There May Never Be Another Game Quite Like Disco Elysium (2024)

I first stumbled across DIsco Elysium - The Final Cut on the PlayStation store a couple of years ago on a somber, rainy afternoon. At that time, I was completely ignorant of what the game entailed. but I knew I was immediately drawn to the washed-out, watercolor art style and the peculiarity of the title.

I didn't buy it then, as I'm very particular about what games I purchase these days, but after a few weeks of seeing it pop up on some videos in my YouTube recommendations, each YouTuber singing its praises for how well-written and narratively driven the title is, I decided I'd give it a shot. What ensued was perhaps one of the most transformative and conscientiously inspiring experiences I'd ever had with a spur-of-the-moment indie title purchase in my entire gaming career, and it remains one of my all-time favorite games to this day.

From the moment you boot Disco Elysium up until you see those end credits rolling across the screen, the game feels like a waking dream. More acutely, it feels like some displaced yet familiar alternate reality - an unfurling of believable events and interpersonal interactions happening in a place isolated in time. Disco Elysium, perhaps like no game I've ever encountered, draws me into its setting so coolly and so consistently, that the very title card elicits a sort of meditative state within me. That's nothing yet to say of all of the elements within the game that amount to such a surreal experience. I may have been late to the party with this one, but believe me when I say there's a sort of timelessness to this title that will gratify any player who gives it a shot, no matter when they encounter it.

You Are Who You Choose To Be

You are a detective, first and foremost, you're there to solve a murder. This is the necessary central conflict introduced seemingly for the sake of having a tangible goal to push the story, but that is where the strict confines of your character end. Beyond that premise, Disco Elysium actively encourages you to define your protagonist not through direct choice, but through action, interaction, and proceeding consequence. This is not an action game. This is a game of pure dialogue, prose, and dynamic thought-provocation on sociopolitical and internal self-discovery topics. Though those words strung together may sound daunting, they are implemented so fluidly that they expand the mind and challenge preconceived concepts of reality while simultaneously offering (but not forcing) fresh perspectives.

Throughout the game, you will encounter scores of NPCs that are so dynamic, multi-faceted, and brimming with personalities so akin to reality, that it feels like a disservice to label them NPCs at all. These are people, each with their own thoughts, opinions, moral stances, dreams, behaviors, hopes, and fears. Though they are stationed at fixed points within the game and possess limited animations, in speaking with them, you immediately see that the ravaged half-ruin of a city they call home has impacted them all differently, thereby affecting how they interact with you and having genuine, human responses to their state of beings and environments.

At the same time, it is these interactions that define your own character as a person existing within the setting you find yourself in. There is an in-game system called the Thought Cabinet that sees the player conceptualize encountered concepts about reality and apply them in ways that can be both a boon and a hindrance to gameplay, but I've found that the mechanic was simply a creative way to depict the very real process of how we, as people, absorb new ideas that challenge our perceptions of reality.

This is a prime example of where the magic of this game truly lies. In choosing not to define your protagonist for you - going so far as to start a new game not even so much as remembering your name or face, much less where you are, who you are, or what your values are - and having all of that established as you interact with a world around you that does not have sympathy for your lack of identity, Disco Elysium forces you to define yourself, both within and, to some extent, outside of the game. It is a game so singularly unique in its existence and telling of its tale, that I am able to write about it at length in this way without even covering what happens within the game itself, and I still don't feel I'm doing it full justice in its description and delivery.

That is nothing to mention of its tantalizingly majestic art style, electing to depict its characters as low-poly clay-like 3D models on the game's main stage but draw the attention of the player, who is already primarily focused on the plethora of dialogue and text boxes, towards the more eye-catching and beautifully rendered portraits of each interactable character you meet. The choice to put the focus on these often vibrant portraits is to the story's benefit. Though they are unmoving, they encapsulate the disposition and demeanor of each character in a way I'd argue a 3D render of the same would have clashed with the game's focus on finding and defining identity and worldviews.

What's more, the world itself, Revachol West, is stunning. The full combination of its ambient soundtrack and early spring precipitation showering an old, storied city aching from the sores of a relatively recent tumultuous past is seen across every building, person, and crack in the concrete. It's alive and breathing, but more with the feel of an old, retired war veteran silently spending a chilly morning in a rocking chair on his porch than anything else. He's done a lot, he's seen a lot, but now he spends his days in the peace of a quiet existence on the fringes of society. And that's far from a negative. It works stupendously well with the tone of the kind of game Disco Elysium is, and it is beyond gorgeous.

As I dive in for my third playthrough and still find myself discovering new dialogue paths based on the varied ways I've defined my protagonist attributes, I still find myself awestruck at how naturally it feels to be enveloped in the game's atmosphere. My familiarity with the in-game world hasn't made it any less an oasis of escapism than it ever was, and that, I can say with confidence, is a magic only Disco Elysium can truly cast.