When I began my playthrough of Disco Elysium, as part of my personal ‘I should play a bunch of RPGs this year’ project1, I had no intention of including it in Head Space. I was just a younger and more naive person, less wise in the mechanics of brain management that Disco would go on to teach me. It is a game deeply interested in examining the mechanics of the intellect and personality, and now I have no choice but to dive deep on it2.
A strange beast, is Disco Elysium. You play a sad sack old police detective who wakes up after an epic bender to find he has forgotten literally everything about himself and the world, which inconveniently coincides with him having to solve a murder in the middle of a contentious strike on the brink of violence. This all takes place in a completely foreign world with different history, science, geopolitics, etc. etc. than our own. And it’s played as a classic isometric dice-rolling RPG, except there’s virtually no combat or action and almost everything you roll for is some kind of mental process or conversational gambit.
I don’t really want to go on and on gushing about the story or the world of the game. I could, but it would do it no justice. And it would spoil or undermine everything you would get actually experiencing it for yourself. If you think you might have an interest in this kind of game and are up for a very good and weird story, give this a go.
Instead I’ll focus on the nuts and bolts and the headspace of it all. I think of amnesia as a pretty seriously overdone trope in fiction generally, and especially in video games. Since you often have to identify AS a character in games (and in the case of RPGs also actually create/build that character), it becomes a very handy crutch to give the player a blank slate to project themselves onto. That’s certainly an aspect of what Disco is doing here, but in reality they are using amnesia launching point to do some much deeper and thoughtful things.
Your character, which you can establish a baseline of at the start of the game, has 24 qualities falling under 4 categories to build on. These come into play over the course of checks, some of which occur automatically and some of which you can choose to take. But in your splintered and melted down amnesia brain, all these aspects manifest as individual personalities. During a conversation Drama, that gossip, will inform you that you’re definitely being lied to. Then maybe Logic make some kind of laborious deduction about the speaker’s motives. Encyclopedia, the bore, might chime in with some helpful context3. The more you put into these traits the more often and more helpfully they will manifest.
That’s the mechanics of how you process things, but it’s basically just varied competencies. They have no real bearing on who you are as a person. Which is what you determine over the course of the game. As you reply to prompts, the game will take stock of your values and start to give you basic, and then more elaborate, archetypal qualities, that it calls ‘copotypes’. These can be further developed with ‘Thoughts’, which take time to process and then unlock a new personality wrinkle with some bonuses and which might come up in conversations. Here are some achievements I got based on my “personality”.
As you can see, I was a pretty boring person (communism notwithstanding4). This is a pretty common trend for me with games that allow you the chance to establish your own personality. The truth is, when I am provided specific hypothetical scenarios with no real world consequences, I usually just choose to be pretty normal as I would in real life. This is because a) I want to actually do good at the game and making the weirdest choices in life is not usually productive, b) the weird choices in games are so often the WEIRD choice that gives off a lolrandom vibe that feels as banal as the boring choice but more pointless, and c) it rarely coincides with my goal in conversation to bring up communism or whatever. The game actually anticipates this problem and has a tip in the loading screen about it.
It all but says “you can say the dumbest thing and the characters won’t be bothered by it, don’t worry about it”. And yet even after I saw this (already many hours into the game), I didn’t much feel like picking out options. I just roleplay too seriously! If I couldn’t imagine saying some dumb non-sequitor in a conversation I’m not going to say it virtually. And part of the problem is that some of trait based dialogue is quite dumb non-sequitory. Initially it seemed like all I got was:
Normal answer A
Normal answer B
Trying to steer conversation to communism
Trying to steer conversation to capitalism
lolrandom
Bad cop
The answers would sometimes skew a more interesting direction based on context or on parts of my personality already established, but by and large none ever appealed to me. This is mostly because they just weren’t relevant to the conversation I was having5. But also because, per the loading screen, it didn’t really matter if I did!
This is a problem I have with RPGs generally and Disco Elysium is no exception: They only give you the illusion of choice. Or, to maybe be more precise, they give you no choice in what you end up doing, only in how you do it. The Main Questline hangs over us and ultimately we will all fall in line with it. Will we have 3 or 4 options about how that main questline resolves? Sure! But that’s a pretty poor excuse for real freedom.
This is all besides the point of your inner voices. I think the interior development you get in the game is really cool6, and I don’t know whether its faults are more its own or just me being boring. The Thoughts system is cool, but you have to spend a skillpoint to unlock slots for them. Eventually you get bonuses from them, as though you’d just put skill points into your traits, but it’s not actually clear what the bonus will be until the thought has processed. There are dozens of these thoughts to unlock and I imagine they open up a lot of interesting doors, but I don’t think the game really incentivizes exploring them. I imagine there’s tons of interesting stuff I didn’t touch, though I do feel like I played through pretty much all of the actual substance (i.e. quests) in the game.
And, as much as I might gripe about how this game feels in execution, I think that’s rather petty stuff. It’s one of those experiences that’s so singular and so interesting and so new that I get swept up in the promise of it and I can’t help but imagine the truly perfect object it could be. But as it is it’s probably, conservatively, in the top 10 most interesting games I’ve ever played. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time, with my normal linear brain.
Coming up next time, I try to spice up my dreamscape with a little movie called… Paprika!
For those waiting with breathless anticipation to hear the next game on the docket, it’s Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.
It also manages to be the first subject I’ve hit that isn’t entirely or mostly preoccupied with dreams, which I made clear in my mission statement is not specifically what Head Space is all about. So I gotta take what I can get.
This is all very cool, but consider that almost every single written word in this game is voice acted and you will realize that conversations will start to take A LOT of time. This turns parsing text into the majority of the game, where it’s usually a small part of most RPGs. (You can jump through the dialogue without listening to it, but this feels bad and like it’s defeating the point of the whole experience).
Although if you’ve met enough self-identifying communists you know that it’s not exactly mutually exclusive with boring.
Assuming it’s not mostly because I’m a boring apologetic neoliberal centrist.
It feels like you go from being a mental and physical toddler to a fully developed person over the course of the game, and not just in superficial +1 to intelligence and strength way.