So, then. Disco Elysium, like Planescape: Torment, or even Fallout or Arcanum, is an isometric RPG with a lot of text. You, an alcoholic, probably drug-addicted cop in early middle age, wake up to face a new partner, a lynching that needs solving, and an apocalyptic hangover that has wiped your memory. So, you start the work of learning… well, everything.

I managed to stumble through solving a murder as an amnesiac alternate-’70s detective in much less than the 60 hours ZA/UM have set as their “back of the box” number for a complete run, although I don’t doubt that there are that many hours of entertainment (and more) to be had in it. Just not all during one playthrough.

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The Disco Elysium Thought Cabinet is one of the game’s defining features. And that’s saying something, considering the many different ways in which ZA/UM have deviated from the traditional RPG structure. In Disco Elysium, it’s not just tools and clothes that you can equip but also Thoughts that you can mull over and adopt, almost always with both positive and negative results.

Our Disco Elysium Thoughts guide will explain the Thought Cabinet as clearly as possible, from how you gain access to different Thoughts to how you can use them, and how they change the game for you in return. It’s a bit of a head-scratcher at first, but stick with it and you’ll come to realise the benefits of this novel system.

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The Disco Elysium skills and character creation system, much like the game itself, is big, brilliant, bizarre, and bewildering. With the four primary abilities of Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics each influencing a set of six distinct secondary skills, there’s an enormous amount to learn and figure out before you even begin to delve into the story itself.

Our Disco Elysium skills guide will walk you through how character creation in Disco Elysium works, before explaining each of the 24 skills at your disposal and how each one can change your story – for better or worse.

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I am still figuring out what I think of Disco Elysium, but I can say with some certainty that it is the first game where I have done a small fistpump and thought to myself, “Yeah, you really nailed telling that woman you found her husband’s body! Nailed it! Best cop ever!”

Disco Elysium is a very dense RPG, where you play an amnesiac alcoholic detective trying to solve a) a murder and b) his identity. As part of the latter quest, the game takes note of your words and actions, and uses them to build an outline of your personality traits. Then it suggests a “copotype” that you roughly adhere to. Until quite recently it suggested I was a “Boring Cop”. I was, as you can imagine, livid at this.

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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.

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While the fascinating surreal detective RPG, Disco Elysium should come to a tidy conclusion when it launches this month, developer ZA/UM say that should they get the possibility to make a sequel… well, they have some ideas. Chief among these is the option for a pregnant woman as a second protagonist, which sounds potentially wild in a wordy RPG where your inner thoughts and physical body claim a presence far greater than numbers on a character sheet. Our Alice Bee chatted with with ZA/UM about that and more when she recently visited them, and has oh so much to tell us about that soon. For now, have a snippet of sequel chat.

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Do you like hearing indie devs spilling the beans about the secrets of game design? Would you also like to see the lovely faces of RPS coaxing said developers to spill those beans at the same time? Well then, you better get yourself over to the Rezzed Sessions stage on Friday October 18th at EGX 2019, as we’ll be hogging the stage from 2.30pm onwards as we grill some friendly developers that just happened to walk into our big indie dev net. From the making of NoCode’s space horror game Observation to how to make an RPG like Disco Elysium, here’s the line-up for the second day of EGX 2019, which runs October 17th-20th at London’s ExCeL.

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Surreal detective thriller Disco Elysium sounds too good to be true, so weird and clever and fascinating that I’ve been happy for it to live in the dream space of what might be rather than face it in the real world as an actual concrete game I can actually play and potentially be disappointed by. That bliss will soon end, as developers ZA/UM today announced a release date of October 15th for the game formerly known as No Truce With The Furies. God, I hope it’s truly glorious. It might just be. Here, see a bit more in this new trailer.

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New year, old friends. The boys and girls of the RPS podcast have not been reborn, they have no resolutions, no ambitious goal to learn German or eat more spinach. They just want to play more videogames. Unbelievable. So let s listen to them chat about the shooters and RPGs that have them most excited. That s what they do on these podcasts, you know, they just talk nonsense. And they get PAID for it. It s outrageous, if you ask me, a nameless publication byline.

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A good writer should know when to deliver an old clich or familiar idiom, and when to hold them back. They can give the reader a sense of comfort, a lifeline to cling to in a sea of unfamiliar or complex verbiage, or be the anchor that drags them down into boredom.

I knew I was going to like Disco Elysium, because people I trust told me I would. And I did very much enjoy the first spin wash of vomit on the laundry of alcoholism that is being the lead character in this detective-em-up RPG. But I felt that I had still to unlock what was special about the game. This happened when I played it for the second time, on the EGX show floor last week, because the second time I played Disco Elysium I found my missing shoe. The first time I played I only found the first one.

So you could say that the other shoe>… confirmed an expectation I d been waiting for.

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