Developer: ZA/UM
Publisher: ZA/UM
Release Date: 30th April 2021
Platforms: PS4, PS5, Google Stadia, Steam, GOG, Epic, and App Store.
Reviewed on: PlayStation 5
When Disco Elysium first launched on PC in late 2019, it was praised for its unique take on the point-and-click genre. Fast forward to today and the game is now available in its Final Cut, which not only brings it to PlayStation consoles, but also adds additional content and a completely voiced narrative. Here’s my spoiler-free review of this very unique adventure.
You’re a detective… right?
Disco Elysium is absolutely best if you know as little as possible going in, which is pretty much how you start the game. Having completely lost his memory (and potentially his mind), our main character finds himself in the middle of a murder investigation, though there’s definitely more going on than meets the eye.
A few minutes into the game, you meet your partner in “crime”. He’s a detective and insists that you are too – despite you having no recollection of it. What you do from here is entirely up to you. Do you focus on solving the murder? Do you ignore the dead body hanging in the tree? Do you get to know the locals? Do you give up on life and accept your fate as a hobo cop, sleeping in the trash out back? The choice is yours – and that’s pretty much the name of the game.
Disco Elysium is a narrative-driven point-and-click RPG, so expect a lot of talking. Thankfully, in this Final Cut of the game, every line of dialogue is fully voiced, despite a script of more than one million words. That’s almost twice the length of the entire Lord of the Rings series (incl. The Hobbit). Think about that for a moment.
Be who you want to be
Disco Elysium can go just about as off the rails as you’d like it to. Where you go, who you speak to and what you say is up to you, though there are a lot of underlying systems in play that help determine how well you’re going to fare. People will remember how you treat them and making friends with one person might mean making enemies of another. You might think that supporting the views of the racist hooligan is great, if you just want to get some information out of him, but your non-white colleague may not be very happy about it.
You decide if you want to support certain types of political views or economic systems, whether you want to partake in alcohol or drugs, and whether you even care about upholding the law. I mean, are you even really a detective? Who knows!
You’re going to have your partner by your side for most of the game, but for those moments where you might want to do something questionable without him judging you, you can do so at night. Any time you advance a conversation or read a book, time passes. Certain characters will be in certain locations at certain times of day, but once it gets past 9pm, you can “go to bed”, which will make your partner leave you until morning, giving you a perfect opportunity to… well, do whatever it is you need to do. No judgements here.
Dungeons & Disco
A key part of the game is the underlying Dungeons & Dragons-style dice rolls, where a “check” will determine whether you are successful in any given moment. This can involve anything as minor as whether you catch something, to bigger things like whether you convince someone to answer your question – or even if someone lives or dies. You can, of course, game the system by simply saving/loading before big decisions, if that’s how you want to play it.
In true D&D fashion, the game uses various stats to help determine your chances in each check. You start the game by picking your base stats, but things like the clothes you wear and how you distribute skill points earned as you level up will change these things as you go. Your skill points are locked in once used, but your clothes are not, so you’re able to change your attire if a specific wardrobe may help your odds in certain encounters.
Another unique system that will help (or hinder) with these checks are the “Thoughts” you may encounter during the game. Whether you discover these depends entirely on how you play, but diving into conversations about certain ways of life – or about whether reality is even, well, real – can give you access to these. If a certain Thought seems interesting to you, you are then able to “Internalize” it, which has your character ponder it for a while, after which it will evolve, adding additional perks. Not all Thoughts are positive though, and you can only equip so many, so be smart about it – or don’t.
The story is your own – mostly
Like I said in the beginning, how you go about the story is up to you. You get tasks along the way, some which are automatic, and others that you can either accept or decline. Even if you get a task, however, it’s mostly up to you whether you follow up. There are a ton of completely optional side stories for you to explore, though some may give you unexpected insight into the larger story, so it can be very tempting to do everything – and you totally should.
The narrative can get pretty far out there and there are some truly insane and fun scenarios to uncover, and you’re never quite sure what is true or false, or real or fake – and that’s part of the fun. That being said, Disco Elysium definitely isn’t for everyone. There is a lot – and I mean A LOT – of story here and the vast majority of your time will be spent in conversations.
You’re probably looking at 20-30 hours for your first playthrough and there were plenty of moments that made me want to immediately dive into a second run, just to see how differently things could have played out. Unfortunately, it seems like most of the story is set in stone, regardless of what the player does, so despite a lot of branching narratives here, your choices are more about how you treat the world around you, and less about the actions you take – which is unfortunate, as it results in less interesting differences in future runs.
Should you play Disco Elysium?
If you’re into narrative-driven, pretty-far-out-there stories, yes. It’s a truly unique adventure that will keep you wondering what kind of insanity is waiting around the corner – and how you might be able to (probably) make it worse. I wish you had even more control over where the story goes, but this game still offers more player choice that just about anything else I’ve played – and it was fun comparing and discussing my virtual life choices with those around me – without spoiling things, of course.
Please note: At the time of writing, the Final Cut does have a number of technical issues, like certain objects being broken/inaccessible, voice lines not playing or conversations/events being stuck, the latter requiring you to turn off the game. It has also crashed on me fairly often, even corrupting my save files twice. Thankfully the game does offer a seemingly infinite number of save slots, so I’d strongly recommend you make use of those – and save often!
-K.A. Pedersen
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