Revisión de Disco Elysium

RPG Ambrosía

Disco Elysium es un juego que es implacablemente desafiante, no solo en su jugabilidad, sino en cada puntada de su tapiz. Rezuma intelectualismo, cada conversación rebosa de guiños a culturas y conceptos tanto reales como imaginarios. Cuando entrevistamos al diseñador principal Robert Kurvitz sobre el juego, nos dijo que sus orígenes tienen sus raíces en los juegos de rol de lápiz y papel que exploró con amigos, incluidos muchos en el estudio ZA/UM, y se volvieron “muy intelectuales”. ”. 

Eso es un eufemismo. Está claro que el juego es el resultado de un deseo de realizar su construcción del mundo suficientemente en forma narrativa; pasar incluso un par de horas explorando la ciudad de Revachol dará fe de ello. Este es un juego de rol que te permite hablar extensamente con un racista que realmente cree que su linaje es el pináculo de la evolución humana y puede ofrecer lo que él cree que es una prueba biológica, ancestral y cultural para ese fin. Bromearás con una abuela sin hogar que casualmente escupe fragmentos de portugués. Escucharás a una mujer en silla de ruedas hablar líricamente sobre criptozoología con la esperanza de que estés lo suficientemente interesado como para ir en busca de su esposo desaparecido. Tendrás discusiones con tu corbata. Y si eres fanático de la escritura sublime, disfrutarás casi cada segundo.

“¡RESPETARÁS MI AUTORIDAD!”

Tanto en el juego de rol como en la narración, Disco Elysium brilla. Tu protagonista, un lío alcohólico e hinchado con amnesia, es el vehículo perfecto para estampar tu identidad única. Así como Planescape: Torment, con muchas palabras similares, enmarcó la historia en torno a los orígenes del Sin Nombre y sus recuerdos perdidos, aquí el estupor autoinfligido de su detective significa que necesita volver a aprender todo sobre el mundo en el que habita, así como su pasado. Al hacerlo, no solo podrá crear a la persona que es, sino también a la persona que alguna vez fue, reescribiendo su historia de fondo para que se ajuste al tipo de policía que desea interpretar.

Tu compañero, el teniente Kitsuragi, traído desde un distrito diferente, actúa como el centro moral del juego. Él fundamenta los excesos de tu policía de manera brillante, a veces sigue el juego, a veces pone su pie en el suelo, pero rara vez detiene tus acciones. A pesar de ser un NPC, está escrito de manera tan sutil que a menudo me preocupaba que lo estaba molestando. Kitsuragi es un alma tranquilizadora en una ciudad sucia llena de gente podrida y, potencialmente, el único amigo que tienes. Claro, puedes enojarlo si quieres, el juego te permitirá explorar casi todas las vías, pero solo los jugadores más intransigentes lo intentarán.

Mirar. Meta.

Revachol es un lugar extraño donde las ideologías del capitalismo, el comunismo, el moralismo y el liberalismo se mezclan en un desordenado exceso de teorías intelectuales, como una charla de TED con coca. Es una ciudad bajo la esclavitud de varias turbas, pero que está supervisada por una fuerza policial civil. La trama principal consiste en investigar un asesinato bajo la sombra de la acción sindical y los derechos de los trabajadores, y al principio se siente como un eslabón débil en comparación con el resto de la escritura. Sin embargo, a medida que descubras más detalles sobre el asesinato y los jugadores involucrados, comenzarás a darte cuenta de que lo que parece un tropo detectivesco mundano es en realidad una columna vertebral fantástica de la que se aferran más historias extravagantes. 

Todo muy bien, podrías estar pensando. Pero, ¿cómo se juega realmente el juego? Esencialmente, Disco Elysium tiene más en común con una novela visual que con un juego de rol estándar. Esta no es una aventura de mundo abierto, independientemente de lo que el marketing haya dicho en sentido contrario. Hay misiones basadas en el tiempo y la libertad de abordar pistas en el orden que quieras, pero estarás confinado a solo unas pocas áreas de la ciudad y sus bajos fondos. Juegas desarrollando a tu detective, respondiendo a los NPC de la manera que consideres apropiada para su personalidad y eligiendo opciones de diálogo que pueden requerir que pases una prueba de habilidad. 

Los orbes ambientales revelan más sobre la ciudad. Les pica que les hagan clic.

Los controles pueden desafiar cualquiera de las cuatro clases de habilidades principales (Físico, Motor, Inteligencia y Psique) y cualquiera de las veinticuatro habilidades individuales que seleccionará cuando construya las estadísticas de su policía al comienzo del juego. Puede ser tentador repartir tus puntos de habilidad de manera uniforme, pero al igual que con los juegos de rol de mesa, las historias más interesantes emergen cuando estás ridículamente alto en una habilidad y terriblemente débil en otra. Mi policía no tenía la fuerza suficiente para despertar a un hombre dormido en un café, pero su conocimiento enciclopédico incluso sobre los hechos más triviales de la ciudad era insuperable, y los caminos que abrieron (o cerraron) estas estadísticas le proporcionaron con personalidad real en lugar de ser solo otro avatar anodino.

