Sometimes I've mentioned before the discussions about games being art, and that some games are especially good at transmitting this. And today I wanna talk about Disco Elysium, which is such a spectacular example.
Disco Elysium is a game about communism, and how it failed. About a dying world. About second chances. About the past dragging us down and preventing us to evolve. About how there's major powers that are not letting us thrive. About the ridiculousness of purity culture and how we're our own worst enemy sometimes. About insanity, religion, decadence, corruption and state violence. About resignation and resistance and about doing what you can instead of trying and failing to do everything. The game affects you deeply, takes hold of you and doesn't let you go. The game is funny, sarcastic, tender, sad, deep, profound. The game can be played in lots of different ways, and have different outcomes to different situations while being the same game. This game changes you.
The game itself is a kind-of roleplaying game with isometric perspective, where you can equip things from your inventory, click on things to inspect them and choose between options when talking or analysing things. You start the game and have to select how to split 12 points between 4 main characteristics, which have each 6 sub-characteristics. You can assign from 1 to 6 in each of these, without passing the 12 points total. This will stay like that in your game, but as you level up it's possible to increase sub-characteristics. These 24 different sub-characteristics determine how you interact with the world. Everything you do gets a skill check against one of those (at least, sometimes against several of those), and a dice roll plus your points in that sub-characteristic determines if you succeed or not. That's the whole game, you explore things, you talk with people, and you roll the dice (or it's done in the background as you speak) and, well, things happen and are narrated to you. As you finish quests and gain xp you can level up and either increase the points in a sub-characteristic or unblock a though process or remove a thought. Thoughts happen to you as you advance, and if you work on them they can give you special abilities or bonuses, plus they develop your thoughts as well.
You start the game naked, on the floor of a hotel room with no memories. What is clear is that, 1-you've had some kind of auto-destructive binge that was the last straw in a chain of auto-destructive binges related to an ex-wife and 2-You're insane: the 24 sub-characteristics of you mind are talking to you, all the time, recommending things to do, giving you insights and their thoughts on all the matters.
Soon after recovering some clothes and talking with people, you discover that you're a police officer, that you have a new partner that has come to join you today, and that there's a very dead body of a mercenary hanging from a tree behind the hotel, quite ripe after more than a week there. You need to find who did it and why, prevent the rest of the mercenaries from killing the union workers who they suspect killed the guy and try to put peace in this neighbourhood of this city, Revachol, the centre of the world, the cadaver of a region that tried to be communist and got bombed to hell and invaded by the coalition of the rest of the world.
The world is dying, and so are you most probably, as you're an older guy that has abused substances too much out of depression and finally managed to get enough brain damage to somehow start from scratch and piece yourself together.
What follows is an investigation in which you talk with everyone, you manage to influence local politics, you try to keep peace and really find the truth, plus to find some tether to keep you going and find beauty in the destroyed buildings and bombed areas, where you try to find inexistent animals, where you meet corrupt union leaders, good people, a fanatic liberal, the last few real communists that are too busy arguing and making pamphlets, old warriors, young drug addicts, fascists, assassins, strike-breaker scum, people lost in the edges of society and a mess of a city that feels alive and decaying at the same time. And also, you find hope. In little things, in recovery, in healing, and in revolution, in a way. Hope made from other people and from friendliness and collaboration. Hope as resistance from an uncaring world, against all odds and reasons.
This game is a statement. It's precious. It's a fucking work of art. And to really experience it you need to try it and discover what it contains by yourself.
This game is such a good political discourse that their creators got cheated by the publishing company and they lost the rights to their world and their story. They're not getting money out of it, so yeah, find copies, download it and play. Their message is important, the money for the publisher is not.
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