Oct 15, 2019

Things I wish I knew before playing Disco Elysium

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut

Disco Elysium is an incredibly deep RPG and there's no right way to play. But there are a few things that might be useful to know when you first hit the mean streets of Martinaise, whether it's making some extra cash, figuring out how the in-game clock works, or escaping your partner's prying eyes.

Collect bottles

Look out for a yellow plastic bag. With this equipped you can pick up bottles, either from the ground or by rooting around in garbage cans. You can then exchange these in the Frittte convenience store for money. You won't make a fortune this way, but it might help you afford a bed for the night.

Always be tabbing

Similar to games like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment, holding the tab key highlights objects in the world that can be interacted with, containers, and NPCs. This is especially useful for finding hard-to-spot bottles. If it feels cheaty, just imagine it's your detective's finely honed senses.

Time passes as you talk

Time in Disco Elysium is not real-time. Rather, it's advanced primarily by talking to people. So whenever you're in a conversation, the clock will be ticking, moving the day forward. You can also make time pass by sitting on benches or reading, which is handy for objectives that are limited to a certain time.

Watch your tongue

It's tempting to exhaust every conversation option when talking to people in Disco Elysium, but this can sometimes be a bad idea. Think carefully before you press a tricky topic, because in this game it's possible to let something slip that can bite you in the ass later, or get someone else in hot water.

Run, stop, run

If you double click somewhere in the world your character will sprint there instead of his usual stroll. Well, it's more of a wheezy jog than a sprint, but it's reasonably fast. And if you want to stop moving suddenly, perhaps to click on point of interest that has just been revealed, slam the spacebar.

Breaking locks

Occasionally you'll encounter a container, or something in the environment like a sewer grate, with a grey outline. This usually means it can't be accessed with your bare hands, which is where the tools found in Lt. Kitsuragi's car come in handy. Equip the correct tool, try again, and the loot is yours.

Play dress up

Disco Elysium has an incredible selection of clothing to deck your detective out with, but they're more than just for making you look cool. Every piece of clothing comes with positive and negative stat modifiers, so if you're having trouble with a skill check, throwing on a hat might give you the edge.

Go with the flow

A game this heavy with skill checks means you'll be tempted to save scum. And while this is a perfectly valid way to play the game, because it's your life and you can do what you want, it's worth noting that failing a skill check in Disco Elysium can often lead to something interesting or unexpected.

Ditch your partner

I love Lt. Kitsuragi, but sometimes you need to be alone to complete certain tasks. To lose him, wait till nightfall then head towards whichever bed you happen to be crashing on that night. He'll wish you goodnight and turn in himself, leaving you free to wander back back into town solo.

Stay healthy

Occasionally an interaction will seriously damage your health or morale. You'll know this is happening by the health critical or morale critical message that flashes on the screen. In these situations a meter will start to drain and unless you quickly use a restorative item (pray you have one) it's game over.

Learn more about the world

If you love lore and world-building, stick some points into the Encyclopedia skill. This will give you little nuggets of information about pretty much everything that crops up in a conversation, from the complex history and politics of Disco Elysium's world to the nerdy specifics of weapons and vehicles.

Listen to your brain

Your broken brain is one of the chattiest characters in Disco Elysium, frequently piping up to remark on things, sabotage your thoughts, or otherwise mess with you. But sometimes these lines of dialogue give you subtle hints about the right thing to say in a conversation to get what you want.

Oct 8, 2019

Welcome to Revachol!

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut - ZAUM_Dani

When middle class people talk about foreign places, they like to talk about “contrasts”. Travel magazines, financial journals, regional reports on the news... it's all about those contrasts.

And what they mean by “contrasts” is that most people are pornographically poor while a few are obscenely wealthy. That's what they mean by contrasts. East of the river, monetary organizations promote regional stability, west of the river cops collect tare for cash and junkies shake so hard their bones come loose from their sockets.

There is no city in the world with more contrasts than Revachol. The broken, magnificent, disgraced former capital of the world. A great sky on fire, reflecting off broken glass. Revachol the Suzerain, Revachol the Commune, Revachol the Administrative Region where all forms of government have failed. Revachol the Resolver, the answer to the great burning questions of history. How should we live? Will the horror ever end?

