You find yourself in darkness and silence. The voices in your head convince you not to open your eyes, not to return to the maddening reality. There are no monsters in it, but there is something worse: a hangover! Waking up on the floor in a drunken hotel room, breaking through an unbearable headache, you try to get dressed and remember what this place is, what you’re doing here, and who you are. I can’t remember anything. You don’t even remember your name and face. A fresh sea wind blows through the broken window. This is how Disco Elysium begins – a brilliant tragicomic story and the most original narrative computer role-playing game of recent times.
Big games, like literature, shrink over time to a non-explanatory plot. The phrase “Anna Karenina threw herself under a train” says nothing about Leo Tolstoy’s novel, just as the description “well, there’s a ghost town all in the fog” says nothing about the Silent Hill series of games.
You might have heard about Disco Elysium in a similar context: “a game about an alcoholic cop with voices in his head” or “a game in which you need to read a lot, but there is no gameplay at all.”
The skills page. The meanings are characteristic of the thinker archetype
Today we will find out what is really hidden in the interactive artwork “Elysian Disco” and why, five years after its release, this game has remained in the minds of people who are not particularly associated with computer entertainment.
The cold spring of 51
The plot of the game is a detective story. Our alcoholic, along with an unflappable partner, will investigate the murder of a mercenary whose corpse has been hanging from a tree in the backyard of the hotel for a week. Unraveling the tangle of relationships in the once beautiful, but now war–torn and revolutionary city of Revachol, Harry (or Garrier Debois – that’s the name of the main character, if he can remember his name and agrees that his name is that) will have to rediscover the world, both externally and internally. At least find out the reason for your own heavy drinking.
Throughout most of the game, Harry will be accompanied by his partner Kim Kitsuragi, who, with his stoic worldview, will compensate for some of the antics of our insane protege.
The detective part in Disco Elysium is the same as in the sources of its inspiration: the TV series True Detective and Twin Peaks. That is, it’s not bad in itself, but it’s only the foundation on which a million little stories are built: about friendship, debt, loss, ups and downs, addictions, politics, and more. A week in the company of Harry and Kim is a window into this amazing and at the same time mundane world, similar to ours if it had been lost in the twentieth century.
It is important to tell these stories correctly, and in this regard, DE holds the record not only in terms of the amount of text (in one passage for 40-50 hours you will see no more than 20% of the variants of various replicas), but also in terms of its quality. This is probably the best game in terms of literary pitch. The style, similar at the same time to paperback noir detectives and the work of Cormac McCarthy, gives a range of emotions from homeric laughter to deep essential reflections. And all this works both in the English-language original and in the brilliant Russian translation. Edited by Alexandra Golubeva a.k.a. Alfina, we have received an amazing adaptation. These texts, with their sparkling metaphors and appropriate profanity, have scattered into quotes and memes in very wide circles. Just don’t turn up your snobby noses at motherfuckers and memes! Not so long ago, in the finale of the book by the same Cormac McCarthy, “The Bloody Meridian” was launched in Tiktok. It didn’t make the book any worse.
The Multiple Minds of Garrier Debois
What does DE look like at first glance? It resembles old isometric RPGs, like two-dimensional fallouts or the first two parts of Baldur’s Gate. With one root difference. There is no combat system here, as there are no battles, except for a couple of plot points. Most of the game boils down to conversations, both externally, with a lot of colorful characters, and, most interestingly, internally. Instead of the standard role-playing skills, strength, agility and other endurance, Harry has personality traits, animated physical and intellectual parameters. No, this is not multiple personality syndrome, but rather character traits. Each of these traits has its own voice and its own opinion about any situation. For example, Electrochemistry, which is responsible for the interest in quick pleasures, will ask the hero to take someone else’s cigarette butt out of the ashtray and finish it. Willpower and Authority will resist this. Moreover, the development of traits does not always play a positive role. Too much Authority will be based on ideas of respect, which will make your character too stubborn in some dialogues.
And of course, skill tests! Critical miss, critical luck, and all that stuff. The higher the skill is developed, that is, the personality trait, the higher the probability of a successful outcome. However, failure is not failure per se. For example, when the cafeteria manager asks you to pay for a drunken brawl, you can try to escape. If the check fails, Harry will caricature a cute old lady in a wheelchair, but later this incident will help to knock out a good discount to pay the fine.
A successful skill check gives you the opportunity to learn a lot about the situation.
