Disco Elysium is an isometric role-playing game initially conceptualized as a tabletop game. It is primarily compared Planescape: Torment if it removed its combat system to focus on the good stuff—its story and dialogue. The result of removing said fluff is a complex narrative and a pure RPG experience unlike any other in the market today.
ZA/UM doesn’t sponsor this review. This is a fair and unbiased review of the game.
Story—A world fully realized
Disco Elysium is a master class in world-building. The history, politics, and culture of Elysium loom like a shadow inviting people to accept its form—some fought against its influence, they are now silently preaching ideologies of a failed revolution five decades past; others thrive in it, finding selfish wealth and happiness through abusing the corrupt system. Some accept the mold, rationalizing to themselves that they are powerless to change the status quo. Then there are those who dance around it, finding selfish happiness through the bottom of a bottle, watching the tequila sunset over the horizon. Nowhere do these conflicting ideologies clash more than in Revachol, the disgraced former capital of the world. And nowhere in the city is more volatile than a small, poverty-stricken district called Martinaise, the setting of the game.
The player-character wakes up to a hangover of world-ending proportions, which completely wipes out his memory. The fallout is so severe that even his semantic memory is affected, failing to recall the simplest concepts, even the currency they use. Upon meeting your partner Kim Kitsuragi, you learn that you are an officer of the Revachol Citizens Militia (RCM) — the official police force for Revachol— and sent to Martinaise to investigate the dead body hanging in a tree. But instead of doing that, you were in the process of a self-destructive bender, one involving a deluge of alcohol, drugs; as well as emotionally scarring the citizens of Martinaise.
“Talking” to the hanged man using your overactive imagination
What starts as a convenient amnesiac trope found in numerous role-playing games—also present in Planescape: Torment— is justified to significant effect, as the game tasks you with solving a riveting murder case while simultaneously undergoing an emotional journey of self-discovery. It is as much as a police procedural as it is an existential crisis.
The overarching plot is intriguing enough to string you along with the game's events, with twists and reveals expected from the mystery genre. But, what elevates it above and beyond its peers is how well the narrative circles back to its established lore. By the end of the case, the subtle ways historical events subtly affect the decisions and motives of crucial characters solidify Disco Elysium as a tour de force of literature. The mind-blowing experience is akin to rereading an Agathie Christie whodunit after knowing the killer—where the signs and clues of the killer scattered throughout the story become glaringly obvious.
Gameplay—Detective arriving on the scene
The game offers three archetypes to choose from the character creation screen: Thinker, a keen-eyed Sherlock Holmes type averse to human interactions; Sensitive, an emotional human can-opener with an overactive imagination; and Physical, a dumb brute who solves problems directly and violently. These are based on the four main attributes: Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics. There’s also a choice to mix-and-match attributes to suit your preference.
The skills are the most defining element of the game. Anyone who has played a RPG is intimately familiar with the mechanic of earning experience to gain skill points. Unlike other titles in the same genre, Disco Elysium contains no combat. Instead, the twenty-four skills are personality traits or characteristics. Don’t expect traditional traits such as strength and vitality, but embrace skills like Empathy and Logic.
Skills are tied to skill checks. While interacting with an object or person, specific skills can access exclusive options. For example, at the beginning of the game, there is a broken window inside your room. Visual Calculus, a skill used to visualize and reconstruct crime scenes, can determine its cause. Passing the check relies on a dice roll of two d6s, with your current level of the skill pitted against the check's difficulty to determine success rates. It helps to wear suitable clothing, as they act like gear, providing bonuses and downsides to skills.
There are two types of skill checks: a white check, which can be retried after failure, either by leveling up the corresponding skill point or the effect of a thought; and a red check, which can only be rolled once. There are also ways to positively or negatively modify checks; the most common way is through your dialogue choices with the character. Empathizing with their situations and beliefs helps your chances, while actively challenging and insulting them does the opposite. This design choice is a much-needed update to the genre, as now conversing is much more engaging and immersive and no longer a mindless task of exhausting all the clickable options.
What’s most interesting about the skill system is that they are characters themselves, with fully-voiced personalities taking up real estate on your thoughts. Skills would often chime in during conversations to analyze, advise, and comment on the situation. For instance, a detective with several points in Rhetoric dissects particular word choices a character utters. Skills could also open up novel actions for you to take. Case in point, Authority knows when the person you’re interacting with respects your badge or not and will ask you to assert yourself when appropriate.
However, skills are not infallible. The individual skills perceive situations within the myopic confines of their judgment, unable to adjust to the context. Half-light, the skill in charge of the fight-or-flight response, always wants you to bash someone in for the slightest aggravations. Dumping points into one skill exacerbates their issues. Inland Empire, your untethered and unfiltered imagination, loses touch with reality and drives the conversation towards the supernatural and outlandish conspiracy theories. It is problematic and hinders your progress in the investigation, but the game is best-experienced role-playing as a flawed character. If a particular skill interests you or fits the type of character you’re portraying, by all means, dump more points into it.
