Everyone knows the GOTY, or “Game of the Year.”
But what about the GOTOY?
Standing for “Game of the Other Year,” I first heard of this comically unwieldly acronym from the co-hosts of the low-key gaming podcast Into the Aether, Brendon Bigley and Stephen Hilger. Because they bring older games along with new releases to the show, the co-hosts created a separate category — the GOTOY — so games older than 12 months old can have a seat at big end-of-the-year gaming discussions.
In this way, the GOTOY includes everyone, whether their favorite game is 2022’s Elden Ring or 2001’s Barbie Beach Vacation.
Or, in my case, 2019’s Disco Elysium.
Set in a fantasy realist semi-open world, Disco Elysium, re-released with the more complete Disco Elysium: The Final Cut in 2021, opens with a middle-aged amnesiac detective waking up in a trashed hotel room after a weekend-long bender. Not even in possession of his own name — for our purposes, let’s call him Harry — this detective must figure out who killed the man hanging behind the hostel he’s staying at even as he struggles to understand his own role in the world.
That world is Elysium, broadly, but Harry is in Martinaise, a dilapidated neighborhood of the once-great city of Revachol, its buildings still in ruins half a century after a failed communist regime that ended with the dramatic intercession of international forces.
Martinaise is a community of outcasts, a quarter of surly war veterans, drug-addled DJs, anarchist graffiti artists, and out-of-work computer programmers, all protected under the broad umbrella of a militant dock workers’ union. No one likes the police poking around, neither Harry nor his beleaguered temporary partner, Kim Kitsuragi, who provides a restrained foil to Harry’s unrepentant fumbling.
Kim, a grounded yet deeply passionate police officer, doubles as my FCOTY, or “Favorite Character of the Year.” Exceptionally well-written, Kim’s steadfast moral convictions are bolstered by a myriad of fleeting interactions that let players see into the detective’s inner life, rounding out his complexity with the little contradictions that make us all truly, chaotically, human.
The game’s hand-painted watercolor environment is drenched in melancholy detail, evoking a yearning so sorrowful that many of my friends put the game down, never to play it again. But it is this world — sad, yes, but still deeply hopeful, and often surprisingly, uproariously funny — that makes playing Disco Elysium so intoxicating.
Much of the setting’s potency can be credited to developer ZA/UM’s use of founding members’ Eastern European origins. The game eschews a black and white interpretation of life in a former communist city, painting the fragile, ideologically uncertain Revachol with a gray brush by refusing to fit the people and politics into simple categories. This delicate balance feels like the result of knowing what it’s like to live on the periphery of the West, destined by detached occupiers to take part in richer nations’ woes without benefiting from their wealth.
Clearly, Disco Elysium is a thinking man’s game.
This is true in a literal sense.
Disco Elysium is neither a walking simulator nor a point-and-click adventure game, but integrates elements from both. The game’s setting and story is interwoven with its gameplay, which take the form of Dungeons & Dragons-like skill checks based on 24 of Harry’s personal attributes.
Chances for success depend on Harry’s strengths in particular abilities, ranging from typical traits like logic and endurance to more idiosyncratic representations of a person’s characteristics like electrochemistry, which controls how much Harry responds to narcotics, or Inland Empire, which allows Harry to sense the supernatural.
The ever-present litany of voices stemming from these traits make up the most striking narrative device in Disco Elysium. Not only do they govern skill check performance, but they also backdrop every scene, providing a unique internal monologue for Harry that varies in its observations, recommendations, and desires depending on whether players focus on intelligence, emotion, or physicality when they level up.
Along with leveling up, players can get skill check boosts through outfit changes, leading to a constant variety of incredible, insane looks, or with the Thought Cabinet, a system that allows Harry to internalize different belief systems after formative interactions. Did Harry tell a character he thinks they’re a chauvinist pig? Bam — he can internalize an Inexplicable Feminist Agenda, raising empathy but lowering electrochemistry. High five Kim, and Harry gets Ace’s High, boosting the skill that represents Harry’s lust for policing.
With the variety of absurd Thought Cabinet and dialogue options afforded to players, it doesn’t take long before many will have created some version of a disco-loving, finger-snapping cool-guy Harry worthy of making any school-aged child cringe. Much of the game’s prodigious comedy is in watching regular people react to this unapologetically (or, alternatively, extremely apologetic) police officer’s over-the-top, inexcusably zany behavior.
Ultimately, it’s the player who decides who Harry is: whether he’s kind or cruel, sober or drunk, the type of man Kim would be proud to work alongside despite a baffling affinity for cryptids or a cop so dirty he shames the already muddy profession.
Disco Elysium’s marriage of art design, narrative, and gameplay results in a deeply impactful experience, one that not only succeeds in the elusive experience of evoking emotion from its players but does it over and over, like it’s an easy party trick instead of the pinnacle of storytelling.
Developer ZA/UM uses the darkly comic premise of an amnesiac, alcoholic detective plagued by the bossy narration of his own nascent personality traits to tell a sweeping account of the messy ways humans deal with the trials of being alive — and the fleeting, beautiful moments that make them bearable.
Relentlessly thoughtful, impeccably written, and creatively inspiring, Disco Elysium is unequivocally my GOTOY.
In fact, it might just be my GOEY: Game of Every Year.
That acronym’s a work in progress, too.
First Published January 12, 2023, 4:00 p.m.
