| Developer: | ZA/UM | | | Release Date: | 2019 | | | Systems: | Windows (PS4 + Xbox One later in 2020) |
This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing Disco Elysium, a brand new game that's the opposite of obscure. Everyone's heard about it, everyone knows about it. But I have to write about it anyway, because it was a surprise birthday gift and I'd be some kind of ungrateful monster not to. It's a bit of a roll of the dice though, seeing as I could end up writing a whole essay here on why it's bad and I hate it. Which would be awkward.
Fortunately the game's got immense critical acclaim, so it seems like a pretty safe bet. In fact I often hear it compared to The Outer Worlds, which came out shortly afterwards and deals with some of the same themes. Or, to be more accurate, I heard people saying "Outer Worlds' biggest problem was that it came out right after Disco Elysium instead of right after Fallout '76". It's apparently narratively masterful in a way that makes the writing in other video games look like video game writing by comparison, plus it's got a name that sounds like a boat in a James Bond movie.
It originally had the title No Truce with the Furies attached to it, but that was apparently only ever supposed to be the project name. Personally I think they made the right choice going with Disco Elysium, as it's got a nice sound to it, it's distinctive, and it's a lot quicker to type. Plus 'disco' is also a Latin word meaning 'I learn' and the game's all about learning things, so it's being clever.
Okay, this is a story driven detective game based around mysteries, so this article is inevitably going to be full of SPOILERS. But I'm only going to play it for exactly one in-game day, so I hopefully won't ruin too much of it for you if you haven't played it yourself. Plus I'm going to pick all the boring options to ensure there's no risk of anything interesting happing and preserve all the wondrous fuck ups for you to discover on their own.
I should also mention that the game is full of bad words, depressing themes, gruesome descriptions, and opinions about politics, just to let you know what you're in for. Not that you'll necessarily see much of it in my article.
I was curious about the 'hardcore' option, so I hovered the cursor over the option and got this message pop up:
"Hardcore mode is existentially difficult. Checks are harder and healing items are more expensive. Choose your clothes and thoughts wisely. For your sweat and toil, tasks reward a small amount of extra XP."I want to be spontaneous with my thoughts and reckless with my clothes so I'm leaving that unchecked. I love it when an options screen actually explains things though!
Somehow I get the impression that I won't be importing my own custom portrait for this one; it seems like it's mutton chops or nothing. But the art's so great that I wouldn't really want to.
I've decided to create my own character, so now I get to adjust my starting stats. Each ability score has a limit of 6, and if I lower them all down to 1 I've got 8 points to allocate. It doesn't seem like a good idea to have anything lower than 2 and I feel like I need to put one of them at 5, so that leaves me with.... 1 spare point to put into my second best ability.
Now I need to decide if I'm going to be smart, empathetic, strong or agile. No one ever solved any crimes by being really agile, except for Spider-Man I guess, but it's hard to pick which of the others to go for. Okay I'm going to go with Intellect 5, Psyche 3, Physique 2 and Motorics 2, and click the 'NEXT >' button before I start to second guess myself. I'm so bad at making decisions.
Seems like the top row already has a lot of diamonds because of my intellect, but does that mean I should make one of them my signature skill or pick something with less diamonds that could use the boost?
Drama lets me detect lies and that seems bloody essential for a detective, so I'm going with that. Actually, no, I'll go with Endurance, because the alternative is not being able to endure things. Wait, Volition makes you sane, keeps you from falling apart at the seams, and helps you avoid irreversible mistakes! It seems like the antithesis of the game's themes, but I'm just crazy enough to pick it.
The game started in a black void, with my ancient reptilian brain giving me a bit of a narration. I decide to carry on non-existing for a bit, just for a change, but soon my reptilian brain started throwing concepts like 'ex-wives' at me and I couldn't help but follow that lead.
Man, this game's going to make me hit my picture limit before I even reach the graphics isn't it? I'm going to have to fight the urge to screenshot every funny line.
Right now it seems like all the protagonist has on him is a hangover, a mullet and his underwear, but I've spotted a pair of pants on the floor and the game assures me I can hold 'tab' to highlight additional objects of interest.
