Disco Elysium: a role-playing game whose skills argue with you

Disco Elysium released on 15 October 2019 for Windows, on macOS in April 2020, and on 30 March 2021 as the expanded Final Cut with full voice acting for PS4, PS5 and PC, reaching Switch and Xbox that October. At The Game Awards 2019 it took four prizes, including best narrative and best role-playing game.

You are a detective with entirely erased memory, waking in a wrecked room of a seaside hostel in the Martinaise district of the city of Revachol. There is a body hanging in the yard. You have a partner, one week, no service weapon and very poor health.

Twenty-four voices

There are twenty-four skills, arranged under four attributes, and the crucial part is this: each of them is a speaking character. Logic proposes a theory. Empathy notices the man opposite is about to cry. Electrochemistry demands a drink. Inland Empire reports that your necktie is talking to you. Shivers tells you what the city is doing three streets away.

These voices interrupt each other and you, argue among themselves, and are regularly wrong. Put points into intellect and you get a character who is clever and unbearable; put them into psyche and you get a man who feels everything and cannot withstand it. An attribute here is not a bonus to a number but a cast of mind you have to live with.

Failure as content

Checks come in white (retry once the skill grows) and red (one attempt, forever). And here is the key: failure almost never closes a path. It opens a different one.

You could not keep your balance, so you fall down the stairs and meet the person who picks you up. You could not lie, so your interlocutor begins to pity you and the conversation turns elsewhere. The scenes are written so that failing yields more text than succeeding.

An ordinary role-playing game punishes a failed check with the absence of a scene. Disco Elysium pays for failure with a scene — which is why it is the only game where you do not want to reload.

The Thought Cabinet

A separate system: ideas picked up in conversation land in the Thought Cabinet, where they can be turned over for several hours of in-game time. A finished thought grants a permanent effect, sometimes useful and sometimes a burden, and removing it later costs points. A conviction here literally occupies space in your head and carries a price. I know of no other game that models so precisely what happens to a person who has come to believe something.

What does not work

Pacing. The final act is noticeably drier than the rest: fewer conversations, and the solution arrives faster than you can prepare for it. Some political threads slide into lecture, where the author's position is audible over the character's.

The full voicing in The Final Cut is debatable. It is beautifully performed, but it ties you to a reader's tempo in a game whose text you want to skim ahead and double back through.

And this: there is a great deal of text. If you are not prepared to read for hours at a stretch, this is not your game, and no difficulty setting will fix that.

Why 9.2

A high nine, because here a role-playing system does for the first time what the genre promises: it defines not your efficiency but your personality. Skills-as-characters and failure-as-content are two decisions found nowhere before it and almost nowhere since. Marks off for the pacing of the finale and the political monologues. What later became of the studio does not belong in a review — that is a separate and joyless story with no bearing on the game itself.