Ideology is a Fuck: Disco Elysium
Disco Elysium is a writer’s game. You can tell from the first because there’s a lot of big words, but they aren’t made-up science fiction ones. If that wasn’t enough to convince you, this game actually makes you like, or at least understand, people who are shitty to you and possibly everyone around them. This is the true mark of a Writer™.
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Disco Elysium is an isometric detective RPG currently available on PC via Steam and GOG, with an Xbox release slated for 2020. It’s both mechanically naive and brilliant. The art is inconsistent, but stunning. It is at turns a real bummer, and full of hope. It is an art piece, but visceral and jagged where Journey was austere and polish, polish, polish. Despite many reviews describing it as “open world”, it’s quite small. It is looking for what makes being alive worthwhile, in a world of deeply felt but ultimately obtuse and counterproductive ideological disagreements. It wants you to understand what it thinks humans are, and it is worth 39.99 USD.
You play a detective who awakens to alcohol-induced amnesia. Your task is to solve the murder of a man who has been hung from a tree out back of the hostel you’re staying in. This is actually your secondary task, a vehicle for your primary task: who the hell are you, anyway? You don’t just find out; one of the best narrative tricks Disco Elysium has up its’ sleeve is that you use the blank slate of your amnesia to decide who the hell you are. Your stalwart partner Kim Kitsuragi serves as both a sounding board, and a standard against which to measure the man you become. At first, it’s all about being able to meet Kim’s expectations, but later in the game, it was very satisfying to impress him with things that I was actually good at. By only ever being subtly judgmental and largely open to your eccentricities, Kim manipulates the player into wanting to meet his standards. Again, this is a writer’s game, and it is bursting with writer’s tricks like this. While the number and variance of choices you’re able to make is staggering, do not doubt that the game knows where it wants to lead you — less in a specific narrative direction, than cognitively. Much of the game’s brilliance lies in how effectively it uses tabletop RPG rules to build an intimate, immersive experience that forces you to make decisions that consider the context the characters exist in, rather than just mindlessly choosing whatever ideology you’re down with in real life, or whichever one seems like it might be the funniest.
The game mechanics are of the brave sort that only an indie studio or a Kojima AAA would think up — for the most part, this is great; some people might hate the fact that they can’t see the invisible, dialogue-determinant stat rolls going on under the hood, but I thought it was a brilliant way to make interaction feel more organic and offer replay value. Other mechanics, like the Thought Cabinet, could’ve used some constructive feedback from more experienced developers. The Thought Cabinet allows you to contemplate certain trains of thought that, once learned, offer both stat boosts and losses. The thoughts are all incredibly clever, and there are a lot of them. The sole failure of the idea is that both permanent stat increases and the purchase of new Thought Cabinet slots use the same points from leveling up. The game is too short for the player to get a chance to do much with the Thought Cabinet, because those points are necessary for predictable, permanent stat increases elsewhere. Out of a list of 50-ish (or more!) thoughts, I was only able to learn four or five. A less significant, but more tedious, mechanical weakness is the lack of a fast travel ability. The game is small, yes, but it is replete with loading screens. The number of times you’ll have to go from one end of the map to the far opposite, have nothing you need to do in between these two points, and have to pass through five surprisingly long loading screens is. Unfortunate.
I have less to say about Disco Elysium’s art than I’d expect. Yes, it’s good. Yes, it’s unique. According to Studio ZA/UM’s Twitter, the game’s artists are classically trained oil painters. I would’ve also believed it if someone told me they were really ambitious Illustration majors aiming to go into concept art, on account of the work being strongly reminiscent of what my friends were doing on the way into Ringling College. The focus on atmosphere, palette, and texture over veracity was the right choice for the world and the story, but it lends itself to a certain inconsistency between artists — the main character, in particular, is treated very differently by the modeler, the character portrait artist, and the artist doing all the promo work. If it was down to “veracity OR atmosphere”, I would also choose atmosphere; if at all possible, though, just a little bit of consistency would’ve gone a long way. The exception to this is art director Aleksander Rostov. His work can be seen illustrating individual thoughts for the Thought Cabinet. It’s incredible. Here’s all the Thought Cabinet illos tiled together as one great big body horror party.
Let’s get post-Soviet Eastern Europe living-in-the-shadow-of-the-Cold-War’s-legacy-but-burying-it-in-fictional-worldbuilding up in here. All ideology is garbage when it loses sight of people and enslaves itself to abstractions. Being woke is cheap; empathy (and knowing when not to use it) is priceless.
Disco Elysium is important and you should play it.
