Getting Down With Disco Elysium

 So, I started playing Disco Elysium.

The game's four years old, and I've heard amazing things about it, but I was, and frankly am still, a little wary of its format. I've bounced off of Baldur's Gate and Planescape Torment because I just didn't jive with their gameplay style, even if (especially in the latter case) I'm very curious about the story.

Disco Elysium clearly builds off of that gameplay format. For example, a big part of the game appears to be dialogue streams where you have numbered potential responses. Honestly, it's not actually all that different from the conversation wheels in Mass Effect.

But Disco Elysium might be closer to an adventure game - I haven't had any "combat" yet, and I don't really expect to.

You play as an amnesiac police officer who went on a multi-day bender of drugs and booze and remembers literally nothing, but soon discovers that you're actually there to investigate the apparent murder of a man hanging from a tree behind the hostel in which you woke up.

The world is not ours - I'm scratching the surface of it, but it appears we're in a place called Ravechol, and within that, in a neighborhood or city called Martinaise.

Things are run-down and bleak, just like our character, whose face is frozen through some kind of nerve damage or something into "The Expression," which was apparently something some rock star had as a signature decades earlier when Disco became very popular.

The bleak 1970s-ish setting is one of the signature aspects of the game, but probably the most distinctive is that our character has internal conversations with different instincts and mental processes in his brain, which have idiosyncratic names and distinctive voices.

These elements of our mind are also our main stats - I haven't actually leveled up yet, but you can pick various character builds (I chose "Sensitive," one of the three default ones) that emphasize the influence of certain traits, and these can be leveled up.

And, in various situations, these traits will pop up to give you advice and options on how to proceed.

I have no idea if I'm playing "well" or even if that's a thing one can do.

Back when I was a kid, I used to play the Space Quest games with my best friend, along with some King's Quest and Quest for Glory. The latter incorporated RPG elements and combat, but the former two were pretty strictly adventure games - you explored an environment, maybe collected items for your inventory, and then used those items to overcome the environmental puzzles (often in really non-obvious ways that made using a guide very appealing, even if that sort of defeated any challenge in the game).

And I sort of get that vibe from this - so far at least, it seems to be mostly about uncovering this mystery, and trying to talk to people in a way that helps you progress your case.

But I'm also barely into the game - I've gotten out of the first building, looked at the corpse (and threw up) and talked to the punk kids hurling rocks at it, and then talked to a girl outside a bookstore. Oh, and I might have talked to a ghost over a PA system?

Early on, you meet your partner - actually another cop sent from another precinct who might actually be there to solve the case before you do, but he seems to be working with you for now at least. The fact that you can tell him you have total retrograde amnesia and his response is more or less "hm, that sucks, and you should probably do something about that, but let's take care of this case first" says a lot.

This does not seem to be a great world to live in.

Anyway, I'm going to try to keep plugging away at the game. There's potential here.