Categorising a masterpiece like Disco Elysium is a difficult task.
At best, it is a story driven RPG crossed with a point and click adventure game, where you play an amnesia riddled, alcoholic, eccentric, confused, and incredibly dysfunctional police man.
At worst, it is a game that confronts you with second person exposition and makes you explore your very own psyche through the incredibly well written sequences of introspection.
This is a game that is best experienced with the keyboard and mouse. I tried to play it on the couch via Steam link with a controller, but the keyboard and mouse driven controls are much less frustrating.
You want to play with sound. The writing, and by extension, the voice acting; is sublime. It's something that works so very well all together. Visually, the game looks like an oil painting, and this adds to the broad strokes of "not truly knowing" everything that is going on around you.
Waking up with an incredible hang over, in a trashed hotel room, you have no idea who you are, where you are, or why you are. Stumbling around and conversing with a few people eventually gets you on the track.
Solve the murder. There's a man who has been lynched, and there's an entire system of people, each interconnected, all with their own agendas out to influence you on what you think really happened, and what should be written in the record.
As you explore, you discover more about how a dysfunctional, disenfranchised, systemic failure of society leads to the dim, somewhat sad world of Disco Elysium.
It is difficult to speak of the brilliance of this game without sprinkling spoilers into the words I type. I will do my very best to not commit this sin, because this is a story that is best explored alone. Like an insight into your own personality, you get out of this game whatever you put in.
Every dialogue option you are presented with allows you to appear to be a truly and exceptionally schizophrenic human being: at one moment responding with the most innocent child-like wonder; another; being an aggressive, assertive bastard - flashing your non existent cop-badge verbally.
You might find it eventually, but in order to do so, you will need to navigate a whole raft of circumstnaces and battle with one of the most obscure character sheets that you'll ever see in your life:
This is a game that you will largely play within your own head, as well as on the stream. Choices have consequences, and can exclude you from certain narrative paths. That's a good thing, because it works just like the real world does. Here, and there (in the real world) causality is a thing must be respected.
In spite of all the things I've said above that suggest that this game is a very serious, deep, philosophical game, I must prepare you for one thing.
This game is funny. It is hilarious, dark, ironic, analytical, and critical of almost everything you encounter - be it for the gripping commentary of objects in the environment as banal as a door knob, or the peeling paint on a door.
If Douglas Adams ever wrote a video game; he would be proud of how this game represented the English language, and the way in which it tells the story.
Playing through Disco Elysium is like picking up a novel that you know will be studied in schools in the future, but you may not live to see that day.
This game is a masterpiece, and is something that people who don't consider themselves gamers should play, just to absorb the atmosphere and the story. Explore; fail, learn, grow.
What a game. One of the very best ever, just because it twists the scant few words we have for describing that stuff between our ears in a mystical, comforting, disassociating scarf drenched in ether. The sweetest Ether.
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