Imagine if one day you woke up with no memory of who you were or of the world you lived in and as soon as you walk outside, the first person you meet tells you that you owe them a month’s rent, damages to the apartment and you have been a nuisance to everyone near the building.

To make matters worse, before you can even continue you’re met by a police officer telling you that you’re late to your job and that you must solve a murder that rocked a community.

This is the beginning of Disco Elysium, an Indie roleplay-playing game (RPG) steampunk theme personal computer video game.

What may sound like a rocky start to a story or video game by barraging the player with problems and quests before truly understanding it, Disco Elysium executes this very well and in a bit of a comical way.

Before the game even starts, you, the player, are allowed to allocate your character skills/stats that can make them smarter, stronger, more charismatic, etc.

The difficulty of the game is decided by what you feel is the best way to play. You can make the first tasks easy by focusing on stats that help you unlock better dialogue options or help you even lie your way out of some issues or you can make it harder by focusing on strength and/or intelligence.

However, there’s a catch, just because this part of the game is easy at point, doesn’t mean the rest is going to be. Disco Elysium creates an interesting difficulty that rollercoasters through the game according to how you design your character and later put points into getting more skills.

Disco Elysium is set in a fictional world called Revachlon, where there’s been a failed revolution and is currently under international occupation, during the game itself, there’s a major strike and tensions are high for both those striking and those opposed to it.

This sets the perfect background for a character with no memory, because not only must they re-learn the world they live in, but develop opinions about it.

Throughout the game, your character is allowed to decide their own social, religious, political, and economic views on the world. By doing this, the game allows the player to interpret the game as you see fit.

However, there can be consequences, that roller coaster of difficulty kicks in here. Characters in the game will challenge you on those beliefs, they will disagree with you and sometimes even refuse to speak to you because of them.

This game does not handhold you and treats the player with a large degree of maturity. You’re expected to know that not only do your actions have consequences but so do your own personal beliefs and speech.

By doing this, Disco Elysium creates an amazing story where you have so much freedom to both learn about the world you live in and accidentally by your own actions hurt yourself, but by hurting yourself by those actions, you learn something about the characters around you and the world itself.

Elysium creates a world of opportunities when it comes to storytelling in video games, and I can’t wait to see what future games ZA/UM and other companies in the industry plan to create.