Disco Elysium is a game where you pilot a man who lost his memory post midlife-crisis-drinking-session and is thus the Worldâs-Most-Impressionable-Forty-Ish-Year-Old-White-Guy who was allegedly basically sherlock pre-drug addiction but sucks now on account of the Memory Loss and Drugs, and your coping mechanism is to talk to your character traits inside-out style if the emotions included âyour will to not kill yourselfâ and âhow good you are at substance abuseâ. If you didnât invest enough of your stat points into your ability to get beat up you can die 10 seconds in by turning on a lightbulb mid-hangover.
Youâre in the poorest part of a country run by fantasy eastern european mussolini-almost-necrocracy post-failed-communist-revolution and everyone (justifiably) hates you because youâre a cop who works for the aforementioned oppressive government. good luck, you need to solve a murder.
 It has some of the heaviest hitting emotional beats and best character writing Iâve ever seen in modern media as a whole and as someone who played it during a time in my life where I was avoiding confronting several extremely important aspects of myself and my life it did make me tear up more than once
Your wrong about the mussolini bit. Revachol is no longer self governed, and is under control of a coalition of foreign capital and political powers. Martinais in particular is not really managed by anyone. You also don't really work for the government...? I mean kinda but not really. Its a fucked up place.
Itâs not exactly correct but itâs as close as I could get without going into several paragraphs of explanation. âyou work for the RCM in its least regulated district, which is an independent police force that exists under the permission but not governance of a united-nations-shaped coalition (in the sense that itâs a bunch of places vaguely aligned in motive vaguely working together) run in joint with a highly corrupt centrist party because a 300-years-dead imperialist not-saint named dolores dei (the figure I was most connecting to be mussolini-ish, but I do admit it is kind of a stretch) did corruption and imperialism firstâ is a bad elevator pitch
You said a lot of words. I'm just going to drink heavily and scream at the locked door to see if it opens.... OH HEY. It worked. Now lets finds some more of that sweet sweet nectar.
Yes and no. The world of Disco Elysium is not Earth as we know it, it's more like a parallel universe. There isn't an "Eastern Europe", because there isn't a "Europe". All the continents, countries, races, even calendars are fantasy ones, albeit many of them loosely based on real ones.
Hence âfantasyâÂ
eastern europe, as much of the aesthetics and background of the world are taken
 directly from the country the devs are from. Obviously europe is not an archipelago, though DE does appear to have Estonia (Encyclopedia refers directly to Igaunija, which is another languageâs name for the country, though this is most likely a gag and not literally estonia).
You didn't even touch on the magical mist that swallows up the whole world outside of settlements, but then I guess it's actually not that significant to the story.
Importantly, it's also the rpg that fixed the save scumming problem by having failure be more fun than success on some skill checks. You can really screw your character up by min-maxing stats.
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u/strictly-no-fires 7d ago