On October 15th, a small indie RPG was released: Disco Elysium became a surprise hit, which Mein-MMO author Andreas Bertits played in a very special way.
What is Disco Elysium? It is a single-player role-playing game with an unusual scenario. You are a washed-up, alcoholic cop in the now run-down city of Revachol. Disco Elysium takes place in a distant world that is very similar to ours but not quite the same. It resembles Earth in the 1950s, combined with disco music, which plays an important role in the culture for various reasons.
Disco Elysium would probably not have been on anyone’s radar. It is an indie role-playing game for which there was almost no advertising. Yet it managed to become a surprise hit within just one day after its release on October 15th. The ratings on Metacritic currently stand at 92 points, and on Steam, it has a rating of 95 percent.
An unusual story in a special game
What is the story about? The story is a bit crazy. You wake up after a drinking binge and can’t remember anything. It turns out that you are a cop who is supposed to solve a murder nearby. It actually sounds like standard story fare.
However, a mystery reveals itself right at the beginning: A strange voice speaks to you, and in moments of sleep or during blackouts, you don’t know why you are a person and what you are even doing in the city.
What is special about the game? Disco Elysium tells a dense and exciting story through many (English) dialogues. Skill checks play a significant role in these. Most of these checks are conducted with your subconscious. You talk to various aspects of yourself and gain useful information if you succeed in a skill check.
These aspects of your subconscious can be improved like skills. Thus, you create an individual character whose abilities affect almost every situation and conversation.
By the way, there is no combat system. Nevertheless, you can fight – also through skill checks. It sounds strange, but it works.
Why are you presenting a single-player RPG here? When I became aware of Disco Elysium, I played the game in a very special way. Not alone in a quiet room, but together and especially simultaneously with a good friend – even though Disco Elysium does not have a multiplayer mode.
This is how I played the single-player RPG in “multiplayer”
This is how I played: Older generations might still remember the time before private internet at home. When we still played on the Amiga or later with the 286 PC.
At that time, I would often call my buddies during gaming sessions when I knew we were playing the same game. We would then discuss our experiences and exchange tips. This continued on the schoolyard. One could essentially call this a kind of “asynchronous multiplayer experience.” Unlike, for example, playing an MMORPG alone and still encountering players you ignore.
And I played Disco Elysium in a similar way. As a father who works full-time, it is not so easy to play MMORPGs. Therefore, I often peek over to single-player games, but still want to have a social experience.
So I opened Google Hangouts on my second monitor besides the game. My buddy and I started simultaneously. We kept messaging each other to find out what decision the other had made in this and that situation or we exchanged tips. I did not bubble myself off like usual to experience a single-player RPG for myself. I consciously played parallel with a friend.
For instance, I felt like it took forever to figure out how to get out of the apartment at the beginning. My buddy explained to me that I should click the point next to my character, as that indicates that the character has something to say. Suddenly, he found the key to the door in his pocket.
A social experience
What other situations arose? Another incident played out amusingly. The manager of the hostel where the character is staying demanded money. I tried to flee, which went terribly wrong. My cop ran straight into the wheelchair of another guest, passed out, and had to endure the ridicule of the mysterious disembodied voice that keeps appearing. My buddy, on the other hand, handled the situation differently by talking his way out of it thanks to a different skill setup and was allowed to pay later.
There were continuously such situations where we discussed or laughed. Like when we had to examine a corpse by the tree, and my buddy didn’t know how to use the smelling salts to suppress the putrid stench of the bloated body and the accompanying nausea.
What is my conclusion? Disco Elysium may be a truly excellent single-player RPG. With the many decision-making opportunities, situations that can unfold completely differently, and the way you can develop your hero in entirely different directions through the skills, it is also fun to exchange experiences with friends while playing. To learn how they experienced situations or what decisions they made.
That may not be a true “multiplayer” experience, but still a social experience that can be transferred to other single-player games. With Disco Elysium, it’s especially enjoyable because there are always so many possibilities for how events can unfold in the game.
