GAME CLEAR No. 80 -- Disco Elysium: The Final Cut

Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (2021, Multiplatform)

Final Cut Of: Disco Elysium (2019, PC)
Developer: ZA/UM
Publisher: ZA/UM
Clear Platform: PlayStation 5
Clear Date: 2/20/22

This game, like so many I play, came highly recommended. And mostly for good reason! I don’t think I love it quite as much as some of its biggest fans, but I definitely think it’s unique, and that always counts for something.

For those somehow unaware, Disco Elysium is a game in which you take on the role of a detective who has lost his memory but still needs to solve a murder case. I’m not usually a big fan of amnesia stories, but this one works all right, and it also makes it a little easier to actually role play as the protagonist despite the backstory he carries with him. After all, he doesn’t even remember it himself.

Anyway, back to its uniqueness. What’s unique about it? Well, that’d be basically its whole RPG system. The game is essentially a glorified visual novel, so its RPG elements and character building are all basically in service of determining how you will navigate the various conversations you have throughout the game. They also relate to how you parse and/or deal with your environment. If you’re intellectually or emotionally stunted, you may have a hard time putting two and two together in the case or knowing, say, when people are lying to you. Meanwhile, if you’re weak and/or klutzy, you may have a harder time negotiating physical barriers in the world.

The thing I like about these attributes is that the game forces you to lock them in to an extent and commit to a build. At the start of the game, you assign a fixed number of points to the four categories of skill: intellect, psyche, physique, and motorics. Each of these has six corresponding skills. Some skills for Intellect, for example, include Logic, Rhetoric, and Visual Calculus. Motorics has hand-eye coordination, reaction speed, and perception (among others). The points you allocate to the attributes set the base levels for these various skills and also, critically, their learning caps. Normally, this would really paralyze me with fear that I might do something wrong and fall into an unwinnable “trap build,” but the nice thing about Disco Elysium is that for most things, there are enough ways to go about solving a problem or doing a side quest that you’re never truly fucked. You’re just playing through the events of the game the way your character would. Role playing, wow!

There are a couple other things that make this system really compelling. First is the way your skills “talk” to you. Each of the skills is personified with human-like portraits (you can see them here). As you converse with others or examine things related to your investigation, these fellows will basically act as your internal monologue. An obvious example is the Empathy skill. If your Empathy is high enough, as you talk to people, it will occasionally chime in to let you know the other person’s body language or how sincere you perceive their statements to be. Physical attributes come into play as well — players with high reaction speeds will be quicker with jokes and comebacks, for example. All this is really sold by the voice acting in The Final Cut, which is laudably performed and really elevates this part of the game.

The other wrinkle that makes this system work well is the dice system. The interjections mentioned above mostly occur as “passive” checks. That is, they happen behind the scenes depending on your skill level. Other checks require the player to actively choose to literally roll the dice (two six-sided dice, to be specific) to determine their chance of success at cracking open a certain conversation branch or investigating a particular thing or area. For example, the aforementioned “Visual Calculus” determines the protagonist’s ability to reconstruct the events of a crime based on the physical evidence remaining there (eg: the direction a bullet came from based on its point of impact). If you encounter a scenario that relies on that skill, you will be prompted with the probability succeeding such a skill check. The higher your skill, obviously the higher your chances of success. Some checks can be retried after making further discoveries or increasing your skill level, but others are known as Red Checks, which can never be retried. Again, normally this is something I would stress out about, but I sort of enjoyed dealing with my failures as they came, usually secure in the knowledge that there would be some way I could work around them. There is also the ecstasy and agony of succeeding a low-probability check or failing a high-probability check respectively. It’s very gamey, and I like it.

All that is to say that the RPG layer of the game works quite well.

The story meanwhile, I don’t want to talk about much. I have a minimal-to-no spoiler policy on here on nixon dot computer, and this is a very heavily story-based game, so that unfortunately does limit me somewhat here. I’ll keep it short, though, and say that while the story is certainly not bad, it definitely didn’t blow my away. Perhaps my expectations were too high.

Anyway, the game is still cool, unique, and worth your time. As I play more and more games, I’ve definitely found a lot of value in unique jank as compared to highly-polished but derivative experiences.

Oh, and speaking of jank, definitely save often in this one. I experienced a couple soft-locking bugs that cost me a bit of time. I’m a compulsive saver anyway, so it wasn’t too big of a deal, but I could see folks that aren’t like me losing hours.

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EDIT (5/21/23): I am ashamed of my words and deeds. Disco Elysium has grown considerably in my esteem since I originally wrote this. Maybe I’ll add a coda here eventually to talk about that, but for now just take my word that it rocks lol.