Sep 10, 2018

Your skills talk to you in Disco Elysium, an inventive RPG that keeps impressing

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut

At first there's nothing save for an inky black void and a stupefied inner monologue. But then a second voice chimes in, bidding me to just go with the flow. That’s my personified lizard brain speaking.

An argument breaks out between me, my lizard brain, and now my limbic system, too. Every part of me is straining towards something different. All I want to do is wrench myself free of this drunken haze and wake up to the ungodly hangover I probably earned.

Rhetorically triangle-choking my lizard brain and limbic system into submission through a series of dialogue-tree-based skill checks is how my journey into Disco Elysium begins, and it's the perfect tone setter. Disco Elysium is a hardboiled detective mystery RPG set in a neo-noir urban fantasy setting, and unpacking my own baggage appears to be just as important as solving the mysteries around me. As I interrogate suspects, I'm also arguing with disparate parts of my own psyche.

Characters, including the many voices of the antagonist’s own personality traits and skills, are often dry and caustic. Even the mundane is tinged with absurdist nightmare logic. Everything is strikingly rendered to look like a dingy watercolor painting.

My character unfolds himself from a crumpled heap on the floor unable to recall who he is, or even what century it is. There's a hole in the window overlooking the balcony. He notes that it's too big for a bullet and too small for a piece of furniture. Also, one of my shoes is missing. Naturally, I deduce that I, in the throes of last night’s bender, put one of my shoes through the glass. Some of the warring factions in my brain seem pleased with the detective work.

With one green shoe and a wrinkled suit, I stumble out of my apartment. There's a young woman nearby. I walk up to her hoping to learn more about my predicament, but my interpersonal skills are lacking. I can't extract any fungible information from our conversation except for the fact that I’m a cop… I think. Nearby is a door leading out to the balcony. Sure enough, I find a green shoe on the balcony amid puddles of glass.

My protagonist is able to read a crime scene like a book, but people seem to be written in a foreign language to him. This is the consequence of choosing logician as my starting class. There were three to choose from, and an option to construct a personalized class from an assembly of skill trees.

Words with friends

Disco Elysium’s skills—categorized under motorics, physique, psyche, and intellect—are where things become very tantalizing. Skills are like specters in your brain representing different parts of your personality. They interject with insights and desires, and sometimes actively talk to you while trying to convince you of their merits.

Electrochemistry, from the physique tree, likes to goad you into doing things like lapping up pools of spilled booze on the floor.

Electrochemistry, from the physique tree, likes to goad you into doing things like lapping up pools of spilled booze on the floor. I only touched my tongue to the stagnant puddle of liquor, by the way. I’m not a monster. When I made that choice, my character said that he likes to delay gratification. Electrochemistry also carries a lot of special chemical knowledge and lurid tidbits that prove valuable in this world of vices. Investing in it also lets you get more of a bang out of stat-altering drugs.

In solving my broken window dilemma earlier I used skills like logic, conceptualization, and visual calculus. My conversation with the woman outside of the apartment called upon skill checks for empathy and a variety of interpersonal and persuasion based abilities that I struggled to pass.

How you build your character will affect your interactions and how you go about performing investigations. The woman outside of my apartment clammed up and was a dead end of a lead for me. For others, she might divulge more if the charm is laid on thicker.

As I work my way around the apartment complex I come across another officer. Apparently, I've been derelict in my duties and left a body uninvestigated. It hanged from a tree up until that point.

As if the Lynchian vibe of the game needed to be further enunciated, one of the skill checks I'm given the option to use relies on the Inland Empire skill, which is part of my psyche. Inland Empire, I am told by the developers, is like the intensity of your character’s soul. It seems to come packaged with some very abstract worldviews, too. Sometimes skills are ethereal like that. What they do and what they represent about your character can seem slippery, but that quality also makes them and the world of Disco Elysium all the more compelling.

