It's Lenval Brown who steals the show, however, giving a voice to your subconscious. The cast works magic with ZAUM's text, breathing life into these characters, their attitudes, their accents, which in turn tell the story of Revachol, with its melting pot of nationalities and beliefs, with much greater clarity.
#Disco elysium mac full
The Final Cut's extra quests mean there's a proper conclusion to your political journey, not just your personal one, but it's the full voice acting that really has a transformative impact. But ZAUM found a way to make it better, anyway. It was as close to perfect as any game I'd ever played. When I wrapped up my detective's story in 2019, I couldn't think of anything I'd change. If Disco Elysium stopped there, with its wild and esoteric skills and 'Thought Cabinet', it would still be more creative than pretty much all of its peers, but then it goes ahead and makes each skill a talkative part of your subconscious-sublime. Screw your DEX and CON rolls, for this quest you have to rely on your flair for the dramatic and your ability to get off your tits on whatever drugs are lying around. It reimagines the RPG genre, cutting out combat and other metrics for success, and giving us the greatest skill system any game has ever had.
There's so much more to it than ideologies and politics, though. We know what Cuno is saying, it still has an impact, it still tells us a lot about Cuno's desire to shock and upset, so do we actually need to hear the word-one that has been used as a weapon against people playing the game?
It's slightly awkward, and stands out in a game that otherwise doesn't hold back when it comes to trying to elicit disgust, but it also speaks to the game's humanity. Cuno uses it a lot, but it's censored in both the text and audio. Cuno, an abrasive teen and potential sidekick, lives to offend, and one of his favourite words is extremely homophobic. That's something ZAUM wrestled with as well. I want more games to explore racism and homophobia, but I'm still working out how I feel about characters in videogames spouting racist or homophobic slurs. I think it can be hard for us to express how we want games to tackle difficult subjects. For all its complexities and uncomfortable scenes, people just seemed to get it-and want more of it. Though I'm sure they probably exist, I saw no takes about how it's pushing a dangerous ideology, and none of the complaints about politics invading the pure realm of videogames. With this in mind, there was almost something uplifting about the popularity of Disco Elysium. To be clear, it's ineffective and cowardly, and it does a disservice to the devs, but the backlash for admitting that your game might actually be about more than shooting dudes in the head is always exhausting. It sucks, but it's not hard to understand why big publishers often try to downplay political themes. Games have only gone from strength to strength as the industry has matured, but it's an uphill struggle. One of the most frustrating things about writing about videogames is the knowledge that the moment you present a game that's remotely smart or has the vaguest hint of interest in politics, it's going be called "woke" or "SJW trash" by the Robocop-isn't-political lads. It's unfortunate that this recent glut of otherwise welcome 'wholesome' games means that this mature dating sim is being held to an unreasonable standard. Some even suggested that it needed an option to turn off the game's antagonist, whose voice actor was also harassed for playing a villain. These complaints were understandable, but there were also critics who seemed to think that queer narratives shouldn't have any problematic elements. The backlash here came from the other end of the political spectrum, with some players criticising Kitfox Games for not providing content warnings or letting people know about the darker elements of what, to be fair, looks pretty light-hearted on the surface. This is a film where a man imagines that he's crawling through a shit-smeared toilet to get his fix, where we see someone end their life in a flat filled with cat feces, but people were scared it would make heroin seem sexy.įor a videogame comparison, we only have to look to the recent Boyfriend Dungeon launch (opens in new tab). It calls to mind one of my favourite films, Trainspotting, which was initially criticised by pearl-clutching conservatives for "glorifying" drug addiction. You are the arrow in the game's political compass. But Disco Elysium has to let you make these choices if it's going to dig into these ideologies.
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