Steam Link Spotlight - Disco Elysium

Posted by Campbell Bird on July 8th, 2020
+ Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad

Steam Link Spotlight is a feature where we look at PC games that play exceptionally well using the Steam Link app. Our last entry was Signs of the Sojourner Read about how it plays using Steam Link over here.

For this entry, I dove into Disco Elysium, an open world role playing game where you play as a detective who has just woken up from an epic hangover, and is now tasked with attempting to solve a murder while trying to piece together his own whereabouts and life. What sets this game apart from other role playing games though is that it shies away from combat and instead relies on dialog-based interactions between characters, which works mostly because the game is very well written and full of detailed and lively characters.


Because of its somewhat slow pace, Disco Elysium makes for a good choice to play using Steam Link. There's also the fact that controlling the game is mostly just a matter of clicking on things and reading. Tons of games that operate similarly have already made the jump to iOS and flourished, so it's no surprise that playing this game using touch works as well as it does.

Unlike some previous entries in this series, there are some notable drawbacks to playing Disco Elysium on mobile, but none of them bothered me too much while playing. As shown in the video above, there is an instance where I tried to follow a tooltip to hit the "Tab" key to see everything I could interact with, which doesn't work. My solution to this problem was to start dragging the cursor around the screen though, which allowed me to see points of interaction by highlighting them as I moused over them. It's not the ideal solution, but works well enough.

For this reason, I think I'd prefer to play a native iOS version of Disco Elysium, and maybe one day that will happen. In recent updates to the game, they've made the game scalable to the point that it can play on really old hardware, and there's new functionality to make the game playable using a mouse only. These don't hint at the game hitting the App Store specifically, but they seem like steps in the right direction.

In either case, you can get by just fine if you try to play Disco Elysium using Steam Link, so make sure you do so. This game is special.

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