Now Playing: Disco Elysium

My initial impressions of Disco Elysium were pretty mixed and, after completing the game, I’m sorry to say that they still are. There are aspects of DE I really like and consider to be extremely well done, but other aspects I find extremely frustrating. In DE you play as a police detective tasked with solving a murder. Investigating the murder, interviewing witnesses, piecing together evidence and interrogating suspects was, for me, the most enjoyable and compelling aspect of the game.

But DE is about far more. It’s also about the world you find yourself in and about the character you play – who he is, who he was and who he wants to be. As I touched upon in my FI post, the world crafted in DE is pretty great, but there are times when it does descend into self-indulgent exposition in a way that breaks the natural flow of dialogue. The game gets the balance right more often than wrong, but it’s guilty all the same.

And then we have the introspective elements as your character figures out who he is. Once again, the balance of this is right more than wrong, but there are times when the game teeters precariously on the edge of its own self-indulgent asshole. It never quite falls in, but it gets pretty close.

Everything in DE is about dialogue, and that dialogue and how you proceed is determined by your character stats. You set your ‘core’ stats at the beginning of the game and you can then boost the various skills relating to these stats either through the use of skill points earned via XP, or by equipping various items and clothing, or ‘thoughts’ you’ve unlocked and reflected upon.

However, there is a limit to how far these skills can be pushed based upon your starting stats. If you only put a single point in physicality, for example, you can only ever boost the skills relating to that stat by 1 with a skill point. And the strength of these skills are what determines your success in the various skill checks that occur during dialogue.

It’s a really interesting and clever system that’s supposed to encourage repeat play but I would argue doesn’t quite work that way in practice. Can you build very different characters in DE and have a very different experience? Sort of – your stats and skills do determine how your dialogue plays out, but your progression through the game will always remain the same. The reality is that the vast majority of the dialogue based upon your skills is purely flavour text in nature – it doesn’t actually result in opening new paths of progression.

And you’ll soon realise that whilst it may be fun to maximise some stats and not others to unlock the different (and admittedly funny) ways your character can f**k up and fail, it doesn’t allow you to progress in a different way. Although the dialogue system in DE is incredibly robust and full of variations, flavour and character, none of it really has an impact on how your progression through the game unfolds.

Sure, it’s possible to get yourself killed in a variety of stupid ways, but that’s just a pointless ‘game over’ and reload. The fact is, if you want to progress through the game and the core investigation without constant failures and potential soft locks preventing any progress – which I’ll touch upon in a moment – there are some skills that are clearly more important and frankly required, than others.

There are at least 3 moments in the game relating to the core story that require certain skills to progress. I reached one of these points fairly early in the game only to realise that the way I had built my character only gave me an 8% chance of success. No matter how much I reloaded my save to try and beat the random dice roll, I just couldn’t proceed. I was essentially locked out of any further progression because I’d chosen the ‘wrong’ set of skills and starting stats.

Which is . . . kind of bad in a game that’s supposed to be all about building your character in various ways. After looking online I discovered I wasn’t alone in my problem, but there were ways to boost my chances by doing various side related tasks, but when I realised this would take a few hours to do, I decided it would be quicker to just restart the game and adjust my stats accordingly.

Much later in the game I encountered another similar situation that required two skill checks of a particular skill to proceed or I wouldn’t be able to progress and finish the game. This one was even more ridiculous considering the skill check was simply for your character to be able to notice and use a ladder that’s already clearly visible on the side of a building.

Once again, I didn’t have enough points in this skill to proceed, so I had to hunt down clothing to boost my chances and look up what side content might provide an additional boost – because there’s no logical reason why some tasks add or subtract from your odds. Even then I had to save scum and reload several times to pass the double skill check . . . all so my character could climb a f**king ladder.

It’s just dumb. If your entire game is about building your character in different ways with a focus on different skills then all of these stats and skills need to viable to enable your progression through the story. But in DE, the truth is that some stats and skills are way more valuable than others, and if you don’t set them up correctly at the start of the game, you’re going to have a much more frustrating time of things.

Because failure rarely leads to new outcomes or alternative paths. If you fail a check, you pretty much just have to find a way to boost your stats and try again. Or you can save scum and reload so you don’t waste so much time because you got unlucky with a dice roll even though you had a 92% chance of success.

I just find it so baffling that the developers built this incredibly complex system of dialogue based skill checks relating to so many different stats and skills, but then only built a single line of progression through the game with little to no variation – a line of progression that requires the use of certain skills.

Once I understood what kind of skills were most useful and required and boosted these accordingly, I had a much better time with the game. Anyone who tells you that your stats don’t matter and that any build is viable is pretty much lying. They’re not technically wrong, but it’s not very fun having to restart the entire game because you’ve soft locked yourself out of further progression.

The side content in DE ranges from pointless, self-indulgent filler, to some pretty good and interesting quests. But, as I said at the start of this review, my focus and my enjoyment came from following the core investigation. Who was the victim? Why did he die? How did he die? Who is responsible?

For all the irritations I encountered during my time with DE, it was solving this core mystery that kept me playing. I wanted to figure it out and I was determined to reach the end and uncover the truth. Unfortunately, the ending and resolution of this investigation kind of sucks. Without spoiling too much, it turns out that the murder was just a random act by a random stranger that had nothing to do with anything.

I guess it’s a twist, in its own way, but it’s not a very satisfying one. To say that DE fizzles out at the end would be a serious understatement. This isn’t helped by a bizarre, random encounter at the end that does see the game begin to tumble into it’s own self-indulgent backside.

I know some people really love this game and I can totally understand why and I’m sure if they read this review they’ll be screaming about how meaningful and important all that nonsense at the end is but, I’m sorry – it’s not. All it does is detract from the conclusion and ruins what is already a pretty lacklustre ending.

Disco Elysium is a game that I kind of loved and hated at the same time but it’s not a game I think I’ll ever have the patience to replay, not when I know how restrictive the skills system really is, how linear progression really is, and how disappointing the conclusion to everything is. It’s ambitious. It’s different. It looks lovely and it has some genuinely great moments, but it’s a very flawed experience and a very hard game to recommend.

5/10