Disco Elysium - The Final Cut

Which is to say it's shit.

not an RPG

TL;DR: British style detective (NOT American-style film noir) point-and-click adventure game with some RPG elements tossed in for speech-based skill-checks. I've played many visual novels that have less text than this game does. The writing style is particularly grating to me; it's like a British English-major showing his sternly-disapproving father that he didn't, in fact, waste 4 years of his life in college. It's literally PAINFUL to read at times, especially the made-up words, which are just phoenetic over-engineerings of existing words. Just because "cat" can also be spelled "C'eaugh'att," doesn't make it a good word; there are hundreds of these abominations in this game. It even has to tell you how poorly-engineered words are PRONOUNCED in the loading screens. This is an artistic and very CONCEPTUAL European-style mystery, in the vein of old point-and-click adventure (PCA) games but with some RPG-like dialogue/skill-checks added for flavor. You can be whatever style of cop you want to be, so long as he is an alcoholic, drug-addicted washup who may or may not be incredibly weird/creepy due to your choices. In Elysium's world, the police (aka "RCM") have about as much authority as a teenager in a military jacket. The progression is linear. I spent most of the time trying to figure out what cryptic thing the game wanted me to do in order to progress (and they were often buried in previously-visited dialogue trees). The story just didn't excite or engage me, and neither did any of the characters. This game seems clearly-focused on elitist-racism and communism for some reason. Recap: 1) Difficult to read. Painfully so. 2) Boring characters with no *CHARACTER* 3) Cryptic methods of progression 4) Overt elitist racism 5) Boring city with nothing outside of the story to do 6) Complete looser of a protagonist 7) Weird and awkward RPG elements 8) Swapping clothing mid-conversaion to pass a suprise skill check 9) As exciting as watching near-frozen molasses drip

The art of this game is awesome, but a narrative game and game about choice, which reads like a late stage communist slogan is inexcusable. I wouldn't mind if it was Zizek-level banter or ideas, but no... The whole subtext of the game is "real communism has never been tried" Utter garbage. I'm giving it 2 stars, because the art is amazing.

Game stops responding at Measurehead. Nice waste of money.