Others call to you from across the city, begging you to find them. In this game so focused on interpersonal communication, you spend a surprising amount of time just looking at something-holding it in your hands, gauging your emotional reaction to it, and letting its history run into you, in a different way than in conversations with people. But it also seems clear that they’re accomplishing something else.
It’s clear that one purpose of these items is to provide flavor for the player. There are clothes, guns, and tchotchkes, books and postcards that provide at least some explanatory text, and at most a few minutes of conversation with yourself about the object and its history. There are dozens of items you can pick up that give you even more information, sometimes about the world, sometimes about yourself. The vast majority of the mystery you’re solving in Disco Elysium is addressed through conversation, with yourself or with other people, or with the city itself, which enables what Chris Breault has called “intuitive and ‘supra-natural’ methods-talking to the victim’s corpse to learn there’s a bullet in its mouth, talking to the wind to learn which building the suspect is hiding beneath.” But for a game so focused on interpersonal conversation, Disco Elysium includes an equally surprising magnitude of stuff. But it’s also, on a basic level, just a lot of information in one package: hours and hours of lore and history, almost too much of it. Indeed, it’s the game that I’ve talked the most about with people who’ve never played a game, and who don’t have an interest in visual novels. It’s been described as a work of literature, one with cross-genre appeal, the game to recommend to people who don’t play videogames. It references literary and political theory and builds its own versions of both.
The 2019 narrative RPG is based on an untranslated novel its creator published in 2013. That’s a lot of time to sit and read.ĭisco Elysium is more than novel-length itself, containing over a million words. If you know what you’re doing, you can solve the mystery that animates the game in as little as five days. The purpose of books is twofold: to let you learn more about the history of Revachol, and to help you pass time. Disco Elysium constructs a literary history for you in the outdoor shelves of a slowly failing bookstore, which include self-help, biography, and romance.
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