It's hard to come across a good detective story. The probability of encountering a surprising and system-changing role-playing game is negligible. Just when we stopped looking for something different in the game industry, where almost everything is tried over and over, Disco Elysium suddenly appeared before us like an oasis.
The finale of 2019 was very busy with high-profile work, including Death Stranding, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Due to this intensity, we had to delay the review of Disco Elysium a bit. Behind this wait is the fact that it is unfair to evaluate Disco Elysium as a one-time experience, as well as the profile size of other works. We have come across many works that claim that the choices we have made and those we have not made have changed the course. Of course, there have been some works that have given the right to this argument relatively. However, most of the time, this structure could not go beyond drawing the way to any of the different predetermined endgames in response to the decisions made. Claims that our actions changed the gameplay experience have often been an illusion. As a result of all this illusion, we got nothing more than a good, bad, or alternative ending. Disco Elysium, on the other hand, manages to offer a different gaming experience to each player, as expected from a real role-playing game.
You open your eyes on the cold floor of a room. Your body and brain are not in a position to perform the necessary tasks to feel the cold. It has been days since the amount of alcohol in your blood passed the threshold that a normal person can handle. This may be why you don't remember where you are and why you are there. Wait a minute, you have a more important problem. “Who?” before the why and where questions. You are looking for an answer to the question, but you cannot find an answer to it among the folds of your brain. You also understand why the first thing that comes to your mind when you get up is cold. The fact that you're almost completely naked definitely has something to do with it. In the broken glass that whispers a cold wind softly into the room… You wear your clothes, which are scattered around the room, with a care that can be described as sad at the most gentle level when viewed from the outside. Even though what you are wearing seems to belong to the clothing group classified as a "set" in the society, you seem to oppose this imposition with a single shoe and an open shirt. Then the third element, the source of the cold that your body refuses to feel, draws your attention; ceiling fan. Why is this working when the glass is already broken? And more importantly, is your tie dangling at the tip of the propeller in question? Here is an opportunity to fix one of the missing pieces on the road to becoming a team! All you have to do is jump and try to catch the tie in the air, ignoring the fact that you can hardly stand even on your feet. A voice in your head tells you that you can definitely achieve this. After all, no information you have gained since you came to yourself can contradict that you are normally a very competent person in the physical sense. Maybe you're a professional athlete or something, who knows? Your brain wants to calculate how many seconds have passed between jumping and finding yourself on the ground again, but can't. And so your first adventure in Disco Elysium comes to an unpleasant end.
PENDING QUESTIONS
No, you are not directing a professional athlete at Disco Elysium. You are obviously a detective, although everything suggests otherwise. The room you wake up in is in a hostel and it seems you are there for a job. However, considering that the corpse hanging from the tree in the backyard of the relevant hostel has been hanging there for seven days, it is very difficult to say that you have done your job properly. But what did they say? Be it late or not… Now you can go down and shed some light on the matter by talking to your partner, Lieutenant Kitsuragi, who has been working with you on the case. Of course, before you do, it would be great if you could figure out who you are, what you've been doing for days, and where your goddamn badge is! THAT'S WHAT YOU CALL ROLE-PLAYING Disco Elysium is a role-playing game, and a great role-playing game.
Throw away all the other work that has tried to integrate the mechanics of tabletop role-playing games into video games. This is exactly what it should be! Your decisions on the opening screen, where you determine what kind of structure your character will be, have never been reflected in the game in such a logical way before. Until now, the points you gave to the "intelligence" category could not go beyond whether you could cast a x spell or new dialogue options. Here, it determines whether you can really use your intelligence. There are 4 main features that define your character in the game: Intelligence, psychology, physical and motor skills. However, this is where things start to branch out because these four features break down into 24 sub-features in total. Just because you rated intelligence doesn't mean you can lie or visualize events as you please. “Drama” determines your ability to lie and understand lies, and “Visual Calculation” determines your ability to visualize what is happening around you. These 24 features determine what kind of character you will have, and no, the scores of these features alone do not determine what you can do.
YOUR MOST IMPORTANT COMPANY, YOUR BRAIN!
Don't think that you can open a locked door just because your "Savior Faire" feature, which determines your dexterity, has a high score. The dice are rolled for every action, every speech, every gesture, tone of voice and the like that will take place in the game. Sometimes the game does this for you and suddenly you are presented with information that you do not have. Sometimes you try to use a certain feature of your own will. Each situation has a degree of difficulty, and the result of the dice + your attribute score together reveals your success. Moreover, it works so fluently that you don't even notice that the dice are being rolled in the back. We experienced the game with three different character traits distribution and we encountered 70 percent different situations even in only the first 2 hours. In one, a character who instantly accepted everything we said because we were authoritarian, the other time manipulated us into becoming a relentless warrior of feminism. And what's even better is that the game uses all of our features as a storytelling technique. Throughout the game, our features chat with us as a voice in our brains and make comments about what we encounter. And they even often quarrel with each other and try to pull them to their side.
The texts of the game are so wonderful that you don't get bored even for a second of the 23-paragraph discussion about a single situation. GAME OF THE YEAR! If we had the opportunity for Disco Elysium, we would talk another 10 paragraphs. We talk about the exquisite atmosphere created, the wonderful music, the perfect voice acting and the countless beauties of the role-playing mechanics that we cannot touch. But the rest is there for you to discover. Our duty is; It is to underline that Disco Elysium is the best game of 2019.