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Disco Elysium Part 3 - Actually Playing The Game
🕑 Added 2023-01-01 03:06:27 +0000 UTCThis Twilight Zone period between Chrismas and New Years is my favorite time of year. There's a weird sense of melancholic but relieved exhalation in the air. We all get this week long decompression period to just stop pretending and loaf around like zombies while we process the year behind us and marvel at the fact we made it through another one without fully becoming The Joker. That one bad day too many is always just around the corner and i get closer to it every year, but if you can just make it past Christmas without totally snapping you at least have a few days of denouement to try and center yourself and plant your feet for whatever horrors the new year may dump on your doorstep.
That particular feeling in the air is something i don't think i've ever seen conveyed in a video game before, until Disco Elysium. The city in this game is a City on The Edge of Forever, a geographical fugue state populated by a lost generation with about as much use for optimism and ambition as a frog has for a flyswatter. The atmosphere that drips from every exhausted character, every lived-in locale, and every somber note of it's soundtrack speaks to a collective unconscious mourning for a dream it can't quite describe, staring down the barrel of an uncertain future and longing for something worth believing in.
There's an odd, persistent feeling of hope to the morose people in that miserable world. The same one that keeps us trudging along in this one. Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl described it as The Will to Meaning, others call it the indomitable human spirit. This last unyielding spark has inspired every tale of perseverance and legend of heroism from Gilgamesh crossing the Waters of Death to Spidey lifting all that crap off his back, but modern media more often butchers the concept by conveying it in the corniest ways imaginable.
The Ministry of Brainwashing called Disney with its simplistic fairytale horseshit, and anime with its 20 minute power of friendship speeches don't instill hope so much as siphon it out of you. So it ends up being a very moving surprise to find a piece of art in the moronic modern age that actually understands how to present this buried, flickering flame with the subtlety and depth required to come off authentic.
The fact that the work of art in question happens to be a video game is the cherry on top for an old beaten down gamer like myself. Way to go, games. I always knew ya still had it in ya to bust out a real masterpiece once in a while. Suck me, Ebert's ghost, and go fuck yourself, Final Fantasy 7 Remake.
There's a lot more i can, and will say about how much ass Disco Elysium kicks. But i can sum up game's profundity in one sentence. It's the game for its time.
Ooh, lord have mercy i am one hell of a writer. As is the galaxy brained badass responsible for Disco Elysium, Robert Kurvitz. Game recognizes game, and games, so I, the ultimate gamer tip my hat to you, sir.
It's a very cool hat. An officially licensed Waffle House hat. It was my Christmas present. I'm a grown up.
Anyways, here's part 3 of my lets play series, because i'm the sort of crazy man who writes these kind of socially conscious analytical diatribes for the description box of a lets play. The same kind of man who asks for a Waffle House hat for Christmas. The same kind of man who goes into Waffle House at 3:00 in the morning, puts a dollar in the jukebox and plays Cowboy Song by Thin Lizzy 4 times in a row while the all black staff gives me scornful looks for interrupting their late night Run DMC party, and then walks home in the rain simultaneously bearing the immense guilt and devilish amusement of having committed another wacky accidental hate crime.
There isn't much to say about this episode specifically, other than it's the one where you finally get to see some gameplay. The first episode being primarily chracter creation and the 2nd being me staring at the various stat screens for 20 minutes while gushing about how cool it all is. This time you actually get to see me walk around and talk to people like a real detective. I also buy a boombox, and try to score drugs from a pawn shop dealer.
The commentary does sort of taper off toward the end of this one, because for once i'm actually paying attention to the game i'm playing. Sorry about that, but it speaks volumes about the game. Do you know how enthralling a narrative has to be to shut my cool but rude ass up? Look at how much pointless pontificating prose i've pooped out in this patrons only post alone. I've put more words in this place than tattoo artists have placed on Post Malone's face. But they probably got paid more.
If you've been watching my gaming videos for a while, you may have noticed that i'm more of a comedy guy than a gameplay guy. Normally if there's a quiet part or a lull in the commentary i leave it on the cutting room floor, but i actually want to show off the dialogue and conversation systems in this game a little bit. From me that's the ultimate show of respect, one that i nearly lost faith any modern game would ever elicit from me.
The hardest part of editing this series is deciding how much of the actual game i can let speak for itself without my ravenous content consumers getting annoyed at me for not making with the ha-ha's and the hee-haws. But those are the hard decisions a man in my position must make, so the rest can sleep peacefully at night. Speaking of which, I've now decided it's time to be done with this post. The end.
