Part 1: What Did I Do Last Night?
The Victorian
Elven Supremacist
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hello and welcome to my Let's Play of Disco Elysium, developed by ZA/UM and released in October of 2019. Now, this game has been sitting in my Steam library for over a year now, and for whatever reason I've never gotten around to playing it until now. And from what I can tell, this game has something of a...polarizing...nature. Depending on whom you talk to, Disco Elysium is either the true inheritor of Planescape: Torment's legacy, or a heap of pseudo-intellectual trash that isn't half as clever as it thinks it is. It's also notorious for being unashamedly political, and I don't mean "political" in that the way that chuds call something "political" whenever they see a gay person their video games, but in the sense that Disco Elysium deals with explicitly political themes in a way that's rare for the medium. The developers are also evidently communists (they gave a shout-out to Marx and Engels in an award speech), which is certainly not an ideology I share, and I've noticed that this game tends be quoted a lot by some, shall we say, very insufferable and terminally online leftists.
But we can't actually judge this game until we play it, can we? So let's dive in.
(Please note that this is a blind Let's Play, so please refrain from posting any spoilers in the replies).
Like any proper RPG, we begin with character creation, starting off with our basic ability scores:
I'm not going to be doing anything too extreme for our first time around. If this game truly is the spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment, then it's likely that mental skills will be more important than physical skills, but hey...who knows how things will turn out?
Next up we need to choose our signature skill, and there are a lot to choose from:
What's interesting is that, while the game informs you that having low proficiency in a skill is a bad thing, it might also be a bad idea to have too much proficiency in it. For example, too high a level of Encyclopedia might "clutter our mind with useless tidbits," and all of a sudden I feel personally attacked. But that's what I'm picking, since our character is probably the sort of person who'd pepper NPCs with a barrage of obscure references to places and people they've never heard of.
(Interestingly, one of the skills is named "Inland Empire." Is that a David Lynch reference?)
So with that out of the way, we begin the game proper.
We begin in all-consuming darkness (which we'll soon learn is because we've gotten black-out drunk), which our "Ancient Reptilian Brain" informs us has "no ex-wives contained within it," which is a rather strange thought to think, all things considered. We can try to focus on this whole "ex-wife" bit, but come up empty.
And then we wake up:
So, in most RPGs, you might be playing a mighty warrior. Or a wizard. Or a sexy blonde elf. But in Disco Elysium, you're playing as someone lying face down in his underwear, having trashed his apartment (a hostel, actually) in a days-long alcoholic bender. And apparently said bender was so intense that not only did we forget what we look like, we don't even recall what our name is!
As if that weren't bad enough, there's a garish-looking necktie hanging from the ceiling fan, which has some rather...grim...implications:
I'm not a big drinker by any stretch, but there have been nights where I've over-indulged, and yes, the morning after certainly isn't pleasant. But this looks about a hundred times worse, not helped by the revelation our character has terrible fashion sense.
Anyway, time to shuffle into the bathroom and have in the look in the mirror. Our Inland Empire skill suggests that we may not like what we'll see:
Aw, come on...how bad could it be?
Well, that's just great. Not only are we afflicted with crippling alcoholism, we also have this goofy, shit-eating grin that we apparently can't get rid of (unless you pass a difficult Electrochemistry check, which we don't). We are asked what "The Expression" is trying to convey, and we give the obvious answer: It's an expression of pain.
(Formally, the term for having a swollen, reddish noise is rhinophyma, and while commonly linked to alcoholism (to the point where it's sometimes called "Whisky Nose" or "Gin Blossom"), the actual causal link between these two factors is less clear)
So that's what this game is gonna be, huh? We're playing as an utter derelict, like The Namelesse One's booze-addled, down-on-his-luck cousin. Well, at least there's nowhere to go but up after hitting rock bottom, right?
We find a solitary green shoe in the room, and after some detective work we ascertain that we likely threw the other one out the window. Since we can't go about...whatever it is we're supposed to be about...with only one shoe, our next goal should to be retrieve the other one. Outside the room, we meet a woman named Klaasje, who fills us in on some of the details we've blanked out on. Specifically, that we are a cop, and that we've spent the last few days getting absolutely shitfaced. During this time, we apparently started singing a song titled "The Smallest Church in Saint-Saëns", and at one point we screamed something about how we "didn't want to be this type of animal anymore."
We can also attempt to get...physical...with her, which seems like a bad idea:
Yeah, I don't think The Expression is going to be charming anyone, mate.
She also mentions that we are in the city of Revachol, which the Encyclopedia skill helpfully informs us is the "disgraced former capital" of the world, having been divided into "zones of control under foreign occupation" half a century after the "failed world revolution." And the name "Revachol" is amusing to me, since not only does it sound like "alcohol," the word reva just so happens to mean "vagina" in Finnish.
(One of our potential responses is simply "Revachol forever," which is an odd thing to say, considering we had no idea what that was just a second ago)
So we're a cop...I sure hope there wasn't any sort of...cop stuff...that we ought to have been doing during all this time...
Downstairs we can talk to the cafeteria manager (who isn't too happy about us trashing his hostel), and then we notice a spot of dried, sticky rum on a nearby counter:
You know, we must be in a really bad way if we've been reduced to licking up drink stains in our desire for booze. I'm reminded of a story about Jean-Claude Van Damme who, during the height of his drug addiction, would often try to snort the bits of cocaine that had fallen onto the carpet, to the point where he'd wake up with bits of carpet fuzz inside his nose.
We get a quest to go find ourselves a drink...but perhaps we shouldn't? I mean, if we're at the point where we're trying to hang ourselves from a ceiling fan during a drunken bender, then perhaps it's time to re-evaluate our life choices...or at the very least keep ourselves from dying of liver failure.
Nearby, we find our partner, Kim Kitsuragi:
Okay, I get it: Kim's the straight man in our little buddy cop comedy duo.
He asks about a dead body in a tree, and about interviewing people, and we deftly try to conceal the fact that we haven't done any of that stuff during our days-long drinking binge. Unfortunately, it falls a bit flat when we are unable to recall our own name. Yeah, I don't think we'll be able to talk our way out of the fact that we fucked up, big time.
We also get a quest to do some karaoke, but to do so we'll need a tape first (I'm not sure what level of technology this world operates at yet, but apparently people listen to music on reel-to-reel tape players). On top of all that, we also have actual police work to do, assuming we can overcome our seemingly insurmountable shortcomings. One thing's for certain, though: it certainly won't be boring.
