The video game Disco Elysium is unique in that it fully immerses the player in the story. This isn’t to say no other video game can be truly “immersive,” but a fundamental aspect of Disco Elysium’s storytelling makes it special among role-playing games.

The aspect in question is amnesia.

The character begins the story with no memory or knowledge. Entering a fictional world with a fresh start creates a stronger incentive for discovery — looking for clues and gathering information becomes more relatable, and our perspectives as players and the characters we play begin to fuse.

Disco Elysium utilized amnesia as a way to make the experience of learning about the lore a part of the story itself. Its strategy of making exploration a seamless part of the playing experience makes for a much more relatable, personal and captivating gameplay experience. As a key achievement in story design and game development, it should serve as an example for future projects that involve more expansive fictional worlds.

Disco Elysium’s storytelling is unique because of how it introduces players to its premise. The game is centered around solving a murder mystery, but long before any detective work begins, we first find ourselves waking up in a hotel room, barely recovering from what was a rough bender.

From the very beginning of the game, the condition of our character and our own perspective correlate with each other. Our character, who doesn’t even remember his name at this point, remembers nothing about the world he lives in. Nothing about the rules, laws, culture or history of his world is known. His amnesia as a starting point matches our introduction to the world of Disco Elysium.

The game’s progression maintains a dynamic that connects us to the character we play. We meet people to ask questions not just about the world, but also about ourselves, the city we are in, the country we serve or even seemingly absurd things like what “money” is.

A complete lack of knowledge on our part about the lore of Disco Elysium matches the delusional state our character is in. The questions we ask in dialogue become more relatable because we can put ourselves in our character’s place and imagine our quest for knowledge as something we might actually do in real life.

Disco Elysium strives to avoid “ludonarrative dissonance,” the mismatch between the story within the game that our character experiences and our own experience as a player. Were we to wake up normally and simply go about our business as a detective, we would not have a strong incentive, or perhaps any incentive, to explore the world around us. No matter what the story may have told us about our discoveries or experiences, we would be disconnected from our character and experience the game from an outside perspective.

Our character’s amnesia creates a situation where we start from a clean slate. Our character’s learning and exploration become our own experience of learning and exploring. Asking questions about our identity, gathering information from the people around us, and deciding how to judge these things all become part of our personal experience with the story.

It is difficult to explain the full beauty of this game design within the limits of a short article like this. Nevertheless, I’m convinced that amnesia as a dynamic in story design must be explored more often to generate more immersive experiences.

The aforementioned issue of ludonarrative dissonance is at the heart of this need for exploration. Video games today, depending on their genre, can involve highly complex world-building, and we, as players, must be deeply familiar with the world around us to feel “immersed” in it.

Consider, for example, a game such as Cyberpunk 2077, which on paper offers choices at certain moments that shape the character you play. However, in reality, background choices or decisions made throughout the playthrough hardly affect the gameplay itself. The lack of room for choices and the limited scope of background stories make immersion in the world of Cyberpunk difficult and uninspiring.

As video games continue to expand in scope, immersiveness will also define how we evaluate the playing experience. Future video game designs should consider tactics that make the character and the player share intersecting perspectives.

When playing a game with a complex story, the player must feel the depth of their discoveries, investment in their decisions and the consequences of their decisions. Disco Elysium is, so far, the only game I have played that presents its story in a way that makes each playthrough personal to the player.

Future projects should definitely take inspiration from its storytelling methods. They should explore how story design introduces its world to players in engaging ways, making the gameplay experience more personal.

Deniz Gulay is a senior double-majoring in history and Russian.

Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the staff editorial.