Disco Elysium’s RPG choices don’t just deal in shades of grey, but the full rainbow of life’s ups, downs and inbetweens.
Lots of games want you to believe they deal in shades of grey. Mass Effect ’s Paragon and Renegade system lets you shuffle your feet between intergalactic Good Cop and Bad Cop, your appearance in the Fable series visibly alters as you go from delightful to dastardly, and BioShock lets you murder-harvest weird little kids… or not. But Disco Elysium, the hit PC RPG now available on PlayStation 4 and PS5 and soon coming to the Nintendo Switch, doesn’t just deal in shades of grey. It deals in hangover-purples, blood reds and nauseous greens. It’s unlike any other narrative driven game I’ve ever played, and the first where I truly have no idea what will happen next. One of the key mistakes that many gaming morality systems make is that, despite giving the illusion of choice, they tend to lock you into one of just two paths. “Min/maxing” a heroic or evil stat usually brings with it some sort of reward, be that an achievement or a power unlock for being a saint or right bastard. You find yourself gravitating to one alignment or another in order to pick up its ultimate prize, even if the choices offered up don’t really suit your character. They deliver custom, gated pieces of the overall experience, rather than melding in with the game as a whole. Disco Elysium is not so simple. As much an interactive novel as it is a role playing game, it revels in words and all their possibilities for nuance, depth and confusion. It takes the amnesiac hero trope and runs with it – letting you piece together not only who you once were through your dialogue choices, but who you want to be through your interactions with the world and its inhabitants.
