Post by WickedCrustacean on Oct 28, 2019 15:50:42 GMT -5
Video games are a very conservative medium generally speaking. The vast majority of them, especially in today's environment of high expenses and risk averse corporations, stick to tried and true formulas, over and over and over again. So it is exceptionally refreshing to play a game like Disco Elysium, one that boldly trail-blazes new ground in the medium, and surprises with its innovation, depth, and the sheer quality of its content.
Disco Elysium is an RPG from ZA/UM, a brand new studio which started out in the East European nation of Estonia, but then migrated into England along the way, to finish the production. The core team working on the game comprises a bunch of friends who used to play pen and paper role playing games in their free time, as well as being writers and artists on the side. Being huge fans of PnP RPGs, they were looking for ways to channel their professional skills into the creation of a computer game that would capture the magic of their pen and paper sessions. It was out of this desire that the game eventually took form, and a short five or six years later, it was released in October.
It is a game not just unlike any other, but one that goes against most tropes and conventions of the genre. Whereas in most RPGs, you play the role of a chosen hero, or at the very least, a bad-ass anti-hero, in DE, you are a broken down, depressed, alcoholic detective, a single negative thought away from a nervous breakdown or suicide. You awaken in a seedy motel, with complete amnesia, thanks to the previous night's massive bout of drinking, as you tried to drink your problems away. Now, on this morning, you find yourself in the middle of a murder investigation, while at the same time, trying to piece together the forgotten bits and pieces of your life. Your partner, a detective from another station, reminds you of the grotesque decaying corpse hanging from a tree in the motel's yard for the last week in this poverty stricken neighborhood, and from your conversations with him, you realize that you are a joke, a drunk has-been who was sent on this case because no one actually wants it solved. But will you reinforce their assumptions and go back to drinking and drugs? Or will you try to rediscover your humanity? Well, that part is up to you.
Where most RPGs expand outward, featuring massive worlds that it takes many real time hours to cross, but which are often fairly empty, DE goes in the opposite direction, has its entire gameworld take up a tiny portion of a post-war city. But that small piece of urban land has a density of content thousands of times higher than a typical RPG. Every NPC you meet has thousands of lines of dialogue, a detailed history and personality and figures somehow either in the main investigation, or some side quest. Every building, likewise, has things to investigate, things to discover, and stories to learn.
The game is played mostly via dialogue, similar to an adventure game. You can move your character around the area, and interact with NPCs or objects, but the vast majority of in-game content is explored via talking. The game has over a million lines of written dialogue. The quality of the writing is simply outstanding, and you can tell right away that the people who created it are real writers, and not the usual video game writer hacks which churn out mountains of drivel that doubles as insomnia drugs. In Disco Elysium, the dialogue is poignant and touching, laugh-out-loud funny and tear-inducing sad, all in equal measures. The main story is interesting enough, though some of its twists and quirks might not be for everyone, but it's the interactions with the regular people of the game and their lives in a dark and difficult world that make the game come alive. Whether speaking with a corrupt dock-worker union boss, a bitter and angry former royalist soldier, a messed up local hooligan kid, or a racist truck driver, there are no caricatures in this game, only real people from a world similar to ours.
What makes DE an RPG and not just an adventure game is that your character has stats and skills. You can select to invest a limited pool of points into Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics. These are all really aspects of your brain in the game, and each one contains several related skills. So Intellect represents cold deductive reasoning and includes skills like Logic, Visual Calculus, and Rhetoric. Psyche is about the more emotional and intuitive parts of the brain, Physique lets you get more physical with the world, and Motorics represent things like coordination and sneaking. By investing points into these stats and skills, you are basically determining how you will tackle dialogue, and thereby quests and situations in the game world. The stats are fixed throughout the game, but the skills can be raised whenever you level up.
