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Disco Elysium: The Final Cut’s changes are uneven, flawed, and wonderfulHearing is believing
Hearing is believing
Each time I play weird and wonderful amnesiac detective RPGDisco Elysium, I fall in love with language all over again, and get properly jazzed up to spill some fancy words. In this case, I’ve played the newDisco Elysium: The Final Cut,an updated version of the gamethat has loads of new voice acting and even some new quests. So I’ll pop a cork in my impulse to use words like ‘ekphrastic’, at least a bit, because I imagine you’ve come here with one of two questions.
Those are: “should I finally get around to playing The Large RPG?” or, if you’ve already played it loads, “is the Final Cut reason enough to do so again?” Please, enter the slide in front of you, and glide, like a graceful brick, into the answer pool below.
Firstly, yes, I reckon you should play Disco Elysium if you haven’t, and the Final Cut only gives more options. If you’re not sure why, readAlice Bee’s review, or sampleAlec Meer’s free-range thought butter. Oodleshave been written about the game’s strengths, and I don’t even think much of it is out of a need to analyse, just to redirect all that lovely energy in some mad ekphrastic outpouring, like all those bands that formed after seeing The Sex Pistols live. For a game so focused on psychic degradation, it is an immensely reinvigorating guzzle of soul juice. It’s also like, properly funny and playfully stupid, pretty much constantly.
That said, there are a lot of words! Reading isn’t what everyone wants out of a game, and that’s absolutely fine. The Final Cut gives every character a voice, and the infinitely listenable Lenval Brown provides narration and the frequent interjections of the protags fractured psyche/skill checks. Here’s Brown narrating the trailer if you want a listen.
DISCO ELYSIUM - The Final Cut (Launching March 30th!)Watch on YouTube
DISCO ELYSIUM - The Final Cut (Launching March 30th!)
Personally, I’d suggest changing the voiceover option to ‘psychological only’ for your first run. You won’t miss out on Brown’s work, there’s just less of it. I think the pacing is better this way, but then I’ve already got a brain-print for how I expect things to unfurl. Bad tech note: there are some bugs, so maybe wait a week. Happy tech note: there’s now full controller support on PC. Combined with the narration, it turns the whole thing into a pleasingly sedate experience, like a bedtime story but with trauma-induced pulmonary complications.
Image credit:ZA/UM
I thought about this, and how impeccable the sound design generally is, and how so many of the voice performances in Disco Elysium: The Final Cut feel close to an antithesis of sound design. A sort of sound ‘discovery’. Found voices. Disco Elysium is not a wonderfully written game because it has fancy prose, but because that prose captures authentic thought and speech, in all its shivering, shimmering nakedness.
And because these are not all big voices, and they are not uniform voices, and because they feel scattered and disparate, they feel authentic to Martinaise. There are so few accents that sound like both their parents spoke the same native language, and it lends itself to that deeply literary, Revacholian Creole that both grounds the game in history and lets it spin free of time and place. In this sense, the more voice performances, the better.
The Final Cut let my brain wander and notice other, older things. How running through your old cases in the ledger and giving your opinion on their outcomes is actually a Rorschach blot test, squeezing in a big chunk of extra roleplaying disguised as exposition. Or how those same case files feature a sneakyPlanescape: Tormentreference, only related to public nudity. Howimportant Spring is to the journeyas a whole. I can’t definitively say that all the Final Cut’s changes are for the best, but I can say I’m thankful I was lured back for another run that may not have happened otherwise.
