Chengzhi Zhang

Disco Elysium: Be a degenerate and enjoy it

I should've known better than to play this game. It's like paying money to have your miseries exposed, parodied, and laughed upon in a different reality. Don't get yourself into this, guys. It's *AWFUL*. Every time I touched this game, looking at its depressing art style and hearing the melancholic music, it gives me that suicidal sense of despair and madness which oddly you would enjoy and get addicted to in the end. There's that something, je ne sais quoi, about letting yourself degenerate, having your life clung to the very basic stimuli of sex, drug, alcohol, and becoming an 'absolute disaster of a human being'. Yeah, Disco Elysium makes you feel the charm in doing all that, in game or in real life dare I say. The lead writer of this game said he intended to 'lead astray' and 'corrupt' the youth with games. Bravo, mate. You did it. I actually had a massive hangover yesterday, probably on the same scale as the one in game, and said some ridiculous things to an old friend which I very much regret now. 'Inland Empire' and 'Electrochemistry' doing their jobs, eh?

The characters portrayed in this game are some of the best I've ever seen. Klassje...what a lass. It's a pity I didn't have a proper closure with her in the end. I actually know a bourgeois woman in real life who's exactly like Klassje, dangerously attractive and filled with hedonism and despair, and she talks in that same cold, distant manner which repels and absorbs me at the same time. Dora, yes, my own Dora is getting married in a few months, and I had more than a few of these desperate and pathetic phone calls with her in the vain hope that things could turn. Cuno, the little prick... I actually made choices in game just out of pure hatred towards him, like I was genuinely annoyed by his mere existence. There are so many more, and I don't want to spoil all of them.

Also, the politics. I have the feeling that one or more of the writers are hardcore socialists. I don't know why I say that but that's my judgement based on the depiction of communism in this. You see, if I were ten years younger I'd be shouting 'Viva la revolución' while playing this game, literally. But hey, it's a true RPG and my ending actually says I'm a fascist and traditionalist..... At any rate, the game is very political, not in the sense it has any political agenda, but that it carries a huge amount of political discourse with it, a nice addition to the RPG elements if you ask me. Especially in this day and age when every developer has a checklist of political correct agenda to stick to.. Stop. Let's not go there.

The writing of this game is THE best I've ever seen in any video game, bar none. And I'm talking about both the story/narrative structure and the quality of the actual composition. I'd guess that one (or more) of the writers probably has a background in Classics (Latin and Greek I mean) judging from the sheer amount of neologisms created in this game and the fact that one conversation actually requires you to read a quote from Heraclitus, in the original Ancient Greek. In any case, the level of sophistication of the writing in this game is truly amazing, sometimes even overwhelming. I, for one, would say I had difficulties decoding what the game is trying to convey half of the time...probably not that much, but you know what I mean.

I didn't even bother to talk anything about the game mechanics (which it does have a lot to it), because they are not important. You come to Disco Elysium for the story, the writing, the philosophy, the politics, and most importantly, the sadistic joy of becoming a despicable wretch. Truly, the 'Roleplaying Adventure of a Lifetime'.