Disco Elysium - The Final Cut Video Game Review (About In Description)
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[Editors Note: Our original 2019 review of Disco Elysium has been updated to reflect the changes and improvements in Disco Elysium - The Final Cut.]
Like all good detective stories, what appears simple at first becomes so much more than that in Disco Elysium – and here it gets so, so much weirder, too. It takes the age-old mechanics of tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons and twists them in strange ways around a macabre tale of violence, poverty, and a society on the brink of collapse. Through sharply written dialogue and an expertly crafted world, it uses some unique game mechanics - such as debating against 24 different sections of your own brain - to create a story that will stay with me for a long time. And, somehow, it manages to make all of this fun and, surprisingly often, funny. Now with the addition of a fully voiced cast and even more side quests to embark on, The Final Cut makes an amazing game even better.
The premise of Disco Elysium is straightforward: A body has been discovered, hanged from a looming tree in the backyard of a hostel, and it’s up to you to work out how it got there over the course of the 30-hour story. Everything that surrounds this core mystery is far from simple, however, not least being that you kick things off with an almighty dose of hangover-induced amnesia. You can’t even remember your name, let alone that you are a cop on a murder case. A part of your consciousness described as your ancient reptilian brain – which you literally engage in conversation with – attempts to persuade you to give up your quest even as your snivelling limbic system battles against it. As you stumble around your wrecked bedroom searching for remnants of your former self, it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t simply a whodunnit, but a journey that will challenge you to solve crises on both profoundly personal and societal levels. It’s a gorgeously designed isometric RPG that makes you think at every turn of its painterly streets.
Learn, Baby Learn
The first decision you have to make when booting up Disco Elysium is what kind of detective you wish to be: Intelligent (think Sherlock Holmes), Sensitive (think Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks), or Bruiser (think Marv from Sin City). Each determines the base stats for your nameless gumshoe and influences the decisions offered to you from the get-go, but they all offer an interesting way to play. For example, opening with the Intelligent build allows you to instantly decipher that you have woken in the city of Revachol as your high Encyclopedia skill level feeds you that knowledge. Begin with the Sensitive option, however, and you’ll have no idea where you are and will have to piece together that same information. The beauty of Disco Elysium’s skill system is that there’s always a reward for the choices you have made – a Sensitive might not know where he is, but he can start interrogating his necktie for clues. Yes, really.
The beauty of Disco Elysium’s skill system is that there’s always a reward for the choices you have made.
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If that isn’t varied enough for you, you can build your own detective from the ground up instead. Your character sheet is made up of four distinct pillars: Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics. Each of these consists of six wonderfully strange skills (like Intellect’s Encyclopedia), which bring their own bonuses. Want to command respect from a member of the public? Spend points on Authority. How about intimidate a witness? Beef up your Physical Instrument total. Want to talk to that necktie? Start messing with the David Lynch-inspired Inland Empire measurement.
Final Cut - Hearing Yourself Think
Disco Elysium - The Final Cut expands its original cast to include fully voiced performances for every character, but none make more of an impact than the 24 different sections of your brain that accompany you throughout your journey. To emphasize just how important they are, roughly half of the more than one million words spoken in this sprawling RPG belong to your character’s innermost thoughts. Voicing all two dozen of these cerebral incarnations is jazz musician Lenval Brown, who masterfully breathes new life into ZA/UM’s tome of a script.
His bass-heavy, calming yet authoritative voice guides you as much as it does educate you on the world of Revachol. The casting for this role was always going to be crucial to the success of The Final Cut, but after hearing the gravitas and depth Brown brings to it, it’s hard to imagine Disco Elysium any other way.
These skills aren’t just passive ways of sending you down different paths; each one is a distinct voice in your detective’s head, represented in the dialogue window during conversations. With high Empathy you might get a voice telling you not to push too hard in a victim interrogation, but with high Half Light (a skill that allows your to interrogate suspects with more force) your brain might tell you to just punch them in the face. They’re as much in-game tip