Disco Elysium is an indie game that you’ll likely be hearing about intermittently over the next few weeks, most commonly in breathless coverage about how it’s the greatest game ever and basically Planescape: Torment 2.0. The parallel isn’t entirely unjustified; Disco Elysium‘s dialogue options are red and expansive, with everything from its font/numbered dialogue options to its tendency to emphasize words with *asterisks* being reminiscent of Planescape: Torment‘s dialogue options and overall style. Much of the time, Disco Elysium feels like what you’d get if you stripped away the more fantastical elements of Planescape: Torment and a Malkavian playthrough of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and then blended them together into a vaguely noir tale of washed-up police and the struggle of people to get by in a world crumbling all around them.
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Still, Planescape: Torment‘s more abstract writing existed to cut to the heart of events too bizarre to realistically portray using visuals and allow the player to *feel* events rather than simply witnessing them, and that’s where Disco Elysium goes in a different direction. Its weirdness comes not from the sense that anything could happen, but from your character existing as a legendary cop who partied away his demons and with them, his memory. His intuitions and entire aspects of his personality have taken on lives of their own inside of his head as a result, so you’re not tapping into anything supernatural so much as trying to unlock his innate detective abilities.
Disco Elysium is remarkably grounded for a game where you can argue with inanimate objects and otherwise scare the people around you (including your new partner), but that means that some of the more elaborate and abstract text can sometimes come across as unnecessarily self-indulgent rather than explanatory, causing the pacing to take a hit. Planescape: Torment and many of its subsequent pretenders created worlds that came across as infinite, even if the game worlds themselves weren’t. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines used its writing to solidify the rules and consequences of its small world. Disco Elysium, on the other hand, has an unfortunate habit of meandering aimlessly for no obvious purpose beyond also being a game with lots of text in it. The writing is strong, but not especially concise. I also don’t feel any kind of connection to Disco Elysium‘s characters beyond my insane detective. That could end up negatively impacting the stakes.
Everything in Disco Elysium revolves around dialogue and skill checks. If there’s a combat system or anything like that, I certainly haven’t seen any trace of it in my several hours with the game. In its place are numerous skill checks that give you a percentage chance of succeeding at a task (which could be anything from recognizing a lie and calling someone out on it to breaking down a door) based on which skills you’ve leveled up, and only some of these skill checks can be retried. Interestingly, this is more reminiscent of gamebooks than cRPGs. Those who are OCD can expect to spend a lot of time save/loading to succeed at unlikely skill checks for the privilege of crossing an area off the list and considering it “done.” That brings me to my final observation: loading times are several seconds longer than I’d like them to be, even on an SSD. Loading saves and entering new areas can take around 15 seconds, and that’s just too long considering how many area transitions there are in Disco Elysium.
The number of perfect and near-perfect scores you’ll see is unsurprising—other critics are hilariously vulnerable to the hype machine for some reason—but there is a good, albeit flawed game here. Disco Elysium may not be perfect, but it scratches an itch few games bother addressing.
