An alcoholic, amnesiac cop wakes up to discover he was supposed to have solved a murder last week. Now another detective has been assigned to the case, partly to help you do your job, but mostly to assess whether you should still be on the force, in jail, or in a loony bin. It's Disco, baby! Or rather, it's Disco Elysium, one of the funniest games I've played in years.
Much of the gameplay revolves around using your wits to investigate the murder, or at the very least, to figure out who you are and what the hell you've been doing. Your wits here are personified by 24 different traits, named things like "Authority" and "Savoir-Faire", and each have their own opinions on the situation, which they readily express to you as voices in your head. These traits make you better at tasks, but levelling them up too much can lead to your character having misleading, unhelpful or paranoid thoughts, and you can end up getting into arguments with different parts of your own brain. You can end up in arguments with anything, including your own necktie.
As with a lot of classic RP Gs, there is an impressive breadth of choice in play-styles. Besides the traits, there are your cop's politics and personality. You can end up a druggy racist, a cackling bunny ears detective, a destitute raving communist, or perhaps even just a pathetically apologetic and boring guy. The game acknowledges whichever way you take your character, and even helpfully keeps track of things like how often you say sorry, or how much running you seem to be doing. It's ace RPG design, with a heap of old school point-and-click adventure dry humour rolled in.
One design decision I do question is the game's approach to censorship: homophobic slurs are partially blanked, but the game is happy to throw around terms like "cunt" or "retard" without any redaction. It's not so much a criticism, so much as a slight distraction, considering how much the game trusts us to handle the unfiltered bad language, adult themes and bigotry on display.
As a whodunit, I can't really disclose story related facts - that would defeat the point of the game. It's a good yarn, even if it breaks some fairly fundamental rules of detective stories. Truth be told, I found the case's solution a bit of a letdown, and not something you could ever fairly work out on your first play-through. But this is a game about the journey, not the destination, and its one hell of a journey, which you bumble and fail your way through. Vibrant, imaginative, thoughtful, highly original and dripping in satire, Disco Elysium is a must buy.
VideoGame —*Nods Stoically*
An alcoholic, amnesiac cop wakes up to discover he was supposed to have solved a murder last week. Now another detective has been assigned to the case, partly to help you do your job, but mostly to assess whether you should still be on the force, in jail, or in a loony bin. It's Disco, baby! Or rather, it's Disco Elysium, one of the funniest games I've played in years.
Much of the gameplay revolves around using your wits to investigate the murder, or at the very least, to figure out who you are and what the hell you've been doing. Your wits here are personified by 24 different traits, named things like "Authority" and "Savoir-Faire", and each have their own opinions on the situation, which they readily express to you as voices in your head. These traits make you better at tasks, but levelling them up too much can lead to your character having misleading, unhelpful or paranoid thoughts, and you can end up getting into arguments with different parts of your own brain. You can end up in arguments with anything, including your own necktie.
As with a lot of classic RP Gs, there is an impressive breadth of choice in play-styles. Besides the traits, there are your cop's politics and personality. You can end up a druggy racist, a cackling bunny ears detective, a destitute raving communist, or perhaps even just a pathetically apologetic and boring guy. The game acknowledges whichever way you take your character, and even helpfully keeps track of things like how often you say sorry, or how much running you seem to be doing. It's ace RPG design, with a heap of old school point-and-click adventure dry humour rolled in.
One design decision I do question is the game's approach to censorship: homophobic slurs are partially blanked, but the game is happy to throw around terms like "cunt" or "retard" without any redaction. It's not so much a criticism, so much as a slight distraction, considering how much the game trusts us to handle the unfiltered bad language, adult themes and bigotry on display.
As a whodunit, I can't really disclose story related facts - that would defeat the point of the game. It's a good yarn, even if it breaks some fairly fundamental rules of detective stories. Truth be told, I found the case's solution a bit of a letdown, and not something you could ever fairly work out on your first play-through. But this is a game about the journey, not the destination, and its one hell of a journey, which you bumble and fail your way through. Vibrant, imaginative, thoughtful, highly original and dripping in satire, Disco Elysium is a must buy.