It feels like I could play Disco Elysium 10 times and still not see everything the game has to offer. That’s likely untrue, but the important thing is it feels that way. After my first playthrough, I restarted the game a couple times, going through the first couple of hours, and the variation of dialogue even in the beginning, when Harry is talking to his Ancient Reptillian Brain and Limbic System is extraordinary. Now this all could be an illusion, the game’s first few hours being strong and full of choice, only to whittle away that choice the nearer to the end a player gets, but a) I don’t think that’s the case, and b) if it is, they kept the illusion of the magic trick going until the final conversation Harry has with his “special task force”. That final conversation plays as a summary of the player’s actions through their time in Martinaise, but it doesn’t get everything right. For instance, I drank one beer and smoked one cigarette to cross those quests off my ledger, but I did it after hours, when Kim had gone to bed and I was all alone in my hotel room, yet during that confrontation, Kim says that I was drinking and smoking the whole time, and Harry’s partner Jean Viquemere says he smells the booze on Harry’s breath. So it’s not perfect, but let me say right now that my example is nitpicky, and is no way indicative of my awe towards Disco Elysium as one of the best games I’ve ever played.
Disco Elysium as a CRPG
It’s easy to see what games inspired Disco Elysium’s creation. The closest point of comparison is Planescape: Torment, a game I finally played in its entirety a couple years back. I’m quite happy with the critique I made. You should check it out. The reason for this comparison is that both of these Computer Role Playing Games or CRPGs have us playing an amnesiac, with the player being able to influence this blank slate of a character through our actions and dialogue choices. Dialogue is the focus here, because while the CRPG is based on Dungeons & Dragons, and like a lot of videogames, simulates combat as its main mode of conflict, Planescape: Torment downplayed the importance of combat, and 20 years later, Disco Elysium removes it almost entirely.
I say almost, because Disco Elysium contains action scenes. There’s an entire row of the skill tree dedicated to physical attributes, and another to motorics (or how good Harry’s reflexes are). In the early game, they’re used for small things - busting down doors, jumping off rooftop ledges, or smacking obnoxious children in the face - but soon enough you can whirling spin kick a racist, climb a rickity ladder with your eyes closed, and the climax of the game plays out like a multi-man turn based RPG boss battle, with characters living or dying depending on how good your preperation, choices, and the rolls of the dice are. We’ll get back to those dice rolls soon.
Speaking of RPG boss battles, it’s been pointed out by others that some of the conversations in Disco Elysium feel like boss battles. The military tribunal I mentioned as the climax of the game is this in its most explicit form, but when I think of talking to some of the most powerful people in Martinaise - Joyce Messier, Titus Hardee, and of course Evrart Sinclair, getting what you want out of them without having your health or morale depleted or integrity compromised, can be as intense as choosing what strategies to employ to get through a tough fight in any other RPG. When to attack, when to defend, what weaknesses to exploit to open them for massive damage, the parallels are here. To further the analogy, Cuno, Measurehead, even Garte, can feel like mini-bosses. They don’t have as much power, but they’re impeding your progress and need just as much finesse to overcome. Finally there’s the random encounters and NPCs, which are kind of interchangeable, cause sadly I think I’ve stretched this analogy past breaking point. I just wanted to say that despite not having explicit combat, Disco Elysium still feels like a CRPG in many ways.
Skills and Thoughts
Another CRPG point of comparison are the skills and thoughts Harry has at his disposal. Just like how placing skill points in other RPGs makes aspects of the game easier, giving the player more options, the same can be said for Disco Elysium’s skill tree. The difference is that all these skills are parts of Harry’s psyche. With enough points they start speaking to him, making suggestions for what choice the player should make next, and what would yield the best result. However, these skills are not always right. They will argue amongst themselves, even admitting to mistakes. There’s a great example late in the game where the Suggestion skill makes a suggestion, and if you follow it, it apologizes to Harry, saying he should never listen to it again. Usually they’re not that self reflective. They are a part of Harry after all. As you’re walking around the world, skills will chime in with thoughts, and every dice roll in the game is linked to a particular skill, but again, we’ll get to dice rolls later. Oh we’ll get to dice rolls later.