Disco Elysium shows off the strength of its writing through its skills. Your chosen skills join the conversation regularly to guide or hinder your progress. Writing for over twenty-four distinct skills to provide multiple perspectives of the same conversation is a Herculean feat of game writing. Aside from contextual remarks, it takes careful consideration of its rules and systems to ensure that all builds are valid to progress through the game.
There are alternative ways to solve a problem depending on the strength of your build. For example, if your obstacle takes the form of a racist 2-meter tall wall of muscle named Measurehead blocking your path to a key witness, what do you do then? You could match him body-to-body, stylishly spin-kicking him out cold, embarrassing him in front of his groupies. You could point out inconsistencies between his deeply held “race theory” then sucker punch him when he’s distracted. You could avoid confrontation altogether by sneaking through a back alley and jumping through a rooftop if you’re nimble enough. If you’re not equipped to do any of the above, you can internalize his long rant about superior and inferior races before letting you through as his pupil. This option comes with consequences to your reputation and integrity as a police officer since you’re consorting with a known racist. Most importantly, Kim will be disappointed in you since he belongs to one of the inferior races mentioned. No one wants to disappoint Kim.
Waiting for the tide to recede
The Thought Cabinet is another layer to role-playing to customize your character. Your choices throughout the game could unlock thoughts that you collect in the Thought Cabinet. You can choose which thoughts to internalize to gain its effects, ranging from simple stat bonuses to new dialogue choices. The Thought Cabinet is an organic way to morph your character as you play as it responds to your preferences. Some thoughts let you commit to a copotype and a political alignment.
A copotype is the game’s twist on classes. It allows you to commit to a stereotype refining your inner monologue and dialogue to accommodate your newfound identity. Suppose that you become an Art Cop; your character would prefer if you and everyone else dressed a certain way. Art Cops also find time to complain and critique about art even when there is none.
There are four political ideologies in the game: communism, fascism, ultraliberalism, and moralism. If it seems that these four are extremes and gross oversimplifications of modern political discourse, then you’re right. The developers previously stated that it is impossible to capture all the small nuances of political ideologies, so they chose those four extremes to represent them best. By selecting an ideology, you can embody their beliefs during conversations.
Unlike most games (and media in general) today, Disco Elysium doesn’t shy away from politics. With the Final Cut version of the game, ZA/UM reworked the political alignment to expand into its dedicated quest line corresponding to the respective ideology. The previous iteration saw political alignment as just another way to define the quirks of your player-character. Still, with the new quests, you are given a chance to carry your chosen ideals and attempt to make your mark on Revachol.
The variety doesn’t end there. The narrative is written with failure in mind. The story does not stop in moments of incompetence or lousy detective work—in fact, failing red checks would lead to interesting results that only unlucky dice rolls could only attain. Failing a simple Conceptualization check to recall your name lets you identify as Detective Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau. Passing that same check leads you to honestly say that you can’t remember, losing the opportunity to champion such a fancy name.
Disco Elysium doesn’t incentivize you one way or another for playing a certain way or with a particular build; it just wants you to sink into the kind of cop you want to become, no matter how disastrous or corrupt. No matter what, expect impeccable writing.
After multiple playthroughs, it becomes clear that alternate choices don’t provide extra pathways but rather a new paint of coat for the same road. Take the example a while ago with Measurehead, there are multiple ways to deal with him, but the choices always converge towards talking to that key witness.
The ending is particularly divisive as many players didn’t appreciate it. Without going into spoilers, literarily, it fits the recurring theme of people unable to move on from the past, like with Disco. But as a game, it suffers from the same narrative dissonance of the core gameplay. Wherein it invites you to role-play as the worst detective and human ever to exist yet still receive the same ending as another player who played it straight, albeit a few minor flavor differences. No matter how you play, your detective will be shoehorned into a tale of redemption. So far, the only way to get a bad ending is by using one particular copotype. Even so, you have to try really hard to get there.
Still, the game is worth a replay or two, focusing on the skills you neglected on your first playthrough. Don’t expect the overarching plot to deviate, but rather focus on the microcosmic narrative of each individual—paired with a new set of skills; it becomes a fresh experience.
People of Martinaise
Of course, the core gameplay loop and the unique systems that create its complex dialogue system would be all for nothing if the NPCs are bland. Fortunately, the untouchable writing success extends to the secondary characters as well. While investigating, you can ask the NPCs about the hanged man, and they have a few things to say about the situation. But the game doesn’t stop there, as it allows you to prod into them to learn their story.