In using the Inland Empire skill to steer our conversation, I attempted to impress upon the officer that I was an amnesiac alcoholic and that I might be capable of anything, and that maybe I killed the man in the tree. A failed check led to the officer essentially hand-waving away my existential concerns.

Power issues around the booth cut my demo short, but I saw what I needed to see. Disco Elysium is dirty and biting while being painterly and flowery. There is stillness in the atmosphere, with tension and suspense lingering on the periphery. It is an RPG about navigating an urban world and your own thought processes. It is strange and disorienting, but also unique, well-written, and evocative. Even just this bite-sized sample was exciting.

Disco Elysium doesn't have a release date yet, but you can find updates on the official website, and on its Steam page. Also check out Sam and Tom's thoughts on the demo from earlier this year.

Aug 24, 2018

Disco Elysium & the IndieMEGABOOTH at PAX West 2018!

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut - ZAUM_Dani

Hello everyone!

Your friendly Community Manager is here to remind you that we have less than ONE week left until PAX West! Myself and the other ZA/UM team members can’t wait to get to Seattle & show off Disco Elysium to everyone there. Let us know if you’ll be going in the comments, we’d love to see you!

Don’t forget to keep an eye on our social media accounts as we’ll be posting lots of photos over the next week of what we are getting up to in Seattle and at PAX West.

Disco(rd) Elysium
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Recently on our Twitter we have been sharing some of the awesome games showing alongside us with the IndieMEGABOOTH, so I thought I’d put them together into a post to share with you all. A great thing about being part of the IndieMEGABOOTH is the community amongst the developers, and we love any opportunity to show our support to the other teams. Whether you’re attending PAX or staying home and following it online, be sure to check these games out! Remember to follow #PAXWest2018 and #IMBPAXW18 to keep up with action.

Boyfriend Dungeon

"Boyfriend Dungeon is an action-RPG dungeon crawler in which the weapons you use transform into beautiful people -- take them on dates to level them up and become more powerful together."
Our friends at Kitfox still have 21 days left of their Kickstarter!

Aftercharge

"AFTERCHARGE is a 3 vs 3 competitive game pitting invisible robots against an invincible security squad in high-octane tactical skirmishes."
Check out their Steam page!

The World Next Door

"The World Next Door is a narrative-driven, action adventure game that follows Jun, a rebellious teen girl trapped in a parallel world inhabited by magical creatures."
Check out their website & find out where to wishlist it!

The Gardens Between

"The Gardens Between is a surreal puzzle adventure that follows best friends, Arina and Frendt, as they fall into a mysterious world of beautiful garden islands. Manipulate time to solve puzzles and discover the secrets of each island."
Wishlist it on Steam!

Bloodroots

"In Bloodroots, you’ll smash, slice, crush, blast, crack, slam, burst, break, split, slit, gut, tear, gash, gouge, scoop, cut, chop, dice, hash, grind, and more as Mr Wolf enacts his revenge."
Check out their Steam page and add it to your wishlist.

Hope you've enjoyed our little dive into some of the incredible games on show with the IndieMEGABOOTH at PAX West, we can't wait to get a chance to play them ourselves. See the full line up here. And just a reminder that you can find us at Booth 857 all 4 days of PAX West. Feel free to share the image or this tweet on social media and let your friends know that you'll be checking out Disco Elysium.

Until next time,
Dani :)

May 31, 2018

Level up by arguing with yourself in scintillating CRPG Disco Elysium

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut

To be a cool police officer, you need Composure, the ability to walk into any situation and not betray your inner fears (and also dance really well). But maybe you want to be a different kind of cop. A cold Logic-driven one, perhaps? One filled with Empathy? Or how about Authority?

That’s all for you to choose as you begin Disco Elysium as a pot-bellied blowout lying on the floor of a trashed hotel room in an unknown city. Waking from an unholy binge that has wiped your memory, you’ve no idea that you’re a detective, or that you’re meant to be investigating a putrefying body hanging from a tree nearby.

