Disco Elysium - The Final Cut

I hate narrative games. I hate plots. and I hate dialogue. Why? I am a dinosaur. I thought I've seen it all. The cliches, the meaningless choices, the awful plot twists (Fallout 4). I saw the birth of the point and click, the rise of isometric, and the death of both as they moved to 3D. The Gabriel Knight Series captures the rise and fall of the point and click perfectly. Much like Disco, I thought it was dead - nay! It was merely sleeping. The brilliant writing and fantastic art direction have reinvented a genre and that in itself is nothing short of a miracle! Voice acting is top-notch. The voices are just so perfect! The choices are meaningful! Coming from Sierra On-Line's 80s games of try and die. The game is light-years ahead of its forebearers. It's truly Cyberpunk. More Blade Runner than the Matrix or Cyberpunk 2077. The pain in the soul is palpable. As with any game. Save often; Save Frequently. As with any game there are some glitches. Clothing might disappear. And design choices (which will probably be patched later) such as unwinnable states via being forced to earn money to sleep at the motel at first. Down to being locked out of quest completion till near end game like Finding all the armor - are curious choices. So it's not Flawless. But despite that. But since it's easy to skip dialogue and just an absolute PLEASURE to replay, it makes loading pretty painless. But I think GOG should increase their sync file size. I beat it last night and I really can't stop thinking about the impact it had on me. I haven't laughed from a game in so long. I also cried like a baby at some points. And there was a good smattering of tears and laughs throughout this game. Hell, movies don't even do that to me. This game is nothing short of a masterpiece. The fact they added voice acting for free is nuts! And it's quality voice acting. Just perfect. The devs and everyone must really love this game and it shows. The best thing I may have ever played. Ever!

Not sure why but I expected something completely different. GOG advertises this as "Role-playing - Turn-based - Fantasy". Well yes, you play a role and you can level up some things, there is dice throwing like in a "real world" RPG. "Turn-based"? Well, most of the time that you do not spent walking around chasing a potentially new available dialog option somewhere or a magically appearing new NPC is spent clicking through voluminous dialog trees. It is neither perfectly polished (I had several occasions where my dialog options with NPCs were oblivious that I already found out something elsewhere), it feels very forced with its gate-keeping blockers (not a troll on bridge but some big guy on a bridge). It is incredibly pretentious in its tone and setting. And it just does not have much of gameplay at all. The world is very static, tiny and nothing makes much sense. The character you play yourself is utterly incoherent (yes, even if it is meant to be). Just as incoherent as this review maybe. Well, I am ranting. Try it if: - you like *point and click adventures* - irrelevant story telling makes your intellect erect - funneh akzents is funné to yuhsa - constantly redressing a doll is what you consider gameplay - you like to retry dialog trees to find a new option two layers deep Avoid if: - you want to play a *game* - something made you think this was an RPG - constantly running back and forth between static characters so that maybe, just maybe you might be able to talk to them about new insight, sounds like a bore to you - you had enough of big brain intellect fantasies in 11th grade school

I really can't explain well enough just how many right checkmarks does this game hit. It has the ideal length, the story is as dark as the world it plays out but it keeps pulling you in and despite there being no combat the game is just so entertaining. This is a must buy

I started playing this game as someone pointed out that this was sort of a successor to Planescape Torment, and it really is. I played this game for nearly 15 hours now, and all of the interactions are fun. A real RPG where I am tempted to try out conversations, actions and explore the world. If you like action and fighting games this is probably not for you. The political factions in the game are like political parties, I think the next time I play this I will try out the communist story line. And there are 3 character class types, that are both like and unlike any system I know. Great!

So many times I've heard of video games medium still waiting for their "Citizen Kane". I don't know about Kane, but in "Disco Elysium" we got our "Crime and Punishment". "Undertale" is like "Watchmen": it's amazing, layered and extremely self-referential, but you can only appreciate it if you've played other RPG games/read other visual novels about superheroes. "Disco", on the other hand, is like Dostoyevski's master work. Not only it has this dense, heavy, very Russian atmosphere (Robert Kurvitz's hometown of Tallin, Estonia is not that far away from St Petersburg), but also while it's lengthy, wordy and seems like impossible to get through, once you get into it, it turns out to be surprisingly light at times, flows extremely well, it's full of fleshed-out characters and everyone - really, everyone - could find something that resonates to them in the myriad of stories told. Truly a masterpiece in the medium of video games. PS. Also, that music... I thought it absolutely makes sense that the soundtrack to a game called "Disco Elysium" was made by a band that previously recorded an album titled "Valhalla Dancehall", but the truth is, it was the other way around - Robert Kurvitz is such a fan of the band that the game is absolutely riddled with references to the band's body of work.