the killer just seems to come out of nowhere quite suddenly at the very end of the game, and then it's over. 

For that reason, I can see a lot of people being disappointed by the ending, but it doesn't bother me personally because it still ties in very strongly with the game's central themes. The story is ultimately about how events from our past can linger on and continue to affect things long after they've supposedly been resolved, and how sometimes just letting go is the best way to heal and move on. The killer's inability to let go is what ultimately leads to all the problems in the main story, but it's also reflected in the city itself having been ravaged by war some few decades ago, having still never been able to rebuild and move on from that devastation, as well as in the main character's arc with the "ex-something," where he continues to wallow in misery with self-destructive coping mechanisms, which is how he very nearly kills himself by the start of the game. Ultimately, the people in the story who fare the best are the ones who learn to let go of the past and look to the future, while finding ways in the present to bring themselves small moments of happiness that make their hardships easier to bear. So while the killer's big reveal does bother me somewhat from a structural perspective, it still serves the story pretty well overall by acting as a sort of foil to the main character's story, where you're eventually able to overcome your troubles (if you choose to), while the killer has doomed themself to living in the shadow of failure and in constant misery. I'll even say there's a certain poetic irony in its anticlimactic nature, with how simple and mundane their motivation turned out to be, really illustrating that a lot of tragic things that happen in our lives aren't due to some greater purpose or divine machination, but are often just random, pointless incidents -- like sustaining a life-altering injury in the blink of an eye during a car crash where you were completely not at fault. Sometimes bad things just happen to us, and ultimately, it's not these incidents themselves that define us, but it's how we respond to them and get back on our feet, while finding ways to enjoy the life that we're granted in this fleeting existence. 

Those are just some of the themes and messages that resonated strongly with me, but you could dig a lot deeper into other subjects as well, like about how failure is an expected part of life and that even if something is impossible, we should still strive towards achieving certain ideals, to get as close to the impossible as possible; or you could view the entire game as a satirical commentary on society and how all aspects of governance suffer from some sort of fundamental flaw that isn't necessarily solved by just replacing one form of government with another ideology. It's worth noting that politics are very much integral to the game's setting and its core identity, but it's not something you necessarily have to engage with a lot directly, since you're often given choices in dialogue to ignore those subjects or pick non-committal answers. Still, it's going to be much more political than any typical game -- not to the point of outright propaganda or pushing one specific agenda on the player, even though the designers are self-proclaimed leftists, since it depicts the entire spectrum and seems to poke fun at all ideologies -- but if politics is something you absolutely want to avoid in your escapist entertainment, then it could be an issue, here. 

As with any good piece of artwork, what you get out of Disco Elysium will be highly personal, with all of its themes being open to interpretation. What makes it all so compelling in this case is all the depth involved with the game's elaborate world-building and characterization. The game does a great job of bringing this setting to life and making you feel immersed in it, with lots of genuine character interactions that make these NPCs feel like real people. The city is almost a character unto itself -- one that you can actually interact with through one of your skills, literally talking to it at times -- and so it's very easy to develop a sentimental, emotional attachment to the setting and all of its various inhabitants who are just trying to go about their business while the world around them turns to shit. As such, the game's story isn't solely about political drama and murder mysteries and journeys of self discovery, but it's also about connecting with everyday people, hearing their plights, helping them solve their problems, or else just consoling them when times are tough and you're powerless to change their situation. 

This is no better exemplified than in the side quest where you help the Working Class Woman find her missing husband -- who, at the time you pick up this quest, isn't even known to be missing -- which eventually leads to one of the more tragically poignant and serious sequences of the entire game, when you discover her husband's corpse, him having seemingly died in a freak accident all by himself, and then you having to break the news to her in her apartment. It's an extremely humanizing quest, where you get to be just a normal person solving a normal case, and empathizing with other people on a deeply emotional level. I mean, just that one line from Empathy subtly telling you not to tell her how long her husband had been dead for, because knowing he'd been dead for a while and that she hadn't even started to worry about him yet would absolutely break her, if she were to wonder for the rest of her life if she could have done something more, or something differently that would've prevented his senseless death. That's not explicitly stated anywhere in the dialogue, but that one line, "it will be etched in her mind forever," is all the writing needs to convey the deeper nuance of what that information might do to her. And it's impressive that you get that much depth out of one minor side character who's not even important enough to be given a name in the interface window; most of the other characters get even more depth and nuance through more elaborate character interactions and recurring developments, making it really easy to feel an emotional attachment to this setting. So when you discover that a certain character has been lying to you the entire game, it feels like more of a personal betrayal, and you likewise build some really strong personal trust with your partner Kim -- all because the characters are fleshed out so well, and because you get so many opportunities to interact with them on a deeper level than what you typically experience in other RPGs on account of all the extensive dialogue options and your skills providing even deeper insights into various subjects. 

