Disco Elysium is a very well-written game. If you like reading, classic cRPGs, or point-and-click adventure games, chances are you're going to love this game. But if you're a fan of the RPG-lite games that have released in recent decades such as the Mass Effect trilogy or even JRPGs, this actually might be a little too slow and too RPG for you. I don't mean to look down anyone who likes those things—hell, I am someone who likes those things! I personally never got much into cRPGs or point-and-click adventure games, but I did love JRPGs growing up in the '90s, and the Mass Effect trilogy are my favorite games of all-time. Disco Elysium took a lengthy adjustment period for me before I began to love it as a result of these tastes—but I do love it.
The most striking difference between this and most RPGs on the market today is that there's no combat engine in this game. You walk around, talk to people, and examine stuff, and that's basically it. Every conflict in the game is governed by skill checks. So you're not running around gunning people down or even stealthing your way through levels. However, I enjoyed this about the game—It allows it to effectively build tension in this manner and makes it so that, when something violent does happen, it affects us more closely to how actual violence does in the real world. It's more shocking.
Most of the game lulls you into a sense of the mundane—A vast majority of what is happening is centered on relatively low-key conversations with NPCs, in addition to the protagonist's own inner dialogue between different aspects of his personality. This probably sounds pretty boring—and it might be to some folks. It certainly could have made the game incredibly dry, but for me, though, it was absolutely riveting. I suspect this has partly to do with my own interests (I'm a lover of classic literature, which is often permeated by these sorts of lengthy derailments into philosophy), but it's also rendered a strength of the game simply by the astounding quality of the writing. None of these inner dialogues that occur inside your player character's head seem like padding. They're all entertaining on some level—either because of the substance of the conversation, or due to the absurd, bleak humor of the game.
This game is hilarious. I haven't laughed this much at a game in my entire life. Even the way simple things are handled—such as choosing to have your character say 'Hello?' into an echoing chimney, only to have him lose his cool unexpectedly and unleash an echoing monstrosity of a scream that reverberates throughout the entire building. Or choosing to tell the hotel manager that you're not paying for the room by slyly slipping away from the desk, only to have your player character sprint away, trip, and fall into a lady in a wheelchair because you don't have a very high dexterity skill—leading you to become a clumsy oaf.
And that's the beauty of this RPG: It allows you to fail—frequently, and often in humorous ways—that allow you to continue the game with only minor penalties. It constantly surprises you in ways such as this whenever you fail a skill check, and it does so in a way that feels deserved. It leaves you thinking, "Why did I attempt to be sly here? I have only 2 points in my Motorics skills. Of course I was going to screw that up". Successes often result in you feeling like Sherlock Holmes, or a sly con man, or just a bad-ass. Failures will make you look silly, sure, but they also lead to unbelievably hilarious moments. And once you get a hang for how the skill systems work, you can reasonably predict not only what sort of outcomes will be had by succeeding or failing a check, but also when you should try for a risky roll, and when you shouldn't, because the stakes are too high and screwing up in a situation will result in some serious misery for everyone involved.
The more I played, the more I was entertained not by the central mystery of the game, but by my player character's inner dialogue. I should probably make clear how this actually works: When your skills get high enough—things such as your physical prowess, your logic, your empathy, or your ability to 'feel' the city around you, etc—these skills vocalize themselves to you (the human playing the game) in order to help you make decisions in-game. For example, you might be interviewing a witness, and your ability to Empathize with them will chime in in unspoken text to tell you; "Hey bud, this guy is lying", and it will also narrate why your player character knows this—the person's eyelid might flutter, or they may pronounce a word in an odd way. Or, your gut instinct (the skill called 'Inland Empire') will call your attention to the way a door feels—it's "too blue", or something—prompting you to inspect it.
This is an astoundingly accurate depiction of how our subconscious mind works. We're constantly making these calculations that, had they occurred in our active thoughts, would take multiple sentences to vocalize. But in our subconscious they're quickly calculated and filed away in the background without you ever noticing.
For example—Have you ever felt when driving that you can tell somebody ahead on your right is about to switch lanes, even before their signal is on, or before they've indicated in any way that they're going to do so?
Why?
"Well... Because they're just moving their car in a way like they want to change lanes? I don't know, it just felt like they were about to switch lanes."
And then, guess what? You're right. They switch lanes.
Disco Elysium is a game full of stuff like this, and the writers are skillful enough to depict it in a way that feels real. To borrow a horribly overused phrase in video game reviews—It makes you feel like a detective. But not just a detective—It makes you feel however you choose to play your character: An alcoholic drug addict craving a fix. A pretentious, artsy-fartsy tool. A meathead weightlifter. A super-cool disco-obsessed fop. Whoever you decide you are, the game is consistently narrating your character's inner thoughts that way, and this all feeds back to you to create an incredibly engulfing experience in which you're attempting to roleplay as somebody and the game is rewarding you for doing so by adapting to your inputs and feeding you lengthy, beautiful narration depicting who you are choosing to be. It bleeds through everything in the game from how you look, to what you're doing, to how you apply your strengths to a challenge, and how you fail challenges that are outside your realm of expertise. And it does this in a superb, artful, hilarious way. All of this creates an attachment to your player character that I've never felt before, in any other game—roleplaying or otherwise.
The game is definitely not without its faults, though. The voice acting is particularly awful in some areas, with the actors delivering monotone, unconvincing lines into microphones without pop filters. I found myself picturing some characters' voices wholly different to how the actors portrayed them, and this made for a jarring experience whenever their lines were voiced. I would prefer to play the game with the voice lines completely turned off, and just allow their voices to play in my own head. It's also very, very wordy, so if you hate reading, you'll probably hate it. Be aware.
You owe it to yourself to give this game a shot if you like RPGs. If you have loved wordy cRPGs in the past, you'll probably love this game. If you have liked RPGs, give yourself a cushion of time to get adjusted to what Disco Elysium does differently. You may be rewarded with a unique experience that's not quite like any other—like I have.
