I Played Disco Elysium.

I think the decline of playing games for “fun” began sometime around the time polygons became the norm and we no longer returned for repetitive gains, repetitive rewards to see who could stack the highest number on top of a pedestal. Sure, while a lot of the 8 and 16-bit era games got on and that concept began to age out, High Score wasn’t a major aesthetic anymore, but it wasn’t until polygons showed up that there was a deep tonal shift from accomplishment and completion to consuming narratives and filmic satisfaction. Major studios now have begun to make their games so massive in fact that I think they’re finding themselves in “buildings” that are just too large to fill with thoughtful and deliberate care to the point where these locales feel endless and banal, any idea of fun stripped from them with the scent of paint thinner left behind. Enormous games are banking on voice acting, star power, fans of the franchise clinging to what they felt when they first played games. So few choices in the games we’re playing now feel like they’re meant for us, instead made by the compromise of the developers for their passionate vision, instead filling boxes that have sprawled as far as their code could reach. Every city in their world has sprung up like a patch of eczema that they need to treat.

No, most games are no longer fun. But they can certainly be enjoyable.

And Disco Elysium doesn’t care about that.

I’d heard about this game from a friend who I’d drifted from for a while (he was a coworker who left on the premise that he no longer felt okay performing the SaLeSmAnShIp duties that our company was trying to wring from him). He showed up at the store to pick up a controller or something equally as innocuous (in fact, maybe it was a 3DS Pokemon game for his wife who was going back through the series?) and he asked, ‘have you heard of Disco Elysium?’ I hadn’t. He said that he’d just finished it and that it was certainly a “Steve Game”, one that I needed to check out. This was in 2019 and the game was only on PC and I knew I’d never be getting there, as buying a gaming PC wasn’t something I was willing to allocate funds towards (at the time) and I sadly was going to have to wait until it would come to console. We shared a little banter on this fact and he kind of explained that he wasn’t sure if it really was the type of game that comes to console. It felt more like a point-and-click adventure, one that was more focused on telling a story than expecting you to really “engage” with it. Shucks. Okay. Well, I guess I’d never play it.

Sometime in 2021, The Final Cut is announced for consoles and I’m stoked. I think it was announced that it would be out in summer, and then it didn’t come. And then it was supposed to be October and at this point I was in the full swing of the Mass Effect Trilogy and the game released at $40 and I was able to convince myself that it wasn’t time. Then December came around and it was time to play a mind-numbing finger occupier (enter: Far Cry 6) while I listened to all the great music that came out in 2021 and wrote about it. Plus it was still $40. I beat Far Cry, and I moved on to Guardians of the Galaxy, it was still $40. I moved on to >observer, it was still $40. I read Infinite Jest. It was still $40. At this point, I said, “okay, I’m biting the bullet. This game is an evergreen $40 game.” It was finally time.

Disco Elysium is definitely a Steve Game. You barely even have to look at it to play it, as the star of the game is the dialog that perpetually builds and stacks on the right side of the screen as you interact, interface and intercourse with the several dozen NPCs that you’ll encounter throughout. Each conversation is a rewarding encounter, one that may not move you forward within the game’s traditional progress, but it will also impress upon you a form of writing that goes so into the weeds, so microscoped and examined that it often gave me spaces of quiet in even the most innocuous of circumstances. There certainly is a Main Character, of course, and he is the lens through which you’re viewing all of this. But I will tell you that for me, the real star of every scene were simply The Words.

The protagonist here is a detective who wakes up at the tail end of a spiraling bender of drugs and alcohol (and maybe even worse?) and you join him from the very start of his washing ashore of consciousness. You wake in a hotel room, staggered and barely clothed. You hold your head in your hands and struggle with the Whys. The Whos. The Whats. Over the first few hours of the game, you piece together that you’ve been sent here (here being Martinaise, a small section of Revachol) to investigate the hanging murder of a person behind the hotel you’re staying at. Apparently, you’ve been here for about a week’s time and have staggered through the district being belligerent, coy, offensive, violent and outright drunk up until the moment you screamed “I don’t want to be this kind of animal anymore” and passed out completely.

Your first task in the game is to bridge the void between the past and the now by putting points into your “skills”, the traditional skills such as “Gun Aiming” and “Jump Height” and “Run Speed” and “Draw Distance” etc. have been replaced with “Conceptualization” (or the ability to create and decipher art), “Electrochemistry” (or the ability to understand or tolerate drugs and alcohol), “Shivers” (or the ability to guard from or sense danger), and “Inland Empire” (or the ability to sync with your hunches and gut feelings). There are 24 skills in all, almost every single one of them vague and conceptual in their description and title. So tasking yourself with building a character’s mental and social makeup through sordid and quizzical context felt incredible. I wanted to see what I would be like in the game if I spent a bunch of points on Empathy and Inland Empire and Suggestion. Some in Rhetoric. Some in Visual Calculus.

