Disco Elysium (2019) - Review

Some times I try to get through things even though I have a niggling thought at the back of my head that keeps telling me that I don't have any idea what is going on. More often than not that thought transforms into the realization that maybe this isn't the kind of experience I want to spend my time on. But some times not understanding what you're doing is actually part of the experience, part of what keeps you moving forward, looking for that one piece of information that will make it all come together...

Disco Elysium has been lauded by pretty much everyone since it was released, and so it wasn't odd that it ended up on my radar. What all those reviews didn't prepare me for though is that it is a novel camouflaging as an RPG with DnD inspirations. If you don't like to read (or listen to a lot of talking), this is not the game for you. Fortunately I love to read, so should be all good, right?

You play as an anonymous drunk, who quickly realizes he is supposed to be a cop trying to solve a case. A murder case no less. Your buddy cop tells you this as you struggle to comprehend where you are, who you are and why life has to be so complicated. It is a little bit comforting that the main character seems to be as lost as I feel most of the time. I literally just run around talking to random people I come across, but that is my job so it works out.

It starts off RPGy enough, you get to create a character by allocating points. This just means that you can't be really smart and really strong, you're either or. Or somewhat half-bad at both. I decided this was the game where I could finally go hard-core smartass, like I've always wanted in the Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gates. Those game tease you with the possibility to roll those kind of characters, without actually making a game that allows you to play that way. But Disco Elysium, surely, would treat my brains differently. I was hoping this was the kind of game where I could talk myself out of a gun fight if needed. 

Mostly this turned out to be true, though my brainy-ness at first just seemed to mean that I talked a lot to myself without actually accomplishing much of anything. Of course, I haven't had a brawny playthrough so I don't know how much more efficient that playstyle is, though I strongly suspect all the talking is unavoidable regardless. The fun consequence of my lack of physical prowess is that I create a character that legitimately seems like he can die if he stubs his toe hard enough. I've heard of people who have rolled DnD characters that ridiculous, but it was an interesting experience to play it myself. It keeps me on my toes (!) because I literally have no idea what will do damage to me. Beside being shot to death at one point, which seems like a predictable albeit unfortunate work hazard when you're a cop, I'm also at one point close to dying because I kick a door to hard. I guess such is the path I chose to wander.

The stakes are somewhat offset by the fact that you can save and quick save whenever you like. Before long I know to quick save before any conversation or pretty much any choice of consequence. Then I realize I have no idea which choices will end up having major consequences and I just end up quick saving before pretty much any interaction with anything. All the inner voices give you hints towards what dialogue choices are beneficial to go for, and I actually really like the system where the game doesn't necessarily outright tell you which is the "good", "chaotic", "evil" or "neutral" path but just hints at it. Even then you can still mess things up with a misinterpretation or a bad dice roll. It makes for dynamic but confusing dialogues, as much entertaining as they are difficult to try to master.

There is however a disturbing discrepancy between the cleverness of the writing/dialogue/game system and the fact that other parts of the game feel so very... game-y. People will stand in the exact same spot throughout the day and onto the next. That makes sense for the bartender at the inn, even though he is looking at the same broken taxidermied bird for days, but less so for the woman outside the book shop trying to figure out which book she wants to buy. Or pretty much most of the people you interact with. This makes them seem a lot less like people, and a lot more like sign posts, there more to offload information and exposition than to make the world feel like a real place. Maybe this intentional? You do question reality a lot in the game, and the way the game is designed I question the game a lot as well.

It also doesn't help that the people you talk to are such caricatures, it just emphasizes their roles in the game as The Thing That Tells You Where To Go, The Thing That Stands In Your Way, The Thing That Has The Next Answer. They all have their one schtick and they schtick to it, pardon my pun. I don't know if I put my points in the wrong things, but this kind of one-themed conversations is exactly what I wanted to avoid when I went with the brainy guy. While there is options to talk people out of things, threaten them or confuse them (you can even talk a door into opening with enough rhetoric skill), it rarely makes it feel like there is any development in their thought processes. It might be an effect of the somewhat limited scope of the script (I mean in narrative, not depth), you are only there to solve a murder mystery over a handful of days after all, but I've played games like that before that never came close to feeling like talking to robots as much as this does some times (ironically one of them is literally about talking to robots, Primordia).

Disco Elysium unfortunately also ticks one of my biggest no-no's for games, which is that the art design never ever should hamper the playability. It doesn't matter how fancy or artsy your game looks, if it makes it harder to navigate in any way, you have still failed in what is supposed to make a game fun. Disco Elysium looks like it's been painted with an oily aquarell (water painting is apparently the English term for it but I prefer the Swedish one - it sounds posher) in rainy gray and brown colours. Pressing Tab highlights interactable objects around you, and the game would've probably been completely unplayable without it, because even with this feature I frequently struggle to figure out where my character can move to. I even at one point had to look up where to go next because I couldn't identify a passage as walkable from looking at it. As you walk around you can look at certain things that are highlighted, but the information serves no other purpose other than world-building, as if they had to label the things lying around because they're too hard to make out with the eye. "It's a broken window with some dust on it" or "there is some gravel on the ground here". I am making those ones up, but they would fit in the game without trouble.

Most of the game feels like a dream sequence where things only make sense on a surface level. As soon as you start to think about it you realize that none of this can really be for real. I think this is entirely intentional. Just like in a dream things seem to just happen and I rarely get a feeling that I figured something out or was an instrumental part of the world. Time moves on as you move around, and the game just decides it's ready for the next scene to play. Suddenly the game tells me I can quick travel, but not how to do it. I am still wondering. Maybe several play throughs would open up the inner workings of the game for me, right now entire game mechanics make no sense to me - like the "inner thoughts" that you can "research" and appear seemingly at random. I don't know what purpose or benefits they serve, and since they cost ability points to research I entirely opted out of investing in them. 

The voice acting is overall good, though I chose to skip through most spoken dialogue and read the text on my own instead (and I definitely didn't read all of the text because there is so very much of it). That is nothing on the game though, I am simply not a huge fan of spoken dialogue (the Yakuza series being a huge exception!). Otherwise there is some passable music playing in the background and the odd sound effect here and there. Overall the game feels very quiet and you'll mostly hear a lot of talking. It just adds to that weird sensation of everything being unmovable around you.

By in-game day 3 I am starting to feel fatigued. Fatigued by the constant gray, the constant sadness, the constant nothingness. Fatigued by being someone so pathetic everyone seems to laugh behind my back and I have no idea why I am this way. Fatigued by running the same route, trying the same doors and speaking to the same people saying the same things. The sense of achievement is too close to zero at almost any given time and it almost feels like being stuck in a hamster wheel. 

Disco Elysium tries a lot of things and I especially found the exploration of the main characters inners thoughts to be interesting. This is something I haven't seen done in this way before, and a lot of the time it worked well. I liked that enough points in the right skills would allow me to know if someone was telling the truth or even suggest dialogue options for me. Too few points in other skills could result in some hilarious situations like dying from kicking a door frame too hard.

Unfortunately the rest of the game feels like a wet, smelly blanket. The characters leave me uncaring because I understand too little of what is going on or why anyone is motivated to act the way they do. No one feels like an actual person with feelings and thoughts, they all feel like mannequins in what is possibly just a big hallucination. My character and me clearly just go through the motions, trying to pretend for long enough to maybe awaken a feeling of purpose, that just never comes. Everyone says they love Martinaise yet I can't shake the feeling that everyone I talk to would actually rather be somewhere else. And so it turns out, would I.

I will miss Kim though.