By selecting different stat/skill set ups, you can approach the game from completely different situations. For instance, you can play an intellectual cop, who deduces things using his brainpower, or an emotionally sympathetic one who bonds with people and finds it easier to glean useful information from them and get them to do his bidding. Or forget both of those, and just become a barbell hoisting, flying spin-kick, womanizer animal of a detective. It's really up to you.
The skills don't just determine your approach, they literally chime in during dialogue as voices in your head. So in the middle of a conversation, one skill or another might give you tips, begin a side discussion, or try to get you to do something for it. In fact, getting a particular skill too high might be harmful, because it will start getting too much power and cause you issues. But they also figure very significantly in the frequent skill-checks in the dialogue. But so do other things as well. If your skill is too low to pass a particular dialogue check, you can come back later after leveling it, or put on different clothes which reinforce that particular skill (for example, a particularly vulgar tie will raise your Drama skill by 2 points). You can also explore other dialogue options, or do other things in the world, which will give you bonuses to your roll, and make the skill check easier to pass. But the best part is, failing a skill check roll in DE does not automatically lead to game-over. It might sometimes, but usually the failed roll just leads to another outcome, often even more amusing than the successful one.
You also have a thought cabinet, where you can research thoughts uncovered during dialogue. A thought is like a piece of equipment with skill benefits, once researched it will give you various bonuses, but the catch it, you don't know which ones until it's researched, and by then you have to spend a skill point to unlearn it if you are not happy. Aside from clothes and thoughts, you can also consume drugs and alcohol which boost your stats and skills temporarily, but damage your morale. While the game is not particularly difficult, there are a lot of things that can kill you or end your game, from a rejection by a love interest (sending you into depression), to dying of a heart attack from physical overexertion, to being killed in the line of duty.
Over the course of the game, which will take you anywhere between 16 and 30 hours, depending on how thorough you are, you will discover the truth about your past, have a chance to solve the murder of a mercenary, and take your detective from an alcohol induced blackout to the creme-de-la-creme of the police force, or back to the alcohol induced blackout. Disco Elysium is a game about walls of brilliant text, millions of small choices, humor and tragedy, and the human condition. It will not start a new movement because the demand for walls of text is pretty low, and the supply of such good writing in the video game medium is even lower, but as one outlier gem, it is not a game to be missed.
Disco Elysium is an RPG from ZA/UM, a brand new studio which started out in the East European nation of Estonia, but then migrated into England along the way, to finish the production. The core team working on the game comprises a bunch of friends who used to play pen and paper role playing games in their free time, as well as being writers and artists on the side. Being huge fans of PnP RPGs, they were looking for ways to channel their professional skills into the creation of a computer game that would capture the magic of their pen and paper sessions. It was out of this desire that the game eventually took form, and a short five or six years later, it was released in October.
It is a game not just unlike any other, but one that goes against most tropes and conventions of the genre. Whereas in most RPGs, you play the role of a chosen hero, or at the very least, a bad-ass anti-hero, in DE, you are a broken down, depressed, alcoholic detective, a single negative thought away from a nervous breakdown or suicide. You awaken in a seedy motel, with complete amnesia, thanks to the previous night's massive bout of drinking, as you tried to drink your problems away. Now, on this morning, you find yourself in the middle of a murder investigation, while at the same time, trying to piece together the forgotten bits and pieces of your life. Your partner, a detective from another station, reminds you of the grotesque decaying corpse hanging from a tree in the motel's yard for the last week in this poverty stricken neighborhood, and from your conversations with him, you realize that you are a joke, a drunk has-been who was sent on this case because no one actually wants it solved. But will you reinforce their assumptions and go back to drinking and drugs? Or will you try to rediscover your humanity? Well, that part is up to you.
Where most RPGs expand outward, featuring massive worlds that it takes many real time hours to cross, but which are often fairly empty, DE goes in the opposite direction, has its entire gameworld take up a tiny portion of a post-war city. But that small piece of urban land has a density of content thousands of times higher than a typical RPG. Every NPC you meet has thousands of lines of dialogue, a detailed history and personality and figures somehow either in the main investigation, or some side quest. Every building, likewise, has things to investigate, things to discover, and stories to learn.
