Disco Elysium Sets A New Standard For Role-Playing In Video Games

After playing the magnificent Disco Elysium, which is now available on Switch and Xbox, even the best RPGs pale in comparison.

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Disco Elysium is an unbelievably deep detective RPG about a hungover cop attempting to solve a brutal murder. The game opens with the main character peeling himself off the floor of a grimy hotel room: the aftermath of a drink and drugs bender so apocalyptic, his mind has been wiped like a corrupted hard drive. It’s a fairly cliché setup for an RPG, but reframed in a brilliantly clever way. What this means from a role-playing perspective is that you can take this gross, wet, formless lump of clay and shape it into pretty much anything you want. There’s no combat in Disco Elysium or any kind of traditional RPG levelling system. You construct your character through the things you say and do, and how you interact with the people around you, not by killing enemies to fill an XP bar.

Thanks to your detective’s devastating hangover, and the amnesia caused by it, this catastrophe of a human is a truly blank slate. Other people can help you remember things about yourself, like your name and where you come from, but one of the most inspired things about Disco Elysium is that you can suppress this information and become someone else—which makes it an incredibly powerful role-playing game. The amount of freedom you’re given to sculpt your character’s personality is remarkable. It also dramatically changes the flow of the game, the outcome of the murder case, what people think of you, and countless other variables that just keep stacking up as you play. The complexity of it all is unreal. You don’t even have to be a good cop: you can be a terrible one if you want.

I’ve played through Disco Elysium twice, and both times the experience was completely different. My first detective was an intensely emotional, artistic soul, who would take inspiration from dreams and have esoteric conversations with inanimate objects, using abstract intuition to unearth the truth. My second detective was teetotal, highly logical, and fastidiously straight-laced, solving the crime in a much more methodical, scientific manner. That’s just two of many types of detectives Disco Elysium lets you create. This really is one of the most absurdly malleable characters in video game history, and everyone who plays the game will see a different side to him. This gives you a wonderful feeling of ownership, and authorship, over the character you build. He’s a mess, but he’s your mess.

Plenty of RPGs let you shape your character through their stats, abilities, gear, and so on, which affects how they play, but generally has no meaningful impact on who they are. This is Disco’s greatest strength as a role-playing experience: you can really create a person. Whether the detective you carve out of that ball of clay is a tortured artist, a feminist disco enthusiast, or a drug-addled psychic, they will have a distinctive personality—and the people you meet will react to it in interesting or unexpected ways. That’s another reason Disco Elysium is such a killer RPG: the world acknowledges your decisions and alters itself depending on who you’ve decided to become. It’s an astonishing achievement, and has single-handedly set a ridiculously high bar for the genre.

It’s not for everyone. It’s slow, dialogue heavy, and almost entirely free of action and other traditional game systems. But if you value games that let you immerse yourself in a world and become someone, you owe it to yourself to play it. It’s extremely satisfying to shape your character a certain way, and be rewarded for it through extra dialogue or discovering ways to solve problems you’d otherwise have missed. It’s also a great game for people who love crime fiction, letting you mix and match genre tropes to create your own Frankenstein’s detective—the analytical genius of Sherlock, say, but with the self-destructive streak of The Wire’s Jimmy McNulty thrown in to spice things up. It might defy almost every standard of the genre, but Disco Elysium is easily one of the greatest RPGs ever made.

Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/disco-elysium-detective-rpg-switch-xbox/