Disco Elysium - The Final Cut

I was scared going into this, since I kept seeing it constantly described as a cRPG, plus the "turn-based" mechanic I generally avoid at all costs. Still, something about the surreal nature of the trailers, the painting-like art design, something about the... ethos, the soul of this game, even, made me brush those worries aside and give it a try. I'm so very glad I did. If, like me, cRPGs, PnP, tabletop stuff is not your stuff, rest assured: Disco Elysium might be that, but it also manages to be other things, as well (or maybe all and none at once?). I don't really know how to classify this game. All the literary comparisons I could draw have already been made, Kafka, William S. Burroughs, E.E. Cummings, Boris Vian, Samuel Beckett, Hunter S. Thompson, etc. It's all this and, again, more. I guess it depends on how each of us plays it, and what kind of cultural background we come from. Whatever the case, though, Disco Elysium is bound to have something in it for you. This is not to say it's a game for everyone -- no game is fit for all people. All I mean is that there's no need to be scared by the cRPG category description: you can dive in at ease if you're a point & click adventure fan, you're likely to love the game if you're into experimental interactive narrative titles such as walking sims. In fact, I'd go as far as to say walking sim fans could enjoy Disco Elysium way more than oldschool D&D players looking for strategic battles or high fantasy tolkienesque medieval settings. Anyway, I echo what many others have been saying: whatever genre Disco Elysium is, you DO have to read. A lot. So it's definitely not a game for those that don't have the patience for that. It's mostly an experiment in interactive storytelling, introspection, character and worldbuilding, so, if you're remotely into that, you'll love this game. If you liked stuff like Sunless Seas/Skies, don't hesitate and pick this up right now.

The game doesn't really hold up to it's own store page 'promises'. "Unprecedented freedom of choice" - The story is set, and has a set path. You can't go into certain locations, or follow certain clues until the game has decided it's time for you to do so. The first hurdle, make sense(the waterlock being broken, thereby no way to go past the canal until it's fixed, in 3 days), there's an actual good immersive reasoning for it. But after that, every roadblock onto why you can't follow a clue, or enter a specific area, falls flat. The simple answer is; "We decided you shouldn't do this right now, even if the clues are pointing here, you need to aquire some other clues somewhere else!". "Countless tools for role playing.​" - This is both a yes, and a no. There are a couple of skill checks that 'must' be done to progress the game and it's story. Failing them isn't a branching path, failing them is simply having to come back later and try again, after putting skill points into that skill(or using drugs, or changing your outfit). The biggest issue with the game, is the dice roll system. If you get a 2, it's an immediate failure, no matter what. if you get 12, it's an immediate success. The issue with this system, is in that you can always fail. This would be fine, if failure was an alternative path, but it very, rarely is. What ZA/UM should've done, is design the game, with the assumption that every dice roll would fail, and create a coherent and enjoyable experience based on that(a story of pure failure, of course, as to give weight to the consequense of failing), and then design the successes ontop of that. As it currently is, they assume you'll win some, and then lose some. And certain checks they assume you'll always manage, which feels cheap(especially with a guranteed failure chance if the wrong dice result pop up). All in all, it's an interesting game, but it definitly is not a game filled with "unprecedented freedom of choice", just the illusion.

