/VERDICT
A stunning
psychedelic
detective game,
Disco Elysium
represents a
whole new
standard for
isometricRPGs.OVERALL SCORE
95 %%
insights into their personalities. However, high empathy can
also quite literally hurt you, damaging your health if you
overempathise with another person’s pain.
The result is an astoundingly complex range of interactions,
with wildly different potential outcomes for nearly every
situation. Early in the game you need to examine the hanging
man’s body, but in your hungover state, the decomposing
corpse puts you on the verge of vomiting. A character with
high Endurance will perform the examination without
problems, but low-Endurance characters will have to find
manual ways of coping, from dispelling the hangover with a
sniff of ammonia, to being embarrassed into doing the work
via the taunting of a foul-mouthed local boy.
This hints at the other key point about Disco Elysium’s
writing; it’s enormously funny. Skill checks can lead to
ridiculous situations, such as chucking an old man’s boule
into the sea because you mistook it for a shot put and
wanted to show off. At other times, the jokes are on you. If
you apologise too much in conversation, your mind will tell
you that you’ve assumed the personality of ‘Sorry Cop.’
You can either say sorry and accept this description, or
swear at your brain, at which point it will say ‘whoa, maybe
you’re not Sorry Cop after all!’
Importantly, though, Disco Elysium’s wit isn’t forced, it
emerges naturally from the mess in which you and the game
world are currently stuck. Speaking of which, Disco Elysium’s
world is a lightly fantastical reinterpretation of 20th century
history – one that’s mired in economic stagnation after a
capitalist government defeated a communist rebellion in a
bloody civil war, and where cars look like they’re from the
1920s but disco has already had its heyday.
Thematically, it paints on both large and small canvases.
It’s able to deal with themes of racism and unionisation,
while at the same time letting you help a woman lift a curse
from the building of her bookshop, and assist a pair of elderly
cryptozoologists search for a mythical creature. There’s so
much else to celebrate here too, from the stunning painterly
artwork to the eerie and soulful soundtrack.
However, there’s also a couple of issues worth
mentioning. Time in Disco Elysium moves according to
dialogue,witheachparagraphcausinga minuteoftheday
totick forward. It attempts to mimic the passing of days
without forcing you to work against the clock, but it can lead
to some annoying situations where you miss an event at a
set time because you’re stuck in a conversation, or you’re
actively searching for conversations to move the day
forward. You can pass the time by reading books, but ideally,
the game needs an ability to wait until specific times of day
and exit conversations at any point.
Also, while the writing is undoubtedly brilliant, it would
still have benefited from a slightly sterner editor. Disco
Elysium’s world is based on a setting the developer has
been building for a decade, and at times it feels like it’s tried
to cram that decade’s worth of material into one game. The
detail is impressive, but we simply don’t need to know
about some elements of the lore.
Nonetheless, Disco Elysium is a tremendous
achievement. It’s staggeringly rich in detail, wonderfully
written and capable of being funny and devastatingly human
at the same time. It’s rare indeed to see an out-and-out
masterpiece leap straight out of the box, especially from a
first-time developer, but Disco Elysium is precisely that.
RICK LANE