"Okay, sir. Just a moment. I need to change shoes, and find some gloves, and put on my racist caricature hat before I talk to you."

You wake up in a trashed hotel room. One of your green snakeskin shoes is AWOL. In the mirror you face the horrible, indescribable *EXPRESSION*. Just the first room drips with atmosphere and implied details of not only who you are, but of the world around you.

Disco Elysium is essentially a conversation heavy point and click adventure game masquerading as a role-playing game. You roam the land, pick up every piece of trash, loose coin and seagull-excrement-encrusted piece of clothing you can, and try to find ways to connect the dots of a gruesome murder mystery that takes place in a city awash with racism, locked in low-key class warfrare and scarred by a war-torn past. Whereas your own character, a mutton-chopped amnesiac who is almost certainly a police officer, is stumbling along in alcohol-induced delirium, the characters around you all have their own interests and intrigue to consider, with some trying to help you, while others simply wish to help themselves.

To say that Disco Elysium is a story rich game is to put it mildly. The world it presents drips with atmosphere and detail around every bullet-hole riddler street corner and underneath every cracked street, and each location and character is imbued with some absolutely great art direction. The game is enveloped in a hand-painted look, crisp visual style and a unique faux 1950's electrofuturistic look. It invites you to explore, to seek out obscure details and to find out the true nature of the people inhabiting the world.

And then it kind of kicks you in the teeth.

The gameplay is governed by a skill-check system. You have a truckload of different skills to upgrade and focus on, and nearly every item, location and character will require you to pass a check in a specific skill to uncover something or impress someone. The skill checks are basically die rolls with modifiers granted by your actions in the game, your own set of skills and, funnily enough, the clothes you wear. However, a failed skill check may not be possible to try again, at least for a long time, so failure can feel outright punishing, and due to the front-and-center nature of the die rolls taking place, it is possible to lock yourself out of progress in the main game by getting a couple of bad die rolls back to back. This brings us to my first real gripe about the game: the clothes.

On a surface level the mechanic of your clothes raising or lowering certain skills is an interesting mechanic. Going into a conversation where you need to compound your authority while wearing what amounts to a circus outfit sans the squeaky shoes is obviously a bad idea. But a mechanic that makes sense at first glance falls apart in the execution. I repeatedly found myself examining an object or initiating a conversation, finding myself faced with a potential skill check, and hastily backing out so I could stand there, in the middle of the street, trying out different combinations of shoes, pants and sunglasses in order to maximize my chance of success. Since the "puzzle" has a single obvious solution, its success is still governed by a random roll, and the act of changing clothes on the spot feels absurd even for our alcoholic protagonist, this just felt frustrating to do. A fun idea in the design, certainly, but horribly executed and clumsy.

Sadly; for a game about Disco, I will also have to dock points for the music and audio. As the game begins the music feels weighty, atmospheric and important, but certain clips of music are repeated ad nauseum, and due to their powerful nature the opening tones of certain tracks began to elicit bursts of laughter or annoyed groans from me over the course of the game. The voice actors, also, range from excellent to hobbyist. A few characters even sound like their lines were recorded by a person wholly disconnected from the character (say, a 20-30 year old voice actor trying to sound hoarse to play the role of a 70 year old man) recording their lines in their moms basement on a headset microphone, and the audio mixer even forgot to filter out the background hum of the room they were in.

I hear there is a deluxe version coming out, with more voice acting. I hope it also replaces some actors entirely, though for me, and the purposes of this review, that's a bit of a moot point.

All in all, Disco Elysium was a wonderfully enjoyable story full of memorable characters and moments, only hampered at times by quesitonable game design decisions and audio issues. I can heartily recommend it.


Oh, and WELCOME TO REVACHOL!



Playtime: 24 hours (A single playthrough)

Ratings (1-10)
Visual: 8
Audio: 7
Story: 10
Gameplay: 7
Overall: 9