So what of thoughts? Through conversation, either with his own psyche or others, Harry can uncover thoughts. If a player has the brain space (and it takes a skill point to clear out more), Harry can internalise the thought, suffering a penalty until the internalisation is complete. Internalised thoughts come with rewards, usually an increase in the cap of certain skills, points in the skills themselves, or something extra. For example two of the most powerful skills I discovered in my two playthroughs are Jamais Vu, and Actual Art Degree. Jamais Vu gives the player 1 experience every time they examine a thought bubble, and Actual Art Degree heals morale and grants 10 experience every time the Conceptualisation skill chimes in during a conversation. With enough points in Conceptualization, this happens often, and that extra experience builds up over the game. The Harry in my second playthrough with Actual Art Degree had the whole skill tree at 4 or better by the end of the game with points to spare. Thoughts are powerful, and Disco Elysium contains so many that I doubt you could uncover them all. Comparing Disco Elysium’s systems to other RPGs once again, the Thought Cabinet reminds me of a job system, where you can spend time learning a skill that can be equipped no matter the change in job. Of course Harry only has one job. He’s a cop, but the game gives us some leeway as to what kind of cop Harry can be.
Copotype & Kim Kitsuragi
Not that the kind of cop Harry can be ultimately matters. Same with the 4 political ideologies Harry can champion. I mean yes they add a lot of flavour to the game, but it’s like selecting dialogue options in Kentucky Route Zero. The game is mostly going to play out with the same beats each time. The choices add seasoning, allowing the player to express themselves as they nudge the character in a specific direction. They can’t change the character or the story, but there is agency here, and even if there wasn’t, I’d argue for the importance of giving the player a sense of ownership over who the character they’re controlling is. It’s just at the end of the day, Harry is a broken shell of a police officer who drank themselves into total oblivion and awoke with severe brain damage. Policing style and political affiliation doesn’t seem as important.
But it does matter, just for a different reason, and that’s the conscience that the game saddles you with, named Kim Kitsuragi. Kim will turn a blind eye to most things in the game, committing crimes, drinking and drug use on duty, and even racist sentiment – but he will chide Harry when all these eccentricities get in the way of solving the case. I don’t know how far Kim’s tolerance stretches as I couldn’t bring myself to lean towards racist or fascist thought in either of my playthroughs, but I have seen others talk about some of the ways the player can hurt Kim. It sounds awful, and if you fail the roll to warn him during the tribunal, he gets sent to hospital, and you spend the rest of the game with Cuno as Harry’s partner and conscience. Yikes.
What I’m getting at is even if the player doesn’t care about what kind of person Harry is, they might care about what kind of person Kim thinks Harry is. I know I did. Hearing Kim defend us to Viquemere at the end of the game felt great, as well as the ability to suggest he joins Precinct 41. I loved the aces high the two shared when Harry shoots down the corpse. I loved uncovering Kim’s interests and getting him to break out of his shell, and I loved the culmination of this unofficial quest being a dance-off between Harry and Kim in the church. I want to be on another case with these two. They’re such an effective buddy cop duo.
Which is a good way to get into how funny Disco Elysium can be. Most buddy cop movies are comedies, balancing the horror of a murder or a grand conspiracy with the goofy antics of at least one police officer, or the tension of putting two strong personalities together. Harry’s self-destruction is played for laughs, and it washes up on the rocks of Kim’s stoicism, but what makes Disco Elysium so great is the game isn’t just comedic or political satire. It’s sad, sometimes downright depressing, but there are moments of joy, terror, and absolute wonder. Heck, I’d argue that solving the murder isn’t even the most interesting part of the game, it’s uncovering the world of Elysium itself, and I think the ending sequence exemplifies this… so I’m going to discuss it. Skip to the next chapter if you don’t want the ending spoiled.
Discussing The Ending
After the tribunal, which kills a varying level of union members and mercenaries depending on your actions and successful dice rolls, there’s still no suspect for the murder. In both of my games, I did not arrest Klassje, so she left a present for Harry in her room showing where the shot that killed the hanged mercenary came from. An island past the end of the coast. We take a boat there and find The Deserter, a cast off of the revolution. He’s lived there ever since, sneaking around Martinaise, watching everyone, stocking up on supplies, and every now and then, using his rifle.
The old man is full of spite, hatred, and jealousy. He killed the merc, mid-coitus with Klassje. Disco Elysium has plenty of foul mouthed, ill-tempered, dangerous people in it, but one thing that unites them all is if you dig a little, there’s a sympathy to how they ended up this way. Well maybe not the Sinclair brothers, but most people. The Deserter is no exception. He ran away from his duty during the Revolution, he saw how his side was massacred by world powers, taking over Revachol and not making anything better for the people. Over a lifetime of hiding and surviving, it’s understandable that such shame, guilt, anger, and bitterness would fester. Even more so when you discover the reason for his erratic behaviour and why he’s got holes in his memory. As Harry and Kim are about to make the arrest, the Insulindain Phasmid appears.