The game is played mostly via dialogue, similar to an adventure game. You can move your character around the area, and interact with NPCs or objects, but the vast majority of in-game content is explored via talking. The game has over a million lines of written dialogue. The quality of the writing is simply outstanding, and you can tell right away that the people who created it are real writers, and not the usual video game writer hacks which churn out mountains of drivel that doubles as insomnia drugs. In Disco Elysium, the dialogue is poignant and touching, laugh-out-loud funny and tear-inducing sad, all in equal measures. The main story is interesting enough, though some of its twists and quirks might not be for everyone, but it's the interactions with the regular people of the game and their lives in a dark and difficult world that make the game come alive. Whether speaking with a corrupt dock-worker union boss, a bitter and angry former royalist soldier, a messed up local hooligan kid, or a racist truck driver, there are no caricatures in this game, only real people from a world similar to ours.
What makes DE an RPG and not just an adventure game is that your character has stats and skills. You can select to invest a limited pool of points into Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics. These are all really aspects of your brain in the game, and each one contains several related skills. So Intellect represents cold deductive reasoning and includes skills like Logic, Visual Calculus, and Rhetoric. Psyche is about the more emotional and intuitive parts of the brain, Physique lets you get more physical with the world, and Motorics represent things like coordination and sneaking. By investing points into these stats and skills, you are basically determining how you will tackle dialogue, and thereby quests and situations in the game world. The stats are fixed throughout the game, but the skills can be raised whenever you level up.
By selecting different stat/skill set ups, you can approach the game from completely different situations. For instance, you can play an intellectual cop, who deduces things using his brainpower, or an emotionally sympathetic one who bonds with people and finds it easier to glean useful information from them and get them to do his bidding. Or forget both of those, and just become a barbell hoisting, flying spin-kick, womanizer animal of a detective. It's really up to you.
The skills don't just determine your approach, they literally chime in during dialogue as voices in your head. So in the middle of a conversation, one skill or another might give you tips, begin a side discussion, or try to get you to do something for it. In fact, getting a particular skill too high might be harmful, because it will start getting too much power and cause you issues. But they also figure very significantly in the frequent skill-checks in the dialogue. But so do other things as well. If your skill is too low to pass a particular dialogue check, you can come back later after leveling it, or put on different clothes which reinforce that particular skill (for example, a particularly vulgar tie will raise your Drama skill by 2 points). You can also explore other dialogue options, or do other things in the world, which will give you bonuses to your roll, and make the skill check easier to pass. But the best part is, failing a skill check roll in DE does not automatically lead to game-over. It might sometimes, but usually the failed roll just leads to another outcome, often even more amusing than the successful one.
You also have a thought cabinet, where you can research thoughts uncovered during dialogue. A thought is like a piece of equipment with skill benefits, once researched it will give you various bonuses, but the catch it, you don't know which ones until it's researched, and by then you have to spend a skill point to unlearn it if you are not happy. Aside from clothes and thoughts, you can also consume drugs and alcohol which boost your stats and skills temporarily, but damage your morale. While the game is not particularly difficult, there are a lot of things that can kill you or end your game, from a rejection by a love interest (sending you into depression), to dying of a heart attack from physical overexertion, to being killed in the line of duty.
Over the course of the game, which will take you anywhere between 16 and 30 hours, depending on how thorough you are, you will discover the truth about your past, have a chance to solve the murder of a mercenary, and take your detective from an alcohol induced blackout to the creme-de-la-creme of the police force, or back to the alcohol induced blackout. Disco Elysium is a game about walls of brilliant text, millions of small choices, humor and tragedy, and the human condition. It will not start a new movement because the demand for walls of text is pretty low, and the supply of such good writing in the video game medium is even lower, but as one outlier gem, it is not a game to be missed.