The game is also surprisingly good at juggling wildly different emotional tones. It actually treats the quest with the Working Class Woman as something of a joke at first, with you pestering a random woman for no reason and even getting side-tracked researching cockatoos as a way to learn more about yourself -- it's almost being self-aware that this shouldn't be a normal quest opportunity, but through your ridiculous antics it turns into a genuine moment of concern for this woman, and then once you find the husband's corpse, the game stops joking altogether to really sell the notion that this is a serious situation. This sort of tonal shift has a lot of potential to be jarring, but the game expertly shifts gears to put you into an appropriate mindset as you go into that encounter so that it all flows together seamlessly. Lots of other situations involve wacky hijinks, usually related to the main character's psychosis (if you choose to play that way) -- enough to the point that the game could almost be classified as a comedy. This is a game where you can die from saying or doing something stupid that embarrasses you, or from sitting in an uncomfortable chair too long, with plenty of Game Over screens that paint the main character's failure in some sort of humorous light. Sometimes the humor breaks the fourth wall or becomes meta, like getting stuck in literal dialogue loops that you can't get out of while your skills freak out about what to do, or else it becomes so absurd that it starts breaking the rules of reality, like when you find a guy living in a shipping container who's so inconceivably wealthy that he bends light and sound around him while also increasing your wealth in the heads up display just by getting closer to him. But the comedy elements work specifically because they're contrasted against a generally quite serious, almost melancholic tone and setting; it would be humorous enough just witnessing your character doing all this ridiculous stuff, but it's the normal people around you reacting to your buffoonery that really sells it, especially with your partner Kim acting as the perfect foil having to put up with your shenanigans all the time, and you trying to play it off when he comments on it. As with anything, your mileage may vary as to how funny you find the actual game to be, but I for one found myself constantly smiling at all the humor, even laughing out loud at times, making this one of the most genuinely entertaining games I've played in a long, long time just on that aspect alone. 

It's worth mentioning, too, that the game is extremely dense with its use of space and its distribution of content therein. Whereas many RPGs try to hype themselves up by how massive and sprawling their landscapes are, with thousands of NPCs and hundreds or even literally infinite quests to complete, Disco instead takes place in a relatively small map consisting of one city block and its adjacent coast, with only about three dozen main NPCs to interact with. So already the concrete dimensions are much more restrained, but that allows the game to spend more time with specific locations and characters, to flesh them out further than other games that might have to spread their concentration over a much wider area. Each location and each character winds up having a recurring role in everything, being involved in usually multiple different questlines or interactions, which gives them more persistence within the world and lets you become much more familiar with them since you often end up coming back to have new interactions in familiar locations with the same NPCs as the situation changes around the city. What's most impressive is just how much of the game's apparent side content actually winds up circling back to the main investigation, or else becomes incredibly relevant to the greater overall story; that includes things like finding a mysterious locked door in the kitchen of the hostel where you start the game and wondering where it leads (and Kim questioning why you would be so obsessed with a seemingly ordinary door), which eventually leads you to a major discovery in the murder case, or helping a group of ravers start a nightclub in an abandoned church, which eventually leads to a major scientific breakthrough where you discover important information about the Pale, which ties back in with your previous quest to investigate the Doomed Commercial Area and lift an apparent curse placed on it by a supposed Evil Entity and which also plays into the end resolution in the story and certain political vision quests. The game feels holistically designed in that way, where everything is there to serve a purpose as one piece of a cohesive whole -- nothing feels superfluously tacked on, and it doesn't waste your time with extraneous filler content. With around 30-some hours of content for a typical playthrough, up to about 50 or so for a thorough completionist, it's an extremely potent experience that accomplishes a lot within a relatively small space and runtime, while never outstaying its welcome. 

As far as criticisms go, I don't really have much to offer on this one. I enjoyed Disco so much overall that very little actually bothered me, and thus anything bad I have to say would just be minor nitpicks. Like, for example, with the way clothes give you various skill bonuses, and how the game incentivizes you to exit conversations after seeing a skill check to meticulously scroll through your entire inventory checking what items give what bonuses and changing your clothes right in front of the NPC before attempting the skill check. That can be awfully tedious, especially later in the game after accumulating tons of clothing when you have to spend even more time comparing options and hunting for what you want, and doesn't make a whole lot of sense thematically to be doing that in the first place.

