Jason Schreier

Disco Elysium

Kotaku

November 7, 2019

unscored

The most important thing about Disco Elysium, an oddly titled role-playing game that came out last month for PC, is that it’s funny. Set in a beautifully ugly world of smudged watercolors and throbbing noir music, Disco Elysium appears at first to be the type of game that might take itself too seriously. It seems nihilistic, dropping not-so-subtle messages that its writers believe everything sucks. Fascists bombed the city. The union leaders are corrupt. The cops are jerks. But there’s a warmth to the game that reveals itself over time, largely thanks to its fantastic sense of humor. Following a branch of dialogue is just as likely to lead to a long-winded treatise about communist philosophy as it is to result in your character dying from a heart attack because he got exhausted trying to remove his tie from a ceiling fan.