In fact there seems to be two kinds of object in here: the kind I can pick up or interact with (blue highlight) and the kind I can click for a one-time only description (blue orb).
"At high levels, Savoir Faire will make you the King of Cool - which is as much so say, the most stylish douchebag in Revchol. A low levels, however, you'll be a bumbling, feckless cop unable to catch a pair of keys thrown by your partner without losing an eye."I could probably cope without having less of that, but I feel like no trousers at all is probably worse somehow? I ultimately decided to put them on anyway and found my room key in the pocket. So that worked out!
Instead I decided to use my incredible intellect and turned the fan off first. Actually I'm not sure that used my intellect stat at all, it's just one of my two options (the other being 'turn the light on').
After retrieving most of my clothes I decided to explore the room next door and found myself looking at a mirror.
There's the option here to use my Encyclopedia skill to delve into his mind and find the truth behind "The Expression" and I'm tempted to take it. It's only a 42% chance of success but that's much better than my chances of stopping "The Expression" from happening, so I'm going to give it a try.
Ah damn, I rolled a 6! That's a failure and it's locked me out from trying the check again until I've put another skill point into Encyclopedia.
There's no sign of recent scarring on my character's hands and there's no sign of glass fragments being pulled back into the room, so the evidence is pointing towards the damage being caused by a projectile the size and mass of his missing right shoe being lobbed from inside the room.
So that's my first task: retrieve my other shoe.
I stumbled out of the room, checked a calendar on the way downstairs (it's March '51), and discovered my new partner Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi waiting for me by the exit. Turns out that we're both cops and we're here to solve a hanging! In fact my character's been here for three days already, though he spent most of that time re-enacting Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
My Rhetoric skill chimed in with the observation that Kim's likely been trying to meet up with me for the last two days, and I appreciate it being there to explain implications and clear up ambiguities. Rhetoric is the kind of voice I need in my head, not like Inland Empire which has been pestering me to express my soul via the PA system.
Speaking of people pestering me...
I chatted to the manager about the dead body that's been hanging from a tree out back for a week now and it turns out he wasn't here when it happened. A woman called Sylvie was the one who found the body, but she quit for... reasons. I eventually got the guy to admit it's because he asked for her number... the cafeteria manager I mean, not my amnesic detective (which came as a bit of a surprise to be honest).
Oh, by the way, it turns out that the whole business about the cafeteria manager driving her to quit by asking for her number was just a misunderstanding. She quit because my detective is a horrible monster! See, that makes so much more sense. I'm going to go tell the manager the truth, that she actually likes him, and hopefully undo some of my damage. Though not the physical damage; I still need to pay for that window.
I also radioed the precinct to tell them I'd lost my badge and they all had a good laugh about that. Then the subject of my gun came up and when we realised that was missing too they had a laugh about that as well. No one on this side of the radio is laughing.
I spotted a pair of kids nearby and went over to convince them to climb up and cut the body down for me, but unfortunately it turns out that they're a pair of little shits. I was trying my best to be nice to them, but one of them decided to establish dominance by yelling for help so I had to back off. Well I didn't have to, but my punching skills are kind of low so I didn't want to risk it
Unfortunately my 'examine a corpse that's been hanging in a tree for seven days without losing my lunch' skill is even worse, so I'm going to have to leave it and come back later. It's a shame because the victim might have some money on him.
Also unfortunate is the fact that Measurehead's a crazy racist with all kinds of theories based on, well, measuring heads. I was given the option to think over his Advanced Race Theory as a possible method of getting in, but I decided I didn't want to risk having ideas like that lodged in my brain, so I'm going to look for other options.
Though I probably should give some thought to where the detective used to live, seeing as it's already 11:05am and he needs a place to sleep for the night. Fortunately this is an RPG, so I've got a dedicated screen to manage my thinking.
Mulling the 'Lonesome Long Way Home' thought over will take 6 hours and 5 minutes of in-game time, and while that process is going on I'll have a +1 to Encyclopedia. When the timer finishes I'll lose the Encyclopedia bonus and gain other effects permanently. Hopefully good effects, though I've no way of knowing; I'm just rolling the dice again.
