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.

Ranking My Most/Least Favorite Quests in Disco Elysium

Disco Elysium is one of the most engaging RPGs I've played in a long time. This is in large part due to its unique take on role-playing through social skills and an abundance of stat checks that influence the way you literally perceive and react to the world around you, but its quests played a significant role as well in hooking my interest from the very beginning and keeping me glued to my computer for the entirety of its 60-hour run time. The quests in Disco relate predominantly to your main investigation to solve a murder, with you playing a police detective waking up from a bad hangover, with no memory of himself or the world around him, who's been sent to figure how who killed the Hanged Man, and why, with two different sides on the verge of breaking out into violent conflict over the murder. 

But throughout your time in Martinaise, you're able to get involved with numerous stereo investigations, or that is to say, side quests, most of which don't seem to be ostensibly related to the case or the greater situation in Martinaise, but which inevitably do wind up relating back to something important, somehow. The quests all contribute to a greater whole sum, in other words, which makes it a little difficult to pick out specific, individual quests since everything ultimately overlaps with something else in some significant way -- but despite that, I'm going to do my best to pick ones out that I particularly enjoyed, and go over what it was that made them so enjoyable. Additionally, I'll also expound on some that I didn't like as much, which is not to say that they were bad quests because I ultimately enjoyed just about everything in this game, but there were still a few that didn't live up to everything else, or that proved to be somewhat underwhelming. 

As always, this is not meant to be an objective ranking of what quests have the most complex mechanics, or the best-told stories, or anything like that -- it's simply my personal opinion, on which quests I enjoyed most based on my own particular tastes and interests. Also please note that this article will have major spoilers for every quest mentioned, some of which will relate to important details in the main story, so just treat the entire thing as spoilers. And now, without further ado, here are my most and least favorite quests in Disco Elysium, in some attempt at a ranked order:

Disco Elysium Beginner's Guide - Tips and Advice

Disco Elysium is a unique sort of role-playing game, in that it doesn't play like other typical sorts of RPGs. With a gameplay system based around a much more abstract set of social skills, no combat whatsoever, and a fictional setting that bears many similarities to reality, but which is ultimately a little strange, it might not be the easiest game to understand right away. From the moment you click "New Game" and are greeted with strange voices talking to you about bizarre nonsense over a black screen, it's going to be an unusual experience that will take some time to fully comprehend. In this game, you play as a detective waking up with a massive hang-over and no memory of yourself or even the basic details of the world around you, but you quickly come to realize that you were sent here to solve a murder investigation, and thus, your main quest is to find out whodunnit, and along the way, also discover more about your past while giving yourself a fresh start to a new life based on how you choose to role-play your character. 

In truth, the game is not very difficult to get through, and its mechanisms -- while very sophisticated in terms of their technical implementation -- are relatively straightforward. It's not a game that really NEEDS a beginner guide, in other words, and in fact, I would say the experience is best enjoyed by just going into it completely blind and learning everything as you go, since that helps you to identify with the main character who is equally clueless about literally everything at the start of the game. But all the same, there are some things that I think might be helpful to know if you're not sure about what to expect or if you're struggling with everything early on, which I wanted to highlight just as friendly pieces of advice. Now as usual whenever I make these sorts of guides, I don't want to spoil things by telling you exactly what to do in terms of "pick these skills, go here and get this special item early, watch out for this NPC, etc," because I want to leave that room for you to discover things on your own as part of the journey, but here are some basic, spoiler-free tips that may help you get a better feel for the game and avoid certain pitfalls.