I Played This Once: Disco Elysium

Something about Eastern European art deeply resonates with me. Why that is, I don't know. Maybe it's the formative years spent on the Minnesota prairies, the black coffee every morning, or the original sin. Either way, I love it. Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Tolstoy (except for War and Peace, which was BAD when I read it at fourteen and I will NOT change my mind), even the philosophers; all this Eastern European literature formed a resounding backdrop to my childhood.

Onto this stage emerged an indie video game by a small Estonian studio: the 2019 hit RPG Disco Elysium. Disco is unique; there are very few games like it. It has 1.2 million words of dialogue; the common line is that it's like 'playing a book'. (All three volumes of the Lord of the Rings, plus the Hobbit, contain only about 550,000 words. The King James Bible has less than 800,000.) But Disco isn't just reading. The writing is brilliant, of course; it's the biggest reason the game is what it is. But the 'game' part of Disco is also brilliant; it's such a well-designed synthesis of what RPGs have been and could be. To put it this way; I've played a lot of games. Not a ton, but enough to recognize the way Disco so effortlessly meshes its writing and its story with its gameplay. Because, let's get this out of the way--this game is a masterpiece.

I try not to say that often. Like I said, I've played a lot of different games, in a lot of different genres. Few games are for everyone. In fact, it's really a reflection on the depth of the medium how vast and varied the world of video games is. Overwatch and Skyrim and Portal are all very good games, but in such extremely different ways. They're not even comparable. Goodness knows how many hours I've sunk into the Out of the Park Baseball series, but that game fills a very unique niche; it's certainly not for everyone. I wrote an entire post about how cool the concept of EVE Online was, and nobody plays that. All that to say: there are lots of really good games that you can go your entire life without and not miss much. A game's quality isn't always measured by the amount of people it appeals to (this is true of literally everything).

But if there was one, Disco might be it. Am I crazy? No. You deserve this. Well, frankly, you probably don't. It's one of those books every man should read before they die. Maybe you don't believe me. Maybe you'll go through your entire life without experiencing how gracefully the game portrays such a breadth of human emotion. The studio that made it broke up after infighting; of course it did. Every so often there's the clickbait about whether there will ever be a Disco 2; why worry? There will never be another.

You play as an inebriated cop, amnesiac, unable to remember anything from his prior life. Also, you can go around telling people to be radically communist. Or centrist. It's such fun. You don't understand how well this game manages to deal with some of the rawest themes of human emotions while still managing to be absurdly hilarious at every turn. I won't spoil anything else; I couldn't do it justice. You'll have to trust me. It's worth it.

It would be remiss of me not to warn my younger readers that this game does deal with adult themes. Language, murder, sex; it's all in there in some form or another. Not gratuitously; but it's a grown-up game. And I think it handles them well, but I wouldn't want you to go in unawares. Wait till you're 18.

If I had to pick one favorite game, this would be it. It's like a truly good book, where the first time through is good and rewarding; but the second is even better, and it merits the third time and the fourth. Disco is a work of art, plain and simple. So if ever a game was worth your time, this is it.