Lena and Morrell are cryptozoologists. They’re searching for the Insulindian Phasmid a creature that may or may not exist. Through conversation with Lena, you can learn about many other phasmids (including the Col Do Ma Ma Daqua, which leads to a thought worth internalising). By helping the cryptozoologists with their phasmid traps and coming into contact with the phasmid’s pheromone, you can use Harry’s Inland Empire skill to speak to the creature.
What follows is one of the most fascinating conversations in a game brimming with fascinating conversations. There are many great lines and revelations. I hope you’ll indulge me as I play my favourites. We’ll start with the Phasmid’s pity for humanity.
“Of course it is nothing compared to the horror that is you – with all of creation reflected in your forebrain, in terrible fidelity, a fire mirror. Eternal, never-ending damnation.”
The Phasmid mentions how humanity brought the pale with them as no creature remembers it before humans showed up, and how we’ll likely destroy everything. What is the pale? I’ll discuss it soon.
“There is an almost unanimous agreement between the birds and the plants, that you are going to destroy us all”.
“You are a violent and irrepresible miracle. The vaccum of the cosmos and the stars burning in it are afraid of you. Given enough time you would wipe us all out and replace us with nothing – just by accident”.
“Instead of air, you exale thoughts. There are no trees that eat thoughts.”
As a capstone to this weird and wonderful game, I found the entire dialogue between Harry and the Phasmid moving. Kim manages to snap a photo of the phasmid. We now have proof of this wondrous creature. A creature who corrupted The Deserter with its camouflage pheremones over decades, turning him into the mess of a broken old man that now sits before you. How beautiful yet terrifying.
This ending counterbalances the worst of this world with the most wondrous of this world, two extremes that have affected each other. Harry has encountered both, and upon returning to the mainland, is snapped back to the middle by his real partner and the remnants of his task force. It’s time to evaluate Harry as a police officer, how well he solved the case, and if he’s not too far gone to keep employed at the precinct.
I’m going to make a leap here. I think the tonal spectrum of this ending exemplifies most of the characters in Disco Elysium. Everyone is trying to do their job, to deal with reality in their own way (and many are succumbing to the pressure, and self-medicating just like Harry). From this perseverance of continual survival, everyone is broiling with both the absolute worst of everything around them and the wonder (and sadly terror) of what might be. There is little room for joy in this world, and I think that’s why Harry’s unorthodox policing (which is made even stranger thanks to his brain damage) is often so funny. It cracks the veneer. It offshoots the melancholy and now and then, as with the church and the dance club, there’s even a small ray of hope. I think that’s why the Phasmid is such an important discovery. Not just for the wisdom it imparts to Harry, but with photographic evidence of this new species, it creates a sense of wonder in what else the world has to offer, especially when this reality everyone is dealing with is so existentially terrifying. Yes, it’s now time to talk about The Pale.
The Pale, Disco, & Anodic Dance Music
The world of Disco Elysium is less a globe, and more a corona. A series of isolas, island continents separated by what is known as The Pale. The Pale is entropic. It eats away at reality. Those like The PaleDriver who have had long exposure from repeated travel through it are untethered to reality, their psyches degrading… and that’s not even the worst part of it. The pale is growing. It’s a fact that all the governments of the world try to downplay, how unreality is spreading, seeping into the world, and whether it be 20 years, 200 years, or 2000, there will be a time in humanity’s future when the pale takes over. Isn’t this a cheery backdrop in which to set a game. No wonder everyone is self-medicating.
But let’s return to hope, and the dance club. Through a late game sidequest, if you choose to help the Anodic Dance Music kids set up their club (and possible drug lab) in the church, you can use their advanced sound equipment to amplify the pillar of silence that Soona the programmer is studying. It almost tears down the building. It is a hole in reality. Baby pale. It is theorised that the early settlers on the isola built the churches to encase and stop the expansion of these pillars. So what does that say about Revachol when most of these ancient churches have been torn down. At least this church still stands, and hey, maybe the kids and their dance music can help contain unreality.
