Disco Elysium: The Final Cut

The words 'great writing' are writ large right across the discourse surrounding Disco Elysium, but it's worth taking time to examine exactly what we mean when we say that, because 'great writing' could mean a multitude of things in any given context or medium, and I think it's important that we be specific about it when it comes to this game.

Part of that is because, quite simply, Disco Elysium is a game, and when the words 'great writing' appear in a game review, they don't tend to mean the same thing as they do when they appear in a review of anything else. In this realm, 'great writing' has historically tended to refer to dialogue alone, as a natural and obvious consequence of dialogue being the only literal writing that exists in many games. This has changed to some extent recently, but when I see a player talk about a game's writing, I still tend to assume this is what they mean - essentially, that the words the characters speak don't make them cringe. (I'm old enough to remember a time when the bar was very, very low.) But while Disco Elysium has some extremely fine dialog, that is absolutely not what people are talking about when they say it has great writing.

That's no doubt why so many people were so excited by this game - it's very rare that we're able to talk about the strength of a game's writing in the way that a literary critic would talk about the strength of a book's writing. Even when games do try to reach beyond gaming and compete with the best works in other mediums, it's TV and cinema they go for almost by default, but there is no doubt that Disco Elysium's ambitions are specifically literary. 'Great writing' here primarily means rich, detailed worldbuilding, creating a space that the reader/player can feel like they're truly inhabiting and deeply understanding. Plenty of games have done that through visuals, but to do so almost entirely through a character's internal monologue and his conversations with those around him is a very different skill and a very different experience; I do not walk around Revachol thinking 'I want to go to that mountain' or 'I wonder what's inside that forest', I walk around it wanting to know more about its history, religion, economics, culture, and politics. I mean, Hyrule's great, but I've never found myself wanting to know more about the writings of a historical materialist who lived there fifty years earlier and how they inspired a popular revolutionary uprising that was crushed by a coalition of foreign governments, nor wondering how the modern citizens of those foreign governments feel about a political and religious figurehead from three hundreds year prior who may have been the actual messiah or may have been a power-mad war criminal depending on which parts of her mythology you choose to take as real events. They're not comparable.

So it is absolutely correct to talk about the quality of Disco Elysium's writing here; this town feels diseased, dirty, broken, abandoned, but it also feels absolutely alive, truly three-dimensional. Characters get into lengthy arguments about politics and I wish they'd go on longer. Seedy underworlds and shadowy undercurrents of power are exposed and you're given a complete picture not just of how they operate, but of how they came into existence and why they've been allowed to fester and thrive, 'bad guys are bad' replaced with 'the systems that should prevent this are fundamentally broken'. That's thrilling, as any experience is when it feels this good and this truly new. All of which makes Disco Elysium sound like a nailed on five-star masterpiece - and yes, there are absolutely times when it feels like it is.

However.

'Great writing', truly great writing, should also be courageous. It should stand for something, mean something, tell us something, hold the power to change our minds and lives, and it feels like there's a void at the core of this game because it so studiously avoids ever doing any of that. Disco Elysium is a game that will gleefully and mercilessly mock you for believing in anything no matter what it is (and credit where it's due, it's often quite funny with it), but it is also a game that is too cowardly to believe in anything itself, lest it invite any mockery in return. We've all known people like that - most of us have been probably been people like that in our teenage years - and we all know they're absolute chuds, and I can't deny that I find it a little disappointing that Disco Elysium, otherwise so very deeply and carefully constructed, falls into this trap. For something that largely feels so brave in stepping outside the accepted boundaries of games, it's a shame that it doesn't confront and challenge the medium's most crippling boundary of all, and ultimately does politics in a way that won't upset people who think politics is somehow beneath them and that caring about anything at all is a sign of weakness. (We all know the wider world of gaming is positively littered with those people, so the temptation is to consider this as a commercial decision - but how likely was it that any of those people would want to play this anyway?) It jars that the game plays it so safe on this point, having been so adventurous with almost everything else. There are other flaws (the pacing is....not great in the first couple of days, and without a walkthrough you're liable to spend large stretches of time ambling around wondering what you're supposed to be doing, speaking to the same people repeatedly just in the hope it advances the story somehow), but only this one feels critical. It's not fatal, not even a particularly massive deal, but it is enough to put a small asterisk next to its name, to make it feel more like one of the 100 best games ever than one of the top 10.

