Disco Elysium, if you didn’t play it when it came out in 2019, is a narrative-focused gem that emphasizes a vast story, worldbuilding, and themes, which in my opinion overdelivers on its promise to leave you stunned, and perhaps changed, by the game’s conclusion. Exploring madness, heartbreak, postwar culture, racist pseudoscience, and cryptozoology in a game that’s equal parts existential philosophy and absurdist nonsense, Disco Elysium was like nothing we’ve seen before.
After its initial release, the game saw a puzzlingly free update, Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, which overhauls what you already purchased and adds new content you didn’t know you were desperate for. With small rewrites, full silky voice acting that delivers every line in a set of gloriously European accents, and new political vision quests, Disco Elysium has been fully realized. And if you never bought the original, it’s the perfect version to dive into.
The game opens on an unnamed, haggard policeman awakening naked and hungover in the dilapidated town of Martinaise, remembering nothing about himself or the world he inhabits, to be informed that it’s his responsibility to solve a murder. As he ineffectually pretends to know what he’s doing, deranged invasive thoughts and vulgar muscle memories assail his mind, offering the knowledge and expertise to do his job as well as the toxic habits that broke him.
The robust, velvet timbre of Lenval Brown, who is a real jazz and ska musician, brings it all together. He narrates the game as the foremost voice in your head, which neatly counterbalances the harsh, grating drawls, and resigned, droll inflections of the poverty-stricken Martinaise locals.
Helen Hindpere, the game’s lead writer, clarified to IGN that Brown’s role is that of our amnesiac cop’s posterior neocortex, the attention center which personifies the game’s 24 skills, joining the Ancient Reptilian Brain, the Limbic System, and the Spinal Cord as the fourth personified voice in your head.
It’s these skills and their interjections that set Disco Elysium far apart from the RPGs that inspired it. I asked Disco Elysium’s game designer, Robert Kurvitz, if these skills were an answer to the oft-cited frustration with the lack of depth in contemporary RPGs.
Disco Elysium: The Final Cut' presents a bizarre and absorbing réalisation of an incredible, yet irrefutably absurd world. Its intricate character-driven narrative entwines with profound philosophical musings to create one of the most captivating RPG experiences in recent memory.
