Disco Elysium Review
No combat, no compromise. Disco Elysium is a role-playing game built entirely from words — and they're the best words gaming has.
Disco Elysium throws out almost every video-game convention. There is no combat. There are no enemies to shoot. There is only you — an amnesiac, alcoholic detective — a murder to solve, and the 24 warring voices inside your own skull.
Your mind is the party
The genius of the design is that your skills are characters. Inland Empire whispers paranoid intuitions; Electrochemistry begs you to drink and smoke; Logic walks you through a deduction. Levelling up doesn't make you stronger so much as louder in particular ways, and the game is happy to let your own brain sabotage you. It is the most original RPG system in years.
Those 24 skills sit under four attributes — Intellect, Psyche, Physique and Motorics — six apiece, and every check is settled by a roll of two six-sided dice. Even your clothes nudge the numbers up or down. Layered on top is the Thought Cabinet, where ideas picked up in conversation are “internalised” over hours of in-game time. Finish one and you might gain a bonus, a crippling quirk, or both; a thought like Hobocop, which toys with living on the streets to save money, is as much a character beat as a stat modifier.
A murder in Martinaise
You wake in a trashed hostel room with a savage hangover and no idea who you are. Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, a detective from another precinct, is waiting to tell you that the two of you have a body to deal with: a hanged man in the empty lot behind the hostel, apparently lynched by a mob. Kim is the game's quiet masterstroke, a patient, dry professional whose occasional raised eyebrow says more about your behaviour than any morality meter could.
The case unfolds across Martinaise, an impoverished district of the city of Revachol, still bearing the scars of a failed communist revolution and run by the Coalition of nations that toppled it. A striking dockworkers' union, rogue mercenaries and ruined idealists all have a stake in what you find, and the investigation gradually becomes a portrait of a city, and a man, trying to recover from catastrophe.
Writing as the whole game
Because there is no busywork, every line has to earn its place — and it does. The prose is funny, political, melancholy and humane, and the failure states are often better than the successes. Fail a check and the story bends somewhere stranger rather than ending.
The internal debates are where it sings. A simple exchange with a cafeteria manager over an unpaid bill can pull in Encyclopedia for a lecture on currency, Authority for a doomed attempt to throw your weight around, and your own mouth for a line you instantly regret. Whether you play Harry as a hero, a political firebrand or an absolute disaster of a human being, the game has thought about it and has something sharp to say.
A painted, melancholy city
The art, led by Aleksander Rostov, looks like oil paintings brought to reluctant life: frozen harbours, rusting shipping containers and snow-dusted squares rendered in thick, moody brushstrokes. The soundtrack by the English band British Sea Power (now simply Sea Power) is a perfect match, drifting between wistful and ominous. It is a place you remember as vividly as the people in it.
The Final Cut and beyond
Disco Elysium launched on PC on October 15, 2019, and swept four categories at The Game Awards 2019: Best Independent Game, Best Narrative, Best Role Playing Game and Fresh Indie Game. A macOS version followed in April 2020. The definitive version, The Final Cut, arrived on March 30, 2021 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Stadia, and as a free update for existing PC and Mac owners; Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S followed on October 12, 2021.
The Final Cut is the version to play. It adds full voice acting, with jazz musician Lenval Brown voicing the narrator and every one of your skills, roughly half the game's dialogue on its own. It also restores four previously cut quests, reworked as Political Vision Quests, plus new art, animation and music. A Collage Mode update arrived in 2023, letting you stage your own scenes with the game's characters, and in August 2025 the game made its way to Android. The Steam release is the Final Cut, and ZA/UM keeps the official channels updated. For the studio's turbulent history since, the Wikipedia entry covers the details.
Create the Disco scenes of your dreams. Introducing Collage Mode: the new functionality that gives you the creative freedom to stage just about anything in-game. Available now for PC and Mac players, with console rolling out soon: collage.discoelysium.com
— Disco Elysium - The Final Cut (@discoelysium) March 16, 2023
Official resources
- Disco Elysium official website
- ZA/UM studio
- Disco Elysium Collage Mode
- Disco Elysium - The Final Cut on Steam
- Disco Elysium - The Final Cut on GOG
- Disco Elysium on Wikipedia
The verdict
If you need action, look elsewhere. But if you want to know how far games can go as a writing medium, Disco Elysium is the ceiling. Pair it with Baldur's Gate 3 for a masterclass in player choice.
What we loved
- Possibly the best writing in any video game
- Your skills argue with you like a chorus of voices
- Striking oil-painting art direction
- Choices that shape who your detective becomes
What held it back
- No combat will divide players
- Dense reading load is not for everyone
- Easy to miss content on a single run
