Disco Elysium2019

Disco Elysium is one of the few games where you not only play, but literally immerse yourself. You wake up as a hungover, totally neglected detective in a run-down hotel room with no memory of your name, your profession or why your service weapon is missing. From then on, you not only clear up a murder case in the city of Revachol, but also who you actually are or want to be. The best part of the game is writing. The lyrics are really strong and unlike anything else you know. Even a fucking broken backyard or a rusty lantern are described so beautifully that you really read it almost like in a novel. And the tone of the descriptions constantly jumps back and forth between clever and totally tricky. There are skills like logic, empathy, or hallucination constantly talking in your head and commenting on everything. Each has its own personality. One is pedantic and cool, the other over-twisted and careless. So you’re not just talking to other people, you’re talking to yourself all the time. Sometimes the voices argue, sometimes they complement each other and sometimes they say something extremely apt. The fact that they are so often wrong and you still like them is one of the greatest strengths of the game. Dice games decide on success and failure, depending on whether you win or lose decides on the further course of the game. The characters are also great. Even people who only appear in one scene have their own way of talking, their own story and often more depth than you think. Almost no one is just good or bad. People are tired, proud, embittered, full of hope or simply failed and all have their reasons. This makes conversations feel like real encounters and not like gathering information. The game also has such an incredible world building. Especially the politics within the world is so fantastic, definitely more exciting than what is happening in Germany. Disco Elysium also manages to get an incredibly good mix of emotions out of one, in one moment I laughed and 5min later it is incredibly melancholy. The good thing is that Disco Elysium does not manage to overwrite the serious and difficult topics with the humor. In addition, Disco Elysium also has a mentally ill soundtrack and an incredibly good synchro. The best part of the game is the protagonist. The protagonist is one of the best written characters I've ever seen, so really holy shit, it's so incredibly complex. It is incredible how many possibilities there are to play him, for example as a morbid nihilist or as a thoughtful and good-hearted detective. Visually, the game is also incredibly beautiful, Disco Elysium looks like an oil painting from the optical point of view all the time. Nevertheless, Disco Elysium is again incredibly much reading and almost on visual novel level of the reading part, which itches me but not. The bottom line is that Disco Elysium is a masterpiece and a real proof that video games can be their own kind of literature. It is smart, sad, absurd and human at the same time and you have the feeling that you have really experienced something. .

Translated from German·Show original