Revachol sits on a fertile island in the middle of the Insulindian Ocean, the world's largest body of water; in the eye of a great archipelago called Face-A-La-Mer. To be from Revachol is to be Revacholian. To be deserted, destroyed. A drug addict with an immunodeficiency disorder. A joke and a clown and a loser baby.

It's like the hanged man behind the hostel cafeteria said: there's nothing funny about jokes.

There's nothing funny about you either. Your swollen face in the mirror. A past you don't recognize, a world you can't bear to remember. The river Esperance flows from north to south, splitting the city in two. In its delta, great ghosts rise to the sky – the financial district. To the east: Le Jardin. Houses with gardens rise along the mountainside, up to Saint-Batiste where two of the world's five largest companies keep their headquarters. But you don't wake up there – you wake up west of the river.

West of the river, it's funky-baby holocaust time all day every day. In East-Jamrock, wild animals roam the valley at night – giraffes that escaped from the Royal Zoo 50 years ago. Giraffes – even-toed ungulates from the savannah. The local kiosque chain Frittte (sic) employs a private army of 2000 men to guard its properties in Jamrock and Faubourg. That's how bad the crime rate is – you need a private army to run a kiosque chain. And deregulation? They built a citizen-funded primitive nuclear reactor on the river. And it immediately entered core meltdown. That's pretty deregulated if you ask me. Below Precinct 41 there's a kebab merchant called Kuklov who makes kebabs that make you immortal if you can eat three and survive. In Villalobos an entire street is walled off and turned into a poppy field by a deified gangster called The Mazda, while his mortal enemy La Puta Madre exclusively employs former narcotics officers to farm his own fields. Through underground tunnels, kids descend into Le Royaume, the resting place of three centuries’ worth of the royal dead, to bring up rat tails and the pearl-encrusted teeth of civil servants. Child labour dungeoneering is a cottage industry. Someone came up with a synthetic opiate called the hunch that has a high lasting for two seconds. You only feel it while you're injecting it.

Contrasts upon contrasts! So many juxtapositions of the old and the new. Dark shades and brilliant highlights. A city of opposites. A real mother fucking dialogue.

Loyalists (a euphemism for “fascists”) say it's all because of the failed Revolution, 50 years ago. If good, kind king Guillaume were still around, he'd drive the moneylenders and the homo-sexuals back into the ocean! Once we were an octopus that straddled the world, sucking up natural and human resources from Iilmaraa to South-East Seol. The city state that screwed the whole world. Then deranged commies pushed the king under a street car and lost the civil war to foreign intervention, damning us to financial servitude. The communists don't respond with anything – they're all dead. Okay, one is still alive and teaches cultural theory at the Ecole Normale de Revachol, east of the river. And there's talk of two more employed by a failed radio-game studio. But the rest are all dead, bulldozed into mass graves after the Coalition Army retook Revachol in '08.

In the ‘20s, the city was divided into zones de contrôle under foreign nations: the Mesque Zone, the Occident-Graad zone, and the International zone. The International Zone is west of the river. International means: no one gives a shit. It's no one's business.

Except yours.You've spent your entire life in the International Zone. As a police detective. In the Revachol Citizen's Militia, a citizen-funded police force as safe (and well-funded) as that nuclear reactor.

It has not been an easy life. Things have not gone well for you. That love thing didn’t work out. Radio networks criss-cross the air, spewing meaningless, feverish political rhetoric. Beyond the curve of the horizon, where the ocean ends, there is an unknowable anti-reality mass called the pale. It has been there for as long as human beings have written down history. And it's advancing.

The year is '52. It's the 5th of March and you're lying on the floor of the Whirling-In-Rags hostel cafeteria. In Martinaise, North Jamrock. The sound of Lieutenant Kitsuragi's motor carriage arriving on the scene interrupts what can only be described as an act of self-annulment through alcohol and amphetamine use. Your bell bottom pants make your ass look fat and, dear god, you think you've lost your badge.

It's up to you – and you alone – to save the whole world. To untie the great knot. To crack the case. To resolve reality. You are the last Revacholian hero. The Revacholian hero has nothing, but he must conquer everything. If he doesn't care, no one does. All of it will slowly roll into the heavens under the advancing pale, or it will contract into a singular miracle only the Revacholian hero can deliver.

