Soon the Russian translation of the Disco Elysium quest will be released - with a luxurious design, tons of text and a lot of passage options

Explain why he should wait

On May 11, 2020, it became known that one of the main games of 2019, the role quest Disco Elysium, will be translated into Russian. The chief editor of Russian localization will be the translator and illustrator Alexander Golubev . This is great news even for those who know English well, because the volume of the text that is necessary for the game is quite difficult to defeat. The game has already been released for Windows and MacOS; in the future, developers promise the version for Nintendo Switch and consoles. The specific date of the Russian version of Disco Elysium has not yet been announced, but it is definitely worth waiting. In the meantime, we explain how this game is so good.

Update. Localization of the game was handed over to Testronic. Alexandra Golubev is still involved in the project, but already as a translator. In November 2020, a team of localizers said that the transfer is 90%ready.

Disco Elysium is not just a video game, but a literary work of a tremendous volume: answering a fan of Twitter, developers from the Estonian ZA/UM studio, said that there are more than a million words of descriptions and dialogues in the game (these are about two “wars and peace” or all seven volumes of Harry Potter). At a time, of course, they will not show you all: due to the variety of the branches of the plot and different endings of the Disco Elysium, you need to go at least three times, choosing other dialogue options and ways of passage in order to read at least half of this million.

If we compare the gameplay with the obvious predecessors of the Disco Elysium - the same dense in the text sense, the first two Fallout and Planescape: Torment - then you can’t help but mention that there are no fights in the usual form, when you need to jam enemies to death in real time or to consider enough action points for a well -aimed shot in the residue. There is no. The success or failure of each action - including rare fights and shootings - is calculated by a throw of virtual bones, in which your skills are taken into account, as well as bonuses from clothing and answers to certain replicas in dialogs with different characters.

You don’t offer you any choice of a race or appearance of the character in Disco Elysium: you play for a policeman with a late stage of alcoholism and a violet face who, on an important official task, drank to complete amnesia and defeated the hotel room. He does not remember absolutely nothing, even his own name (this is a separate plot branch, which can not be passed and reach the end with a fictitious name or even without it). And then the actual development of the character begins, which collects fragments of his personality according to pieces of memories or forms it again. Each increase in one of the 24 characteristics (six in four categories: intelligence, soul, physical endurance and motor skills) to one point opens up a lot of new opportunities. And each new turn of the next multi -page dialogue opened in the next, even more delusional and exciting, will hide.

Many of these dialogs are as absurd as possible, especially if some skills are pumped to the maximum. A considerable part of the conversations occurs literally with the voices in the head of your hero, in the role of which these animated (each has its own portrait and voice) skill. Some of them look more or less familiar for role-playing games-for example, physical strength and charisma-but there are exotic ones, such as the “internal empire” or “conceptualization”. The benefits of the latter are not obvious at the beginning, but seduced to the end, they help the Universe of the Disco Elysium universe to the maximum to reveal in all its psychedelic splendor. At the same time, the world of Disco Elysium is arranged so that even the wildest nonsense that came to your hero in the backs of the most ugly binge (one of the skills exists literally in order to pick you up: mucus from the table, this puddle of the barn, you need to urgently crumble) may be the only true option for the development of events.

In addition, your character has a separate set of characteristics-something like perks in Fallout. This is the so -called “cabinet with thoughts” - perhaps the most original find of the developers Disco Elysium, which allows you to literally gather the personality of the hero from peculiar cubes: memories, philosophical views and political ideologies. The interlocutors most often lead to these thoughts of the hero, after which each needs to “conceptualize” each: to spend some game time to ensure that it is fixed in your mind; By mechanics, this is similar to the Tree of Scientific Development in Strategies. Thoughts that can be put in a cabinet - in total they can be found about fifty, but in the closet a place for a maximum of 12 - not just give a bonus to certain characteristics. Like skills, thoughts in Disco Elysium are the full -fledged personality traits of the hero who will influence the attitude of other characters to him, discovering new opportunities and dialogue options.

The number of combinations of different characteristics and thoughts in Disco Elysium is hardly counting. By the end of the game, your policeman can become both a militant nationalist, prone to lengthy dialogues with his own tie, and a homeless anarchist, obsessed with the inevitable apocalypse, and a genius-narcomancer in the spirit of Sherlock Holmes or a sweet drink like Jimmy Macnalti from the series "Shewl" (yes, its authors are also mentioned as a quality Source of inspiration). The process of development of the character is so branched and diverse that it is unlikely that two people passing the game will turn out to be the same main character. Naturally, the approach to each quest changes with each option. Therefore, the potential for repeated passage is not that endless, but be prepared for the fact that immediately after the final credits you will unbearably want to start immediately and explore new, still unknown backbils and branches of the plot.

Even during the first passage, the depth of the world of the world Disco Elysium is amazing. The whole action takes place on a relatively small virtual patch, much smaller in area than the worlds of The Elder Scrolls or “Witcher”, with literally a couple of the main gaming locations for the entire game. But a gigantic amount of internal mythology is trampled into this volume. So about the world of the game - the dying Empire of Revashol (it is located in the universe, filled with an unknown, but continuously expanding hostile substance) - in the course of its development will have to read about a whole book with a “picnic on the sidelines” or “doom doomed”. It is not surprising, by the way, that the developers mentioned the Strugatsky as one of their main sources of inspiration.

The plot of Disco Elysium is developing in a world, the similarity of which is easily guessed with ours: in Revashol, everyone speaks with a French accent, and in Orange with Dutch. At the same time, some "Easterns" will surely cause the joy of recognizing from any resident of the post -Soviet space - we will not spoil it with spoilers. And the main character-waking up with a monstrous hangover at the beginning, vicious, but charming, in search of lost love, which is either inhabited into extensive philosophical conversations, then into obscene chosen ones with real and fictional interlocutors, cannot but remind you of a broom from Moscow-Petushki.

The design of Disco Elysium deserves a special mention: both the impressionist watercolor palette of game locations and characters, and the absolutely Boskhov illustrations for the “mental cabinet”, and the soundtrack from the British indie group British Sea Power. He, along with the album of sketches, was released by a separate addition to the game. And when, after the next passage, sobbing over some plot twists, you will squeeze everything you can from Disco Elysium, a few more hours of “sticking” and nostalgic overheating are guaranteed to you.

Alexey Kovalev