Partly because the old habit to exhaust all topics of discussion dies hard. But I try not to end any dialogue threads prematurely. But if you’d rather not, there is often an option to skip it. If political history brewed from a post-communist, Eastern European experience is your cup of tea, then look forward to taking a long drink. The game creators are Estonian, and it shows.

In-game screenshot No one disappoints Saint Kim! And Lamby! Once in a while, the words break your heart. The banters between characters are often funny, outlandish, and endearing.

To the writer’s credit, however, the conversations are not dull. Even I, the dialogue junkie, found my eyes glazing over the lengthy explanations on the sociopolitical nuance once in a while. Dialogues can meld into a wall of text after a while, testing one’s fortitude (and brain capacity) to take in the hefty information. Hence, reading is integral to the gameplay. Yet the outcome of your dialogues and actions are randomised with dice throws, although your odds can be improved by levelling up on specific skills or internalising some of the ‘ideals’ in the ‘Thought Cabinet’.ĭisco Elysium is inspired in part by the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons and Kurvitz’s 2013 novel Sacred And Terrible Air. Depending on your point allocation in the myriad of skills, you can choose your interaction style with in-game characters (and a particular mailbox). Credit: ZA/UM Disco-ldĪn open-world role-playing game, the game promises “unprecedented freedom of choice”. It is equal parts bleak and romantic, witty and wrong, fantastic and real. It is, as the game’s lead writer Robert Kurvitz puts it, “a French cop-show”. It is the escapist boots of police procedural role-play boiled in a pot of bubbling geopolitical tension. It is a murder mystery hung from an old tree, which dizzying tangle of ideological roots had only barren branches of dogmatic spiel to show for it. And it is not just the unique oil-painting-like visuals that made city ruins look poetic and melancholic, or the unnerving voices that keep arguing in your protagonist’s head. Credit: ZA/UM Kim is great (just ask the Internet), but you’re on your own in finding your pantsįrom the get-go, Disco Elysium is special. With Kim as your partner, you have to figure out the culprits behind the lynching, and along the way, how reality even works (it’s an extreme case of waking up on the wrong end of the bed). Fortunately, another detective, Kim Kitsuragi, had rolled into town to assist you. Too bad you lost your memories (or marbles) overnight. All signs point to you being a drunkard detective from the Revachol Citizens Militia (RCM) – a self-organised peace corps operating “within a legal twilight” – assigned to investigate the lynching. Meanwhile, you wake up in a trashed room of the same inn, remembering nothing.

Nah, everyone in fact went about their business while a corpse hung in the backyard of a local inn. Credit: ZA/UM Every RPG lover’s favourite screenĭisco Elysium is set in the revolution-torn city of Revachol. Specifically, it builds the character of my in-game protagonist, an amnesiac cop with delusions of superstardom. But you know what they say – challenge builds character. This messed with my compulsion to click all the dialogue options. The type of responses you tend to make, whether it is apologetic or racist, would also affect the identity and ideals of your character. Some replies, when picked, would come back to bite you in the behinds later because words have consequences. The realness extends to even the dialogue. The world is “alive with real people”, as the studio behind the detective point-and-click adventure, ZA/UM, describes it. After all, there is nothing to lose and only laughter to gain by uttering them.ĭisco Elysium changed that. The backpacks that Peter Parker left all over New York City in Marvel’s Spider-Man? The Rick and Morty legendary gun in Borderlands 3? I could leave them all behind, but no way was I going to let the most insane dialogue choice left unsaid in Monkey Island or Oxenfree. I’m hardly ever a completionist in video games, except when it comes to point-and-click adventure.

Disco elysium character builds