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dkirschner's Disco Elysium (PC)
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| [December 25, 2024 02:14:51 PM]
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I should have been writing entries for this as I was playing (same with Death Stranding, coming soon…) so that I could chronicle great moments. But man, I got sucked into this hard, and the great moments are uncountable. I don’t know how many times—dozens, at least—I thought, “Wow.” The writing is the best in any videogame ever. My total time was well over the “completionist” time on howlongtobeat.com because I read everything I could. Approach it like a novel; part absurdist, part political philosophy, part murder mystery. There is nothing like Disco Elysium. Here are some things that set this apart from a typical isometric RPG / point-and-click (the two genres this borrows from the heaviest):
1. You play as a loser, not a hero. And not just any loser, but an alcoholic cop who also loves to do speed (although you can swear off drinking and drugs; in my playthrough I was mostly clean). This is not an RPG where you can "be anyone." You can choose the "flavor" of alcoholic loser cop, but you're still an alcoholic loser cop.
2. The writing is smart. Like academic smart. Like if I didn’t have a PhD in Sociology I would have understood far less. If you like social and political theory, you may be the target audience here. And a variety of political theories are present, their virtues and flaws explored. None are upheld as “the answer” to organize society, yet special critique is reserved for people and systems that exploit the marginalized.
3. There is no combat, except for theory combat and some dialogue-based combat toward the end.
4. There is equipment, but it’s just clothes to make you look cool and/or absurd, and they affect stats.
5. All stats affect various checks and dialogue options.
6. Your stats are characters. Okay, this is a seriously unique feature. Your Empathy, your Logic, your Endurance, your Hand-eye Coordination…they all talk to you. They give you advice (sometimes bad advice), narrate situations, provide background information, crack jokes. You would think that high stats are all good, but this isn’t the case. Yes, you’ll pass checks, but any personality trait in an extreme has drawbacks. For example, Encyclopedia is great for providing you with background information, which you can use to your advantage, but at high levels, it provides a constant barrage of useless trivia (even claiming to know things that it doesn’t!). Or, Drama is great for putting on convincing performances, telling if people are lying, and so on, but at high levels, it becomes manipulative and mean.
7. You can talk with objects.
8. The game “remembers” dozens of choices you make and tweaks dialogue accordingly. I was constantly surprised, like “it remembered I said that?!” The ending calls back to many decisions that you made, tasks you completed, and so on. It was a bizarrely sweet, touching ending.
9. You can internalize thoughts such that you have an “inexplicable feminist agenda”, understand “race theory,” become an “art cop” (a cop who is also an art critic), or fervently believe you are the one who will usher in global communism. There are like 50 thoughts. Usually, you suffer some penalty while having the thought (for a few in-game hours), and then you get whatever pros and cons for internalizing it (and you don’t know what these pros and cons are ahead of time, so it’s a gamble as to what the thought does). To unlearn a thought costs a skill point, so I basically never unlearned anything once I learned it. I actually disliked this aspect of the game, that I couldn’t experiment with thoughts because of limited thought slots and limited skill points (that I preferred to put into stats). I also disliked that if you remove a thought, it’s gone forever; you can’t have it again. When clicking around one time early in the game, I accidentally unlearned “inexplicable feminist agenda,” which I was so curious about, and didn’t realize it until a couple hours of playtime later, so I couldn’t go back and keep it.
Characters and worldbuilding are top tier. Many characters are extremely memorable, such as Cuno, a speed-addled tween who talks in the third person and poses so hard to be badass to some girl peering over a fence behind him; a “high net worth individual” who is so rich that light literally bends around him; and a group of electronic music fans who want to create a meth lab and a dance club in an old church (in which also currently reside a “crab man” who is a religious zealot who lives in the rafters and a computer programmer who DMs the world’s largest RPG and who is trying to find some rip in the fabric of the universe or something). Oh, and of course, Kim, your trusty sidekick, a cop who is better than you in every way. Regarding worldbuilding, the game takes place in one downtrodden part of a city, which serves as the lens through which you learn about the past like 50 years of world events—a communist revolution; the spread of a religion; a suzerainty; etc. It’s dense in the best way.
Quests (or tasks) are creative and, like the characters, extremely memorable. The main quest in the game is to solve a murder, but that was often the least interesting part. Instead, things like helping those EDM fans make their dance music more “hardcore,” hunting for cryptids, exploring a haunted commercial building behind a book store, trying to collect everything you need to sing karaoke at the hotel, and arguing with the hotel staff about karaoke and rent and whether he’s a bartender or not and constantly listing off new things you find that are wrong with the hotel, are all highlights. I think that by the end of the game, I did pretty much everything possible.
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dkirschner's Disco Elysium (PC)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Monday 25 November, 2024
GameLog closed on: Wednesday 25 December, 2024 |
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