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:
Favorite Quest #5:
Investigate the Doomed Commercial Area
Anyway, once inside, you get to wander through the remnants of various failed businesses, and in some cases speculate on why they failed -- like maybe the group who was developing a sort of online RPG simply mismanaged their budget and let the scope of things get wildly out of control until they could no longer continue funding it, or maybe the ice cream makers scared away too many potential customers by selling their product out of the stuffed corpse of a scary apex predator. Eventually, you make contact with The Entity and learn that she's just a normal person who's converted part of the chimney stack into a workspace where she runs her business making custom, novelty dice. Her business seems to be running fine, and she can give you a rundown on all the perfectly logical reasons the other businesses failed, so it would seem like the curse is just a bunch of meaningless superstition, but you're of course free to continue role-playing as if it's real, if you so choose.
And that's pretty much it for this quest, although you can later find out through another unrelated quest that there might, in fact, actually be paranormal forces at work, although it's not strictly relevant to how you solve this particular quest since it happens much later. Otherwise, this quest really isn't all that complicated; you basically just talk to two people, and then it's essentially finished. But I like what it does for the world-building, by letting you see more of what actually goes on in this world with even a bit of a behind-the-scenes look at how some of the businesses in this area operated before shutting down. There's some good exposition here to show how Martinaise has fallen on tough times in the last few decades, which you uncover through a more active process of investigating specific environments and sub-plots. That makes it a little more engaging to learn all this backstory than just hearing about it through dialogue or other more passive means. It's also interesting the way this quest demonstrates some of its unique depictions of technology, with anachronistic computers and the internet handling data transfers and communications through call-in radio networks, which helps to establish this setting as being similar to our current reality, but ultimately its own beast altogether.
The world of Disco Elysium has a fair number of quasi-paranormal elements to it -- perhaps most notable being the whole concept of the Pale, a sort of Nothingness that exists between known areas of the world, and which seems to drive people crazy who try to pass through it -- but the idea of a curse affecting the local businesses at 32 Rue de Saint Ghislaine in Martinaise, Revachol, is probably your first introduction to the idea that there might actually be some weird, unexplainable phenomena in this world, and that the main character's potential demented psychosis (if you choose to pick those kinds of dialogue options) might not actually be complete nonsense. This quest caught my interest from the very beginning, because I was role-playing as an eccentric weirdo who was all about this kind of stuff, so it was a great match for my character's personality and gave me a lot of fun opportunities to dig deeper into that element of his characterization.
Favorite Quest #4:
Find the Working Class Husband
Starting on Day 2, you can find a nameless working-class woman browsing through books outside the bookstore. At first glance she might seem like just a generic filler character who's there to literally fill out space, but if you approach her, you can ask about the book and inquire if she needs the assistance of a police officer. And for some reason, you can be REALLY determined to provide some sort of assistance, to the point of going down the list checking if her husband, kids, and cockatoo are all safe and sound. That's about as far as this line of questioning goes, with her repeatedly shutting you down at every turn since she doesn't even have a cockatoo, she knows exactly where her kids are, and although she doesn't know where her husband is right this moment, that's not unusual and it's no reason for concern. But not far away, you can find a "Working Class Drunk" which the Authority skill latches onto as being the Working Class Woman's Working Class Husband, so case solved! Time to report back to the Working Class Woman about your findings.
That's of course not her husband, but the more you persist, the more she starts to reveal that her husband has been away a little longer than usual, and your constant pressing of the issue is starting to make her worry. This triggers the actual quest entry, but you can't solve it for at least another day, when the waterlock gets repaired and you're able to explore the coastal region on the western side of the map. Over there, you randomly stumble into a dead body on the boardwalk that seems to match the Working Class Woman's description of her husband. And as far as you can tell, he was drinking, slipped through a faulty plank in the boardwalk, fell backward, hit his head on the nearby bench, lost consciousness, and bled to death. At that point, there's not much else to do but call in the body to be retrieved, and check with the local library to confirm the man's identity before you break the news to the Working Class Woman.
