It’s a strange place consisting of land masses separated by land and sea, with a lot of mist/smog contributing to a general lack of visibility. The game is set in the world of Elysium, which is plagued by relentless wars. Harry’s character arc takes him from bumbling sodden fool, to an increasing unstable mind, before some redemption by close of the story. The Development of Harry Du BoisĪs the player, you can take control of Harrier “Harry” Du Bois. Its themes of madness, heartbreak, post-war cultures, racism, pseudoscience, cryptozoology, polemics, and absurdity offer some of the best video game writing ever seen. If you don’t play video games, but love literature, then I do suggest you put your concerns aside and try Disco Elysium. You learn, advance, solve puzzles, read, and wonder.
It’s an experiential thing-play the game, marvel at its vastness, enjoy the moments you trigger off by your decisions. Much the same way as I have with Disco Elysium. Well, I just dove in and pieced things together based on intriguing segments. Minus a traditional novel structure, where do you begin? The prose of characters merges together, often from one paragraph to the next. I had this problem with Sartre’s The Reprieve, which was written in simultaneous prose. That’s made picking bits of dialogue from Disco Elysium a tad tricky. Even if you did, it couldn’t function here as it’s interactive storytelling. Frankly, it’d be pointless to gather it all together. Now, sadly, due to the nature of the experience there’s no official complete text of the work available. The likes of ZA/UM sweep away the awkwardness to showcase how narrative can and should function in video games. To this day, there’s still a lot of embarrassing, ham-fisted narratives in the industry that are juvenile and stuck 30 years in the past. As this is a landmark achievement in gaming. It has the scope of a Solzhenitsyn epic, merged with dark humour and a sense of enterprise-an ambitious project looking to do something pioneering. Plenty of existential considerations and flirtations with hungover philosophising amongst a sense of growing madness and heartbreak. Oh yeah! I rate it big time.Īfter playing the game, I classed it as a sodden mixture of Bukowski meets Venedikt Yerofeev’s Moscow Stations. And it is brilliant.ĭisco Elysium is at #6 in my list of the best indie games of all time. The game launched in 2019 and was a big critical hit, winning numerous Game of the Year awards. Disco Elysium and the Exploration of Heartbreak and Drunken Acceptance Rightly so! It’s incredible, which is why I want to explore the game’s universe to consider its depths and depravities. Helen Hindpere was also a lead writer on the project and won all manner of awards for her work.
DISCO ELYSIUM COMMUNISM PLUS
You can think of these as a kind of Choose Your Own Adventure book-you guide the story by picking what your characters says to various characters you meet.īy doing so, you develop out an impressive narrative structure veering from hilarious dark humour to stark tragedy.Įstonian novelist Robert Kurvitz (and founder of ZA/UM) wrote the structure for the game, plus he also designed it (an indicator of how talented people in the games industry are). It develops the narrative through extensive dialogue trees. It’s a critically-acclaimed one, too, by the London-based indie developer ZA/UM.ĭespite all the fancy pants graphics and excellent soundtrack by British Sea Power, the driving force of the experience is its brilliant dialogue. Plus, point-and-click adventure games such as the Monkey Island series.ĭisco Elysium fits into both genres, but it’s officially classed as an RPG. Most notably in the many and varied role-playing games (RPGs) since the 1980s. But to think that is to do them a major disservice.įor a long time, there have been a lot of impressive, narrative-driven video games. If you don’t play video games, they may seem far removed from literature and narrative structure.
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