Especially if the Phasmid is right. If the pale is a manifestation of humanity’s dark impulses, its desire for self-destruction, then celebration might have an opposing effect, even if that celebration involves indulging in humanity’s more primitive urges. Like most of Disco Elysium, the pale can be held up as a mirror to Harry himself, the darkness growing, festering, eating away at everything that is left. Despite how destructive the drinking and drug use has been, there is an odd counterbalance in our main character. It’s in the title of the game itself. the Disco might be what’s holding Harry back from the edge.
Early on in my first playthrough, before I had a sense of what this world was, the talk of Disco confused me. The year the game takes place in is ‘51, and I said to myself, “But Disco is from the 70s.” I know right? Thinking that Revachol had some connection to our own world and history. Through talks with Joyce Messier and others, I learned that the Disco era ended a while back, but Harry still holds on tight to it. In the way he dresses, the way he talks to people, and the expression permanently fused onto his face. His boasts of being a superstar cop feel like the influence of the Disco holdover. Once we learn that Harry’s behavior (destructive and otherwise) is influenced by a woman leaving him years ago, it’s not too far fetched to assume that Disco also relates to his glory days as a police officer, when him and his lady were still together. Ironic that while holding onto the pain of the breakup is what almost destroys Harry, holding onto the care-free attitudes of Disco could be what saves him. By helping the kids build their new genre of Anodic Dance Music, the good parts of Harry can pass on the spirit of what kept him going to future generations.
Why The Dice Rolls Are a Problem
And since I’ve brought up hope a couple times, that’s a nice segway into the part of the game I really wanted to talk about, the dice rolls. In my impressions video many moons ago, I talked about how much I loved the dice rolls, because even failure was amusing. Not only in terms of animation or what Harry says, but despite failing a roll, there’s usually a way to travel down the dialogue tree to get what Harry wants, with only a detriment to health or morale as payment. The variation and surprise of these failures, especially in the games’ first day teach the player that failure is not the end all and be all, can be funny, and will often lead to an interesting outcome. Ah, if only this were true.
In a vacuum it is, but the problem is these failures can stack up. There was a moment where the dice rolls failing throughout Martinaise had me stuck. Once a white check fails, often the only way to try again is to level up and put a point in the corresponding skill. But it’s a dice roll. It’s all too possible to get the boost you need to put the dice roll in your favour, and still fail it, wasting the skill point you just spent. I had hit enough failure in day two before the water lock was opened up, that I had run out of places to explore, and ways to earn experience to try a dice roll that might fail all over again. This is when I started save scumming.
Now the conversation about save scumming has come up again because of Baldur’s Gate 3, but for those of you unaware, some people have a problem with a player saving the game before a dice roll, and reloading their game until the roll goes their way. Never mind that no one should care about how another person plays a single player game, the fact that the term itself has the word ‘scum’ in it should tell you all you need to know about how the practice is looked upon by the wider community. And you know what? I don’t actually like save scumming. It’s not because I think it’s against the spirit of play, fairness, or some other bullshit, but it’s because loading a game and retrying a roll interrupts the flow of the game. Especially when you fail multiple times in a row. It lays bare just how infuriating and unfair basing forward progress on a roll of the dice can be.
And sadly these dice rolls are baked into Disco Elysium. I’ve already talked about conversations being like combat, and how skills and thoughts have corolaries in other RPGs. What makes it all feel fresh here is how it’s recontexualised. How it still leans on the same systems but with a new presentation, a new perspective. What makes Disco Elysium clever is the complete removal of combat while still keeping the game engaging on a systemic level through the strength of its writing. This removal and recontextualisation of other RPG systems makes the dice rolls feel archaic to me. A vestigal leftover from the genre’s past. Yes randomness makes skill checks feel exciting, especially when a player rolls a double six or ekes out a success roll on a slim chance. The corresponding sound effect and green tint help sell this, but like all games based on chance, the dopamine high is fleeting, and it’s only there to make it ok for those times the system doesn’t work in your favour. I don’t know about you, but the good feeling I get from succeeding on a difficult skill check does not make up for the bad feeling I get from failing on an easy one. Save scumming doesn’t solve this issue, but it sure as hell makes it less frustrating.
