Disco Elysium (2019)
Disco Elysium is a 2019 role-playing (rpg) video game made by ZA/UM.
Revachol is a city that lost its revolution long ago, and you play a detective who has lost most of himself. You wake in a ruined hostel room with no name, no memory, and a corpse outside waiting to be identified. ZA/UM turns the investigation into a conversation, with witnesses, with the world, and above all with the crowd of voices in your head that stand in for your skills. Each one argues, tempts, and second-guesses. The writing carries the whole thing, funny and mournful and steeped in politics, and the case is only where it starts.
Quick answers
What is Disco Elysium about?
Revachol is a city that lost its revolution long ago, and you play a detective who has lost most of himself. You wake in a ruined hostel room with no name, no memory, and a corpse outside waiting to be identified. ZA/UM turns the investigation into a conversation, with witnesses, with the world, and above all with the crowd of voices in your head that stand in for your skills. Each one argues, tempts, and second-guesses. The writing carries the whole thing, funny and mournful and steeped in politics, and the case is only where it starts.
When was Disco Elysium released?
Disco Elysium was released on 15 October 2019.
Who made Disco Elysium?
Disco Elysium was made by ZA/UM.
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Explore Disco Elysium guides
Disco Elysium in our writing
- Companion guide: Amnesia & Memory
- Companion guide: Conspiracy Thrillers
- Companion guide: The CRPG: The Complete Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games
- Companion guide: The CRPG Renaissance: How Kickstarter Brought the Genre Back from the Dead
A few thoughts on Disco Elysium
If your idea of a good time is a role-playing game built almost entirely from words, this rewards close reading the way a great novel does. Expect political argument, black comedy, and a hero you assemble from competing impulses rather than stats on a sword. Slow, strange, and unusually literary, it asks you to think more than to fight.
RPGs where talking beats fighting
Disco Elysium hands you a detective who cracks a murder almost entirely through conversation and the voices in his own head. These RPGs put the same weight on dialogue, branching choices and consequence. Charm or lie your way across Fallout's Mojave, spare every monster in Undertale, or let a single week reshape everything in Life Is Strange.
Massive open-world RPGs to get lost in
Disco Elysium drops you into Revachol, a broken city with decades of history in every corner. If you want that lived-in world to roam, these open-world RPGs bury lore in ruins, side quests and quiet places, from the Continent of The Witcher to the plains of Hyrule and the golden Lands Between.
Bleak, moody game worlds where atmosphere does the talking
Disco Elysium wraps its case in melancholy, ruin and a world that already lost its future. These games share that heavy, haunted mood: crumbling gothic cities, a silent kingdom of bugs, and grim fantasy where the atmosphere carries as much of the story as any line of dialogue.