GAME REVIEW: Disco Elysium (2019)
If there is one game that’s been extremely heavily recommended to me from any and all types of people, it’s Disco Elysium. Never, in recent years, have so many people who have such different personal tastes all told me that I have to play this game. Actors, game devs, geeks… all of them have been singing this game’s praises, so FINE (haha), you all beat me down and this is the first console game that I’ve been playing in 2024. Tl;dr, this is a really good game, but you know me, I don’t keep these insights short!
There’s a funny story in here, wherein I had heard about this game… who knows how long ago, but much closer to when it was released. My partner was giving it a try and was saying it was really interesting. However, around the same time, he had also been playing a tactical RPG with really cute pixel art called Chroma Squad, so for whatever reason, I had mixed up these games, resulting in me expecting Disco Elysium to be (or at least look like) Chroma Squad… if you’ve played Disco Elysium, you know how far in the opposite direction the oil-painting-inspired game is from a cute pixelated RPG, good grief! I also didn’t know anything about what the game was about, so I was certainly not expecting to step into the shoes of a raging alcoholic in the middle of a severe and potentially supernatural mid-life crisis.
If you haven’t played it, the game is about an amnesiac detective, who is also an alcoholic in a cosmic pit of depression, trying to solve a murder in order to prevent chaos from breaking out in a post-revolution town. It’s a ludicrously grim and gritty game, with a very depressing main character, whose inner voices/personality have a lot to say. With the slogan “what kind of cop are you?,” the main point of the game seems to be to play this person in as many weird and fucked-up ways as you can, in order to experience as much of the game’s strangeness as possible.
Let’s start with the good stuff! One thing that I really love about this game is that part of its mechanics function as a point-and-click inventory game, which really throws me back to one of my all-time favorite games, King’s Quest VI (which is also one of the first video games I ever played). It’s a mechanic that was pretty simple back in the early days of gaming and I have always loved and missed it—even modern KQ games simply don’t have the quality of puzzles the old game had. There was something about wandering into a place and finding some random object sitting somewhere and wondering how in the world will I ever put this item to use in the future? Disco Elysium shares that mechanic, though not so strictly as it was done in classic point-and-click inventory games. There are items you can use, items you can waste, items you can collect, items you can sell, and much like in Souls-gaming, your outfit has a huge effect on your stats, so finding as many maniacal things to wear as possible is highly recommended.
Unfortunately, there is the issue that, because the game is so big, this means that it’s plagued by a handful of bugs still, at least on the PS4 (I’ve heard it’s much better on Steam). For example, after starting my game, I’ve never been able to successfully load it by hitting “continue” from the main menu. I’ve had to load my last save every time, and even then, sometimes it still doesn’t work. When speaking to Morell outside of town, some of his dialog was covered by the player’s inner monolog text. Often, when you’re trying to meet The Pigs after 22.00, she just doesn’t show up (and in my partner’s game, you could still hear the sirens), sometimes caused by quick traveling or passing time by reading. Little things like this pop up all over. It makes the game a little bit annoying at times, but ultimately doesn’t detract from the overall experience and honestly, considering how huge the game is, I’m surprised there aren’t more bugs.
Now, let’s talk about the world a bit. I will put a warning in here for folks who, for example, have ADHD or struggle with reading, because the game is inspired by the old Infinity Engine games of yore, so there is a lot of reading… literally 6000 years worth of world history can be found in the game. Furthermore, because your PC has retrograde amnesia, you need to learn this world lore from the NPCs, many of whom are happy to give you TEXTBOOKS worth of information about this world. The amount of detail they put into their worldbuilding is utterly mind-boggling, and what’s interesting about it is that they’ve made it feel really next-door to the real world—Mesque, for example, felt like Mexico, even going so far as to mention a type of musician called a “marietti” (if I recall correctly)… a mariachi, of course. As an Estonian game, I was deeply amused that the most psychotic character was clearly Finnish (from a place called Vaasa (which is a town in Finland), shouting mulkkupää and referring to her pipo). At first this annoyed me a bit… why make it so similar to the real world but not use real names or come up with your own words for it? However, after a while, I started to realize that it was creating a trippy effect where it feels like the real world but isn’t… like an alternate universe or something along those lines. It’s very bizarre but in the end, I think I understand what they were going for and it did indeed create a weird, surreal effect. After all, a lot of the game is weird and surreal. Speaking of, there’s also some suggestion that this world is, in fact, some sort of hellscape or purgatory for Harry—you can go pretty deep down that spiral if you’re so inclined.
On the general downsides of the game, it is worth mentioning that you can get yourself locked out of the ability to progress if you don’t manage your time and attitude well. If you don’t find a place to sleep in the first two nights—meaning if you don’t find enough money to pay for your hostel bills and a night there, you simply won’t be able to progress in the game, which is pretty strange to me, especially considering that there are shacks you can hide out in and benches you could sleep on. There are also checks that can hold you up and if you aren’t able to gain anymore experience to try again, you might find yourself trapped. It’s worth keeping a lot of saves on hand, just because this sort of thing can happen.