It costs nothing to start a thought, but getting rid of it again or unlocking a new diamond costs a precious skill point. I'll let you know if that starts driving me crazy.
TWO IN-GAME HOURS LATER
I tried begging him not to leave, saying that I'll stop drinking and take the trash out, but it didn't have the effect I'd hoped for. So now I need to find a way into these apartments to get onto that balcony and track him down.
No seriously, this is going to be a big help. When I equip it in one of my hands I can collect empty bottles, which can then be exchanged for cash! And I really need cash right now, as I've only found 3.70 reál so far and I need 130 to have a bed to sleep in tonight. I got up at 8am, it's 1:38pm now, that's less than 1 reál per hour and I'm burning daylight here!
I also spoke to the people who run that bookshop to the right and it seems like they're having curse problems. It also seems like I can read books to move time along, but that means spending precious cash to have even less time so I'm not seeing the benefit right now.
But I wasn't going to be beaten by this! All my talking has earned me an extra skill point, so I put it into 'Composure' to unlock the dice roll and let me give it another shot with better odds. And I went and screwed it up a second time!
By the way I should mention that characters generally only have a voice for the first few lines, just enough so you can still hear it in your head as you read the rest of their dialogue, and you never get to hear the protagonist talk at all.
I'm not surprised though really, considering the insane amount of writing in this game. Recording it all would've cost a fortune and made the install size huge, plus it would've also slowed conversations down to a crawl. We can typically read much faster than we can talk, and I would've ended up skipping to the next line anyway.
TWO IN-GAME HOURS LATER
Though there's information on the binder that becomes visible in a certain kind of light (like the kind from Kim's headlights), so I used his car to reveal the secret career stats from the detective's past life!
Also on the left hand side I can check my tasks and even get hints on what I should be doing, which is nice. Like I need to find out who has another key to this dumpster to find out who dumped the victim's clothes in there.
ONE IN-GAME HOUR LATER
Still, could be worse. I could have to pay for food as well. No survival meters in this thankfully! Though it'd make Electrochemistry's day if I got some cigarettes and beer.
The game's technically in a fantasy world with different 'races' to our own, but it's not dwarfs and elves, it's just people and people, and this guy's worries about mixed races causing competition and foreigners dominating culture are similarly mundane. So I told him to go fuck himself... which didn't advance my investigation any. Being a cop is hard.
Oh it means the drug called speed! Right, okay, that makes sense. I'm a really good cop by the way.
Unfortunately the thought hasn't provided me with the location of a home to sleep in, as I apparently don't have one. Maybe Kim has a couch I can use.
Man, now I have to walk back inside the apartment building just to get back out to the street. Maybe if I bought a map I could use it to fast travel around, but that would mean spending money and that's the opposite of what I need to be doing.
ONE IN-GAME HOUR LATER
Plus he's having another Homer Simpson conversation with his own brain, as Rhetoric believes that the detective's ready to lead the charge and usher in a glorious new era of communism, based on a bunch of stuff he didn't say.
"While everyone else is out partying , having a callous laugh, *you* will reverse the fortune of the workers of the world.It's a lot to lay on a guy who was first confronted with the concept of money only 12 hours ago. Though it has given him something to think about - literally. Another thought for the thought cabinet.
You alone, against every living thing, against every human alive: eight hundred trillion reál in the hands of an *impossibly* well organized ruling class; towering city blocks of bank-men who have the ears of prime ministers; million-headed armies of nations and the love of your own mother!"
7:14 PM - LESS THAN TWO HOURS LEFT
The good news is that it'll only take about an hour to learn the thought, the bad news is that I've already got a brain full of thoughts and I need to earn another skill point before I can either discard one or unlock a new slot. I should've just played as a strong character and punched all my problems, that would've been smarter than being smart.
Right, I need go achieve or learn something to earn experience and get my skill point, so I'm going to go run another lap of the streets and see if there's anything new I can do. It's hard to know if you've exhausted an entire dialogue tree in this as once you've been down one branch every dialogue choice along the way is marked as read.
