Guide and Walkthrough (PS4) by chris-williams

A comprehensive guide and walkthrough for Disco Elysium, covering character creation, quest walkthroughs for 'Goodest of the Good Cops' and 'Baddest of the Bad Cops', and appendices.

A number of games have been touted as a spiritual successor to the much loved _Planescape: Torment_ - one even had the audacity to incorporate "Torment" in its name - but _Disco Elysium_ is the first to capture what made its spiritual predecessor so special. Not only must there be lots of text and not only must the text be well-written but the text must actually be fun to read. If your gameplay loop is largely reading (or listening since the _Final Cut_ is fully voice-acted), that loop has to be enjoyable. Sounds simple when you put it like that but creating an enjoyable RPG when there's almost no combat to pad out the runtime and only a small game world to explore is a task so difficult that only two games in more than twenty years have managed to pull it off.

On the surface _Disco Elysium_ is a buddy cop story (albeit one where you're the loose cannon, rather than the by-the-book straight guy): there has been a murder which turns out to be a lot less open-and-shut than initial appearances might lead you to believe. Your PC is (as you learn early in the game) a brilliant officer with a distinguished career but stress, heartbreak and untreated but self-medicated depression have broken you. You awake from a three-day bender that has left you with severe dissociative amnesia so that your character's first hours are spent making sense of his world (which, conveniently, allows you, the player, to learn about the world at the same time).

And the game's doomed world is not a happy one. The story is set in a town named Martinaise, in a country named Revachol. Martinaise was once a pleasant resort-cum-working-port but 43 years previously, revolution followed by counter-revolution left the town in ruins. Martinaise was ground zero for _Operation Deathblow_, the invasion by a foreign coalition which broke the Commune of Revachol (as one of the characters in the game asks: what kind of people come up with a name like "Operation Deathblow"? Murderers, that's who). That same Coalition of Nations are still nominally in charge and through either accidental neglect or deliberate policy, much of Martinaise remains in a state of ruin and - to a large degree - beyond the writ of law. As a backdrop to the game's events, a militant, unionised workforce are in an industrial dispute with the town's monopoly employer and the murder that you're investigating has the potential to ignite an already smouldering conflict.

If all this sounds like _Trouble At T'Mill: the videogame_, the deftness of the writing lifts it beyond the relentlessly Brechtian. The pathos and sadness is balanced by slapstick humour, politics of left, right and centre are ruthlessly satirised and the cast of supporting characters are drawn with the finest of brushes. The (peerless) writing is matched by the art style which combines modernism, fauvism and cubism with the grotesquerie of Giger and Bosch.

The Walkthroughs

_Disco Elysium_ is a game that supports (and, for trophy hunters, requires) two playthroughs. _Goodest of the Good Cops_ provides an efficient, thorough and coherent path through the game. If you've not played the game before, or if you're not interested in trophies, this is the walkthrough to use.

_Baddest of the Bad Cops_, which guides you towards the Platinum trophy, is a lot more metagamey. Since it provides less context and sometimes directs you to do slightly odd things, I do not recommend this for a first or only playthrough, particularly since it misses out on a crucial part of any murder investigation!

The walkthroughs use the _Final Cut_ release (which is available as a free upgrade for all supported platforms). The principal difference vs. the original release is the addition of the political vision quests. If you only have the original release, simply skip the irrelevant content.

The walkthroughs are bookended by reference sections. The game's character creation system is both innovative and unique and this section is worth reading before you start playing. Finally, there is a reference section for the game's loot and a list of the game's trophies.