Disco Elysium is a role-playing game developed by ZA/UM in which players control an amnesiac detective investigating a murder in the decaying port city of Revachol. With no traditional combat, progression is driven entirely by skill checks, dialogue choices, and the chaotic inner voices of 24 competing psychic abilities.
Disco Elysium is a role-playing game developed and published by the Estonian studio ZA/UM, released in October 2019. Players inhabit Harry Du Bois, a detective of the Revachol Citizen's Militia who wakes up in a trashed hotel room with no memory of who he is or how he got there. A body hangs in the courtyard. His partner, Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, is waiting downstairs. From these small beginnings unfolds one of the most original and fully realised worlds in game history.
Disco Elysium has no conventional combat. Conflict is resolved through skill checks — dice rolls modified by character stats and equipped items — and through the game's defining mechanic: the Thought Cabinet, a set of internalized ideas that Harry can develop over time into passive bonuses or penalties. Twenty-four skills govern every aspect of play, from Electrochemistry (which craves substances and pleasure) to Rhetoric (which argues political positions mid-conversation) to Encyclopedia (which dumps trivia at inopportune moments). Each skill has its own voice and personality, and they bicker with each other inside Harry's head.
Character builds reward radically different playthroughs. A high-Empathy Harry reads emotional undercurrents that a high-Intellect Harry misses entirely. A collapsed stat can lock off entire dialogue branches while opening others. Failure is often as interesting as success: botched rolls produce absurd consequences that feel earned rather than punishing.
The world of Revachol is a failed revolution in amber — a city occupied after its commune was crushed by international capital, its residents still sorting through the wreckage of ideology and history. The writing, led by Robert Kurvitz with a team including Argo Tuulik and Helen Hindpere, is extraordinary in its range: comic, tragic, politically engaged, and frequently surreal. Conversations with minor NPCs contain as much texture as the main plot. The game does not flatten its politics into a comfortable message; it lets all its characters — communists, fascists, liberals, apolitical pragmatists — argue their positions with full force.
Disco Elysium won Game of the Year from numerous outlets in 2019 and achieved a 91 on Metacritic. It is regularly cited as among the finest RPGs ever made and one of the most significant games of the 2010s, praised for proving that the medium could sustain literary ambition and political seriousness at the highest level. A director's cut with full voice acting for all dialogue was released in 2021.