Skills are characters in themselves, speaking up during dialogue and offering insights on the world as I explore.

Yes, Disco Elysium hinges on an amnesia-powered plot, but don’t let that put you off, because it’s the freshest and most fascinating RPG I’ve experienced in years, perhaps ever; one which plays right into the best aspects of pen-and-paper roleplaying. The first whisper of its promise came even before my character opened his eyes as several of my skills started discussing the nature of oblivion and my impending consciousness. These skills, you see, are Disco Elysium’s equivalent of agility, strength and charisma ratings, and they are wild. There are 24 of the things, arranged into four key types: Intellect skills affect my capacity to reason, Psyche skills allows me to influence NPCs and also myself, Fysique skills are body skills, and Motorics are about how well I move.

Here’s the thing: skills are characters in themselves, speaking up during dialogue and offering insights on the world as I explore, if I’ve invested enough points in them and the behind the scenes dice rolls go my way. So Perception will tell me it’s noticed footprints beneath the hanging corpse while Visual Calculus will allow me to examine them closely.

Electrochemistry, which just wants to smoke, drink and have sex, constantly pipes up with new conversational options for chatting up NPCs and cadging drinks (it even opens a quest called Find Smokes). Interfacing, meanwhile, manages my ability to work with machines, opening opportunities to use radios and another paraphernalia.

Skills, therefore, guide you around the world, and they affect everything you do. But the revolutionary thing is that they also provide a stream of consciousness from deep within your character as his impulses try to push him one way or another. As you put more points into skills they’ll become more dominant, and most come with negative effects. Authority, for example, gets off on having power over others, which is handy when you’re getting intel out of suspects. But find yourself in a situation where you’re begging an old woman for money, it might get enraged that you’re looking so desperate and make you say something you’ll regret.

And if that wasn’t enough, many skills, such as Encyclopaedia and Empathy, explain details of the world, from the subtleties of an NPC’s reaction to the rich history behind the setting. Disco Elysium takes place in a fantasy ’70s, a world separate from ours but at the same kind of level of technological, social and political development, plus with a dose of magic and weirdness. Getting to explore its mix of the familiar and fantastical is a pleasure, especially when it’s drawn in such a striking art style, which blends a traditional isometric viewpoint with 3D lighting and shadow effects.

If ZA/UM can sustain the promise of Disco Elysium’s opening across the finished game, we could have a new RPG classic on our hands.

May 29, 2018

MEET THE SKILLS - MOTORICS

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut - ZAUM_Dani

Motorics (MOT) covers your peripheral nervous system, your five senses, and your vestibular system. It’s our take on the classic Dexterity and Perception stats, but not only. Motorics also has an added mental aspect – your street smarts, the ability to think on your feet and maintain a poker face in stressful situations.

Above all, the Motorics skills make you cool.

And, unlike the other skill sets, they doesn’t come at a huge cost. Put too many points into Physique and it turns you into a violent animal – something like Marv from Sin City. Overdo Psyche and you’re Dale Cooper on MDMA. Too much Intellect turns you a Holmesian pedant. The twist with Motorics is – there is no such twist. Ultra high levels of the Motorics skills surprise you with expanded functionality. It’s the stabilizing element of your build, the binding agent.

A high Motorics cop is one smart, streetwise operator, closest to the classic Detective archetype: your Johnny Dollar or Sonny Crockett. It’s also the flashiest attribute animation-wise, and definitely the best-dressed.

Which is not to say that the Motorics skills make you perfect. You may come off as jumpy or high strung. A bit of a cokehead, even. But, honestly, that’s nothing compared to the trouble you can get into with the other three.

Let’s have a look at what these six desperados can do for you.

Hand/Eye Coordination

H/E, as we shorten it, makes you fire that gun. Makes you fire it good. The more H/E you have, the more precise your aim. And, be it a Villiers 9mm, a Kiejl Armistice, or a banged up old Liljeqist in your hand, you’re going to want to be very precise, because bad, bad, very bad things will happen if you aren’t.