Yet isn't that just an amazing thing to be able to criticise a game for? It is an unrecognisable line of thought for video game criticism; the framework that supports this kind of conversation simply does not exist in 99% of the things you'll ever play. Disco Elysium feels like a significant breakthrough, one that opens up all manner of doors and possibilities and leaves enough room for improvement to make contemplating those possibilities an exhilarating thought - and if history does not regard it this way, if it is rendered either as a total one-off or as merely the starting point for one single developer to spend their career kicking against the wider industry, then gaming as a medium will be significantly poorer for it.

Recommended for: people who don't realise they live in Eastern Europe yet.

Whether implicit or explicit, the "point" (or whatever could best live up to it) is blunt. Ideology failed, the symbolic/ social order collapsed. As the amnesiac, middle-aged child of the world that has been called post-modern, your task in the "game" (or something that might live up to it) is to find out what exactly went wrong.

You play someone who doesn't remember their name. You are a detective, apparently, and possibly not a very good one either, investigating the brutal murder of a man in The Zone. This mostly involves approaching various movers and shakers of Revachol with the question "what went wrong?" All under the surprisingly patient gaze of a new partner, Kim, who grounds the game in detective-noir, smokes a single cigarette a day, and looks devastatingly cool while he does it.

The first thing you need to know about Disco Elysium is that it is both really good and probably more interesting to people who don't call themselves gamers than to those who do. Talk to your girlfriend about it. Bring it up at breakfast. Don't be ashamed anymore.

Pontificate all you want. Finally we got a game that wasn't written by surburban nerds who create their reality by blurring together the last few years of American TV. A 10000 word essay or 1 hour video on the philosophy of Disco Elysium is completely unnecessary: pontification only happens when income draws from Youtube watch hours. Disco Elysium "works" (for all the sickening adoration), because it's meaningful, applicable, "relevent," not-entirely-escapist and, despite its reputation as a European art-piece, easily understood.

I laboured through Twin Peaks part 3 to the eighth episode and finally started to get it a little bit. Fuck. This is weird. Imagine if TV had grown up like this and I could be flicking on to channel 5 as a kid for a live synthesized Decasia mini-series or to watch atoms jerk out in a nuclear blast for 10 minutes. Beats The Office.

Disco Elysium casts the history of video games in the same light. Planescape: Torment happened, then "gamers" got 1000 versions of "good enough" narrative pulling from half a century of "good enough" cinema.

It gives you the words to say "is that it? Did all of that "limitless potential" of 64-bit games in the early 90s have to culminate in 100 pastiches of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings?"

Often overlooked: the game overcomes savescumming - of rebooting a save until an unwanted randomised event does not occur. It avoids the ancient frustration of failing a dice-rolled skill check with good writing, an intuitive system that allows the player to retake checks if they later level up the associated skill, and by investing the player in commiting to their choices, whatever the consequence.

To this day, high-profile CRPGs fail to acheive this. For all its epic scale, Pathfinder WotR never comes close. Baldurs Gate 3, for all its budget, can't do it either. This is the overdue knife cutting through decades of horrible videogame writing and uninspired design.

Also overlooked: Disco Elysium is easy to read. It's a text-based game designed to mirror Twitter with vertically-oriented text. Easier to read than the horizontal norm, mirroring the way we (on average) read 1000s of words a day without a thought. Shadowrun did it. Did anyone else? "Oh but we've always done it horizontal like this..."

Criminal to overlook: the watercolour am-I-drunk-or-just-an-impressionist art style and (Britist) Sea Power's score. Phenominal.

