Disco Elysium - Previews

You'll eventually meet your partner and investigate the body, which has been hanging for more than a week and is quite ripe at this point. A couple of kids standing nearby can be interrogated, but prefer to continue throwing rocks at the corpse and jeer mercilessly when you toss your cookies at the smell. Your character may try to steal the deceased man's boots, or might find that he threw his police notebook in the garbage during his drunken stupor.

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Do not mistake this dialogue-driven RPG for an interactive novel. This top-down point-and-click adventure, made by a small studio out of London, includes puzzles and inventory-driven mechanics that you might expect in a LucasArts classic. The difference here is the sheer breadth of branching dialogue paths and optional conversations packed into this early-2019 PC adventure game—not to mention the hilariously dark and brutal script driving its horror-loving humor forward.

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Right now that game is missing some voice lines and needs some polishing, but it’s in its last ten percent of development, and it’s clear that they’re close to the finish line. The story is where the devs promised me that they’re using their last months with the game to push the content, and I look forward to seeing some of the rough edges smoothed out. I played about forty-five minutes of the demo, and the entire situation with the strange voice in the protagonist’s head that talked a lot about primal feelings and wanting to sleep (me too, I tell the lizard-voice: I also want to sleep), as well as the connection to disco powers, were unexplained. Once the game is released, however, that connection will likely come along along. My mustachioed protagonist and I had only scratched the tip of the surface by the time I finished the demo, leaving behind a union on strike and kids throwing rocks at a corpse.

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Power issues around the booth cut my demo short, but I saw what I needed to see. Disco Elysium is dirty and biting while being painterly and flowery. There is stillness in the atmosphere, with tension and suspense lingering on the periphery. It is an RPG about navigating an urban world and your own thought processes. It is strange and disorienting, but also unique, well-written, and evocative. Even just this bite-sized sample was exciting.

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I’m somewhat curious to see where Disco Elysium goes with its plot, since I was not able to get a great sense of it from the demo I played. It seems like one of the most direct conversions of a tabletop RPG system to a video game that isn’t just a D&D game, with a lot of open-endedness to explore or play through it however you see fit. Even if it seems like it might be a bit hardcore for me I’m still interested to see where it goes, but unfortunately we may need to wait a while since there’s no confirmed release window for the game on Steam.

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Silver Coin said:

I have no preference either way, but the first name probably wouldn't sell as well.

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ZAUM Studio's Aleksander Rostov (Art Director) and Robert Kurvitz (Lead Designer & Writer) are joined by Alex Wiltshire (Acclaimed Video Games Journalist) to discuss the development of Disco Elysium, a groundbreaking blend of hardboiled cop show and isometric RPG.

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