I have things to say about Disco Elysium, which is easily my Game of the Year, but for context I first have to discuss my experience working on the Blade Runner game two decades ago.
I had the great fortune to work on Blade Runner early in my career. It was my first lead role and I was woefully underqualified. Fortunately I was surrounded by a crackerjack team of veteran programmers and artists, as well as a veteran designer from the Police Quest games, Jim Walls. Together we built a game that, while flawed, turned out okay.
One of the vision-level goals on Blade Runner was making the player feel like a detective. This proved to be an elusive target. Classic adventure game puzzles – picking up clues in the environment and talking to people – got us part way there but it wasn’t enough. We drew on the source movie’s ESPER machine to create a handful of set-piece examinations of photographs, and the movie’s Voight-Kampff test to build a few interrogation scenes.
The game we created was a success and I’m very proud of the work we did. Blade Runner was moody, it told a new story in a beloved setting, and it had multiple endings. But from a design perspective, I never felt we figured out how to make the player feel like a detective.
So it’s incredibly inspirational to me, twenty-plus years later, to play a game that not only nails that vision but does a bunch of other amazing things at the same time.
What makes Disco Elysium so special? Relatively spoiler-free thoughts below.
It’s Unique
If you read the advance press on Disco Elysium and glance at the screenshots, you’d be forgiven for assuming it was an open-world isometric RPG, along the lines of Baldur’s Gate or Pillars of Eternity – albeit one with an interesting fantasy-noir setting. But Disco Elysium has almost no combat and you play a single, specific character. And while there is RPG-like skill progression, it’s primarily in service of a deep skill check system for the game’s extensive dialogue trees.
The closest analogy that keeps cropping up in the gaming press is Planescape Torment, the innovative story-focused RPG from 1992. Like Planescape Torment, Disco Elysium lives and dies by its content, not its mechanics. It is less an open-world RPG and more a complex choose-your-own-adventure novel.
Yet even Planescape Torment is not a perfect comparison. Planescape, though it told a powerful story with a combat-light approach, is still squarely in the fantasy RPG genre. Disco Elysium, despite its detailed and complex fictional setting, has a lot of meaningful things to say about the world we live in.
It’s Smart
Disco Elysium is the first game from the team at ZA/UM, a passion project that started as a life as a custom pen-and-paper RPG system. The game isn’t perfect – as is typical for first-time developers, ZA/UM made a few rookie mistakes. Pathing in some cases is finicky and not obvious; sometimes scene exit hotspots are unclear. For a game that’s primarily built around choice and consequence, there are a couple of questionable moments where progression is blocked behind specific skill checks. There is one case where if players spend too much money at the wrong time, they can get genuinely stuck without being able to complete the game.
All that said, the game is focused and tightly designed. The story has two main threads – a murder case and your own character’s development – and everything in the game lives in service to those threads. Each player will have a unique experience because the order of experiencing the majority of the game’s sequences doesn’t matter, and every character build will see different angles on the same case.
The team also solved thorny design challenges in elegant ways. Too often in an RPG with dialogue trees, the “right” answer is to select all the options in sequence until they’re all exhausted. Some games have found partial solutions to this problem – only giving a player one choice in a tree before the other person reacts negatively or positively, or adding in an alignment system to encourage players to roleplay.
Disco Elysium expects players to think about how someone they’re talking to will react to what’s said, but the design takes that concept one step further. All the characters in the game feel fully fleshed-out – there are very few that don’t seem like living, breathing people with their own motivations and goals. In a conversation, sometimes NOT saying something is as important as saying something. A player that simply works down the list of options will reveal a lot of information to someone who shouldn’t have it – and it will come back to bite the player later.
Building a text-heavy game creates an inherent challenge: how do you get players to READ all that text? The Disco Elysium developers clearly understood the problem and worked to solve it.
First, they’re simply great writers – the content is verbose, but sharp, witty, and never tedious or unclear.
Second, they made a lot of solid user experience design choices – clear tooltips so players fully understand their options, good placement of text on the screen with a short visual length of lines, and just the right amount of voice acting to provide a sense of character without blowing their development budget by voicing every line of their million-word script.
It’s Bold
Controversial content can sink a well-designed game. In this modern world of internet mob justice, a developer who builds content that potentially offends anyone is opening themselves up to not just criticism but abuse. Every developer I know that wanted to build a game with edgy subject matter had a lot of discussions first about whether it would truly be worth it.
The creators of Disco Elysium have no fear. They crafted a gritty noir tale in a broken, war-weary fictional world and didn’t shy away from any of the implications of the setting. Drug use, addiction, sexual abuse, trauma, racism, and politics are all squarely front and center as elements in the game’s story.
Yet none of the content ever feels exploitative or cheap. The dark moments are earned – by the setting, by your character’s own experiences, and by the lives of the other characters you’ll meet. They’re handled matter-of-factly, without any filters or euphemisms. And the subject matter makes the humorous moments – which are front and center as often as the controversial content – shine brightly.
It’s Personal
Despite the game’s writers expressing a clear authorial point of view, ample room is left for the player’s agency.
It’s not a spoiler to say that your character, a broken-down alcoholic detective who wakes up with amnesia after a bender, starts the game as a failure. How much of a failure is driven home over and over again for at least the first third of the game.
But then you start finding your way. You bounce off the other characters in the game – racists, communists, suspects and innocents – and pull a thread of the case here, and another thread there. In the process of learning more about the case, you learn more about who your character is – and the structure of the game is such that the answer will be different for every player.
I’ve played a lot of adventure and RPG games and I feel like know all the tricks. I usually see the classic “story twists” in most games coming a mile away – this character will betray me, this character is hiding something, this character is my love interest. But Disco Elysium regularly upended all the tropes and surprised me over and over again without resorting to cheap twists.
Late in the game, I had a conversation that made me realize I had significantly screwed up some choices. For a while, I had fallen into the pattern of clicking off every dialogue option in the tree, and Disco Elysium punished me for it.
I still completed the game, with an ending both melancholy and satisfying, but that moment stuck with me. It taught me something not just about how I play games, but how I make choices in general.
I can’t say more without getting into spoiler territory. Your own 20 to 30 hour journey through Disco Elysium won’t be the same as mine. You may not have exactly that same conversation – or you may feel differently about it if you do.
But I’ll guarantee you’ll experience something powerful, personal, and truly unique.
Have you played Disco Elysium? What are your thoughts? Discuss in the comments, but please keep it spoiler-free!