Diving into Disco Elysium: A novice’s handbook to navigate beginners

Disco Elysium is a murky murder mystery that takes some time to crystallise. Some players may initially struggle to understand the game’s principles and plot due to the obscurity of its introduction.

We’ll help this puzzling experience make more sense in this beginner’s guide so you can focus on getting your memories back and deciding whether or not you’re an Apocalypse Cop or rock star.

• Competences and Skills

You take on the role of a man who has forgotten everything in Disco Elysium. He has to solve a murder while also trying to figure out who he is. Four sets of skills that control how the main character interacts with the outside world must be used in order to do it.

The three builds available to you at the beginning of Disco Elysium are Thinker, Sensitive, and Physical, which distribute 12 points among the following four abilities:

• Intellect- How smart you are depends on your intellect. How well you understand the world around you depends on its level.
• Psyche-Your sensitivity and emotional quotient are gauged by psyche. It controls your capacity to sway both yourself and other people.
• Physique- Your power and fortitude can be best described by your physique. Your body’s whole structure, both inside and out, is determined by this.
• Motorics- Your senses are described by motorics. Your physical and mental agility are also governed by this quality.

Make your own construction

Additionally, you can create your own construct by allocating up to six points to each trait (with a maximum of 12 points overall).

After making your own build, you must select a Signature Skill. Your four skills each have an impact on six skills. Each of these 24 abilities has a starting level that is determined by the degree of each ability. Selecting a signature skill boosts the learning cap for each skill in that class and adds a level to that talent. These skills can get additional points as you level up.

Read up on each skill’s function because it will affect the dialogue options you have in the game. Consider each of your party’s 24 skills as an individual. The more advanced they are, the more likely it is that they will assist you in dialogue, learn the details of your identification, and determine what led to the murder.

Review the Overview and Info pages for each talent to familiarise yourself with its functions. You can respect your character’s base abilities on this screen while choosing your signature talent, just in case you change your mind.

• Right at the Start, Save

Here is some fast and straightforward advice: As soon as you take control of your character, save. In order to accomplish this, press Escape, then choose “Save Game.”

Without giving anything away, if you choose poorly in your messy hotel room at the start of the game, you could potentially pass away. You might not want to start over since you managed to kill yourself in the first five minutes, especially if you took the time to create your own build.

• To Highlight Objects, Hold the Tab

Disco Elysium has a similar aesthetic to those old-school point-and-click adventures, with significant details spread over each screen. Hold the Tab key on your keyboard to draw attention to things you can alter or individuals you can interact with rather than frantically clicking around to see what you can interact with.

If you can communicate with them, both individuals and objects will glow green. You can’t speak to everyone, as shown in the screenshot up top. Who is a person of interest and who is not is made plain by the highlighting. A fantastic approach to make sure you don’t overlook any oblique cues or challenging-to-spot elements is to hold tab.

• Health Tips

In Disco Elysium, most of the harm you receive is verbal, as opposed to other role-playing games where you could sustain injuries from physical combat. The game lacks conventional combat. Instead, there are intensive meetings that involve talking, asking questions, insulting each other, and more. Your mind and body can suffer from conversations.

By kicking trash cans or sitting on uncomfortable seats, you can still lose health, but your Morale can also be harmed. You could, depending on how your character is constructed, have more Health than Morale points. A better state of health allows you to take more chances, such as trying to slam doors open or using your physical power to get through more challenging conversations. Your state of mind provides you more resilience to tolerate verbal jabs or an unpleasant conversational slip-up. 

You must purchase specific medications at Frittte, the strangely named pharmacy next to the hotel where the game begins, in order to heal.

Traditional inventory screens are not available for usage with those products. Instead, the bottom left of your screen shows you how many healing supplies you have for each stat. The numbers on the bars indicate how many healing items you have available for each type of health, including both physical and mental health. To restore any lost bars, simply click on the numbers.

• Doing White Checks again

Disco Elysium uses checks, like a standard RPG, based on your 24 talents for specific scenarios.

Sometimes, the dialogue options you have or the methods you interact with the world depend on your abilities to tell you whether or not you can do something. Checks are influenced by your skill level, your findings, or even statements you’ve made in the past. When you hover over the relevant dialogue choice, you’ll see your chances of success and the skill employed.

When you’re prompted to make a check, the game will roll invisible dice and attempt to beat a hidden number using your skill levels and other factors. You will have the chance to say or do something that you ordinarily wouldn’t be able to if you pass the check. This feature gives the plot some mobility because your individual skill levels and previous actions can influence what you can do later on.

If a check is marked as a White Check in the game, it means you can try it again at a later time. If you possess a high level of the necessary skill or have discovered other circumstances that would boost a check’s success, it will be more likely to succeed.

Red Checks can only be attempted once, so proceed with caution. If the success rate is poor, consider improving the necessary ability or look for additional strategies that can boost your chances of succeeding.

• How to use the Consciousness Cabinet

Every time you level up, you can upgrade a skill by one point. But there are other ways to boost your scores as well.

Given that your character has completely lost all sense of who they are, certain conversational topics can spark an idea in their head. These fresh ideas are added to the Thought Cabinet. Thoughts in the Thought Cabinet have no independent action. You can start ruminating on new ideas, though, if you use a talent point to open a place in the Thought Cabinet.

Every new idea first appears as a challenge. You can internalise a concept while it is still a Problem by placing it in a vacant slot. Each idea will then start its own countdown and deliver a new, momentary bonus or debuff to one of your talents once that process gets going.

The countdown utilises the game’s timer to estimate how long internalisation will take; it typically takes a few in-game hours. You discover a thought’s resolution once you have internalised it. These solutions provide one or more skills from any of the four ability categories with a permanent buff.

The distinct inner self that you establish for the main character is ultimately a result of internalised thoughts in the Thought Cabinet. Buffs enhance the character’s skills, which also affect what they can say or know, and those thoughts may impact some of the things they say in conversation. 

• You did not soft lock the game

Certain stats can be decreased by debuffs obtained from the Thought Cabinet or goods you are wearing. Surprisingly, you can really drop stats to zero, which is an effect that is never completely explained. This has a significant effect on a particular stat called perception.

Your character cannot recognize objects they can interact with if your Perception skill decreases to zero due to a Thought Cabinet notion or item of clothing you are wearing.

In fact, if your Perception reaches 0, you can find yourself able to walk through a door to enter a room but unable to use that same door to leave it, leaving you trapped. Due of your poor perception, some doors or other important items won’t be highlighted if you press Tab to highlight interactive objects.

If you notice this, you might only need to change into a fresh outfit or decide to forget a notion that affected your perception. Do not forget that losing an idea costs one skill point.

• Take on Side Quest

You might discover that it’s initially hard to inspect the dead body that serves as the game’s key plot point depending on how you allocated your character’s skill points. Fortunately, there are a ton of side missions in Disco Elysium that you can complete, many of which will help you level up, collect fresh concepts for your Thought Cabinet, and possibly bring you closer to understanding what’s going on.

Don’t be afraid to take on side tasks because they all present chances to explore the entire map, gain more knowledge of the area, and find important case-related information. Fortunately, your victim isn’t leaving, and you have a few days of gameplay left to solve the enigma surrounding the murder.

While it’s unclear which side quests will ultimately be important to the murder, several of them offer crucial context for what initially seems to be a straightforward case. Discuss everything with everyone. Return to persons you’ve previously spoken to after learning more details about the case to see if any of the new information you’ve learned creates opportunities for new conversation.