And that's the extent of the quest. I like it a lot, because it feels like a good representation of the game's ability to juggle wildly different tones to great effect. The whole thing starts out as a ludicrous joke 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 meta and self-aware that this shouldn't be a normal quest opportunity, but through your ridiculous antics it leads to a genuine situation of concern for this woman, and then eventually to one of the more tragically poignant and serious sequences of the entire game. What makes it work is the sheer mundanity of the Working Class Husband's death; he wasn't murdered, he wasn't involved in some complicated scheme, and he probably didn't even do anything to deserve what happened to him. Through a sequence of random circumstances the man just accidentally died, all by himself, for no good reason, and was left undiscovered for two whole days. That just goes to show how cruel and senseless the world can be at times, where bad things happen for no greater purpose, and the game stops joking about stuff immediately to really sell the notion that this is no longer a joking matter.
For all the time you spend in this game being a chaotic bumbling wreck of a human being, it's pretty significant, then, to have a quest like this humanize everything, 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. Which is surprisingly effective writing that also etched this whole situation in my mind. So it's just a really strong quest that does a good job grounding the whole experience with a very real, relatable situation that stands out for how much it contrasts against all the other typical quests in the game.
Favorite Quest #3:
Help the Ravers Start a Night Club
This might be the longest quest in the entire game, aside from the main quest, and it starts out as innocuously as talking to a random girl you find playing with a microphone recorder out on the ice, and having a complete mental breakdown about ****ing your own hat. Anyway, the girl's name is Acele, and she's there with her friends Andre, Egghead, and Noid, trying to convert the abandoned church into a new night club that will focus on a groundbreaking new genre of "anodic dance music." Problem is, a couple of spooks have moved into the church before they could get there, and the ravers need your help to either get rid of the spooks, or find a way to get them to cooperate. This leads to a whole series of quests involving a weird crab man living up in the rafters of the church, and a woman named Soona who's there studying a strange phenomenon, in addition to other tasks where you work with the group of ravers to perfect their dance music and continue to gain their trust so you can pass their insanely high-level skill checks. So really, this entry is an umbrella for pretty much everything associated with that church, since it ends up being central to quite a few different endeavors.
What's notable about these quests, is that they all run in parallel with each other along a single narrative path, which is a little bit different from all the other quests in the game that tend to scatter off in all different directions as their own branching sub-plots. Even though there is still a lot of overlap between those other quests, there is a slightly more disjointed, non-linear feel to them where you wind up bouncing back and forth between a bunch of different questlines all at once, which are entirely different storylines altogether but which wind up relating back to the murder investigation in some way. In contrast, these quests with the ravers in the church flow directly alongside the quests with Soona and take place in a largely self-contained area, which gives them a really engaging pace since you don't get distracted by mandatory roadblocks or other things popping up to force your attention -- you just get to focus on this one story for a good chunk of time. I stumbled into this quest randomly at the end of one in-game night and then spent six hours of real time doing everything, across several different sessions, making it probably the single most engaging segment of the entire game for me.
I found the church itself to be particularly alluring on account of all the bizarre stuff going on there, from the weird silence you experience in one very specific spot, to the apparently infinite void of nothingness looking up into the rafters, to the enigmatic conversation with the shadowy Tiago, and all the time spent reflecting on Dolores Dei in front of the fractured stained glass window -- which helps to expand on the world-building some more with finding out that she might not be of this world, depending on who you listen to. All of that combined with the ethereal soundtrack gave this place a distinctly mystical feel, which combined with my fascination for the more paranormal elements of this world, made me really interested to look into these mysteries. Working with Soona, you learn that the column of Silence is actually a two millimeter hold in the world, with pretty deep implications that the Pale might be actually expanding into civilized spaces through this hole in the world. It even ties in with the Doomed Commercial Area as a possible explanation for the curse, with extra dialogue opportunities to relay this information to the bookstore owner and dice maker -- that's not to mention it serving extra importance during the Moralist Vision Quest, as well as during the final dialogue with your Precinct 41 partners when going over all the positive things you've accomplished or discovered in your few days in Martinaise. So even though the hole doesn't directly relate to the main plot, it actually winds up being extremely important for the overall story. Finding out about all this stuff was one of the single biggest "holy crap" moments for me, just because of how significant it turned out to be while also being pretty out there, as something completely unexpected.