Not only is H/E for aiming, or throwing – it’s also for catching. You’d be surprised how useful that is. Your partner just threw you the keys to your patrol vehicle. It’s a cool moment, but Benny Shitfingers drops them in the sewage. Vehicle inoperable. Mob boss flips a coin in your direction: here’s a tip rent-a-cop. Blam, he pokes your eye out with it.

It’s incredibly uncool to not catch things.

Oh and remember when I said it’s for using firearms? Well, the twist here is: it also analyzes them. Pick up a gun and H/E will tell you things about it: weight, calibre, reliable range. Good to have in a murder investigation if firearms are involved. And they always are. Revachol is a very gunny place.

Reaction Speed

Reaction Speed also gets a little gunny. Let’s you dodge incoming gunfire. It’s the yang to H/E’s yin. The anti-gun. Your danger sense. Your dodge skill.
On the mental side of things, it’s also your mental alacrity and street smarts. It helps you dodge snipes of the verbal sort: quick jabs and cheap shots, dramatic moves people try to pull on you. Reaction Speed is an alarm system.

Overdo levelling this one and you’ll develop that jumpiness I mentioned. Surely a small price to pay for not being, you know, dead. Or standing there with your mouth agape, trying to come up with a cool comeback after the she’s already gone.

If you want to build a mental powerhouse, max up on INT Skills like Logic, Conceptualization and Visual Calculus, then throw Reaction Speed in there too. They’ll call you Johnny Big-Brain now! It’s possible to be very intelligent without it, but it’s a slow, studious intellect. Reaction Speed gives you smarts.

It’s perhaps the quintessential hardboiled detective skill in the game…

Perception

…second only to Perception. This one’s a giant. It’s the magnifying glass in your hand that allows you to see the drop of blood in the fish tank. The keen ear that catches the sound of breathing under the floorboards. Perception governs your sight, smell, taste, and hearing.

Because it’s so all-encompassing, it’s better to say what it doesn’t do. Perception does not read tells and body language (that’s Composure, another Motorics skill). And it doesn’t detect microscopic details with your fingertips (that’s Interfacing, another one). But you’re still going to want to put a few points into this one, believe me. And, yes, it does yield clues too. A lot of clues. Even too many, perhaps? A high Perception cop is going to be drowning in little notes about the things they saw, heard, or smelled – some of them extraneous, or even misleading.

But still, be careful – too little of this one and you’ll be on an experimental playthrough of Disco Elysium: The Adventures of Johnny Blind.

Perception does all sorts of nice things outside of dialogue too, affecting how you interact with the game’s ultra-detailed art. It detects hidden containers for you to loot, and reveals hidden objects in the world – footprints on the floor, for example. Then you can use Visual Calculus (an Intellect skill) to read their size, make and so on – another example of Intellect and Motorics having great synergy for a classic detective build.

Also, expect to find hidden areas: secret rooms, doors, and rooftop paths in the city of Revachol.

The city’s also littered with these little green orbs you can click on; classic “question mark” moments that provide quick observations like: “someone left the stove on,” “water’s dripping from this tap.” Some of these orbs are only visible to higher Perception characters. You can use these hidden, golden orbs to question people: “You just renovated, but the tap’s leaking?” This is one more way environmental exploration (crime scene analysis) and questioning people (interrogations) are connected in Disco Elysium.

Finally, there are certain Thought Cabinet projects that allow you to auto-succeed, say, all hearing-type Perception checks. So there are workarounds for a low Motorics character who wants to play the “blind saxophone player” cop. (Please don’t. Also, there are no saxophones in Elysium.)

Savoir Faire

Savoir Faire is all about style, subterfuge, flair. Even sexiness to a certain extent. It’s our combined Acrobatics and Sneaking skill, with an added zest of verbal flare every now and then. The full package for a slippery roguish detective. You’re basically a ninja-cop, or what our worldbuilding calls a Sambo artist. (Sambo, short for Samaran Boxing, is a communist martial art from Sapurmat Ulan.)