There's also a weird conflict with how the game wants you to spend skill points; on the one hand, it wants you to spend them proactively to raise your base skill level in order to succeed at more challenging passive checks, but on the other hand, it also wants you to save skill points so that you can retry failed active checks down the road. But at the same time, maxing out a skill makes it really difficult if not outright impossible to ever retry a failed check in the future since you lose the most standard, reliable way to unlock those checks. And so there's this weird tug-and-pull going on, where no matter how you spend your skill points it feels like there's always some missed opportunity or catch-22 involved, with a constant feeling of wanting to do one thing but then feeling like you need to do the other, which could apply both ways. It's not a major issue by any means, but it's just a weird element that makes the skill point system feel somewhat unfulfilling.

Having the ability to reload a save to retry failed skill checks compounds on this matter, since that allows you to completely negate the consequences of failed checks without having to spend the extra skill points, thereby giving you the best of both worlds -- proactive use of your skill points as you acquire them to improve your chances at triggering passives, while still being able to instantly retry anything should you ever fail. For a min/maxing meta-gamer, that's objectively the best way to play if you want to maximize the amount of content you can experience in one playthrough while getting the most out of your skill points, and so it's kind of a bummer that the game not only allows for that type of save-scumming, but also implicitly encourages it, since that goes directly against its core philosophy of "embracing failure." You can always exercise self-restraint to just live with your failures and play with the systems as intended, but the fact that this work-around is even possible does seem counter-productive and can be a little too tempting in some situations to ignore. 

Because frankly, not every failed skill check leads to entertaining end results; sometimes they just shut you down and say "no, that didn't work," with no real resolution or story implications. That can be unsatisfying to have optional content just closed off like that due to random chance, especially when you had a high chance to succeed and it was something that you had spent the entire game fully embracing into your character, where failure doesn't feel like an appropriate option. Like this was your one chance to shine, to bring an exciting conclusion to this major plot thread that's been building for the whole game, your chance to experience an amazing ending that sheds new light on the world and the central themes in the story, the ultimate payoff for how you've been role-playing your character, and then -- oh no you failed, and now the scene is just over. At which point you either reload your save to see the successful outcome, or you replay the entire game all over again and hope you do better next time. 

In those kinds of situations, it can be straight up anticlimactic and outright frustrating to fail those kinds of checks, and so I wish there were some other way to manipulate dice rolls after the fact, like by giving the player a limited resource that you could spend to re-roll one or more dice. That would give the gameplay one more active element with strategic decision-making, and would also help to mitigate some of those unsatisfying results without requiring an immersion-breaking reload to bypass it. Now mind you, critical failures are a typical part of RPGs, of course, so I wouldn't want to get rid of them completely in Disco, but they tend to work better when you have a live GM who can read the room and improvise an entertaining outcome, or when you have a group of friends around you to laugh at the irony of an epic failure, or else when you have the chance to play it off with your own dialogue. You don't get any of that in a video game and so those failures are harder to stomach when the game hasn't already programmed an interesting outcome for you. In general, I think it would also help to have multiple tiers of success for each skill check, or at least certain ones, so that you might get at least partial credit for a decent roll that just isn't quite high enough to achieve the maximum effect, instead of strictly binary pass/fail thresholds like Disco uses, but that might be too much to ask for a video game where there are more limits on how much work the designers can put into everything before the game launches.   

Otherwise, most of the reasons I can think that someone might not enjoy this game come down to subjective preference, where you just kind of have to know what you're getting into before trying it and whether anything will be a deal-breaker for you. Like, yes, there's going to be a ton of reading involved, not a lot of visual stimulation through animations or cutscenes, and there's pretty much no action in the gameplay whatsoever, but those shouldn't be regarded as negative marks against the game's quality when that was the whole point of its design to begin with. I can also see some people maybe just not enjoying the writing style if you find it too flowery or self-indulgent for your taste, and it's also completely understandable that some people just might not vibe with the game's setting, characters, themes, or story. But if you're the type of person who hears "it's like Planescape: Torment, but without the combat" and gets excited by that prospect, then it's almost a sure bet that this will be right up your alley. If you're someone who likes tabletop RPGs for their adaptive storytelling and character-based decision-making, then this is an exceptional game that's worth checking out. If you enjoy games that are weird, quirky, and unusual, then there's a lot of potential here to sink your teeth into. Those statements fit me to a T, and Disco Elysium has quickly become one of my favorite RPGs of all time -- possibly one of my favorite games just in general. For those who can get into it and appreciate it for all it has to offer, it really does have a rich spirit and unique soul unlike anything else you can find in modern gaming, and that's what makes it really special.