But besides that, the ravers themselves are a lot of fun to interact with, with lots of comedic moments along the way towards helping them refine the "Hardcore Aesthetic" through their music, and even getting Kim to join in with some epic dance moves once all is said and done. Or if you fail, it leads to some serious character development with him when you apologize and learn more about how he's had to endure different forms of racism his whole life, so it ends up being a touching moment either way. On the flipside, all the dialogue with Egg Head is amusing with him acting as the perpetual hype man, especially when you convert him to your political ideology and he starts spouting "INCREMENTAL PROGRESS! YEAAGHH" at the start of every dialogue. Acele, in particular, has a notably empathetic, relatable quality to her as a struggling artist who's losing interest in her passion because of how fruitless it seems, which also leads to one of my favorite messages of the entire game: that these artistic endeavors we cling to help to make the world a more bearable place to live in when everything else has turned to ****. It's kind of hard for me not to find meaning in that sentiment these days, and so this quest really spoke to me on a deeper level than most others in the game.
Favorite Quest #2:
Find the Insulindian Phasmid
One of the first characters you meet in Martinaise is Lena, the cryptozoologist visiting the Whirling-in-Rags hostel. Despite being just a seemingly minor side character at the start of the game, she actually winds up being one of the most prevalent recurring characters, first serving to help orient yourself in the world when you wake up with no memory of the world around you, then on day two sending you on a quest to look for her husband Morell, who's conducting research out on the coast but hasn't reported back yet, in addition to plenty of other interactions along the way towards getting Morell home safely. Along the way, you can team up with Morell to set up traps and perform various tasks in the search for the Insulindian Phasmid -- a special cryptid resembling a walking stick insect that Lena saw as a child, and which she's spent the rest of her life hoping to find again. But after numerous rounds of setting up and checking traps, the endeavor begins to feel fruitless, and Lena starts to question whether she actually saw the Phasmid at all and if it's worth continuing in vain searching for something that probably doesn't even exist. Worse yet, her marriage with Morell was founded on their mutual interest in cryptids, which is beginning to make the whole premise of their relationship feel a bit flimsy to her. In spite of that, you can choose to encourage her to not give up hope in the Phasmid or her marriage, while you continue the search on your own.
That's about as far as the quest actually goes, since there's not much more you can actually do to continue searching for it. Try as you might, those traps will always remain empty, even after getting the little gremlin Cuno to stop stealing the locust bait from inside. But regardless, I was fully on board with the premise of this cryptid, fully embracing it as part of my character by going all-out on every aspect of the quest, even going so far as to internalize thoughts about cryptids, swamping myself in its repugnant pheromones, and repeatedly going back to check the traps long after the quest was ostensibly complete, always hoping that some stage of the main quest would eventually lead to a new discovery. But the longer the game went on, the more I started to sympathize with Lena and began to lose hope that we would ever find it -- only for it to surface near the very end of the playthrough, when you're just about to finish solving the murder investigation.
That moment of it slowly standing up, with the music starting to swell and the slow revelation that this is the Phasmid we'd been looking for all this time, was pure magic. It was a moment filled with awe and wonder that such a thing could actually exist and that we were even having this interaction at all, which is a strong testament to the game's world-building that I actually bought in to this as being such a noteworthy thing. Ordinarily in these types of games I'd be like "Yeah okay whatever, it's a goofy-looking imaginary stick-bug in a fictional video game," but the game as a whole did a really good job of pulling me into its setting and making these sorts of details have the sort of impact they would if this were a real place. And after all the crap you've gone through with revelations about your past life -- like all the terrible things that have led you to such self-destructive behavior where you would drink yourself into oblivion -- and everything with the murder investigation, all the people dying around you, and the world just being a generally miserable place right now -- after all of that, seeing a creature like this that had never been documented before, that everyone believed couldn't be real, instilled a sort of hope that there was still magic to find in this world. But at the same time, it's also an omen for what's to come, with revelations that the Pale might be man-made, and that our existence in this world may bring about its eventual destruction. So it ends up being a pretty heavy-hitting moment all around.
Much like the quest with the Working Class Woman, this one has an engaging arc to it, with it starting as a bit of joke with you essentially just goofing around looking for make-believe insects, but then it goes through a series of evolutions before culminating in a serious, emotionally-moving conclusion. My jaw was dropped the entire time in just pure awe at what this quest had unexpectedly built up to, and it served as arguably a stronger climax to the game than actually solving the murder investigation, which is a big part of why it ends up near the top of my rankings. The one issue I find is that you never get to followup with Lena and Morell after its discovery, since the game ends soon afterward, so it would've been nice if there could've been a phone call or montage of newspaper headlines somewhere in the end to wrap up their story. That's a minor issue, however, and doesn't detract from the overall impact of the quest for me.
