Alcohol. Disco. Communism. These are the spirits haunting your amnesia-addled brain as you awaken in your thrashed hostel bedroom. You are a detective… maybe. You can’t remember. Come to think of it, you can’t even remember your own name, or where your badge is, or how your room ended up in the state it’s in. All you know for sure is that there’s a dead body hanging from a tree in the lot outside, and *someone* needs to get it down. You had better put on your stained bell bottoms and snake skin shoes and get to it, detective; Martinaise needs you.
This is how ZA/UM’s 2019 role-playing video game “Disco Elysium” opens. Immediately, we are introduced to our washed up main character, Harry DuBois, a washed-up police officer who, after a particularly violent night of partying, has completely lost his memory. You deduce (eventually) that you’ve been sent by your precinct to investigate a mysterious hanging behind the Whirling-In-Rags, a homely hostel centered in the middle of the vaguely-Baltic town of Martinaise. Easy enough task for a “normal cop,” which you, decidedly, are not.
The actual gameplay of “Disco Elysium” is built around this fact. In traditional role playing games, a player may decide to build their character around generalized, abstract attributes—strength, dexterity, or health, for instance. In “Disco Elysium,” though, the player’s customization of their player character occurs through point investments into personified aspects of Harry’s own psyche (called “skills”); want to be better at talking to people? Invest points in Harry’s Rhetoric stat. Want to exert your power over others? Level up your Authority. Want to increase your willpower to finish the case and stay clean? Volition is the skill for you. Be careful, though; investing too much or too little in any aspect of yourself comes at the risk of your thoughts overpowering you. Here’s an example of this system from my own playthrough of the game: I wasn’t charismatic enough to schmooze Garte, the grumpy hostel owner, to lower the costs of the damages I had committed to his poor room, so, my version of Harry did what any normal person would do: sprint away from the front desk, jump in the air, turn around, flip Garte the bird, and crash land on an elderly woman in a wheelchair. Amazing. Best video game ever made! 10/10. But, I haven’t even shared the best part yet: your skills talk! They chime in, chastise you, offer advice, laugh, and try to keep you alive as you try to solve the case and, unknowingly, try to save the soul of Martinaise. Your entire journey through the game (or rather, your journey from the front desk to the wheelchair) is directly influenced by who you, the player, choose to be.
Genuinely, though, the transformation of the human psyche into a palpable game system is the foundation on which the narrative of “Disco Elysium” is built, and what a fantastic system it is in its own right — but it cannot be understated just how masterful (and I mean masterful) the writing of “Disco Elysium” is. These fun game mechanics would be nothing without the wit, introspection, and depth of the game’s text; which comes in at about one million words.
I could write a million words about my experience with Disco Elysium, but I don’t want to spoil a singular thing. The game is available on Steam for $39.99, and I cannot recommend it enough.
