Disco Elysium

Disco Elysium is a role-playing video game that features an open world and dialogue-heavy gameplay mechanics. The game is presented in an isometric perspective in which the player character is controlled. The player takes the role of a detective, who suffers from alcohol and drug-induced amnesia, on a murder case. The player can move the detective about the screen to interact with non-player characters (NPC) and highlighted objects or move onto other screens. Early in the game, the player gains a partner, Kim Kitsuragi, another detective who acts as the protagonist's voice of professionalism and who offers advice or support in certain dialogue options.

The gameplay features no combat in the traditional sense; instead, combat is handled through skill checks and dialogue trees. There are four primary attributes in the game: Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics. Each attribute has six distinct secondary skills for a total of 24, which the player can improve through skill points earned from levelling up. Upgrading these skills helps the player character pass skill checks, which are based on a random roll of two six-sided dice, but potentially result in negative effects and character quirks, discouraging minmaxing.

Disco Elysium takes place in the fictional world of Elysium, developed by Kurvitz and his team in the years prior, which includes over six thousand years of history; the genre is described as "fantastic realism". The narrative was constructed with attention to Karl Marx's theory of history, which posits that the material production of life directly conditions the political, artistic, religious, and philosophical superstructure of society in itself.

The game takes place in the year '51 of the Current Century. Elysium is made of "isolas", masses of land and sea that are separated from each other by the Pale, an inscrutable, mist-like "connective tissue" in which the laws of reality break down. Prolonged exposure to the Pale can cause mental instability and eventually death, and traversing the Pale, which is typically done with aerostatics, is heavily regulated due to the danger.

Disco Elysium was developed by ZA/UM, a company founded in 2016 by Estonian novelist Robert Kurvitz, who served as the game's lead writer and designer. In 2005, Kurvitz was playing in a band called Ultramelanhool and conceived of a fictional world during a drunken evening while listening to Tiësto's "Adagio for Strings". The group then created a collective of artists and musicians, which included oil painter Aleksander Rostov, the lead artist of Disco Elysium, to expand upon the work of that night and developed a tabletop role-playing game based on Dungeons & Dragons on this steampunk-like concept. During this period, Kurvitz met Estonian author Kaur Kender, who helped him to write a novel set in this world, Sacred and Terrible Air, which was published in 2013 but only sold about one thousand copies.

Kurvitz fell into a period of depression and alcoholism for about three years following the book's commercial failure. This failure, along with Kurvitz and Rostov's teenage experience with Dungeons and Dragons, would inspire the design philosophy of embracing failure. This can be seen both in the "failure of a cop" main character: Harrier Dubois, the many tragedies surrounding the characters and world, and the RPG pass-fail dice system. This would also go on to inspire one of their scrapped taglines "A Roleplaying Game About Being a Total Failure".

Disco Elysium received "universal acclaim" according to review aggregator website Metacritic, with it being praised for its narrative and conversational systems. Fellow review aggregator OpenCritic assessed that the game received "mighty" approval, being recommended by 96% of critics.

PC Gamer praised the game for its depth, freedom, customisation, and storytelling and called it one of the best RPGs on the PC. IGN praised the game's open world and compared it favourably to The Witcher 3 and Red Dead Redemption 2, despite being much smaller. The Washington Post said that the game is "conspicuously well written". GameSpot awarded it a 10 out of 10, their first perfect score since 2017.