In February this year, Amazon announced that it would adapt the game "Bliss Disco" into a series, which made the game enter more people's vision. This game has won 4 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.
Elysium Disco game screen
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, its reasoning settings are not even rigorous enough, and the real charm of this game is that through the process of solving the case, players can examine a multi-dimensional examination of an alienated region. The identity of the police officer brings this process of examination into different dimensions of geopolitical, social and psychological space: the region called "Martinez" is an out-of-control monster, full of evil, unknowable, and always with inexhaustible hope.
In the game, characters and cities interpret and complement each other. When Harry walks out of his room and through all the maps in the game, he finds that the area is just like himself—trying to move into the future driven by hope, and looking back at the past in the midst of complex conflicts.
Harry will try to find fragments of memories and take the initiative to put his body against a broken gun; he can escape the past, trying to break free from the tender old dreams under the protection of amnesia and alcoholism; he can also be full of fantasies, thinking that singing a karaoke song will 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 encirclement and suppression of the League of Nations, famine, financial crisis and other historical events for hundreds of years, and is falling into an era of brokenness and chaos. Unoccupied churches were turned into nightclubs; men in fishing villages were idle and drunk in the daytime; the harbor was littered with striking workers; royalists and militia were spending time together in bomb craters by the sea, because they were all dying of old age. The tower apartments were blown up by coalition artillery, leaving only the bomb-scarred ruins, with students, female workers, discriminated against, and street children temporarily living in them, while the housing agents were taking stock and clearing them. 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 "minds" to choose from in the game, but no matter what choice will not affect Harry's case, it will advance the plot, but Harry's 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 is over, but the veteran who fled the battlefield and from reality replies, "... The struggle never stops..." Words cannot describe Harry's speechless, mournful shock.
Elysium Disco has only three maps in total, which can be said to be very limited, but the game still establishes a strong connection between Martinez and the outside world. For example, he would find through the switch in the basement that the huge and complex "production plan" was still waiting to be executed, and a 74-year-old woman was 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 a seabird standing on an ice floes, it traces the site's history back thousands of years; Harry walks through the dark streets in the wet spring snow, conveying who is watching Harry under a distant lamp at this moment. Different information is like dust in the wind under the gray clouds, building a grand world.
The system of the game is full of humanity, and it sets up a door that cannot be opened under any circumstances, as a reminder that the world is like this. It will also allow players to win incredibly. 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, foul-smelling drunk who meets a little girl holding a lamb, and she asks Harry to kiss him—and when a gentle white cloud sticks to Harry's messy beard, many players will cry in front of the computer and 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 to the last minute of the game.
As a teenager, he chose games, preferring complex combat systems, map design, and process volumes. As time flies, the chores become more and more redundant, the playful days are less, and I gradually like the simple and interesting ones. "Bliss Disco" is the magic 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.
(Original title: Spotlight Love and Hope Achieve Phenomenal Game Masterpiece)
Source: Beijing Daily
Author: Yan Xiaoping
Process Editor: u017