Geralt's an interesting case, however, because despite sporting lots of fantasy RPG tropes, The Witcher 3 doesn't have a conventional fantasy RPG protagonist. Little breaks in the case, some friendly banter with Kim and a hug from a stranger are moments to be treasured. Even gloomy Geralt gets to save the day, no matter what, but there's no room for destiny in Disco Elysium.

When you're not the chosen one, those little victories really matter. On those rare occasions where things went right and Kim would congratulate me on a job well done, it was like winning the lottery. Instead of a litany of heroic deeds, I collected flaws, delusions, obsessions and weird quirks-a person, essentially. I got seduced, tricked and used as a pawn by both the union and a corporation. Sometimes it was a failed roll, but often it was just me making a bad call.

I'm never going to be able to relate to Commander Shepard deciding the fate of an entire species, but I've definitely been an inconsiderate, shitty friend. Where another RPG might merrily let me act the saviour and never ask any questions, Disco Elysium made me confront why I was making these decisions. You might not be able to make other people change, but you can still grow.ĭespite being a seemingly throwaway conversation, I reconsidered the relationship between Kim and his forgetful partner, and it grounded me in the world in a way that no big moral decision in something like Mass Effect ever could.

I challenged the racist because, frankly, it felt really good to tell the guy where he could stick his rhetoric, but in the end he remained a racist, I was still angry, and Kim was-against his will-at the centre of it. I thought about the argument, and how Kim had tried to stay out of it and had even asked me to just ignore it, and how I didn't listen. Instead of the game affirming that I was the most important person in the universe-which I already know to be true-I had to find closure myself. This is surprisingly fertile ground for roleplaying. Sure, you can convince people to see things your way or lie to them, but fundamentally everyone is pretty set in their ways. So many modern RPGs are about influencing people-thanks, BioWare-but here that's a lot less frequent. He was just some stupid racist dude who wasn't remotely important. He wasn't a nemesis I would eventually be able to chop to pieces 30 hours later. And that guy just got to keep standing in that spot, being an arsehole.

As the aforementioned halfling necromancer, I'd probably be able to make the racist change his ways and give away all his money to a refugee charity, but in Disco Elysium I just got to tell him to go fuck himself. It's 25 percent of the interactions I've had online, and it's far from the only stressful chat. There's an NPC you can chat to who has some extremely unpleasant things to say about your partner, Kim Kitsuragi, and if that rightly doesn't sit well with you, there's a good chance that you'll end up in a completely pointless argument with a grotesque racist that goes nowhere. I felt compelled to play it because it's simply one of the best RPGs around, but I stopped playing for a week because it just bummed me out. You will inevitably find characters and have conversations that make you deeply uncomfortable. It went through a bloody revolution, is currently part of a vaguely tyrannical centrist regime, and boasts more than one ethnic supremacist movement. If you decide to be Communist Cop, you'll need to wrestle with the role of the union, which in Revachol ostensibly looks out for workers but is also run by a crooked businessman, and then there's the spectre of the failed revolution with its victims on both sides. By corporations, mob bosses, revolutionaries-there are plenty of vultures, and some of them are even sympathetic. When people believe in something in Disco Elysium, they get exploited. At times, it comes close to the nihilism of South Park, though thankfully without the smugness.

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