As far as video game writing goes, very few games hit as hard as ZA/UM’s Disco Elysium. The gorgeous RPG is one of the literary greats of modern gaming, and it strikes a chord with almost everyone who plays it, including Dead Space writer and producer Chuck Beaver.
Alongside explaining why Batman Arkham Asylum would make for a perfect James Bond game, Beaver said Disco Elysium was a huge surprise in terms of its writing quality. “I came late to the party,” he said in an upcoming episode of the FRVR Podcast. “So, I played it like four years ago… that game is just, I really love that game”.
While Beaver claimed that the game is “not for everybody”, but for players who love games with high-level writing, Disco Elysium is unbeaten. “You’re reading a novel, is basically what happens” he said. “But the writing is so good. The plotting is so good. The world building is so good.” And the game’s balance of realism and fantasticism made an impression on the Dead Space lead.
Beaver’s infatuation with Disco Elysium isn’t just due to its strong writing quality, but for its unique approach. While there are a lot of games with great writing, nothing attempts to try anything similar to ZA/UM’s masterpiece, at least for now.
“It’s all based on this really mundane sort of Eastern Bloc sad dystopian-ness, right? In this horribly dysfunctional anti-hero,” he continued. “It’s just so good, that’s really, really great, like that kind of really high literature writing like that, that’s not happening in [anything else. Like, what game is remotely thinking about that, you know? It’s all going to be very much more typical writing where you’ve just got sort of very plain sort of things happening.”
Right now, ZA/UM is working on Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, an RPG that follows a similar narrative and aesthetic style to Disco Elysium. However, many of the developers that worked on Disco are no longer at the studio with many splitting off to work on their own titles in a complicated web of new studios.
As for Dead Space, EA’s iconic horror franchise is currently dormant on a hiatus. Following EA Motive’s remake of the first game, which released to critical acclaim, the franchise is on a rest. Unfortunately, the remake’s low sales of 2 million copies means it’s unlikely to return anytime soon.
Disco Elysium is available right now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch and PC. (It’s also a perfect Steam Deck game, just saying!)