Favorite Quest #1:
The Mystery of the Ex-Something
This entry isn't for any specific quest per se -- in fact, I don't think there even is an official quest for this, although the one to give Figurines to Dolores Dei is what leads to its ultimate conclusion, so I guess I'm stretching the rules for this video a bit. But regardless, it's a major sub-plot that spans the entire game, which I found particularly intriguing. From the very beginning, you know that you were on a crazy bender last night, and partied so hard that you forgot literally everything about yourself and the world around you. That serves as a useful mechanism 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, while also giving you a fresh slate to role-play the main character in whatever way you want. But it also adds a mystery element to the story with figuring out what happened in your past to make you go on such a chaotic bender, and why your character is the way that he is.
It's suggested briefly at the very start of the game, that there may have been an ex-wife in your past, and that you really shouldn't think about it considering the pain you went through already to get to this point. But that's pretty much all the setup you get for this, and then it's up to you to explore and poke into various thoughts and memories to try to piece together who the ex-something is and what happened with her. Nothing ever comes easily, however, as the game steadily doles out minor hints and clues in unexpected places that don't really tell you anything concrete -- some of it being laced in heavy metaphor that you can't possibly understand until much later. All-the-while your volition and other skills are all warning you not to go down this line of questioning, and urging you to just forget about it. But such is the nature of mystery that being told not to look into something only makes me more curious, and so I found myself really engrossed by the budding story that was developing, here, with every little teaser that I tried to decipher any kind of worthwhile meaning from.
The first big moment comes when you read a letter, which you had previously tucked into a hidden compartment in your police ledger that seems to paint a positive, happy picture of your relationship with the ex-something, thereby setting up the tragedy for its ultimate downfall, where the mystery then becomes "How did our relationship go from that, to nothing but a painful memory?" Anyway, you pick up more scattered clues along the way, one of the more notable ones being if you keep making random phone calls from a payphone, it'll eventually land on Dora's number, as her name gets revealed, wherein you learn that she's moved away and is now with someone else, before you eventually arrive at the game's finale. There, you have the chance to rest before finishing your final tasks, and wind up dreaming about Dora. Except, your mind sees her as Dolores Dei, the revered religious figure that your mind has been unwittingly conflating her with this whole time.
And my god, is it a gut punch, as it quickly becomes clear that this had become a toxic relationship, where she grew to flat-out hate you, even to the point of aborting your unborn baby -- and you played a significant part in sending her down that road. Worse yet is that you've still been clinging to an idealized memory of her all these years later while she's obviously gotten on with her life, as yours continues to spiral out of control. And try as hard as you might, nothing you say can convince her to take you back. Even succeeding a skill check to kiss her ends in a sort of failure -- she does not reciprocate the kiss and remains cold and distant to you. Then she leaves, and you're forced to just let go as the dream slowly fades back into consciousness.
It's hard to tell how much of this version of events you should really trust, since it's ultimately a dream happening from a biased and deeply troubled mind, but it's still just so poignant that I was deeply moved by how tragically it all played out. Whereas other games would treat this as an opportunity for you to win her back and get your life back on track, or else as a bittersweet moment of acceptance, with a weight being lifted off your shoulders as you realize that your love just wasn't meant to be so you can safely move on with your life, Disco instead offers no such condolences -- it just kicks you while you're down, emphasizing that this is a sad, ****ed up situation, and there's nothing you can do to change it. In the end, all you can do is just let go, and hope that, eventually, you'll start to forget about her, and the pain will subsequently go away. There's some pretty strong symbolism there for the mental anguish that your character has been experiencing all these years, in terms of how his image of Dora has warped her into this impossibly divine figure which then comes crashing down when faced with reality. It even reflects elements of the main story, in that we can't escape the consequences of the past, and that continuing to hold onto old sentiments can be a recipe for disaster.
So, yeah, I just really enjoyed this plot arc, and even though there wasn't an explicit quest entry to "Find out more about the ex-something," I was deeply engaged with uncovering the mystery and figuring out how all of that backstory motivated the main character. In fact, I would say this was the more engaging mystery for me than "who killed the Hanged Man," which was still interesting in and of itself, but that plot didn't have quite the same personal resonance as this one. Plus, I'm a sucker for a good emotional gut punch, and this certainly had one.
