ZA/UM
Disco Elysium
ZA/UM
PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One, Series X and S
YOU wake up, unable to remember anything about your life or how you got here. This is the opening of so many video games that an amnesiac protagonist has become something of a cliché.
But Robert Kurvitz, lead writer and designer of Disco Elysium prefers to see it as an essential part of video game storytelling. “There’s a promise of newness and being someone else, and for that the player needs to forget who they were,” he told me when we spoke after the game’s recent console release.
To be fair, Disco Elysium doesn’t quite start with waking up. The game’s first words are uttered by your ancient reptilian brain, which you engage in a conversation about whether to become conscious. Soon, your limbic system joins the exchange as you become increasingly aware of your surroundings, before waking up half-naked and hung-over. It is a unique and arresting beginning.
Stumbling out of your hotel room and speaking to the people you meet, it becomes apparent that you are a police detective trying to solve a murder, and you have been on a three-day bender, leading to complete memory loss.
Like many role-playing games, your character has a number of skills that determine your ability to perform tasks or unlock dialogue options. But while a traditional fantasy RPG might rate you for strength or magic, Disco Elysium‘s skills are more unusual – what’s more, they talk.
Your Encyclopaedia skill, for example, might feed you bits of information about the vaguely Eastern European setting of the game, while Composure helps you read other people’s body language and Electrochemistry pushes you towards indulging in alcohol and other addictive substances.
Kurvitz says the team wanted to avoid presenting the skill characters as the kind of intrusive voices that might be experienced by someone with, say, dissociative identity disorder. The skills are clearly facets of one personality rather than a mental cacophony. The team wanted to simulate the way the mind works through internal monologue, says Kurvitz.
This means that while the basic plot is about solving a murder, the game’s real concern is the construction of identity. When playing, you gain points you can invest in skills, boosting the chances of success when you use them and further moulding your personality. Increase your Drama skill and you will find it easier to be inventive and spot when people are lying; boost it too high and you could become overly dramatic.
In addition to the skills, certain characters or experiences you come across in the game can trigger thoughts that you can choose to engage with and internalise. I found myself going for dialogue options dealing with art or creativity, which resulted in my Conceptualisation skill offering me the chance to be an “art cop”.
The result is you can make some really strange choices about how your detective behaves, sending you deeper into Disco Elysium‘s weird world. I have been taking full advantage, but Kurvitz says it has proved surprisingly difficult to get players to embrace these options.
To nudge people towards more interesting role playing, a message on the loading screen reassures you that making odd choices won’t mean you fail in the game.
Perhaps the lesson is that when we are invited to reinvent ourselves, we tend to stick to the familiar.
Jacob also recommends…
Planescape: Torment
Black Isle Studios
PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS
This cult classic role-playing game, also starring an amnesiac protagonist, is set across a strange fantasy multiverse and was a big inspiration for Disco Elysium.
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Source: Humans - newscientist.com