Besides skills, there are ideas. After thinking about a certain idea (or ideology) for some time, you can get buffs and debuffs for various characteristics. Harry’s thoughts are as eccentric as he is. The idea that it’s very convenient to be a homeless cop in order to know the streets better is just the tip of the iceberg.
All this makes for incredible replayability in this essentially linear story. The summation and randomness of many events makes each passage unique, even if the initial values are the same. It was only in this walkthrough that I learned that Harry’s trademark grin is an imitation of an old Disco singer. In previous playthroughs, Harry couldn’t remember this fact. But towards the end of the game, a mystical giant telepathic insect convinced me that I should continue to live for the sake of… the working class!
Welcome to Revashol
As you progress through the setting of the game, it wins your heart more and more. The world of the game is becoming clearer and more incomprehensible at the same time with every step. This is the same situation that was in “TES III Morrowind” or “Pestilence.Utopia” (the latter, by the way, was worked on by Alfina, the author of the Russian translation of Disco Elysium): at first glance, familiar elements appear from completely unexpected sides, and the desire to understand what is happening takes the player into the game reality.
The reality of Disco Elysium does not just calculate historical events and change the names of real peoples and ideologies. She instills in them a completely different mysterious context. The world is full of left-wing and right-wing political forces, but there are no weapons of mass destruction. But there is Grayness: a foggy ocean capable of swallowing the whole world. Instead of ordinary natural miracles, there are real, unknowable and unpredictable miracles. At the same time, all the main events are quite rational and human. These feelings refer to another source of inspiration for the development team: the philosophical fiction of the Strugatsky brothers. Most of all, it resembles the “Doomed City”, but in the ironic absurdity of the “Dead Climber”.
Oil painting and noises
The same highly artistic approach can be traced to the visual part of the game. Artist Alexander Rostov was inspired by the work of Kandinsky and oil paintings, so the main screen of the game looks like a redrawing of screenshots of CRPGs from the turn of the millennium, which further enhances the sense of a highly cultured experience.
The sound part is no less spiritual. The music of the British Sea Power band will forever remain in the memory, like the feeling of a cold morning on the seashore somewhere in France. It rhymes very well with the existential mood of the game, as well as with the dominance of a culture similar to French in this world. The tracks, by the way, are not entirely original: they are instrumental reworkings of early creativity. So, after listening to, for example, the 2013 album From the Sea to the Land Beyond, you will instantly catch that vibe. A very interesting expansion of the game experience. And yes, there is no disco music in Disco Elysium.
Literature, drunkenness, and board games
The story of creating such a highly unusual game is no less original, and it also explains this originality. Studio ZA/UM (yes, it is intentionally consonant with the Russian word “zaum”) was originally a Tallinn bohemian hangout that tried itself in any kind of creativity. These were music projects, fine arts, and, of course, literature. And no computer games! Only tabletop role-playing games, DnD, and others that the crowd actively played. From such a role-playing session, the world of DE was born, which later became… a book. The Holy and Terrible fragrance (Puha ja oudne lõhn in the original, there is no official Russian translation of the book) it was published in 2013 and failed miserably, which plunged writer Robert Kurwitz, like Harry, into the abyss of alcoholic depression.
His friend Kaur Kender pulled him out of this state by introducing the idea of reworking the book into a video game. According to legend, Kaur told Robert something like this: “We failed at everything, let’s fail again in a new area.” And there was every chance of this outcome, because none of the gang, including the aforementioned Alexander Rostov, knew how to develop video games. They probably didn’t find any game developers in their native Estonia. Therefore, having sold the Kender’s powerful car to accumulate initial capital, the group moves to Foggy Albion in order to develop a game with those who know how to do it in their free time from bohemian hangouts.
This origin perfectly explains why DE is most reminiscent of a homemade role-playing game with bohemian drunks. In fact, this is it, recorded digitally, with illustrations by one of the participants and with the music of their favorite band in the background.
Disco Elysium is great for being the only game for those who don’t play games at all. Low system requirements will allow you to run Disco Elysium on almost any computer. Containing a lot of interesting ideas, it will sink into the soul, first of all, of lovers of modern literature. For some, it will open the way to more serious works of art as such, and for others it will allow them to laugh heartily. And it may well help someone to get through difficult periods of life and better understand themselves. She’s really capable of it.
At one time, I was stuck in it for about 50 hours. Insanely cool, I would even say not a game, but…An interactive book. And as a literary work, and as an individual visual style, and sound. Everything is fine there
Well, there is still too much non-linearity in the details and the role of role-playing mechanics for the book.