I admit, I’ve procrastinated on writing this review. Part of that is the length of the game. Disco Elysium isn’t a long game, per se, but it’s long enough that I had to find time to play it from start to finish. Part of it is my own schedule. I played this game in November, during which I also did NaNoWriMo and wrote a full novel in a month, so, y’know, busy. Most of that procrastination, though, is me being intimidated by this review and what I can add to a discourse that has, at this point, been thoroughly had. Most elements have been picked apart by reviewers more adept than I, and the pure gameplay elements I usually discuss seem a bit meaningless beside the overall picture Disco Elysium presents. There is a conversation around this game, it’s been had, and I am late to it, stumbling and stuttering as I struggle to interject a thought already long since said.

But I’m still here. I’m still writing about it. Because maybe there is something more to say.

I am me, and I am glorious.

For the precisely no one who is unfamiliar with Disco Elysium, yet still reading my reviews for some reason, Disco Elysium is a detective RPG. You play as Harry Dubois, an amnesiac detective tasked with solving the murder of a mysterious hanged man. He is joined by his partner, Kim Kitsuragi, as he investigates the murder, rediscovers himself, and reshapes the future of the district of Martinaise.

Disco Elysium is a non-violent (mostly) RPG, creating a fairly distinct style of gameplay. Rather than investing in combat skills or weapons, players invest in ways for Harry to approach the world and the thoughts he has about it. A player might choose to invest heavily in empathy at the expense of logic, or in pounding athleticism rather than perception. The choice, as the game’s tagline suggests, is entirely what sort of cop the player wants to be, and how they choose to interact with the world around them.

Disco Elysium is also almost entirely text-based. While Harry does move around a beautiful landscape, the problems he faces and barriers he must overcome are text-based, using a set of invisible dice to resolve whether he has the skill to overcome a particular challenge. His interactions with the world are based on the conversations he has and what he says, with the player’s choices informing who he ultimately becomes.

I became a clown. A real-life, full-time, pie-in-the-face, unicycle-riding circus employee. And I am delighted.

There’s a lot within Disco Elysium that makes it clear why it’s held in such high esteem. Its writing is some of the best writing in video games, with fleshed-out character after fleshed-out character filling Harry’s world. Kim Kitsuragi alone is one of the best companions in the grand canon of video games, and he is one of many, many characters in Revachol. The world is lush and lived-in, and the ideas interesting to engage with. The history of the world is as much a character as any of the people, and Harry’s grappling with it and placing himself within it as compelling as any relationship he builds with other people.

Similarly, the very feeling of playing the game is phenomenal. Both its artistic style and music do an incredible job of building the world and its emotion. The plaintive horns of British Sea Power hit me every single time I entered the square outside the Whirling-in-Rags, and I kept being delighted by it.

The sum of Disco Elysium’s parts work together beautifully to create a masterful experience. The whole is greater than that sum, but even then, it’s with the knowledge that each individual part is itself a masterpiece.

And sometimes devs are just put up against the wall in an analogy that definitely will not play any part in the rest of this post.

The puzzle with Disco Elysium, then, is more of a meta one. This is a game with universal acclaim, that everyone agrees is a modern classic. And yet, despite that acclaim and despite the real desire on the part of the game-buying public for more Disco Elysium, ZA/UM has not produced another game. There is no true sequel to Disco Elysium. Indeed, ZA/UM itself has splintered, with the devs and writers responsible for Disco Elysium scattering out to a variety of new studios and a variety of new projects. Much of this splintering is specifically because of the success of Disco Elysium.

In many ways, the story of ZA/UM reflects the story of Harry Dubois. They were good at what they did, and they fell apart because of it. Also there were probably blonde ladies smelling of apricots involved, but I can’t confirm that part.

Sometimes, the story is not disco.

This is not to say that there are no successors to Disco Elysium, or that it hasn’t had a lasting impact. Instead, it’s fair to say that what made Disco Elysium so successful is also what makes it hard to reproduce, and arguably means its greater impact on games will be minimal, even while it remains one of the greatest games of all time.

There are successors to Disco Elysium, games that likely owe their existence to the ground Disco Elysium broke. Games like Citizen Sleeper are very much games in the same vein as Disco Elysium, with a rich world explored through text, and a layered, living backstory that needs to be understood for the story to make sense. However much I love these games, though, they don’t have a large impact on the industry. Instead, they remain indie darlings and cult favourites, games that everyone who plays them agrees are amazing, but whose success is based on criteria that don’t appeal to a more general audience.

Disco Elysium has a long tail, but it is a shallow one, lapping up against games that might never have otherwise succeeded, but drenching them when it does find them.

/shivers

This is the conversation that still remains about Disco Elysium. It’s this conversation about its legacy, why it’s complex, and why it’s shallow. It’s that conversation about what it takes to move the needle in an industry consolidating around the most profitable ventures to the exclusion of games like this one, and how, even when a game like Disco Elysium is successful, it’s almost an act of self-sabotage.

Disco Elysium is an incredible game. I wish there were more like it, but equally, I understand why there aren’t.

Developer: ZA/UM
Genre: RPG
Year: 2019
Country: United Kingdom
Language: English
Game length: 20 hours
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/JU6HTcXqRQc