One of the best games of 2019 was the Indie game Disco Elysium, and while it has a critical and commercial success following its release, few would have guessed that it would take home more awards than any other title at last night’s Game Awards. In the end, Disco Elysium claimed the award for Best Narrative, Best Role-Playing Game, Best Independent Game, and Fresh Indie Game.
By comparison, Death Stranding was also expected to perform well, and it still did, winning the award for Best Performance, Score and Music, and Game Direction. However, the games fall on opposite ends of the production spectrum in terms of cost and scale, as Death Stranding has been a massive undertaking. The victory is a great one not only for the Disco Elysium developers, ZA/UM, but also for indie developers who now see how powerful their games can be without AAA production budgets.
For those who have not played or heard of Disco Elysium, players take on the role of a detective who must investigate the murder of a man found hanging from a tree in one of the most troubled parts of town. The protagonist suffers from a self-induced case of amnesia from overdrinking due to an emotional breakdown and must also discover who he is at the same time.
From there, the game begins to shine through its dialogue-heavy gameplay mechanics, watercolor art style for characters and settings, and fantastic take on innovating the classic roleplaying systems of other games. There is no direct combat system like in other RPGs, the game pushes the medium by blending those dialogue options with classic point and click narrative games. Since everything is resolved by your choices, and the narrative and writing are so rich, getting sucked into the story happens almost immediately.
After having received such widespread acclaim following its release, and validation of that reception through winning more awards than any other game at The Game Awards last night, Disco Elysium has cemented its position not only in 2019, but in years to come.
The implications of its success will be seen in several ways. First, other developers will look to this success and attempt to emulate it for themselves, either by taking some aspects of the game or many, and as with all trends that are picked up once they become popular, will work to varying levels of success. In the same way that Dark Souls was such a hit, now every other action RPG developer feels the need to mention that game when promoting their own, often inaccurately.
On the other hand, Disco Elysium pushed its own medium so much that we should now expect other RPGs to take similar risks, and the result should be the ongoing evolution of the genre, which is fantastic, otherwise it risks growing stale without innovation.
In any case, we congratulate ZA/UM in their sweeping victory last night!
Source: The Game Awards 2019
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