You may also be… a bit of a douchebag, to be honest.

A police detective who sneaks out of conversations and pulls acrobatic moves can come off as an exhibitionist. The other Motorics skills affect your personality in surprisingly (for the Metric system) agreeable ways, but this one’s a wild card.

On the other hand, it’s extremely useful for sneaking into places. It lets you interact with the game’s environment in some pretty flashy ways, where our combat system blends into an acrobatics system for jumping, climbing, etc.

The twist here — and the importance of this cannot be overstated — is that
Savoir Faire also lets you dance.

Composure

Composure is your poker face. The Motorics firewall for your inner turmoil. And also its reverse – your ability to read other people’s body language and tells – to see beneath their facade.

Composure and Perception go well together, making for an ultra-vigilant cop. Composure and the Psyche skill Volition are a good combination for a man of steel who never cracks under pressure. And you’ll be under a lot of pressure in Disco Elysium. Or, if you want to be the expert in reading people, combining Composure with another Psyche skill, Empathy, gives you X-Ray vision into people’s mental states.

If Savoir Faire sexes you up in a slightly douchey way, Composure does the stomach-in, shoulders-back type thing. A trustworthy sexiness. Great posture.

The big twist here is that very high Composure becomes your fashion sense. First of all, it criticises other people’s sartorial choices – not only are they sweating and obviously hiding something, they also have a lame floral shirt. Second, it lets you push your fashion sense on them. Make your partner wear a stupid orange pilot cap. You look too cool for others to not trust your advice.

Interfacing

Interfacing is the final piece of the puzzle as your fine motor skills. Digital dexterity. Fingerworks. Oh boy, does this one do a lot of things — it basically does all the rest: takes notes and helps with handwriting analysis; interprets electrical circuitry; instructs you on how to use a simple blue button; runs your hands across the gear shaft of a motor-carriage; disentangles a Stereo 8 tape from a hawthorn tree, patches it up, and plays it at night on your short stint as a tape-jockey; runs diagnostics on a motor lorry; picks locks; does a great massage; finds microscopic tears in body cavities…

In some extreme cases (very high Interfacing needed), you can even perform what we call a phenomenological transfer: put your hands on the steering levers (motor-cars in Elysium do not use wheels) of a Coupris Kineema and know precisely what its mileage is, how it was treated by its last owner, and what road it was last driven on.

Interfacing is one of those rare skills in the Metric system that sometimes borders on the extraphysical. Extraphysical is what we call the realistically supernatural. The real deal. Reality-breaking. Interfacing’s extraphysical effects are much, much more subtle than those of the Physique skill Shivers, which puts you in touch you with the city of Revachol, but they’re there, connecting you to machinery, electrical circuits, and, most curiously, radiowaves.

You see, in Disco Elysium you can circuit-bend into radiocomputers. These machines have on-air processing. Large prime number stations criss-cross the air. Advanced tape computers use arrays of antennas to sieve through their calculations to perform advanced calculus on site: to run programmes and communicate between the remote corners of the world. There’s a Ream A24 Prefect console somewhere down there, in a hidden basement – or a church, who can say? – that you can use to circuit-bend into remote units. Access personal information, read love letters, learn ancient secrets.

Tape computation has existed in this world for hundreds of years. Who knows what you’ll find…

Oh, what’s that, mom? What am I doing? I’m playing a seventies-style cop with a handlebar moustache who frequency-hacks into ancient radio stations. It’s not basic dungeons and dragons.

–

That’s all for Metric, the system that powers character creation in Disco Elysium. We hope you’ve enjoyed these posts and have gotten some interesting ideas for your build.

Next time we’ll talk about the Thought Cabinet, where you develop character traits for your cop, giving your skills new and strange side effects.

After that we’ll finally be ready to talk about the Elysium setting – its technology, geopolitics, schools of thought, and culture.

Till then.