All of these skills won’t help you Beat the Bad Guys. In fact, there is exactly one instance of actual “combat” I can think of and you barely engage in it, rather you attempt to influence it. This isn’t a game where you fight anything but your own failures, your own memories, your own doubters (and that includes yourself). The skills you buy contribute suggestions to your dialogs with others and your perceptions of the world around you. The higher the skill, the more it works as steeled observations of your interaction with a person, or with how a city street is lined up. The higher a skill, the more moments of clarity hit you. And this works so well as you play and build this character, because where you begin (with barely any skill points whatsoever), you rarely have any clarity, any vision, and when those voices speak up, often they are wrong. They push you in the direction of being offensive or crass or just ‘weird’. As those skills get honed, you begin to really get to dig deeper into conversations, into people, into their whole world. For someone who thrives on observation and the art of People Watching and rambling conversation, this was such a joy to watch unfold.

But was it fun? No way.

I found that I would only be able to sit with this game when there was going to be a lot of forgivable time in front of me. The same type of time I’d have to allocate for, say, reading a book or writing a letter. You need to sit in front of this game with fresh eyes and a clear mind or you will entirely miss the point. You read in this game (or listen to the recorded dialog which I turned off after a while as it was a bit theater-kid/melodramatic for me) a lot. You spend a lot of time getting overly verbose descriptions of not only the street you’re standing on but the history of it, the way that ash takes its shape, the way that footprints stand on it and tells of a woman who used to walk it. This has the feeling of a classic literature novel, with each word building a blooming garden of description, but the landscape you’re in front of is squalor and industrial survival. Where you are is bleak and who you are is even bleaker. It’s a dogged road. So you have to be prepared to take a lot of that in, to digest it with fortitude. And I will be honest, I did sit down with this game at least twice and nearly fall asleep, not because it wasn’t captivating, but because it’s just a lot to take in.

If I could recommend this game in book form, I probably would.

The gameplay is similar to a Maniac Mansion or a Monkey Island game where you have, realistically, twenty different areas you can explore within a few city blocks, each of those populated by 2–5 people who you can engage with. And as you’re going to places and searching them or speaking with them, you are given side quests, leads on your case, and opening up new dialogs and encounters via the dialog trees you are engaged with. At its core, you are running back and forth between people places and things and applying what you learned at the previous [noun] and hoping that it’s the Open Sesame for the next series of dialog choices. It’s just that basic. So on top of all the reading and all the densely packed verbiage, actively you are barely doing anything. So as a game, I don’t believe I enjoyed it.

There were times where I’d be lost and would have no clue where to go, and would be limited by my own skillsets and dice-roll failures that I could no longer move the needle forward in the storyline. Some of the objectives in the quests say things like, “Come up with a suitable location for…” or “Get [this item], but don’t worry if it’s already [at this location].” This may be deliberately vague and confusing based on my own choices of skills, and that is fine. But at the same time, I wish it would have just disappeared or if my character could have asked for help in different ways than the 2–5 dialog lines that were in front of me. As I mentioned before, some of the voice acting is a little over-the-top for me but happily you’re able to shut it off. And what’s more, some of the dialog is a little heavy-handed and goofy, which is okay in certain circumstances, but in a game that has such stoic beauty, it would take me a bit out of the state of flow that I was finding.

I would love to be able to replay this game with a different character build and see the different forms of dialog, the different ways I could interact with the world and its people. But it’s such a heavy and weighty experience, one that feels a little hopeless and cumbersome that I probably won’t go through it again.

But all of that being said, I don’t think I’ve read a better book this year than this game as it was written. The way that it engages in the inner dialog of a man’s life as it falls apart, while he puts it back together through wet sand on the beach is extraordinary. The way that the small district of this small city on this small island has a full life, a full legacy showcases an absolutely robust imagination, one that I wanted to dig deeper and deeper into the more I played. The few glimpses we have of love that he’s lost, of a life that he’s squandered, of the way he notices how people are looking at each other when you leave the room… this was an absolutely masterfully written work.

This game stops telling us that immortality is our sought perfection and that our temporal wick is the only intrinsic value, the only core competency we should be skating on and with. The entire final 10–20 minutes of the game, between an interaction with your past along with an interaction with a parapsychic present resounds as some of the most memorable and enduring fictional conversations I believe I’ve ever been privy to.

The game took 21 hours and of that 21 hours, I would say that a quarter of that felt a little fruitless. I don’t want to make it sound like I didn’t like it, but as I said before I don’t think I’ll be playing it again. I will one hundred percent be keeping an eye on the writer of this game in hopes that he writes a book either within the world of Disco Elysium or in any other world he sees in his mind’s eye. Truly the star of the entire experience were his words.