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With my favorite quests out of the way, we can now move on to my least favorite quests. Now in truth, I don't really hate any of these quests, and in fact, I enjoyed Disco Elysium so much overall that it was really hard to pick even just five quests to put on this list. So I may be stretching things a little bit with some of these selections, but I can safely say that the following quests are all ones that I was somewhat disinterested in doing, or that I didn't like as much as
all the others, or else were ones where I experienced some degree of disappointment along the way to finishing them. So without further ado that brings us to,
Least Favorite Quest #5:
All the Political Vision Quests
One of the most notable additions to the Final Cut update were the "Political Vision" quests, which give you a chance to pursue a new side-quest related to one of the four political alignments, so long as your character meets the minimum requirement to select one during a dream sequence at the end of your third night. You might qualify for more than one, but you can still only pick one per playthrough, thereby making them feel somewhat special for uniquely defining aspects of that playthrough. When I read about this, I thought "well that sounds cool," and then I kept hearing about them in ways that made it seem like they would be kind of a big deal -- and then I played them, and came away feeling a little underwhelmed by everything.
It started with the Moralist quest, which I did first. The whole idea is that you work with Soona, the researcher from the church, to rig up a radio antenna to try to call the authorities at the Moralintern in hopes of getting them to come and intervene on account of how bad things have gotten in Martinaise. This premise goes great with the main quest considering that things are pretty crappy there just in general, but with the city on the brink of a violent outbreak and your recent discovery of the entropenetic pale anomaly in the church there's legit, pressing reason to want to get the Moralintern involved. Actually contacting them is pretty cool, too, with the way it teases future echoes in the pale through Kim's dialogue that you think is from the past but is actually something that won't happen until the game's climax, and also getting to visualize a new perspective on the world with the radio operator describing everything she sees from a detached, aerial viewpoint up in the warship. So with this quest progressively building up hope that my mission was going to be successful and that the Moralintern would do something awesome to help, it was extremely anticlimactic for the quest to suddenly end in a Game Over screen upon boarding their dropship. And then it was downright annoying having to replay that whole lengthy sequence setting up the antenna and calling the Moralintern again, just to ultimately reject the whole premise at the very end so I could keep playing the game. It's still a neat quest with some pretty heavy, impacting concepts, all things considered, but the endings soured the whole experience for me.
The rest of the political vision quests were all equally unfulfilling, albeit in different ways. The communist quest about trying to rebuild communism has some decent stuff going on, what with it introducing a couple new characters and opening up a new room on the map so that it feels like genuinely new content, and the ending message ("In dark times, should the stars also go out?") is pretty touching. But I didn't enjoy all the time spent in one location just reading textbooks and listening to the two guys talk, and the whole idea of communism being able to manifest itself as a literal, physical force in the world was a bit too hokey for me to get onboard with, even though building the house of cards did have a pretty cool moment to it. The fascist quest about trying to turn back time to the supposedly "better days" was hard for me to care about in general because I just don't like that whole ideology, but it also has you dealing with a bunch of generally unlikable characters in all familiar locations, which made it feel pretty mundane and lacking in any sort of exciting "wow" factor. I guess there's some amusing dialogue here and there, and the ending can be pretty sad if you're invested in the storyline, but I don't know, I just didn't really enjoy this one. And then the Ultraliberal quest to become a high net-worth individual was kind of a similar thing in that it used entirely old, familiar characters and locations that I had already interacted with plenty of times previously, so it wasn't very interesting to me. The whole thing feels kind of like a joke, where it's entirely about wacky shenanigans with no real point or emotional core to anything, which is kind of entertaining, but much like the fascist quest it didn't really do anything for me.
So ultimately, I was let down by every one of the Political Vision quests in some way. Maybe the problem is just that I had hyped them up in my mind too much before playing them; they're all decently engaging quests and have redeeming aspects to them, but they didn't live up to my expectations and actually proved kind of frustrating in the end for the one that I actually enjoyed the most.
