How Disco Elysium helps to prove video games are high art – Reader’s Feature

metro.co.uk:

A reader explains his love for cult classic Disco Elysium and how its mix of the profound and the absurd has left a lasting impression.

It really helps that I love the music of Sea Power, née British Sea Power. They are an awesome British indie band with a beautiful brand of soaring orchestral scores punctuated by the use of achingly mournful horns, which have led to them being commissioned to make several scores for film and, more pertinently to this article, video games. It’s well understood that music can elevate a game, heightening the emotional impact and adding depth and heft to your bond with the characters and gameplay. Sea Power did their job well for ZA/UM on Disco Elysium, an incredible experience that’s unique to video games, but the music is just part of an overall experience that comes together to produce a key example in the argument for games as high art.

For people unacquainted with Disco Elysium, it is ZA/UM’s first game and similar to an old school point ‘n’ click adventure mixed with even older school pen and paper role-playing games. You play an amnesiac detective called Harry Dubois (though you don’t even know your name at the start), who wakes up from one of the most epic drug and drink fuelled benders of all time to the realisation that for three days you should have been investigating the dead body hanging from a tree at the back of your hostelry. Your room is almost completely destroyed, to the chagrin of the owner, and you must deal with your new partner from another district, Kim Kutseragi, whose infinite patience belies a man who thinks you are a complete mess both personally and professionally.

I love the plot, which twists and turns as you develop a