The concise "Bliss Disco" hides depth and love

◎ Yan Xiaoping

In February, Amazon announced that it would adapt "Bliss Disco" into a series to bring the game into more people's vision. The game has won four awards from TGA for Best Indie Game, Best Role-Playing Game, Best Narrative Award, and Best New Indie Game Maker, and is a phenomenal game masterpiece, and its art, music, and voice acting are also quite artistic.

Bliss Disco is essentially a detective game — an unnamed corpse hangs from a tree, and Officer Harry has to hunt down the real culprit within a week. When he woke up in a strange room, he didn't know who he was, where he was, or even where the other shoe was. In fact, "Bliss Disco" is not as complicated as it seems, the reasoning setting is not even rigorous enough, its real charm is that through the process of solving the case, the player can examine a multi-dimensional examination of an alienated area, and the identity of the police officer makes this examination process enter different levels such as geographical space, social space and psychological space.

The area called "Martinez" is an out-of-control monster, full of evil, unknowable, and with inexhaustible hope. In the game, characters and cities explain and complement each other, and when Harry walks out of his room and walks through all the maps in the game, he will find that the area is just like himself— on the one hand, driven by hope, trying to move into the future, and on the other hand, looking back at the past in the midst of complex conflicts.

Harry would try to find fragments of memories and take the initiative to put his body against a broken gun; he could escape the past, trying to break free from the tender old dreams under the protection of amnesia and alcoholism; he could also be full of fantasies that singing a karaoke would make this ruined harbor full of fun. But no matter what, he must explore his past with the city, and even face the torture sent by the murderer when he discovers the real murderer and ushers in the end.

Martinez has experienced historical events such as the king being thrown out of the carriage, the League of Nations encircling and suppressing the Revolution, famine, financial crisis and other historical events in the past few hundred years, and is falling into a new era of fragmentation and chaos. Unoccupied churches have been turned into nightclubs; men in fishing villages have nothing to do and get drunk during the day; the harbor is littered with striking workers; royalists and militia are spending time together in bomb craters by the sea, because they are all dying of old age; tower apartments have been blown up by coalition artillery, leaving only bullet-stained ruins, students, female workers, discriminated people, and street children temporarily living in them, while housing agents are taking stock and retiring.

This chaotic environment of no one is matched by the unbridled flow of ideas. Harry will be talking to a variety of different people, and he himself can choose different theories to equip himself and trigger different game branches. This is an important mechanism of the game , the "Thinking Cabinet". There are 53 kinds of thinking to choose from in the game, but no matter what kind of choice will not affect Harry's case, it will advance the plot, but his experience will become different. That is to say, in "Bliss Disco", there is no difference between each idea, Harry only needs to jump out of the inherent thinking in reality, face all kinds of people with an open mind, etc., and know why he made this choice to complete the game. At the end of the game, Harry tells the veteran that the war has ended, and the veteran who fled the battlefield and fled reality replies that "the class struggle will never stop"... Harry was speechless and shocked with pity.

Elysium Disco has only three maps, but still establishes a strong connection between Martinez and the outside world, for example, he will find through the exchange in the basement that the huge and complex "production plan" is still waiting to be executed, and a 74-year-old woman is always on duty at the call desk. There are also mysterious creatures that even biologists think do not exist, and they will fly over the sea to meet Harry.

Bliss Disco does not have a combat system, but uses the simplest, traditional board game system "roll" to advance the game, with the number of each throw plus the required skill value to determine Harry's success or failure, and the skill is also through the idea to change the game action, this form of the system produces a huge amount of text, but also the part of the production team to devote the most effort. The text of Bliss Disco is very stylized, the simple words are rich in literary meaning, and when they are superimposed on a very specific game experience, the unique pleasure of reading is strangely maximized, even a simple sentence such as "Swallows whisper in the air" will make the player's heart vibrate.

There is a skill in the skill tree that ranks last, "Celestial Induction", which cannot allow Harry to speak and strengthen his body, and it is almost "useless". But for the whole game, this is one of the most important skills, as it will bring information about Martinez and even the entire world. As Harry passes by a seabird standing on an ice floes, it traces the site's history thousands of years ago; Harry walks through the dark streets in the wet spring snow, conveying who is watching him under the distant lights at this moment. Different information is like dust in the wind under the gray clouds, building a grand world.

The game's system is full of humanity, and it sets up a door that can't be opened under any circumstances to remind "the world is like this" and will make the player unbelievably victorious. For example, Harry needs to enter the port, and the keeper is a racist who is 2 meters tall and has a fist as big as a bowl, and if he accepts his racist views, he can pass it immediately, and if he refuses, the winning rate is only 3%. However, Harry was able to beat the other side with this extremely low winning percentage and was not affected by the other side's point of view. You know, Harry will die even sleeping in the dumpster or pulling on the light rope, but all he needs is courage in the moment of standing in the harbor.

There are also small inconsequential details that remind Harry to keep an open mind at all times. Harry is a scruffy and foul-smelling drunk, he will meet a little girl holding a lamb, she will ask Harry to kiss it, when a gentle white cloud sticks to Harry's messy beard, many players will cry in front of the computer to pause the game. There is also a small tramp Kunno, who is full of dirty words and influences the case, and Harry is eager to punch him to the ground. It's this nasty Quinno who will eventually grow into Detective Kuno De Ruyt, harry won't know about it in advance, but he'll see a "I love Kuno" option in a trivial graffiti mission.

Harry was accompanied by Inspector Kim, who sold his shiny wheels to help Harry lose money; sat on a swing with a frustrated Harry and waited for the tide to recede; wiped Harry's vomit with his own handkerchief; or simply said, "You're not crazy." Faced with his incurable amnesiac partner, Old Kim tolerates almost everything, but he says it's "trust." Old Kim was also the last person to write a review to Harry, and he remembered every choice in the game for Harry. This can also be seen as the production team keeping the player's emotional efforts until the very end of the game.

When he was a teenager, he chose games, preferring complex combat systems, map design, process volumes, etc., and as the chores became more and more redundant, the playfulness became less and less, and he gradually liked the simple and interesting ones. "Bliss Disco" is the god of the latter, it brings a full sense of interaction and a deep world with the volume of single-player games, and all of this is based on simple and beautiful structural rules, relying on the strong talent and delicate love of the producers, so that the role-playing game, the oldest type of game, has produced a wonderful masterpiece.