Least Favorite Quest #4:
Find All the Ceramic Armor Pieces
While investigating the Hanged Man as part of the main quest, you learn that he was wearing a full suit of highly advanced, ultra-expensive ceramic armor; scavengers have supposedly claimed most of the armor pieces from his corpse already, but his boots are still there by the time you arrive, since his legs have swollen to such a degree that the boots can't be removed through normal means. This triggers a sequence of tasks, first to find one piece of armor (with the boots being the obvious first step -- if you can get them off his corpse without Kim seeing you do it), and then another to find all the remaining pieces after acquiring your first piece. When you find them all, you complete the task, get an achievement, and get to sport your cool new armor set. And that's basically it. It's not a particularly elaborate quest and it would seem to have extremely minor story implications, with no real story to it whatsoever, but it still serves as an alluring collect-a-thon given the mystique and value of these armor pieces.
So it's a fairly inoffensive quest, but it ends up in my "least favorite" section because I personally got nothing out of it. I was onboard with the premise to start with, but then I screwed up getting the boots because I incorrectly thought I had become trapped in the Doomed Commercial Area after moving the corpse into the fridge, when the door to the bookstore became locked late at night and I didn't want to keep exploring further and risk getting even more side-tracked than I already had been in that area, so I didn't realize there was another exit right around the corner. I also didn't realize at that point that time was going to stop at 2am, or that there weren't any consequences for staying up late, so I didn't want to spend any more time down there than I had to. So I hastily took the dialogue option with Kim to move the body into his vehicle thinking that was the only way to get out of there quickly, and basically just forfeited the boots in that moment. Then once I got the shirt, I apparently never bothered to put it on, which is what you need to do to trigger the next task and subsequent dialogue options to even ask about the gloves in the first place, so I never had any opportunity to get the gloves and never knew I was missing a pre-requisite condition for them. You eventually get the helmet at the very end, but at that point I didn't like the way the armor looked anyway, and could never see myself actually running around wearing that set. On my second playthrough, I was more interested in trying to solve the case by never interacting with the Hanged Man, which meant no boots, and I wasn't really that interested in the armor set anyway because I already didn't like the way it looked. So again, I don't hate this quest by any means, but the whole prospect just turned out to be a big nothing-burger for me across two playthroughs, hence why it's here in my "least favorable" section.
Least Favorite Quest #3:
Interview the Union Boss
One of your primary leads in the murder investigation is to interview the leaders of the two relevant sides of the conflict -- Joyce, who represents the company employing the deceased, and Evrart, who represents the workers who allegedly killed him. I put off visiting Evrart initially because there didn't seem to be a convenient, desirable way to come and go freely from that part of the map, so it was just kind of a hassle getting to him in the first place. I didn't want to subscribe to Measurehead's racist theories and wasn't strong enough to fight him directly, and although I was capable of making the jump into the harbor district from the rooftop, I didn't want to get "stuck" there and be forced to explore the whole area, so I wound up reloading my save once I realized you couldn't just backtrack the way you got in. For some reason, that whole area of the map just wasn't very alluring to me, and there was always more interesting content more immediately accessible to me, so it took me until midway through Day 4 to finally get to Evrart. By that point, I'd apparently missed an optional side task from him because I took too long meeting him, so that made me a little disappointed that I hadn't gotten there earlier, just for the sake of my completionist mindset.
But anyway, you can talk to Evrart about a number of things throughout the game, with multiple instances when you might want or need to return to him for something, and it just wound up being an undesirable prospect every time for me. For starters, I just didn't like the guy very much in general -- he's got this perpetually sleazy tone in his voice that rubs me the wrong way, his blatant corruption is highly objectionable, and he makes you sit in this really uncomfortable chair -- so just talking to him was an unpleasant experience all around. On top of that, just getting to him is a chore since you have to go through three loading screens, and the path to him is this long, circuitous zig-zagging route where the walk-able paths are sometimes hard to discern from the rest of the background environments, so I dreaded going to visit him every time just because of that extra hurdle. I actually think Evrart is an interesting character in the grand scheme of things so I enjoy his inclusion in the game, but I definitely didn't like interacting with him, so really this entry is for any quest that involves him directly.
Least Favorite Quest #2:
What is the Race Enigma?
