![]() ![]() Even skills that lack obvious application to conversation, like “Visual Calculus” (used for reconstructing crime scenes) or “Interfacing” (for picking locks and operating machines), still play out as conversation. (It makes you sound an awful lot like Agent Dale Cooper during the first season of Twin Peaks.) “Empathy” lets you understand others’ feelings, opening up conversation paths in which characters confess their inner turmoil, while “Suggestion” trades in charm to persuade others to your point of view. The “Inland Empire” skill - a nod to David Lynch’s film of the same name - channels surreal visions of your surroundings and hunches about mysterious goings on. In other words, even when he’s not speaking with another character, your detective talks to himself, a crowd of voices thrumming in his head. These voices contribute to conversations, opening up different dialogue options, but they also present ideas, observations, and opinions to the player. Skills in the game take the form of distinct voices. The conversation system ZA/UM designed doesn’t simply communicate dialogue between characters, it also expresses the inner conflict of your protagonist. Instead, it has an incredibly complex conversation system. In contrast, Disco Elysium has almost no combat. All of which is to say that all too often video games turn the richest fantasy worlds into stages of destruction. Your character grows through this experience, but most of that growth revolves around combat, not only because you earn experience points through combat but also because those points get funneled back into combat skills. Sometimes conversation is integral to the game, opening up branching story lines, but usually conversation is simply a means to an end: you get a quest in a dialogue, that quest sends you after an object, you fight creatures to acquire said object, and you return to the aforementioned quest giver (for a reward, of course). Most digital roleplaying games feature a gameplay loop alternating between combat and dialogue. A woman in a wheelchair reminisces about a moment in her youth when she spotted the Insulindian Phasmid, an otherworldly creature that uses psychic powers to conceal itself as a thicket of reeds. A red-headed boy spews obscenity, throws rocks at the mercenary’s corpse, and prays for the city to burn. There are plenty of characters directly involved in the conflict between the company and the union, but there’s also a broad spectrum of individuals caught in the conflict’s orbit: an old royalist soldier gripes about how the revolutionaries of yesteryear paved the way for the decadence of the present. Drug trafficking may be involved, or it may just be a distraction. The mercenary may or may not have been killed by a band of union dockworkers. The body hanging from a tree turns out to have been a mercenary, working for a shipping company (Wild Pines) that’s currently trying to break the local dockworkers’ strike. Like the best detective fiction, the game’s murder case is really an excuse to dig up the social, political, and personal secrets that led to there being a corpse in the first place. Disco Elysium makes up for this tired cliché by introducing the fascinating post-revolutionary city of Revachol and the peculiar stories embedded in it. Amnesia is a well-worn trope, especially in video games, where it offers players a clean slate for building their own character. ![]() This is the opening scene of Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, the newly released version of the 2019 computer roleplaying game from Estonian developers ZA/UM. You still don’t remember your name, though. In the course of your conversation with Garte, the hotel and café manager, you realize several things: you owe a not insignificant sum of money for damages to your hotel room, you are a police officer - a detective - here to investigate a case, and a dead body hangs from a tree behind the hotel - it’s been there for at least a week. You scuttle out the door, make your way downstairs, creep to the angry-looking individual behind the counter. You retreat from the toilet, back into the remains of a hotel room. You’re not sure what’s happened, but you have the nagging sense that there’s some crime for which you must atone. The face you confront is mottled and raw. You make your way to the bathroom, splash water on your face, then stare into the mirror. You climb out of bed, retrieve pants and a shirt from the floor, a tie from the ceiling fan. YOU WAKE UP surrounded by empty bottles, no memory of the previous night, no memory of your own name.
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