Además, las habilidades que eliges tienen personalidad. No solo abren nuevas líneas de interrogatorio u opciones para abordar su caso de diferentes maneras, sino que también son participantes activos en las conversaciones de su detective. Si está interrogando a un sujeto, Logic puede intervenir para señalar una falla en su declaración, Empathy puede ofrecerle consejos para ponerlos de su lado y Drama puede alentarlo a sacar su mejor actuación teatral para tocar sus fibras sensibles. Puede seguir sus consejos si lo desea, pero agotar todas las opciones de diálogo en estilo de memoria, como los juegos de BioWare han entrenado a los jugadores durante la última década, a menudo será contraproducente. Los NPC a menudo recuerdan lo que dijiste anteriormente; no hay nada peor que elegir una opinión diferente y ser visto como un infiel, o peor aún, poco confiable o poco confiable. 

The art style is unique and quite lovely.

Failing certain skill checks may harm your Morale — one of your two energy meters. Morale is the essence of your identity, so learning something unpleasant about yourself, or just finding out something sad can knock off a point, while solving part of a case or getting praise from Kitsuragi can pep you up. Health can be damaged by failing actions such as jumping from balconies, smoking cigarettes, or punching a telephone in anger. Run out of Morale points and you’ll give up being a cop; run out of Health and you’ll give up living — but these can both be recovered with consumables, or by sleeping overnight. More importantly, failed skill checks may lock you out of retrying them, until you’ve learned something crucial about their nature, or put enough points into a skill to retry them. The simple act of having a conversation can improve your likelihood of passing a skill check too; you’ll be told up front the percentage chance of success and from there it’s up to you. 

Your skills will also offer up quests of their own for you to accept or decline. Electrochemistry really, really wants you to find and take drugs. Savoir Faire suggests you fight indirect taxation and stick it to The Man. Other skills may task you with different challenges. Alongside your log book of leads to follow up, your addled brain will uncover Thoughts as you learn more about yourself and your environment. These are added to your Thought Cabinet — think of it as a special items area — and offer bonuses and penalties to your existing stats and require you to “internalise” them over the course of hours of in-game time to make sense of them and unlock their final form. 

A completed Thought — if you don’t want it, spend a skill point to forget it.

The resulting breakthrough after completing a Thought may ultimately be positive or negative depending on what kind of cop you’re playing, but there’s space in the Thought Cabinet for twelve out of the fifty-plus Thoughts available to discover in the game. Experience points are gained for uncovering information, completing quests and, in many cases, doing unusual things. Levelling up provides you with skill points you can either invest in any of the twenty-four skills, unlock more Thought Cabinet slots, or “forget” a Thought that you don’t feel is appropriate for your detective’s build. You’re unlikely to want to stick with the first Thoughts you ruminate on, especially since you don’t know what kind of benefits or penalties they’ll provide until after the gestation period. They’re like a loot box, but free and with actual personality. 

All of this means that there is a staggering amount of potential to finely hone individual elements of your character here. I may have been a ruthlessly intelligent, almost supernaturally perceptive specimen, but my strength was pitiful. However, I was still able to plough points into the Physique subset of Electrochemistry so that I could explore the bizarre quests handed out by that skill. The flexibility the game offers means that if I wanted to replay the game as a buff meathead, I’m almost certainly going to experience a completely different playthrough. While it may be tempting to save scum your way through some of Disco Elysium, I would encourage you not to. Failing skill checks can often lead to more interesting outcomes than passing them.  

Hovering over a check will show you how likely it is you’ll pass it.

The murder you’re tasked to solve feels like a side note, at least at the beginning. The first act saw me completely ignore the body I was there to inspect until it was 2AM game time and I’d exhausted almost every other avenue of investigation. I wanted to learn about Martinaise, the area of Revachol you start in. I wanted to debate with its people, learn about its history, explore its underbelly. I wanted to craft my detective into a feeble, delusional superstar with an addictive personality, someone with an uncanny ability to recreate a scene purely in his mind, as long as there’s enough booze and speed flowing through his veins. 

The game lets you do all of this and more, or the entire opposite. You can be a strait-laced, by-the-numbers officer, or someone who apologises all of the time (Boring Cop and Sorry Cop are two stats which are genuinely measured). You can offer withering criticism of people’s achievements, or utter “I AM THE LAW” in your best Dredd voice, and your profile will take note of your choices accordingly. 

More importantly, you’ll learn. While I wouldn’t consider myself well-read when it comes to political or social history, I was staggered to realise how little I actually knew about the main tenets of liberalism, fascism, socialism, communism, and so on. There are no punches pulled here; each political philosophy is often skewed wickedly by a team with a sharp eye for satire. It comes at a cost though: the mountains of text you’ll be hit with contain ideas which can often prove dizzyingly complex to unpick without a dictionary and Wikipedia ready on a second monitor. Thankfully, you can click out rather than alt-tabbing in a multi-screen setup, something I suspect was a deliberate design choice created just for my method of absorbing information, though that might just be the delusions of a Superstar Cop.

