So I’ve Finished: Disco Elysium

A few months ago I finished a playthrough of Disco Elysium on the Nintendo Switch. Disco Elysium is a point-and-click RPG adventure title that… uh… well, confuses the heck outta me.

Spoilers, below.

First and foremost, the developers of Disco Elysium are a tangled story in and of themselves, and not just in the crunch-it-till-you-make-it nonsense that pervades the industry. People Make Games delivered some top-tier reporting on what went on:

What resulted from that awkward development before the denouement and collapse was a game that I’m still not entirely certain I’ve played.

Let me try and explain. You should already know reading this what this game is, and if you don’t you can read better words about that from Rock Paper Shotgun. So I’m playing this point-and-click game and there’s very little sense to my actions about which will advance the game and which won’t. Does it matter that I learned what my spirit animal was? Will it affect the ending if I spend time learning cryptozoology? Does my abstention from mood-altering substances make a difference in how I’m treated?

Is the reality of the game even real to its inhabitants? Is that distortion field due to the drugs or the poverty? I’m just left with so many questions. It really echoed some of the weird feelings I have about adulthood where, yeah, there’s so much to do, but how much of it matters? Especially when there are few voices telling me what matters beyond paying bills and staying out of trouble.

I will say that the Switch port is clunky and awkward. Don’t play that one. But if you played Planescape: Torment and wished it had less combat, then you really should check this out. The consistency and quality of the writing is astounding (and needed to be, since that’s almost all the game is), the way it plays with expectations is with humour born of love not ridicule, the setting is far too deep, the world feels cohesive, the game is barely even a game… it’s pretty good, y’know?

But I don’t think I’ll ever play it again. And if either the studio or the creators make a sequel, I might not play it either, given what PMG discovered.

I’d rather play a Supergiant Games game instead. I hear they actually let their devs take vacations.