The delightfully unusual detective role-playing game Disco Elysium is finally on console. The Final Cut version of the game arrived yesterday on PlayStation machines (4 and 5), the App Store, Stadia and PC (a free update if you already own the base game), and there’s an Xbox version due to follow this summer.
I’ve been playing it on PlayStation 5, and generally it works well. I haven’t noticed the frame-rate issues I’ve seen reported elsewhere, so presumably they really have been fixed. But I have come across the object interaction bug, which sometimes doesn’t register your interactions, or doesn’t quite trigger them. Pressing the button again usually rectifies the issue, so it’s sometimes annoying but rarely more. Loading times seem fine on PS5, though I wonder what they’re like on PS4, and I haven’t seen any other bugs, though I’m only early in the game (code arrived late).
But the most notable new addition is full voice acting. Disco Elysium is a wordy game and only patches of it were voiced originally, meaning most of the time you were reading a text box on the right-hand side of the screen. And though the words were (and are) delightful – Disco Elysium has an outrageous sense of humour, and a lovely way of voicing thoughts that really ought to stay in your head – the sheer amount of them could be wearying. This also made the game somewhat quiet and still, as it waited for you to read and catch up. But the addition of audible voices has a powerful effect on this.
