Joseph Luebbert
What would you do in a world of near endless opportunities?
When you imagine an RPG, you might think of games like Skyrim, Dark Souls, or Final Fantasy. What would those games be without their combat? Likely mediocre games with uninteresting dialogue trees, but that is where Disco Elysium thrives. It focuses on the characters and dialogue instead of combat, making conversations and interactions more meaningful.
Disco doesn’t even have any actual combat systems (mostly), focusing almost entirely on the dialogue instead of any forms of physical conflict. This is the case mostly because the game takes place in a small town, with you being a cop with amnesia trying to navigate your situation, rather than some mary sue hero. Instead of the driving force being “Oh man, what big bad guy do I need to prepare to defeat at the end?”, It is instead more about the mystery of your predicament. “Who am I? How did I get into this situation? What should I do about this?”. The game gives you a huge sense of mystery about the game world, and encourages you to explore and poke around to solve these mysteries in many different ways.
One huge mechanic in this game is how your actions shape the person you play as, known as Harrier Du Bois. You have a set of 24 skills that function as an internal monologue, becoming more prominent the higher you level them up. They also are important for doing skill checks and physical and mental abilities. For example, your reaction speed can catch split second shifts in certain environments, or during conversation with certain people. This can help you catch things or dodge objects or attacks with a higher probability of succeeding. Occasionally, these skills will interact with you one on one, trying to convince you of some belief or ideal.
If you subscribe to the ideas your skills suggest, you unlock thoughts, which can add dialogue options, skill buffs, and even remove some dialogue if it conflicts with the thoughts you endorse. It is much more engaging overall than, for example, the Fallout series, where your skills only serve to succeed if your skill number is high enough.
This game breaks the majority of conventions with dialogue and how you explore the game’s world. Most games like skyrim have a bland background, and a set of dialogue options as you progress through the conversation. Disco Elysium has a feature where you can scroll through dialogue history, making it so you can recall parts of a conversation at any time. This helps for when you may need to consult earlier parts of a conversation if you forget or need to catch up.
Disco Elysium is a shining example of the RPG genre, when you truly have the opportunity to do nearly anything you want, and rewarding you for choosing unique paths.
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