Why Disco Elysium Remains the Greatest RPG Ever Written
2024-11-08 · 5 min read
Disco Elysium dropped in 2019 from a tiny Estonian studio called ZA/UM, and it immediately made every other RPG's writing look like a first draft. You play a catastrophically hungover detective who cannot remember his own name, investigating a murder in a city that feels like a post-Soviet fever dream. There is no combat. Every conflict is resolved through dialogue and thought.
The game's skill system is its masterstroke. Instead of strength and dexterity, your stats represent facets of your psychology: Inland Empire lets you talk to your own necktie, Electrochemistry pushes you toward every possible vice, and Shivers lets you hear the city itself whispering to you. Your character's mind is literally arguing with itself in real time.
The political system is equally fearless. You can be a communist, a fascist, a centrist, or a moralist, and the game takes each position seriously enough to critique it devastatingly. No other game has engaged with political ideology as something more than an aesthetic. Disco Elysium treats your political beliefs as something that shapes how you see every interaction.
The writing quality is simply unmatched in the medium. Lead designer Robert Kurvitz and his team created prose that rivals contemporary literary fiction. The descriptions of Revachol's harbor district, the internal monologues, the conversations with every NPC, all of it reads like a novel by someone who has read everything and can synthesize it into something new.
The tragedy of Disco Elysium is what happened after. ZA/UM imploded in a mess of corporate restructuring and legal disputes, with key creative leads departing. The planned sequel seems unlikely. But the original game remains, perfect and complete, a monument to what happens when writers with genuine literary ambition make a video game. Nothing else comes close.
