![]() ![]() After all, I would also find it difficult to stay suave in a burning castle or while hanging out of the back of an aeroplane. ![]() Nathan Drake totters about, getting hurt and pulling funny faces, and that makes sense to me. Some other games clearly recognise the appeal of imperfection, though struggle to keep it consistent. And depending on your choices, you could really drive your life into a ditch and run off hooting. The pile of booze-soaked meat and hair that staggers out of the Whirling-in-Rags in the game’s intro has to spend the majority of the first day wondering how to get a corpse down from a tree, remembering where they left their gun, or just trying to find their shoe, all through the filter of an apocalyptic hangover. Sure, it’s implied that you were a competent detective in the past, but that was then and this is now. The power fantasy works as a visceral experience, but not as a way to connect with the hero.Ĭlick to enlarge The main character of Disco Elysium finds life so difficult that just changing his expression proves near-impossible at times.ĭisco Elysium recognises this and runs with it to its logical conclusion, presenting a main character who’s struggling to keep up with the basics of day-to-day human existence, let alone doing his job well. We don’t really understand Marcus Fenix’s struggle to cut a parade of aliens in half with a chainsaw, but we can damn well understand the guy who sneaks around the battlefield altogether to avoid getting mowed down. Hypercompentency is dehumanising because it’s not something most of us can really comprehend. Why fuss about with pieces of string pulled from a dumpster when you could just blast a hole through the obstacle ahead?īut it's this very kind of limitation that often makes characters more likeable. If Roger Wilco were a pioneering badass flying into unknown depths on the final frontier, they’d have had to make an action game. Sure, part of that is just the limitations of the genre. Half these characters you wouldn’t trust to open a door in less than an hour, but in these games, they’re presented as the only hope in a desperate situation. Larry Laffer is a scrawny sleazebag who aspires to be a stud. Roger Wilco is a bumbling janitor pushed into the frantic cosmic nonsense of Space Quest. Guybrush Threepwood is a wannabe pirate who can’t even swordfight at the start of Monkey Island. They were sometimes actively stupid, but at the very least they weren’t very good at whatever task they were supposed to be doing. Many of those old adventure games had a recurring trend: namely, that the main character was some level of inept. Its mechanics, its approach to storytelling, its spirit is clearly looking back at old games like Planescape: Torment, but the truth is there’s a part of its DNA that goes back even further to the pixel-pimple games of LucasArts, Sierra and Delphine. Disco Elysium is a phenomenal game, perhaps both because of - and in spite of - its many homages to the classic adventure games of the 90s and early 2000s. ![]()
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