Conclusion
The problem is without the skill checks, there’s no point to the skills, the thoughts, and all the other trappings of the RPG within Disco Elysium. The chaotic nature of the dice rolls is an integral part of what the game is. Often while playing I thought about a hard cap on skill checks like in Fallout: New Vegas, but that would go against the game’s desire to have the player enjoy failure while the game continues onwards, which I think is the way forward design-wise. Yes the dice failures often have a punishment associated with them (and perhaps that’s the part that needs to be removed), but to be able to roll (heh) with the punches and change approaches because the obvious way forward didn’t work out, holds merit. This is the spirit of what Disco Elysium offered, I just think it fumbled its execution. That it’s still one of the best games I’ve ever played regardless speaks volumes. One of my ideas about what makes a great game is that its strengths overshadow its weaknesses, and the quantity and quality of the writing in Disco Elysium definitely overshadows my criticisms. It just doesn’t invalidate them. While it seems unlikely that we’ll get a worthy sequel (if we get one at all), I hope games inspired by Disco Elysium consider the use of dice rolls, and how to make failure more interesting and palatable. Let’s further deconstruct the RPG while keeping the writing and design at a high standard. That’s not asking for too much is it? I mean making a good game isn’t that difficult right? Right? Thanks for watching.
Epilogue
Well that took a little longer than I thought it would. I finished Disco Elysium back in November but I decided I wanted to play it through a second time before writing the script, and then I put playing it that second time to the side to finish the NES and 2023 videos, but it’s finally done and I’m proud with how it turned out. This is my first critique using Davinci Resolve. I’ve used Vegas for the past 8 years, and I’m still getting used to all the little quirks that come with learning a new piece of software. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the video, both on its presentation and the ideas within. I have an even greater appreciation of Disco Elysium after making this, which is always the outcome I want with such a video. If you’d like more perspectives on the game, in the description there’s a reading list of all the articles and video essays that I found worth a read or a watch during my research.
So let’s talk about what the next video is going to be. As usual, it’s up to you to vote on it. Those who remember the poll at the end of the Vampire Survivors video recall that the games that weren’t picked were Red Dead Redemption, and Tunic. The third game was chosen by my lovely Patrons and is… drumroll… Super Mario World. One of the launch titles for the Super Nintendo. Yeah, the poll was all SNES games and Mario won. That means the choices for the next critique are Red Dead Redemption, Tunic, or Super Mario World. There’s a link to the poll pinned in the comment section, and I’ll be leaving the poll up for a week from when this video is published. Happy voting, and I look forward to seeing what wins.
Now it’s deleted ideas time. For the last couple critiques I’ve used this space to talk about ideas I had while writing the script that didn’t make their way into the final work for whatever reason. For Disco Elysium, I have two. The first is an addition to the section where I was comparing Disco Elysium to other RPGs. I wanted to mention how enjoyable it was triggering detective mode and having all these little nooks to explore with loot in them. Finding treasure is always a highlight of RPGs for me, and having an analogue in Martinaise added a fun sense of progression as I was exploring the world. I just felt I had already made my point about Disco Elysium as a CRPG, and talking about the loot would have dragged the script down.
The second idea was about the action scenes themselves. This was an idea I talked about in the Post Game Clarity Best of 2023 podcast. How despite this being an RPG with no combat, the few action scenes the game did have made me think of how much games treat combat as a crutch. Even in other CRPGs, it feels like you’re fighting every few minutes. Like the writing and exploration wouldn’t be enough to keep a player interested. There’s a video in my reading list of Disco Elysium lead writer and designer Robert Kurvitz talking about his idea for the expansion of the games’ action scenes in the sequel. How you could break a sequence like a car crash into a series of millisecond decisions like the fight with Measurehead or when things go south in the Tribunal. It got me thinking about how even in action movies, there’s downtime to develop the characters and to move the plot forward, and it’s like games don’t trust themselves to do that. I think Disco Elysium proved that action scenes like the Tribunal are more impactful due to their infrequency and how the game built up the stakes of that particular moment. Really it makes me think of this as a new direction for the medium. That games could be so much more, and it’s Disco Elysium that showed me this possibility.
So why isn’t this in the critique? Well it never came up when I was writing and I didn’t want to shoehorn such an idea into what I had, plus I knew I could talk about it here.
And since we’re coming to the end, it’s time to say that if you enjoyed this video and want to support more like it, why not become a member of my Patreon? For as little as $1 a month you get written monthly updates, and voting on which games I cover next. The $3 tier gets early access to the videos, and there’s a higher tier if you’d like me to shout you out at the end of this video. I also have a Ko-fi page, but if you can’t afford either, please consider giving the video a like, leaving a comment, and sharing it with your friends.
Until next time, I hope you’re all well, are enjoying your gaming, and are having a wonderful day.
