The world of videogames and culture in general already has little room to surprise its players and spectators. Fortunately, however, from time to time we come across some of those surprises that no one should miss. That is precisely the case with Disco Elysium, the role-playing video game by ZA / UM that originally saw the light of day at the end of 2019 on PC and that little by little has been landing on other platforms. Now, finally, Xbox’s turn has come and that is why today we bring you our Disco Elysium: The Final Cut review for Xbox Series X.
Memento
The British studio ZA / UM puts us in Disco Elysium in the shoes of a middle-aged man who wakes up in a messy room without remembering who he is or what he was doing. We will soon discover that we are working on a murder case and that recovering all the memory fragments that we have left lying around is essential to know where to start. However, there is also a second unknown: who we really are. Disco Elysium does not allow us to shape the appearance of our character like other RPGs, but it does give us the possibility of build personality of the same and do it in our image and likeness or, simply, as we like it the most.
At the beginning of the adventure we will have to decide how many points to dedicate to each of the four main branches for our character: intellect, psyche, physical and motor skills. Once we have done it, we must do the same with a secondary ability, which can be part of any of these four branches and which will help us to begin to mold the protagonist. The decision we make at this point will help us to have more or less fortune in certain game situations. But don’t worry, because when Disco Elysium closes a door, it opens a window.
The paths of ZA / UM are inscrutable
To continue shaping our game at Disco Elysium we will have to walk the streets of a depressing and decaying city, we will have to talk to all kinds of characters to get information and also investigate places to discover inadvertent details. The statistics They will form a fundamental part of our journey and before taking any action that requires a skill, the percentage of success that we can have will be indicated. As we mentioned before, however, failing in these types of situations and not achieving what we wanted is part of the Disco Elysium experience. We shall keep exploring to find alternative paths that allow us to continue advancing in our research despite previous failures.
Although written here it may seem like a tedious process, Disco Elysium has a magnificent weapon so that it is not: a stratospheric script. All the conversations are interesting and the excitement never seems to wane. What is certain is that the ZA / UM video game, as a good classic western role-playing title, has many texts and narrations (a feature added with brilliance in this Final Cut edition). If you’re the type of gamer who needs to jump into action as soon as possible and doesn’t enjoy dialogue, this may not be your game. However, if you feel identified with what is now exposed, Disco Elysium may easily become one of your favorite video games.
Face to face with reality
Before we explained that Disco Elysium offers alternatives regardless of how you’ve shaped your detective’s personality and qualities, but it’s also true that at certain points (especially early in the game) it can seem like you’ve run out of options. No character you find tells you anything relevant or you find anything of value. At some point, however, whether by chance or a few days later in the game with something new that has appeared, you will know what to do and that will be when you feel most satisfied with your progress as an investigator.
Game time passes very slowly unless you are reading a book or questioning someone, so these are good alternatives for things to happen in the world of ZA / UM and power. move forward in ways we never even imagined before. As you may have already deduced, Disco Elysium is not a game that gets along with a rush, so taking it easy and not getting nervous when things go wrong or you think you have run out of alternatives is the best advice we can give from these lines to enjoy a history that, no matter where you look, is a work of art.
The audiovisual as a complement
The history of Disco Elysium is so good that it could work in any other cultural medium, but the truth is that ZA / UM does not waste being framed in electronic entertainment. And it is that beyond your great narrative, Disco Elysium takes us fully into scenarios with personality, full of details and with all kinds of portraits, diaries and very neat images and what a pleasure to contemplate. As if that were not enough, the music is also more than up to the task and helps us immerse ourselves in a proposal that, if it catches you, will not let you go until the very end.
The narration added in this Final Cut, as we mentioned before, is a perfect addition and serves as a fulcrum to support an already excellent story. If something should be said negative in this sense it could be some other bug during the gaming experience and some texts too small in certain circumstances, although the title allows the main text to be enlarged from the menu itself.
conclusion
We are not going to discover at this point that Disco Elysium is a modern narrative artwork in the world of video games. Its hundreds of alternatives and possibilities give us a unique story for each player, where decisions matter and each action has its consequence. Disco Elysium: The Final Cut it is not a video game for all tastes, with dozens of hours of texts and dialogues, but if your proposal makes you fall in love with it, it will surely end up becoming one of your favorite games in recent years.