Disco Elysium will not be remembered for its impact on the video game industry. Its innovations have not been adopted by its genre, even if they are as simple as vertically organised text or a way to redo skill checks. Its writing, too, has not been matched, though perhaps we can point to "Gamedec" as a game that at least tried. There is resistance in the medium: nostalgic conservativism meets market pressure meets lack of ambition and talent and suddenly another Disco Elysium can't happen. Instead we get to look forward to Fallout rip-off number 112, or is that already out?

A certain amount of stars align, a game like Disco Elysium happens. Some miserable Estonian alcoholics say fuck it, give it one last go, and knock it out the park. Unlikely to happen again, but sure to be relevent conversation at your next dinner party, so get on it.

The writing is very clever and surprising for a video game. This game probably has the best writing I've ever seen when it comes to the plot progression, dialogue, monologues, language style, and philosophical themes, and humor. For me though, it's too much. I don't want such a philosophical game and I don't relate to the humor very much. An objective to snort a line of coke? Sure it's kinda funny and unexpected but that's just not my humor. Dying in my sleep from an existential moral realization? Too philosophical and trying to hard to be thought provoking. Best things about the game are the visual art style, soundtrack, and writing for sure, but the only thing I like about the writing is the unorthodox nature, not necessarily the philosophical over tones.

The pedestal "greatest game of all time" is one that is pretty hard to live up to, and whatever game makes it to the top spot probably won't be the best ever made. I have issues several issues with many of the top rated games on the site, but Disco Elysium is not one that I mind seeing in the top ranks. It's not really one of my favorites but it's a very well made adventure game with RPG elements. Definitely has its own style with the psychological thoughts and constant reflecting, super text/dialogue heavy and incredible amount of depth in the lore of the universe.

Is it perfect? No, absolutely not. The RPG side is too bare bones with the D&D dice rolls and clothes to wear to boost up some stats, that's about where it ends as far as an RPG goes. It's cool that it was like 20 categories of stats and each serves its purpose to get dialogue "white checks", many of them are just crucial to keep the story progressing and you seem to always have multiple paths to get to your goals. That's why I see it more as a point and click adventure game, what you will be doing most of the game is just a classic P&C game but with some added RPG elements in dialogues with the dice rolls and stats. There's not really any combat in the entire game, and this is for me crucial in RPG games to have some.

The game is quite well written in all of its aspects, from the various directions of the internal monologues and all of the characters being quite memorable. But... that's a whole lot of damn text at times, sometimes you are just investigating a side conversation and then it just goes on and on and on about the details and whatnot.. some of those are a little boring even if it's well invested in the the lore of the city, its history or its characters. The whole map is small with just 3 main areas that you will be re-visiting over and over again, perhaps would have like to explore a little bit more? The game is quite long too for such a small location, the dialogues are really what drives everything.

I had started a playthrough 3 years ago but I didn't have the motivation to finish it then, just kinda disappointed by the whole non-combat RPG aspect and when I was expecting something a little bit more epic about it all. But finally have returned to it and now with full voice acting patched in it was a little easier for me to go full into the game, and I'm definitely glad I did. Tampered my expectations and accepting the game for what it is allowed me to enjoy it more this time around and see it to the end. The story tackles a lot of subjects with capitalism, fascism, communist and liberal themes and a lot of more ambiguity between every choice made while being quite funny at times too. It's a nice reflection of our modern times and our complexities. I guess it's not really needed for me to recommend it given its instant classic status, but I don't know, maybe just don't walk into it expecting the most RPG game ever.

Disco Elysium is the pinnacle of CRPGs as a medium for character writing, world-building, and mystery exploration. The political charge and emotional empathy of the game is without peer in the industry. There are more entertaining, action-packed, thrilling RPGs but you will never find a better or more intelligent one. Make sure you love reading before playing: this is a text-heavy adventure that depends on dice-roll skill checks to conversations and actions reminiscent of Planescape: Torment's nuanced dialogue choices, but with a magical-realism tone rather than wild fantasy.