A detective’s work is its own reward. Right?

The lessons you’re given are mostly told through the NPCs you meet. Whether it’s unpicking the supply chain of a drug cartel in order to understand its economic impact on local society or listening to pétanque players bicker about whether the revolution that stamped out communism decades earlier was actually beneficial, each dialogue goes to places you wouldn’t expect, and possibly won’t understand. The text is dense and the subjects often impenetrable on first reading, thanks to the substitution of real world examples for fictional ones. Will that impact your overall enjoyment of the game? Possibly. However, for all its complexity there is a general through line in each conversation which contains enough information for even people ignorant of — for instance — economic theory or critical thinking to make a judgement on how you want your detective to respond. 

The base layer of good / bad / indecisive / crazed is often obvious, even if the words leading into you making those decisions are not. Just as Aaron Sorkin managed to package US politics into an accessible and entertaining format in The West Wing, ZA/UM takes challenging intellectual concepts and folds them into a thoroughly enjoyable RPG. Sure, you can trade banter with a rich yacht owner about moralism, but you can also go dumpster diving and then spend half an hour inspecting your hilarious, grime-encrusted case files, or while away time talking to a dicemaker about the perfect tetrahedron. I did all of these.

Your grandma might not approve of the language, but she may appreciate the racism options.

Outfitting your character is also a lot of fun, since each item of clothing has its own impact on your stats, as well as being reflected accurately in your avatar. It also gives you the chance to hard roleplay. In my case, being a “hobocop” slotted in neatly with my almost compulsive need to collect recyclable garbage in a plastic bag before returning it to a pharmacy for cash. The city’s currency, réal, is hard earned. You might stumble across a few coins here and there on your travels but to make enough money to afford anything of use, you’ll need to get creative. Begging people for cash is always fun, but you could also try coercing them with hints of “favours” in exchange for a financial downpayment. 

Revachol isn’t a huge place to explore, but it would certainly have benefitted from a wayfinder on the map rather than a static screen, even so. Though it may feel like the number of locations pales in comparison to modern RPGs, the sheer depth of activities you can carry out (including secret quests, hidden objects and unlockable conversations) is astounding. Reading one of the many books you come across can lead you down paths of exploration which may take half an hour. Other interactive items are similarly involving, while there are side tasks which appear to have been thrown in for the hell of it. Want to sing karaoke at the cafe? You’ll need to track down an appropriate song first. Want to go off in search of a mystical invisible being which only takes the form of a sound? Go ahead. And do you dare pull back the sinister yet alluring curtains at the back of the weird bookstore? Do it. Or, at least try. Failing is fun.

Traversing the city and uncovering its secrets is a delight in no small part due to the wonderful oil-painted environments. The rough brushstrokes give Revachol a worn feel, befitting a city covered in wartime craters and rusting coin-operated binoculars. The skill portraits are equally brilliant; if you ever wondered about the best way to depict a person’s Savoir Faire, worry no more. Though there is partial voice acting for most of the NPCs, it’s best ignored where possible — while the variety of regional accents is impressive, the talent is variable and the actual recording quality is questionable, as if the actors were taped in a broom cupboard. Fortunately the snippets of incidental music accompanying you across town are far, far better and really drive home Disco Elysium’s emotional core. It might have the tinges of steampunk, but stripped back it’s a desperately sad (and occasionally optimistic) game about broken people surviving in a shattered society. 

I might be rubbish at moving about or using my hands, but at least I can perceive that.

At times the game is openly meta; one subquest sees you stumbling upon the remnants of a vast game created by a basement studio in a country which is technologically up-and-coming, a clear nod to ZA/UM’s Estonian heritage. The writers revel in Disco Elysium’s development and their own intelligence, sometimes to the point of smugness. Whole rafts of ideas are dissected and discussed through the mouthpieces of NPCs, as if Kurvitz and his crew were desperate not to waste the decade-plus of world building they’d established in their pen-and-paper sessions. In some places this verbiage feels unnecessary. In others it’s downright odd, distracting from whatever task you’re currently working on in favour of a lecture on one ideology or another, resulting in some characters feeling like overeager philosophy professors. The game would certainly have benefitted from a less indulgent editor to help trim some of its word porn. 

Yet it’s hard to begrudge the team its achievement. This is one of the most refreshing, exciting and downright enjoyable RPGs to be released in years. It offers a wealth of content (well over 40 hours for my playthrough), sublime roleplaying, and the potential for hugely different playthroughs depending on your character build. It’s simply remarkable that this is the studio’s very first title, especially since it’s a strong contender for game of the year. It might have a glimmer of Black Isle’s beloved template in its design and execution, but it has layered far more interesting ideas, mechanics and secrets on top. That the richness of its experience comes from mere words feels like an anomaly in the age of mindless violence, instant gratification and blasts of dopamine. Disco Elysium is more measured, delivering its payoffs when you’ve truly earned them. It’s the gaming equivalent of a bottle of decent scotch whisky: rich, complex and well worth the investment.