The scope is narrower but more focused, intimate, intense. It’s one of the instances where Disco Elysium’s PC-centric pen-and-paper origins shine through and affect the standard cRPG conventions. Since one obviously cannot construct effective personal drama for all possible player avatars (the only guaranteed common trait being player agency), the authors made the furies torment our hero through his prior life. After all, the game’s original title used to be No Truce With The Furies, and that alone illustrates pretty well how important it must have been for the authors to have a singular ruined soul at the epicenter of the narrative. While it may seem somewhat restrictive to disallow self-insertion in a cRPG, it helps the story to focus on the inner turmoil of our character as much as on the people and events that surround him. That somebody has a name, a face (sort of), a semblance of life, and a long history of destructive self-abuse, all of which slowly resurface during the course of the game. Instead of giving us the usual freedom to become a soon-heroic, god-chosen nobody, Disco Elysium puts the player in the tear-and-alcohol-soaked shoes of a particular *somebody*. If that sounds imposing, boring, or discouraging, then I’d say it’s a call to arms - this disco groove may prove deeply therapeutic for a soul made coarse by the endless stream of inconsequential power fantasies and colourful yet insipid distractions. Its ambition is no less than an attempt to break out of the standard Skinner box cRPG structure and probe at what lies beyond that particular pleasure principle. Dungeon crawling, epic adventuring, kobold-slaying: all of it is cast aside in favour of the exquisitely penned world-building, characterization, and human interaction. In the video game terms, it resembles an RPG/adventure with an unusually strong emphasis on narrative, character study, and failing at life, spectacularly. Lots of them.ĭisco Elysium is the anxiety-driven, doubt-ridden, schizopolitan brainchild of an Estonian studio called, a bit arrogantly, ZA/UM. The unmistakable quixotic aspirations were there. What the mise-en-scène lacked was a board game or two, a pocketful of D&D campaign notes, maybe a pair of loaded *cursed* dice. Having played through the game, I can say that this first impression was both right and wrong. They’re trying to arrive at a hard conclusion: is Kant shit? What about that pompous blowhard Hegel? And when the conversation becomes a bit too heated for the Monday afternoon, someone exclaims: Sartre is the shittiest of them all! Everybody laughs, nods in agreement, and the discussion is taken in another, seemingly unrelated direction. I pictured: scruffy-haired young men in ill-fitting blazers and their makeup-averse amicas, all of them choking on cigarette smoke in a bohemian cafe slash cheap diner. A lot about it reminded me of my college years: from the ambition to change the world to the whiff of highly metaphysical alcoholism that usually accompanies designs so grand. When I first came upon a short description of Disco Elysium in 2016, I couldn’t help but feel nostalgic.
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