Disco Elysium - The Final Cut

The game feels like is was written by David Lynch after he got road head from Hunter S. Thompson while driving down Kentucky Route 0. It plays kinda like Planescape: Torment/Tides of Numanera, but with effectively zero combat. The game is driven by internal/external dilogue between the outside world, your character (an amnesiac, alcoholic detective), and his skills. In this way, the skills you possess passively inform the text that’s revealed to you (complete with their own, imperfect biases) while also modifying your active abilities to complete tasks. In this way, your skills will literally transform the world that you are able to perceive – and I found this pleasingly executed as a mechanic. The game, at this point in time, has mechanical flaws (skills not working correctly, save games corrupting), balancing issues (some skills being much more useful than others), and missed opportunities (types of actions/references not feeding into thoughts [in D&D terms, “feats”] which are essential for the exploration of story arcs). There were a few breakpoints in the game where I had to resort to save scumming in order to progress; this was irritating, but by no means a deal breaker. I would wager that most of these issues will be fixed in later patches. T The writing is fantastic: it is funny, bizarro, realist, empathetic. My personal journey took me to a painful place of self-reflection, treachery, and (repeating myself) kinda profound empathy. If you’re down for a story rich world with virtually no combat and (the game’s early, so I forgive this) a couple of weird bugs, the you will love this game. If you need combat or are disposed to skip dialogue/reading sections, you will not enjoy this game. If you’re easily offended, you’ll be put off by some aspects of this game (but the blame would partially be on you for going down those rabbit-holes and tricking yourself into believing they were mandatory). It took me 30+ hours to beat; I relished the experience.

Disco Elysium is a wonderful CRPG that lives and breathes a very particular style of post-soviet malaise. It's a game about failure and rolling with whatever life gives you, and its release, a herculean effort by the incredible people at the ZA/UM CREATIVE COLLECTIVE was a small miracle in itself. Unfortunately, the miracle is over. The ZA/UM CREATIVE COLLECTIVE is dead Thanks to the shortsightedness of either Tonis Haavel or Kaur Kender, executive producers at the ZA/UM games studio (a SEPARATE ENTITY from the ZA/UM creative collective), all the members of said creative collective have been ousted from the company under circumstances involving the game's lack of live-service monetization model. The members included: - Robert Kurvitz, original writer of the setting which, before Disco Elysium, debuted in the Estonian novel "of sacred and terrible air". - Martin Luiga, lead artist. - Aleksander Rostov, lead game designer - Helen Hindeper, assistant writer to Kurvitz. Additionallu, Robert Kurvitz is currently locked in a legal battle against the ZA/UM games studio to reclaim ownership of his intellectual property. DO NOT BUY THE GAME - the money from purchases is going straight towards the perpetration of this theft. Find other ways to play this game, and purchase a copy of Sacred and Terrible Air if you can. ZA/UM WILL NOT WIN.

1st off: the game is not nearly as long as reviews made it out to be on a single playthrough. It can be done in about 20 hours if you really read fast and rip through it, but probably more like 30ish hours. That said the game really invites multiple playthroughs, not because your decisions have a huge impact on the plot, but because your decisions have a huge impact on YOU. How you apply points, how you act in conversations, changes everything about you and how people react to you. The main mystery of the game isn't the murder the game starts with but who you are as a character, and the game's mechanics are consistent and support that, it has ludonarrative consonance. The traits, attributes, and thoughts system can be overwhelming but don't fall into the trap of trying to min/max or find the most efficient or most meta character. Focus on your character and the story of them. I played a drug-obsessed, maniacally optimistic believer in the supernatural with delusions of grandeur who was in constant danger of a heart attack, and the game gave me many ways that let me get through its puzzles and stories using those skills. In my second playthrough the skeleton of the plot is the same but now I'm a laconic gruff cop who seeks self-inflicted pain and is desperately trying to conceal just how much of his mind is missing, and that's changed my path trhough the story. last tip: don't click every single conversation option, like in life what you DON'T do/say can be just as meaningful and altering as what you DO do/say.

There is a decent chunk of 5/5 game in here. Unfortunately, after couple brilliant in-game days, the game seemed to collapse under its ambition and undermine itself. You play as a down-on luck amnesiac detective on a mission to solve a mystery of a hanged man, and his own self identity. While the game is mostly text based, it is an RPG. You create a character and distribute his stats, each governing 6 skills. Those skills will determine what interactions your character will be able to perform, but also determine what he sees and thinks – it is a detective game where what you character seems and notices is more important that what you see and notice. This is done by skills “talking” to you: for example “encyclopedia” might chime in giving you useful (or not!) info about something you heard. The game starts brilliant – its full of content, pacing and writing is excellent. You discover things about yourself, you examine evidence, question and confront witnesses. There seem to be plenty of checks relevant to skills you chose, giving you various ways to approach problems at hand. At some point things take a drastic change to the worse – progression is gated behind a very specific skill check, event, which was presented as avoidable, become unavoidable, skill checks rigged to win or fail, character and story development halts, you are unable to follow-up on leads you have, until the game decided it is time to wrap it up. The epilogue is a wall of text, tying up every single loose story thread. There are two separate “tests” when game judges how you performed – in solving the mystery, and your character. Pacing is really off, and it feels very artificial. Some mechanical issues (like encouraging to swap your clothes behind every check) become more and more apparent as games goes on. Still, there is a solid chunk of great game, and for a debut title, it is impressive. I would recommend giving it a try, but due to the drop in quality I would recommend waiting for a sale.

Here's the thing: I like gaming worlds to be magical, outlandish, whimsical even, and I like when my adventures there make me forget about this old boring world I have to deal with daily. Yes, I am an escapist. But here comes Disco Elysium, and it tells me a story which, while set in a very unique world, is pretty far from the wild rides of world-changing or world-saving adventures. Yet this story is so good, so heart-felt, so unlike anything I've seen in cRPGS so far (Planescape would be the closest thing to compare it with, and this should speak for itself, I guess) that I threw my escapism out of the window and dived deep into the world of Revachol and it's prodigal detective.