Disco Elysium: The Final Cut

[dronology]

ZA/UM’sZA/UM’s cult-hit detective RPG, Disco Elysium, is set in a city where every political ideology has failed. As your player character — an alcoholic cop in flared trousers and a tie resembling the intestines of a dead animal — roams Martinaise hunting for clues and discarded bottles to deposit, the legacy of these failures is painted into every one of the game’s pre-rendered dollhouse environments. There’s the cracked tilework built under the King’s wasteful regime; the bullet holes in the walls along which the Communists were lined up; the King’s statue restored by a bunch of art-school “young ironists” as part of an aborted attempt at gentrifying the area into a resort. (...)

While the shallowness of your character’s politics is there to reflect his shallowness, some players and critics felt the game ended up displaying a lazy none-of-the-above political nihilism, which is perhaps why marketing for The Final Cut’s added Political Vision Quests promised that the ideologies would be taken more seriously. In one sense, they aren’t — the Vision Quests riff off of all the same jokes about fence-sitters, rent-seekers, arm-chairers, and self-loathers. What you won’t get to do is follow your chosen ideology all the way up to a glorious homiletic victory where it’s proven better than the other ones. But you will get to learn what your character’s ideology means about himself. (...)

The Final Cut’s other big new feature is the addition of full voice acting, and it is delightful how instantly different the dub sounds from any other game. The acting style is that of a BBC Radio 4 audio drama, evoking theater rather than cartoons. This is a game in which you discuss existentialism while getting mocked by a personification of your own Ancient Reptilian Brain, and fittingly, the tone of the dub evokes The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or the weirder Doctor Who audio dramas, a non-naturalistic proscenium where these things can coexist. (...)

I won’t patronize the intent of Disco Elysium by calling it some sort of proof that video games are high art. It’s a work of commercial popular entertainment featuring a bunch of your favorite murder mystery archetypes (an alcoholic ’70s-themed cop who’s sad about a woman!) crossed with Planescape: Torment and the Chapo Trap House tabletop game episodes where they play as drug-addicted old-timey racists and fight Jared Kushner. It’s a game with a whole character who’s there to yell incoherent lyrics from songs by Scooter. It’s a shriek of chaotic patterns on a polyester necktie. (...)

I could double the length of this review by expounding on my love for the way the Skills become increasingly dysfunctional members of your internal monologue as you level them up, and how this combines with the use of drugs to boost your stats to simulate the precise way that being high on booze and speed can transform otherwise normal people into the most annoying people alive. Building the role-playing on highly entertaining failure means the characterization has a sitcom engine propelling it. Instead of the bland helper of most Western RPGs, the protagonist of Disco Elysium is an obsessive, compelled into his actions by things he cannot let go, and suffering the cringe-comedy consequences. You can turn your detective into a homophobic art critic who smokes to feel like a cowboy; a guy who snaps finger guns at people all day and puts his real gun to his head every evening; or a doomsaying feminist obsessed with EDM and boxing. But you cannot turn him into someone who isn’t him — every quirk becomes another coping mechanism, stinking of his self-loathing. Even if you try to have him act like a normal detective, it does nothing to stop him imagining that his necktie is telling him to autoerotically asphyxiate (“now you’re not just crazy, you’re also boring”).

All of these joys are still waiting for you in Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, improved with the full voice acting. You shouldn’t let the bugs and the lack of podcasters put you off spending some time in its delirious, oil-painted tragicomedy. Disco Elysium is not the sort of game that you play to master, but it is the kind of game that, if you truly internalize its thoughts, will make your real life easier to live in. It will keep you company as you wait without power for a glorious future that will never come — and even if it did, would end up being stupid.

New quests and voices add even more political edge to Disco Elysium: The Final Cut