In its place are thousands and thousands of words, most of them written by the game’s lead writer and designer, Estonian novelist Robert Kurvitz. What this all adds up to is a video game in which gameplay is a non-factor. Between these moments you get to explore Revachol, taking in the watercolor palette of the game’s animation and luxuriating in the sorrowful score. This system isn’t just ornamental-while playing last night, my character’s Volition attribute was strong enough to interject into a conversation with a witness to point out that this woman’s charms had scrambled the Empathy and Suggestion attributes, and their contributions couldn’t be trusted in this case. A good chunk of the game is spent listening to dialogue from voice-acted NPCs, and even more time is spent having scenes described to you by a narrator who regularly speaks directly to your character from the point of view of his various attributes. The guts of a role-playing game are all there, but the experience of actually playing Disco Elysium feels much more like listening to a richly produced audiobook. Your character, an amnesiac detective tasked with solving a murder in an impoverished post-war city called Revachol, moves around and interacts with various NPCs, navigating through dialogue trees that occasionally surface skill checks that you pass or fail based on how many skill points you’ve invested in each of your character’s 24 attributes. The base mechanics of the game are similar to a classic table-top role-playing game.
DISCO ELYSIUM MERCH PC
But it’s an impulse I never really paid much attention to until Disco Elysium got its fingers around my brain and started messing with the ways I think about video games.ĭisco Elysium-which was originally released on PC in October 2019, won a hatful of Game Of The Year awards, and was then remastered this year for the new console generation-is a little hard to explain.
This is possibly a joyless way to think about these things. Even the big Triple-A narrative games, the ones that are supposed to elevate the medium from entertainment to art, will find a place in my mind as a 15- or 20-hour game. I know not to hope for much more than 6–10 hours of gameplay in the single-player campaign of a big-budget first-person shooter I know that the giant open-world games will offer me, if I have the stomach for it, nearly 100 hours of questing, fighting, and mindless loot-hunting. Video games have spent so many years conditioning my brain to conceive of them as units of time and effort.
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