![]() Voiced by Lenval Brown, the different aspects of your personality are all given a deep and raspy delivery. Tying these all together is the narrator, a new addition to the Final Cut. ![]() Mechanically these are a way to chart your own character’s growth besides the usual RPG faire of dumping stat points into corresponding buckets, but narratively it also provides a way of shaping your character’s beliefs, and the type of cop you identify as. ![]() Researching entries in the Thought Cabinet will usually have a short-term detrimental effect on your skills, but will eventually unlock greater bonuses down the line. Botched rolls in Disco Elysium aren’t marks of failure as they so often are in other systems they’re narrative inflection points.Īs you peel back layers of the investigation and your own psyche, you’ll unlock entries in your Thought Cabinet. And even if you fail one skill, another might swoop in at the last moment and provide a different angle for you to exploit. While some skill checks act as hard barriers to progression down dialogue paths, others might change the entire tone of a conversation or a character’s long-term perception of you. Much to the chagrin of Dungeons & Dragons grognards, some of the best moments in Disco Elysium are when you fail a roll miserably. ![]() Your skills aren’t absolutes either-they’re warped through interpretation and unreliable narration, compromised by your character’s history and prejudices. But like any good player or MC at a tabletop roleplaying group, your skills ask you questions and incorporate the answers, often challenging your assumptions. As you climb through dialogue trees, your skills-some more conventional, like Logic or Empathy, others more outlandish, like Inland Empire for bizarre dreams and gut feelings-will chime in as an inner monologue, incepting new ideas or realities. The only way that you’ll advance your investigation-and indeed, the in-game clock-is by talking with people. It walks a tightrope between utter pessimism and navel-gazing profundity, but because it so wholly-and earnestly-commits to its edginess, it never falls prey to either. If this sounds bleak, it’s because it is: Disco Elysium is a fraught and harrowing game, loaded with confrontational themes and language. Players assume the role of an amnesiac cop trying to solve a brutal murder, while also coming to terms with their own history of alcoholism and substance abuse. All of this serves as a backdrop to the main narrative through line. Thankfully, the world-building isn’t solely kept to exhaustive info dumps you see it in citizens’ tired faces, in their stories, in their failing shop windows and dilapidated, leaky homes. Its current occupants have transformed it into a powder keg, with a group of striking union workers who hold absolute dominion over the streets pushing back against their corporate overlords. While the city’s history is turbulent, it’s far from rested in the present. The world’s brutal history is rendered in painterly strokes and muted hues, with the post-imperial-post-communist backdrop littered with the bullet holes from decades-old firing squads. The result is a lean and agile game that truly-and uniquely-deserves to be compared to the tabletop RPGs it so clearly takes inspiration from.ĭisco Elysium is set in the fictional city of Revachol, in a dark stretch of urban wasteland all but abandoned by civic overseers due to rampant violence and corruption. The game’s exhaustive list of skills and stats crosstalk and implant ideas the same way players at a table share thoughts and motives: through meaningful conversation. Their latest title, Disco Elysium – The Final Cut (a more fleshed-out version of 2019’s original), is a game that knows CRPGs are about questions, but is smart enough to identify that what makes tabletop RPGs unique are who those questions are being directed at. Interrogate it.ĭeveloper ZA/UM uniquely understands that trying to feed rulesets to a computer and hoping that something human comes out on the other side is a pointless endeavour. You don’t engage with the world you interface with it. But mostly you’re a solitary actor poking and prodding at scenery and cast members set down by an unknowable director. And yet not many manage to capture the essence of what it means to collaboratively tell a story with a group of friends-how could they? Video games are lonely experiences some made less so through the veneer of well-written dialogue or charming character interaction. Both developer and fan alike will tell you it’s through their slavish adherence to arcane rulesets, or their weak nods to the oft-hailed crown of ‘choice-and-consequence,’ or even how many +1 broadswords lie scattered across their worlds. Countless CRPGs throughout gaming history-from 1988’s Pool of Radiance to 2015’s Pillars of Eternity-have purported to recreate the tabletop roleplaying experience.
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