I do also appreciate that the game swears as much as it feels like, while it bleeps out (most) slurs—I love this. It means the makers have some degree of modern understanding of what is offensive and what isn’t. Swearing isn’t inherently offensive. Words are received how we perceive them, simple as that, and if you choose to be offended, you will be. But the way the kids in the game refer to f*ggots is extremely offensive and derogatory, so the words get bleeped out. That said, I do recall another slur (I can’t recall which one) that wasn’t bleeped out, so take this with a grain of salt. It’s good, but not perfect.
Now, there are two major complaints about the game, relating to the story. First of all, this game is an Agatha Christie novel and by that I mean that I’ve read most of her murder mysteries and it’s very not overly common that the reader is given a chance to solve the mystery themselves. It’s usually that someone isn’t who they say they are, or some new person appears, or something along those lines. It’s the same in this game. You are not capable of solving the mystery yourself… all you can do is try to arrest the wrong person until eventually the game leads you to the right one. That, inherently, can be annoying for some people and I do admit that I’d love to have a murder mystery game where the player actually has the chance to legitimately solve it themselves, but this is a story game, in its core, and the story is not about the murder, it’s about the PC (Harrier du Bois). So there is a world in which this game was actually aware of its focus and didn’t want to make things overly complicated in a game that’s already extremely complicated. If we’re thinking purely about mechanics, this did simplify things for the makers in a logical way.
The other thing that stood out as being somewhat unfortunate was that, regardless of how you behave, the outcome of the game doesn’t really change. On one hand, I understand this, because you’re playing a deranged man and the point of the game is literally to figure out how you want to play him. The endgame is really just a summary of how crazy you behaved, but ultimately, solving the crime does happen one way or another, it seems. This ends up leaving a feeling of actions not having any real consequences. It’s like stepping into a world, with a ton of paths in front of you to take, but all paths lead to the same end-point. Once again, I understand that this game was already a complicated piece of art and expanding on multiple endings would have been a ton of extra work, but… if the makers consider making another similar game someday, that could be a point of focus—allowing more than one ending per how you behave.
[spoilers] For example, I feel like perhaps Harry shouldn’t have found the Insulindian Phasmid if he didn’t believe in it. That would mean that he would only be able to solve part of the crime, not all of it. He’d find the killer, but not the reason for his behavior or deterioration. [end spoilers]
Ultimately, I loved the endgame scene, but once you’ve played it once, finding the killer is pretty boring the second, third, fourth time. All that changes is how the folks at the end of the game react to you and talk about you. Here, you finally get the summary of who your character really was… personally, being rewarded for my whole game with a summary of how I played is a bit of a lackluster ending. It would have been nice if there were any real consequences in the game. The way it is doesn’t necessarily promote a great interest in replay if you don’t feel like just trying every single prompt. Furthermore, for those trophy hunters, apparently you can go through the game by just spamming every chat tree, which is a bit silly… just goes to show how little consequences there are. For someone who plays TTRPGs as often as I do, I both celebrate this game for its vastness, while still complain that you just simply can’t beat the true openness of tabletop roleplay.
However, overall, it is very fun to play, especially if you like behaving like a maniac in video games. Personally, I don’t enjoy going around sexually harassing women and acting like a sociopath, so there were aspects of the game that I wasn’t interested in pursuing, and the lack of consequences for such behavior is a bit questionable on a moral level. That said, if you’re not taking your video games too seriously or thinking too critically, this game is really a masterpiece when it comes to the sheer magnitude of options you have to explore, the completeness of the world and the NPCs within it, and ways that you can accomplish tasks. I’ve been having an amusing time trophy hunting (we’ll see how long I pursue these trophies before I get bored) for different ways of acting like a crazy person. There are also a couple of awesome story beats throughout that I won’t spoil, but just keep in mind that the game has a lot of fun twists and options to play around with.
So, I do really recommend Disco Elysium to anyone who’s passionate about games or who enjoys story games or even roleplaying games. It’s definitely recommended for people who love murder mysteries and interactive gaming, though again, don’t expect to be able to solve the mystery yourself; the clues given aren’t enough for you to figure it out. That said, I can understand why many people consider this one of the best modern video games… it hasn’t broken my top-5 modern favorites, but I do think it’s a brilliant game and it deserves shouting out!
For reference, my current top favorite modern video games are Dark Souls (& correlating games like Bloodborne), Salt & Sanctuary, Hollow Knight, Sea of Stars, and Nex Machina. Witcher 3 is up there as well, if we consider Souls-gaming classic enough at this point to not count.
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