Disco Elysium is at its best during moment-to-moment conversations with the various characters. It is unafraid to meander to tangents so far removed from the investigation, which you can’t help but wonder if it’s necessary—often, it isn’t, but it’s written so well you’ll want to see it through the end. Distinct voice acting helps alleviate the strain on the eyes from all the reading. They aren’t directed to sound like the average cookie-cutter over-enunciated background character; they are dripping with thick accents and curious manners of speaking. The result is a strange blend of familiar and foreign, where you feel like you the accent sounds plausible enough to be expressed on a far corner of the globe, but you can’t seem to place where.
Most RPGs have your player-character as the decent person and your companions serving as unhinged eccentric maniacs; it is the other way around in this game. Since you are already the crazed and unstable character, your partner, Kim Kitsuragi, acts as your straight man, bringing you down a few notches when you go too far off the deep end. Kim is unbelievably patient, tolerant, yet quick with a verbal punch; he acts as the flexible moral compass to your partnership.
As you’ll spend the majority of your time interacting with NPCs across the town, it doesn’t help that the game’s load times are atrocious. It is consistently abysmal from booting up the game to loading up the next area, even with an SSD. There’s a notorious segment of the game where you have to talk to a character located at the top floor of the Whirling Rags. From entering the building to reaching the top floor, you have to pass through four loading screens and then repeating the process on the way down. This issue is even worse on console.
The lack of fast travel wouldn’t be an issue since the playing area is manageably small, but since the developers implemented it poorly it deserves some criticism. To unlock this option you need a map; you can buy or steal this off the bookstore. You’re only allowed to travel between the three major regions of the world, but you can’t do this any time you wish. You have to physically put yourself in landmark of the region so you can finally access fast traveling. It is an infuriating feature but it isn’t game-breaking.
Quests—To-do list
Quests aren’t given to you through a task giver; it comes naturally in tasks. Most of the time, they are simple reminders of where to go with the investigations, based on the leads and clues you’ve gathered. Other times, they are triggered through your play style and skills; Electrochemistry is notorious for this. In charge of your next dopamine rush, it barrages you with quests to seek and intake drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes. Like all quests, you don’t have to do it if it cramps your style. There are also secret quests that don’t show up on your ledger until you’ve completed them.
Aside from that, you can also gain a quest by agreeing to help the citizens of Martinaise. Some NPCs need help, and as an officer of the RCM, it is up to you to decide if you have time for a side adventure. There was one hilarious bit where the player-character fixated on one NPC who was minding her own business. After striking a one-sided conversation with her and learning that her husband hasn’t been home in a few days, you can take it upon yourself to start a quest to look for him—even though she doesn’t want you to do that.
Upon completion, quests grant experience points and sometimes clothes.
Visuals, Art, and Music—It's Disco Baby
Disco Elysium boasts an impressive expressionist art style. Every frame on-screen resembles a watercolor painting brushed on top of a bleaker version of itself, blending hope and nihilism. The messy oil portraits of the characters and especially the skills create surreal and haunting imagery reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s collection. However, what steals the show is the massive mural depicting all the thoughts in the Thought Cabinet braided and stitched together—viewing the piece as a whole leaves a disconcerting trippy effect on the eyes. It reportedly took the artist over a year to make.
Anton Vill’s thought cabinet in its full glory
British Sea Power, an English alternative rock band, provided music for the game. Iconic tracks featured in their past albums were remade for the game. Tracks like “Up Against It” and “Tiger King” had their melodies sampled to use in-game. The blaring horns sampled from “Red Rock Riviera” are sparingly used as you explore outside, generating a somber ambiance.
Critical Acclaim—The indie show-stealer
Disco Elysium was developed and published by ZA/UM. It was first released in 2019 for Microsoft Windows to critical and commercial success, winning four categories in The Game Awards 2019, and with different publications awarding it their game of the year. The expanded and reworked version of the game called Disco Elysium: Final Cut, featuring new content and full voice acting, was released last March 30, 2021.
It is currently available on PC for $39.99 on Steam. It is also available on PS4, PS5, and Stadia. It will also be released for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch later this year.
Conclusion—Final Cut
Disco Elysium’s ability to tie everything back to its narrative while simultaneously balancing dark humor, emotional gut-punches, and philosophical discourse establishes itself as a genre-defying modern classic. Pick it up if you desire a strong narrative, deep customization, and freedom of choice.
Score—9.5/10
Pros:
- High-standard of voice acting
- Witty and engaging writing
- Beautiful art style, visuals, and soundtrack
- Deep customization through skill system and thought cabinet
- Interesting and layered characters
- Abundant lore
Cons
- Alternate paths lead to the same result
- Similar ending on different playthroughs
- Abysmal load times