The first 30 minutes of playing this game, I believed this would be a 10/10 or a 5 star game. I died by turning on a lightbulb in my hotel room. THAT was the RPG stuff I was looking for! A guy who has no idea what reality is, and there may actually be some super natural stuff going on, and this may or may not be reality for the character... man! My brain saw all this potential, and I was so excited! Then I went outside, and started the investigation, flirted with some woman like a brain damaged man out of a coma, laughed at a lot of things, and even helped a young girl get out of the cold by talking to her very strange and superstitious mom inside their bookshop! But that bookshop conversation was the first reveal of the overall problem with this game; dialogue that seems clever, but isn't dialogue. It's just the devs showing you what they think, through long-winded text walls. It seems clever at first (because my god it really is. at first) but after about 2-3 hours of play, everything boils down to "communism, fascism, feminism, capitalism, racism, and sexism." Everything. Literally everything. Every single character, ever internal dialogue, ever choice, boils down to an "ism" of some sort, and the game takes every opportunity to hammer it home, again and again. I don't care what the developers' politcal stances are. It doesn't bother me one way or another, but this is bad writing, and bad story telling. I wanted to know what the "danger" from the north was. I wanted to know why his wife hated him, why his partner was with his ex wife. I wanted to know why he wanted to kill himself, why the dude became a cop, and what his sense of justice really was. I wanted this guy who had no pre-concieved sense of what reality was to be free to understand a perception of reality that only someone like him in his state of mind could comprehend. Instead his stomach tried to convince him to be a fascist, and his muscles tried to convince him to be an ethno-nationalist...

Bought the game when it released in 2019, recently downloaded the Final Cut update. Been having technical issues, the biggest being that mouse controls *do not work* unless I turn on my bluetooth game controller. So in other words, in order to play with mouse I need to drain my controller's battery. Yikes. And the new voice acting just plain sucks in my personal opinion, biggest offender being that the same deadpan voice actor is used for all 24 of your inner voices. (And seriously you can't just un-Cuno the original Cuno voice like that, what were they thinking?) There is a "Classic" option that does basically nothing, so essentially this update cuts content that was in the original game... very unfortunate creative decision on the developer's part. Anyways, on to the reason for the 1 star. You know how GOG advertises a rollback feature for game updates so you can go back to earlier versions? That apparently doesn't apply to big updates where they rename the product listing. Earlier versions of Disco Elysium are just completely gone. I contacted GOG and they said "the old installer is no longer supported and therefore unavailable" and I need to contact ZA/UM to ask for them to help me out (which I did, but I'm not holding my breath they'll even answer my email). I've been buying games on GOG for 8 years and even before Galaxy Beta on the old website, you could choose to download older installers off the website. The fact that this pro-consumer bit of reassurance can just be jettisoned like it's absolutely nothing is making me question if I'll be buying anything on GOG in the future. At least on Steam you know everything auto-updates and there's nothing you can do about it, with GOG it feels like a total bait-and-switch. I'll at the very least be uninstalling Galaxy and manually downloading installer .exes from now on. Who knows when something like this will happen again without absolutely no warning.

The story is compelling, the lore is ocean deep, the characters are vivid, the game itself is very, very opinionated. Disco Elysium is a perfect endcap for Malebolge the 2010's. It's best experienced semi-blind, with a general idea of what to expect in terms of more serious real life issues it addresses. And, no, it doesn't fit perfectly into any particular media genre. Some technical nitpicks: - The clothing system, while interesting at first blush, ends up being merely a stacking game of big numbers. I ignored it once I hit a net positive in bonuses and wore what I thought looked cool. - There's no fast travel for some reason? Click, click, click, click... - Some of the voice acting really misses its mark. - I wish there was a "Hardcore" mode. I found myself savescumming out of video game habit. This is on me. I don't find hitting percentiles that interesting. - The strictly optimal way to play the game is to bank your skill points and use them when you approach a problem you want to solve in a certain way or need to redo a roll. I picked what seemed good for the narrative I wanted, but I would have had an easier time making those checks if I hadn't. My main issue: While I loved the game aside from the issues above, I felt that the game came uncomfortably close to romanticizing addiction. In real life, addiction doesn't make you interesting. At a safe distance, addicts are extremely tedious and boring people. When they're all up in your face, they're an existential danger. These are not "troubles" that give a guy more character depth, like the flawed macho manly man protagonist out of Hemingway, Burroughs, Thompson... addiction is just a common as hell chronic health problem that can affect anybody. We have to strip away this mystique if we want to address the public health crisis we're facing. Ultimately, Disco Elysium is a top notch effort. It's new, it's fresh, it's bursting with life and ideas, but it's not without its technical or narrative issues. 4/5.