Disco Elysium - The Final Cut

Disco Elysium is a unique RPG that rises above its simplicity and flaws due to its excellent writing. It is one of the best video games I have played. One possible negative is the gameplay is simplistic. The gameplay mostly takes place in text boxes from which you make decisions and pass(or fail) skill checks. Your decisions on where to assign skill points affects your odds of passing said checks and other actions you may have performed can also improve or hinder your odds, but once a check is made you simply pass or fail based entirely on RNG. So if you were willing to save scum you could pass all checks without putting any points into improving skills. Apparently on launch it was a buggy mess. The developers have worked many of those bugs out so that by the time i got it I didn't run into any bugs that were any more than just annoying. Even still the game is riddled with typos and at best questionable decisions(are quests and repeatable checks that i can’t actually access anymore supposed to still show on my map?). Also, the game is actually quite small. It has a decent play time but that is spent running back and forth over the same ground talking to a relatively small number of people. All of this only adds up to a minor annoyance for me however as the writing is so f**** good. The setting and characters are well fleshed out, the people feel like real people Martinaise feels like a real town. At one point I failed a skill check that put Kim, my partner, in danger and i felt real fear for this fictional character in a way that I never have before in a game. Also the level of freedom is stunning. You can choose to be a psychopath hedonist that manipulates everyone around him, simply a drunk loser, a straight and narrow by the book cop, a communist fundamentalist, or any crazy combination of these. The game manages to make different thoughts and actions available based on how you are playing your character so that all of this feels incredibly meaningful.

Overall, this game would have been a solif 4.5-ish star game. I love the story, the characters and the way you progress through the game as a whole. But...... The game revolves around leveling up different skills, like Perception, Logic, Empathy etc, so yoou can costomize your characters different every time. Here comes the part that dumps the overall score down by alot. There are hidden checks being done, that can only be visable and reacted to if you have a high enough skill in a certain category, and pass the hidden dice roll, and there is one part towards the end THAT YOU CAN FAIL, AND IF YOU DO, YOU MIGHT NOT BE ABLE TO COMPLETE THE GAME. It's absolutely unforgivable that this is still in here after a year and a half.

Not a Isometric Fan but this game finally made me get it. Buy this game now.

The game is really 5/5 and all the good things people say about it are true. It gives you a lot of agency, it is weird and choices do matter. However, I had the game about 80% done and I softlocked because I failed a very important check. And this was a problem from the release on and it never got fixed and it never will be fixed because the game studio is dead. So I played for hours at this point, I am invested in the story and I wanted to see how it concludes with the character I became in this game. Then up comes this check for the one stat that I never in the entirety of this game had to roll for. I upped my chances a little with clothes and I think I even had a 70 or 80% chance to succeed. And I failed. and that was it. And apparently after this check you have to do the same check again! At this point all solutions to this are "do side quests and level up so you can retry the roll". But at this point I completed all the sidequests already. All of it. really. I would need a level up to try a reroll on a sidequest to finish a sidequest at this point. So now I just have the game installed and I let time pass till I am motivated enough to either find a cheat tool to manipulate the save file, start a new character with this specific check in mind or just uninstall and forget about this whole experience. For a game that does this many things right in an RPG genre it is unbelievable that they had this oversight. So if you like a game that you can definitely explore 80% of and then you have a 60% chance to see the rest of it then this is for you. Or you could spoil yourself and search for the softlock online. But what fun is a game that you have to spoil for yourself to be sure that you can have some closure.

This feels like the logical next step of classic RPGs like Planescape:Torment, mixed with the unique appeal of pen&paper with actual human dungeon masters. This game excels at telling a gripping story in a unique and interesting world, while also being a terrifyingly effective mirror to a lot of actual problems and fears of modern humans and modern society. In over 20 years, no game has felt this close to my actual thoughts and experiences or was that customizable in its experience.