Disco Elysium Review (detective holbinski, MD)
-To anybody who stumbles into this 'review', be aware that the creative collective ZA/UM behind the company ZA/UM, the minds and souls behind the art, world, design, and writing of Disco Elysium have dissolved. Forced out by the inhuman, alien drive of their Capital co-opted investors, they 'involuntarily left' the company, and thus their collective ceased to exist, their goals fulfilled to the best of their ability, but with so much work left undone, and potential scattered like fistfuls of ashes to the wind.-
"And then you see it. As it strangles and beats your friends to death... the sweetest most courageous people in the world. You see the fear and power in its eyes. Then you know. That the bourgeois are not human."
I've never been more hurt by the breakup of a group of any kind than ZA/UM, and the absolutely tragic and ironic circumstances that lead to their dissolution. Their message couldn't have become any more poignant. Aleksander Rostov, Helen Hindpere, Martin Luiga, Robert Kurvitz, and everyone at ZA/UM who brought this game into existence, thank you. Most of all Robert Kurvitz, who poured his life into this universe for so many years. I'm so sorry we'll never get to see what was to be, and now never will be.
Please play this game. There wasn't a singleplayer game of such great length that held my attention to its completion since The Witcher 3, which I played 6 years before Disco Elysium. 6 years of trying, and failing to be invested in dozens of worlds, trying and failing to recapture the childlike wonder of being immersed in almost any world I would step into. Skyrim as a kid, Dark souls II later on, Witcher 2 and 3 years after, and then an almost complete and total absence. I thought games had lost the ability to amaze me. They hadn't. It wasn't a problem intrinsic to games, but a problem of vision, and the lack of it. Of novel thinking, the ability to spot what was missing in games all this time, the ability to grasp the grounds upon which an evolution in game design could spring, and the skill, passion, and perseverance to execute on it and deliver it to the world.
At least the world allowed that. Against the odds at least they delivered that. There may never be another ZA/UM, but at least there was ZA/UM.
Volta do mar.