LESS THAN ONE HOUR LEFT
Fortunately careful observation has revealed an important gameplay mechanic: time only moves forwards when I'm doing something, like having a conversation. Walking around the streets doesn't take any time at all.
I'm still going to run though, even though my double-clicking finger is aching at this point. I could just hold the button down and walk everywhere instead but it takes so damn long. Oh hang on, if I double click and then hold that makes him keep running? This changes everything!
ONE IN-GAME HOUR LATER
I need to push time forward to reach bedtime and that means getting things done, so I'm trying to examine this body again. The first time I tried it he threw up, but that led Kim to suggest getting some ammonia which brought my chance of success up to 8%. Then I had a chat to the asshole kid again to learn how he can stand to be here and that brought it up to 17%. Unfortunately even wearing the Endurance raincoat I still only have a 28% chance of success, so I'd be an idiot to roll the dice on it at this point.
I rolled the dice and won, allowing me to examine the body and use my awesome brainpower to find out all its secrets. My awesome brain also came up with the idea of shooting the buckle to drop the body down, but common sense is telling me to maybe not do that. Which means I need to get help from the people on the other side of that bloody gate guarded by Measurehead.
Fortunately my Advanced Race Theory thought just finished and the detective has concluded that it is... bullshit. That revelation has raised my learning cap for Rhetoric, given me +1 point to Conceptualization, and allowed me to fill my dialogue box with all these new options.
I told Measurehead that contemplating his philosophy has led me to one inescapable conclusion: that I need to lay off the alcohol, and he seemed satisfied by that, agreeing to open the gate for me. BUT ONLY ONCE. Unfortunately by this point it was 9pm and Kim needed to sleep, so I couldn't actually go in.
That gate had better still be open tomorrow!
It's times like this that I think back to what I've seen here and remember... I've got those case notes I can read to skip time forward 30 minutes don't I? I could've just used them to immediately jump to bedtime once I had my money and saved myself a lot of running around looking for something to do.
Never mind, I've finally finished day one and I'm ready to turn the game off.
I like how he's still carrying his plastic bag in the dream, just in case there are some dream bottles to pick up (there weren't).
Right, now I'm done. Actually, no, I can't turn the game off just yet, there's still one thing I need to do.
I'm still stuck wandering my tiny stretch of waterfront for now though. Unless that door to the harbour's still open. Man it'd better be.
CONCLUSION
Disco Elysium is basically what you get if you take one of those old Infinity Engine RPGs like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment, and extract all of the strategy and fantasy. Well, most of the fantasy, as it eventually becomes clear that this world isn't just an alternate history with the names changed; there's weirdness going on here that exists even outside of the protagonist's head. Though it's perfectly mundane to the people living in it, and the game's all about mundane problems.
It's also extremely text heavy but I didn't feel like I was flipping through dialogue boxes waiting for my turn to interact to come up. Partly because the text is deliberately written in a snappy and confrontational way to keep your attention and get you thinking, and partly because it always wants to know what you've decided. Every few paragraph the ball was thrown back to me and I got my choices, and those choices were remembered for later. My absolute fuck ups as well.
The gameplay's all driven by skill checks and dice rolls, and it never tries to hide it, though a lot of it happens passively. You talk to people and your skills will chime in if they're strong enough to pass the check, which is great because it means you get the voices in your head that you deserve. They sometimes even talk to each other, which I love. It's like you've got a support team on the radio ready to give you excellent/terrible advice in any situation, whether you want it or not (I always wanted it). What helps make it work is that the game's more interested in telling a story than throwing up roadblocks, so living with the consequences of failure can be more interesting than succeeding. I'd often try a white check even when my chances were low, because upgrading the appropriate skill also gives you a second try, so why not? Worst case, you need to use a healing item (or lose), but you might also get something out of it, or maybe get insanely lucky. I mean I started a new game to check something and got "The Expression" off his face first try with something like a 3% chance of success.
You can adjust your skill points a little and improve your odds when you're not in the middle of a conversation by changing your outfit, but this leads to the first big problem with the game: the inventory is really basic.
