Day 148: Today's Pick — Disco Elysium

I am going to ask you to do something difficult, which is to play a video game with no shooting in it.

The video game is Disco Elysium, released in 2019 by a small Estonian studio called ZA/UM, originally adapted from a novel and a tabletop campaign that several friends had been running for the better part of a decade. There is a Final Cut version (2021) that adds full voice acting and a few extra quests; that is the version to buy.

Here is what Disco Elysium is. You play a detective, washed up on a beach in a fictional, vaguely Eastern European harbor city called Revachol. You wake up hung over with no memory of who you are, what you do, why you are here. There is a body hanging from a tree in a courtyard. You are, you slowly realize, the cop assigned to the case. You have a partner, a cool-headed lieutenant named Kim Kitsuragi, who has been waiting patiently for you to recover the basic ability to put on shoes. Together, over forty or so in-game hours, you will solve a murder, tour a small portion of a vivid, decaying, ideologically scarred city, and have a very long argument with the contents of your own head.

That last part — the argument with your own head — is the part of the game that nothing else like it has ever done.

Your character has 24 internal "skills," each of which is a kind of subpersona inside his skull. Empathy will, when you meet a stranger, whisper to you what they are feeling. Inland Empire will, when you stare at a necktie hanging on a fan, tell you that the necktie is judging you. Encyclopedia will, when you encounter a place name, recite half a page of made-up world history. Drama will offer to coach you through a lie. They speak in italics. They do not always agree. Some of them want you to be a better detective. Some of them want you to drink. Some of them want you to write a slim volume of poetry. Some of them have political opinions, and the opinions are extremely strong.

This is, as a play mechanic, bonkers, and it works. You sit on a curb on a freezing morning and have a four-page internal debate with three voices in your skull about whether to take a sip from a stranger's bottle of lukewarm beer, and the writing is so good — so genuinely novel-grade — that you forget you are reading it on a screen. The Estonian writers got, with the help of an exceptional English translator, the kind of prose that a video game has historically not had access to.

What's the world like? Imagine a 1970s East European port city, after a failed communist revolution forty years ago, in which the streetcars no longer run, the church on the headland is being repurposed as a noise-rock club, the harbor unions are striking, the bookshop owners argue with you about ideology, and somewhere offshore a cryptid the size of a hill may or may not exist. The whole thing is hand-painted in a moody oil-and-pencil aesthetic that makes every frame look like a Eastern European art-house film. The music — by the British group Sea Power — is restrained, muted, mournful, and absolutely correct.

There is no real combat. There is no jumping. There are no skill trees in the traditional RPG sense. There are dialogue choices, all of which feel weighted, and the occasional success-or-failure check based on your skill build. You will not "win" the game in any conventional sense. You will end the game, slightly dazed, having lived in someone else's small bruised life for forty hours, and you will think about it on and off for years.

A small set of tips for first-time players. Build a "thinker" — invest in INTELLECT and PSYCHE skills before SENSITIVE or PHYSICAL — for your first run; the writing rewards a thinker more than a brawler. Don't skip dialogue. The optional internal voices are the best part of the game, and skipping them for "efficiency" is like reading a great novel by skipping the descriptions. Save often, but don't reload to chase optimal outcomes; the game's failures are often funnier and more interesting than its successes.

Pricing: $39.99 retail, often $10–$15 on sale. Plays well on Mac, PC, and Steam Deck. Plays adequately on Switch and PlayStation; Xbox port is fine. Length: 30–60 hours depending on how thoroughly you explore. Replayability: high but emotionally taxing — most players take a year off before doing a second run.

Day 148. The pick is, in plain language, the best-written video game ever made. Set aside time. Play it.

Then call a friend.