As mentioned in the previous entry, when trying to find a way into the harbor district, one of them is to get on the good side of the burly, tattooed guy guarding the gate. This guy's name is Measurehead, and in order to get him to let you through without a fight, you have to embrace his conceptualization of racial hierarchies. And it might be the most annoying conversation in the entire game. It's an interminably long diatribe of this guy droning on and on and on about all the racial ethnicities in the world, and while it can be useful from a world-building perspective for the player to hear about these kinds of things, it's coming from an incredibly biased source that you can't trust, and he goes into so much detail that it just became information overload for me. The longer it went on, the harder it became to remember anything he was saying with all the proper nouns I'd never heard of quickly being swapped out yet for more proper nouns on a completely different subject, so it didn't even really serve as an effective overview of the world's population for me since I just personally had a difficult time retaining and contextualizing his information. At a certain point, it started to feel like school homework when you're studying for a test just trying to remember facts and trivia through brute force memorization, which eventually made me lose interest in doing so altogether. Then of course, his delivery is tedious with his slow speech making it take forever for him to finish a statement, and with the all-caps writing making it more of a literal eye strain to read through it all in order to skip his slow voice-over.
As far as the actual quest is concerned, there's not much to it -- you just internalize the Advanced Race Theory thought and come back to him, but I wasn't willing to spend a skill point and a Thought Slot on that, so this quest wound up sitting in my journal unfulfilled for the entire game. So the subject matter of the quest was inherently unappealing to me, and the delivery method through Measurehead was not very pleasant, either. The one good thing I can say about all this, is that the concept of "Al Gul" was kind of funny to embrace into my character, whom I was role-playing as an eccentric weirdo, with being able to sort of misinterpret that term as some kind of spiritual entity, so I appreciate Measurehead at the very least for introducing me to "Al Gul."
Least Favorite Quest #1:
Split a Kilo with Cuno
This entry isn't so much for this quest specifically, but instead it's more of a catch-all for all things involving Cuno. Because I'm just gonna say it: I hate Cuno. The little gremlin is just annoying on all levels, from the grating sound of his voice, to the repetitive upturned vocal inflections, to the excessive profanity, to his constantly referring to himself in the third person, to his belligerent behavior -- everything about this kid is insufferable. It's irritating trying to conduct serious police work with him constantly running his mouth in the background and outright obstructing the investigation, and it's frustrating how hard it is to put him in his place. Like I got so fed up with him that I literally tried to punch him, but failed horribly in my attempt to do so and ultimately chose to just lie there and die rather than live with the embarrassment in being stood up by that little ****head.
But eventually, you may get the chance to empathize with him, which can lead towards a quest where he tasks you with appropriating illegal substances from his violent father, with the idea being that you'll split the haul with Cuno. Of course, you can choose to take this quest on for whatever reason, be it to take it all for yourself, or to confiscate it for legal reasons, or even to actually split it with Cuno to get on his good side. And you're likewise warned repeatedly that Cuno's dad is supposed to be really dangerous, and that you should be really cautious trying to pull this off. But then you break into his apartment and find out that Cuno's dad is a pathetic loser who's too strung out to offer any resistance whatsoever, basically lying there on his literal deathbed, with other revelations to be found in the apartment therein, that Cuno has had a rough upbringing in this abusive, negligent, and toxic environment which might explain some of his current behavior problems.
I've seen people argue that this moment was enough for them to do a complete 180 on Cuno, where they stopped hating him and started to feel sorry for him, and while I can sympathize with his situation it absolutely does not change my opinion of him. Simply knowing WHY he's such an obnoxious pest isn't enough to make me suddenly like him, and I still hated all subsequent interactions with the little irritant. Now to be fair, Cuno does actually improve over time if you do enough to gain his respect, and also distance him from Cunoesse -- who's probably an equal culprit to Cuno's father in fanning the flames of his belligerency. And he will actually come to support you by the end of the game, even accompanying you on the final mission, depending on other circumstances at play, with talk of him maybe even growing up to become a police officer himself one day. So he's not irredeemable, and I can see why some people might eventually grow to have a certain fondness for him. But my god, those first interactions with him, which go on for so long during a critical part of the main quest when everything in the game is brand new to you, put him in such a deep hole with me that it was impossible for him to climb out of it by the end of the game.
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So, those are my thoughts on some of Disco Elysium's more notable quests that I
liked or disliked for various reasons. Remember, this was not an
objective ranking of quality or the ones I necessarily consider to be
the "best" or "worst" quests in the game -- they're just the ones that
interested me most based on my own personal tastes and preferences, or
ones that I took personal issue with. There are a lot more quests in the game that might deserve
special mention that I didn't cover in this video, so I'd be interested
to hear what other quests resonated strongly for you, especially any of
the smaller, less-popular ones that don't get as much love from the
community or gaming press.
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