The second biggest problem is that the game may not have typical RPG battles, but it's got plenty of typical RPG walking around. It's like being stuck in the starting town of a game, in the bit where you run around doing quests for people while you wait for it to finally open up... except it never opens up. Plus there's no fast travel, at all, not even a little bit. Time freezes when you're not solving problems or reading new dialogue, but it's still kind of tedious to walk up and down the same stretch of beach over and over again, with everything along the way already examined and all the items claimed. I can tell that the game's deliberately going for a certain pace (the slow-ass boat ride at one point made that clear), but this would be perfect for replays if it wasn't for all the backtracking padding it out.
Third huge problem is that you hear the start of Red Rock Riviera (YouTube link) by British Sea Power every time you go down the waterfront. Nothing else, just the start, over and over, until you're stick of it. Funny thing is, I listened to the full song afterwards out of curiosity and discovered it's actually pretty great when it gets going! Fourth huge problem: it doesn't play the full version over the end credits.
On the plus side, the game is bloody awesome and I love it. It turns out that the time and money problems I had on day one aren't even an issue as it goes on, but the visuals never stop being awesome. My tiny static screenshots don't do the environments or the artwork justice. But a game like this lives or dies on its writing, in much the same way that a book does, and this is an endless stream of quality prose. The game designer is a novelist, one that apparently also like to do research and have opinions and stuff, and it doesn't seem like much was holding him back here. There's some real substance in the game as it delves into this world, its politics, its problems and its history, and it'll go full Wikipedia on you if you put enough points into Encyclopedia. There's a lot of cynicism too, which you'd expect considering it's narrated by the voices in the head of a man who drank enough to annihilate himself.
The player character is strangely innocent though, as this isn't exactly a 'what did I do last night?' situation; he's regressed all the way back to 'what is money?' and is learning about the world like a child. The game's based around three mysteries: the murder, the setting and the protagonist, but every bit of it contributes to the overall story, and as you accumulate information you get to construct a new version of the man from the shattered fragments you uncover. If you want to make your detective an addict or a racist or suicidal, it's happy to let you do that... and let you deal with the consequences. Though it's also going to mock you for it, because it mocks you for everything. Fortunately it's also very funny, which is good because otherwise it'd be a pretty bleak and miserable game. You deal with all the worst things, and all the worst people saying all the worst words, and it really puts you in the hero's snakeskin shoes as he's forced to either confront it all head on, or shield himself with drugs and delusions. But it's ultimately about a man who hit rock bottom and got back up, and I was really rooting for the guy.
Disco Elysium is definitely not perfect, there's plenty of room for improvement, but as hybrids between Planescape: Torment and Sanitarium go it's pretty solid. Like 'best in the whole damn genre' solid, not that it's a big genre. It's one of the best narrative driven games I've ever played and I'd strongly recommend it, if running up and down the same street isn't a deal-breaker for you.
Thanks for reading!
Super Adventures will return in two months, hopefully, but until then why not keep yourself entertained by promoting my site relentlessly? Tell everyone on Twitter, Reddit and Discord etc. that there's a great video game blog you've found... that's taking a break for two months. Okay, I didn't think this through.
Also Sci-Fi Adventures is back tomorrow, but I'm focusing on Babylon 5 right now so it's a bit niche.
"...a brand new game that's the opposite of obscure. Everyone's heard about it, everyone knows about it." First time I read about it in my life. But it looks fun and I loved the aesthetic choices. I'll check if my pc can run it and buy it as soon as I get a new job.
ReplyDeleteIt's so goddamn -grey-.
ReplyDeleteI wish I were a games developer -- well, I sort of am, but not the right sort -- because I would be rushing to produce No Truce With The Furries right now. I have no idea what sort of game it would be, but the pun needs to be claimed.
ReplyDeleteI look forward to playing this one day as it seems like just my sort of thing, but I know right now from reading your playthrough that the thing with rolling tasks on six-sided dice but giving the success chances as percentiles is going to rub me the wrong way. I understand and accept that I am probably the only person in the world who is bothered by this.
Happy birthday, Ray!
ReplyDelete