All you have to help you in this – the last and the greatest of the cases undertaken by man on Earth, in the sheer face of death and history – is Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi from Precinct 57.

That's it.

There's a dead body in the tree. There are battle lines in the streets. 4 days remain until the district explodes in violence; 28 years remain until the end of the world. Every day, every second, every beat of your ailing heart matters

- Robert

You can get Disco Elysium on October 15th for 39.99 USD / 39.99 EUR / 34.99 GBP respectively.

Oct 5, 2019

Disco Elysium lets you be Sherlock in flares

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut

I've only just managed to get this dead man down from the tree. First I had to get past the stench, no easy feat since the body's been there a week, and then sever the industrial rope he was hanging from. My partner suggested getting help. Pfff.

I waved him away and shot through the rope in a rare display of competence. On my other save, where I created a character with less impressive physical stats, I can't even get close to the body without vomiting and instead have to psych myself up by going away to think about it for half an hour.

Disco Elysium will let you play the kind of detective you want. Its selection of stats and skills can mimic a variety of "copotypes" like the master of deduction, or the Columbo who always has just one more question, or the one who "just get these flashes", or who talks to dead people, and so on. Replaying its opening days I've been a tough guy who takes no nonsense and an unhinged sensitive who at one point began taking off his clothes to get a better sense of the air. "It's a technique of mine," I tried to explain to horrified onlookers as I unzipped my fly.

No matter what flavor of gumshoe you create though, your character is always a boozehound with amnesia, the one genre staple that remains true in every playthrough. You're always a loser who woke up on the floor missing a shoe.

Disco Elysium encourages you to play to your skillset by giving each skill a voice. In the classic text box where NPCs answer questions a skill like Authority will pop up to suggest that somebody needs to be manhandled, while Inland Empire—which takes subconscious insights and transforms them into dialogues with objects—has given my necktie the ability to suggest inappropriate things. Electro-Chemistry wants me to smoke a discarded cigarette butt while Visual Calculus is telling me the shoe size of footprints in the mud.

It's a glorious overflow of information. I have to block out irrelevant stuff like I'm telling Watson to shush because I'm on the edge of a breakthrough, for god's sake man just shut up, I'm trying to think here and I can't listen to you and my necktie at once.

To get prosaic for a second, all this is folded into a classic top-down RPG. I walk from location to location clicking on objects, picking up clues or just coins, then interrogating every character who will let me climb their dialogue tree. It's Planescape: Torment if instead of being based on Dungeons & Dragons it was more like Life on Mars or China Mieville's novel The City and The City.

The thing about mysteries is that everything hinges on the solution, and if it falls apart at the finish that makes the time spent getting there feel wasted. The opening hours of Disco Elysium give me confidence, though. The writing's perfect for the genre, poetic in a "Raymond Chandler sneaking something profound past his editor" way, and there's a lot of detail to uncover. A side task to explore abandoned shops that might be cursed blew out into something far bigger than I expected.

What's more, playing through the opening a second time with a different loadout was just as interesting, changing the tone like I was watching a reboot with a different director. Now I want to go back a third time as a supergenius who can analyze tire tracks and tell you what car they came from while snapping at my long-suffering sidekick. The game's afoot, even if I've only got one shoe.

Disco Elysium will be out on October 15.

Oct 3, 2019

Disco Elysium's developers are in a bloody battle for the human mind

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alice Bell)

When visiting ZA/UM’s studio, I had to take my boots off. This is because their studio, where they are putting the final touches on open world RPG Disco Elysium, is also a flat in a townhouse in Hove, where several of them live. It has nice wooden floors, unbelievably high ceilings, and a big bay window cradling some workstations. There’s also a bookshelf full of many different tabletop RPG rules and expansions, and other tabletop games.

Artist Mikk Metsniit makes black coffee in the kitchen, and Robert Kurvitz, lead designer and writer, proudly shows me all the miniatures for Kingdom Death (pointing out, in particular, the Flower Knight), and a set of display stands for Arkham Horror: The Card Game that they’d ordered specially from Etsy. Kurvitz collects TRPG rule books and other “nerd shit” both as a stress reliever and as research. This checks out, because Disco Elysium has its roots in almost two decades of Kurvitz’s nerd shit.

(more…)