The 2019 Goaties: #2 - Disco Elysium
I am Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau, Cop of the Apocalypse and a through-and-through badass. I spend most of my time in this dingy backwater drinking and smoking, with a dash of speed here and there for good measure. My partner hates me, because I am both barely paying attention to the horrific case at hand and I am casually racist. I have kicked mailboxes, punched intercoms, and run full-speed at a locked door just to see if it would open, for mere objects do not pose a threat to me. I am, in a phrase, a walking tragedy.
This is but one path of many that the protagonist in Disco Elysium might walk down, a profoundly fascinating, imaginative RPG in the vein of classic Infinity Engine games (see: Baldur’s Gate, Pillars of Eternity). It is, in so many ways, a game about the bitterness and joy of the human experience, embracing a devoted weirdness that extends to the world and its impeccably well-written cast. It revels in the mundane and is unafraid to put so many disparate aspects of humanity - love, loss, regret, childlike wonder, depression and anxiety, even racism and sexism - into the spotlight. Even when so many aspects of it feel like they shouldn’t be as effective as they are, everything about it feels like part of a greater whole. It is a profoundly important, crucial role-playing game.
“DISCO ELYSIUM
(Steam)”
Set in the windswept, discarded city of Revachol, Disco Elysium puts you in the discarded, booze-stained clothes of...well, you can’t really remember your name...or your job...or where you put one of your shoes. After slowly re-acclimating to your surroundings, you are somewhat surprised to learn you’re a cop, trying to solve a murder case, and you’ve kind of gone off the deep end. With your assigned partner, the by-the-book Kim Kitsuragi, you begin walking the beat to discover factions at odds with each other, a labor union strike on the verge of getting violent, and an entire neighborhood filled with wonderfully fleshed-out, realized characters with hopes, dreams, and genuine, human failings.
You’re also pretty regularly hearing from 26 distinct voices that live in your head, aspects of your personality ranging from Coach Physical Instrument to the gleeful drug-pusher Electrochemistry. Apart from the glottis-y, guttural Ancient Reptilian Brain and the wispy, frightened Limbic System bookending each day and night, these Voices represent your character’s skill tree, broken up into four core stat types (Physique, Motorics, Intellect, and Finesse), but they’re as much members of your party and key to solving the case as your partner is, the ways they flesh out the world for you truly fascinating, diverse, and engaging. They’ll talk to you and each other, and the more skill points you dump into any one trait, the more they’ll chime in, occasionally to your detriment.
The Voices make every skill point feel like you’re furthering the definition of who your Cop is. The diversity in which these skills feed into the perk-like Thought Cabinet allow you to shape your character’s worldview in surprising, original ways. Make enough choices of one type, and a Voice will soon be along to try and internalize that ideology into you, with skill bonuses and extra dialogue options once you’ve spent enough time thinking about it, which noticeably affects the story as well. Want to be an incredible meathead that subscribes to race theory and the impending apocalypse, but is profoundly clumsy? You can do that. Feel like being the only person bringing about a communist revolution, completely devoid of empathy but full of useless encyclopedic knowledge? Mazovian Socio-Economics and Encyclopedia have your back.
What sticks out most about Disco Elysium after playing through it is just how immense the world and the characters within it are. Even two months later, I can distinctly recall nearly every person that’s interactable within the world, and the depths to which their personalities feel fleshed out and real. Kim Kitsuragi is the perfect foil to the main character’s aloof, miserable existence: he’s determined, very focused on the case, but still willing to crack a smile or joke now and then. As you build (or ruin) your relationship with him, he responds in kind: he trusts you more (or less), and he is (or isn’t) willing to indulge your occasional flights of fancy as you listen to stories of cryptids or nod stoically at the bartender. The relationship between the Cop and Kim feels so considered and measured over the course of the game that I felt genuine regret when I would make decisions he wasn’t down with.
The citizens of Revachol are no slouches, either. There’s the scrappy, awful weasel of a child, Cuno (and Cunoesse, his...friend? sister?), who refers to himself in the third person and is so fed up with the world at such a young age, proudly proclaiming, “Cuno doesn’t fucking care,” whenever you leave. Evrart Claire, the abysmally grimy union leader with a lazy eye, constantly withholding information while being as pleasant and affable as possible. The girl in the hotel room next to mine, cool and reserved, yet she still bursts into laughter when my incompetent, tongue-tied dipshit of a cop attempts to flirt with her by saying, “I want to have fuck with you.” Disco’s cast of characters is so full of life and they’re so much deeper than the usual random NPC with one tree of dialogue.
These characters help flesh out a story that manages to be gripping, mundane, and just windy enough to be intriguing. The main beats of the murder case are surprising and go to some genuinely shocking places on their own over the course of an in-game week, but there are so many tangents within the world that have wonderful, self-contained little arcs. The supposedly haunted Commercial Area, your Cop’s (potential) desire to hunt down and then perform some karaoke tracks, the drugged-up freakers trying to turn a local church into their drug den and disco palace...there’s really nothing in Disco Elysium that feels like filler. I savored every moment, every veering errand I could scrounge up, just because it allowed me to spend more time in that world.
It’s taken me this long to get around to actually talking about how the game plays, and...y’know, it’s fine! I’ve never been super big on “classic RPGs,” to the point where I’ve never actually finished one. With no combat to speak of, Disco Elysium has to rely on the strength of its storytelling, and the ways in which dice-roll skill checks can complicate or dramatically simplify your casework. It’s a game that’s made me consider seeking out other Infinity Engine-style RPGs, if only to see how the genre has led to this specific release. It feels like a fork in the road in terms of how these sorts of games are envisioned, and it’s so refreshing to see something so thoroughly fleshed out that doesn’t rely on combat in any way. It’s also pleasantly brief and never overstays its welcome, with a full playthrough clocking in at around 15 to 20 hours.
Ultimately, the thing that makes Disco Elysium continue to resonate with me long after seeing it through is just how easy it was to feel like my Cop was a reflection of myself. The diversity in dialogue options and the thoroughness with which those options feel considered let me express myself in situations in ways that I genuinely would in the real world. I’m often overly apologetic; I can fall back on very silly jokes to make attempts at lightening up darker moments; I even have some socialistic political leanings. I am a flawed but capable human, and all of those aspects of my own personality could be represented in the main character’s dialogue, to extents that no other game has come close. Protagonists in RPGs are so often the platonic ideals of Good or Evil, Paragon or Renegade, and the fact that Disco Elysium's protagonist is just a goofy, forgetful, mess of a man makes him feel incredibly real and, well, human.
I nearly forgot this game was coming out until someone mentioned it to me in vagaries, and when I decided to take the plunge, it consumed my attention and was the only thing I played for a week straight. The world of Revachol is so forlorn and bittersweet, but so many of its inhabitants are larger than life and make it one of the most realized locations I’ve seen to date. It’s a monument to indulgent, confident writing, and stands in a class of its own as one of the finest RPGs I’ve ever played.
