Disco Elysium - The Final Cut

The game is really great but the studio seems to have been overtaken by some investor. Maybe "borrow" the game instead of giving money to investor. The original dev team was fired :(

I was really looking forward to this, maybe too much. Maybe my disappointment was my fault, for reading the developer blogs and believing what they said. They deliberately misrepresented the final product. The blog dealing with motorics skills makes it sound like there would be stealth mechanics, and numerous guns to find and use. There's neither. The blog dealing with the game's overall length is a pack of lies. It details an underground zone which doesn't exist. It claims the shipping yard area is its own zone, but it's just a couple of screens. It claims 90 hours of content, when the average length of play is 30 hours, which is consistent with my experience as a lifelong reader. What's good about this game? I think it has great art, especially for the skills. The character portraits do at least half the work in characterizing all the NPCs. (Whether any of them are likeable is another question, but they are identifiable). The writing occasionally made me laugh. And I think the way the gameplay mechanics are entirely centered around dialogue is worth looking at, because it is a new approach for the genre. I honestly believe it's a 6/10 game, and worth a run through if you like CRPGs. That's the only praise I can give it. This game has no combat, which is unusual for CRPGs. The marketing line is, it's like Planescape: Torment without all the unnecessary combat. That would be of interest, were the combat replaced with anything worthwhile, but it's not. All of the front-loaded content, railroading, and binary choice and consequence, that is present in most CRPGs, is present here. The result? It has no game mechanics except for dialogue choices and skill checks. The reactivity applies only to inconsequential lines of dialogue. In terms of influencing the story in a meaningful way, it is WORSE than most all other games. I wish I could go into more detail here. Maybe I'll make a video one day, but does anyone give a damn? If you know, you know. Numenera is better.

In those moments when Disco Elysium hits the right mixture of its message, its mystery, and its heart, the game is truly phenomenal; a work of beauty. I found myself simultaneously inspired and crushed when it was able to achieve those heights. And then I would spend hours aimlessly wandering around because I didn't hit the right conversation stat check to unlock the game's progression. Such is the dichotomy of the game: I pushed through the moments in which it was a tediously long-winded illusory exercise in thought-wank to hopefully arrive at another poignant and powerful experience. Whether or not you will enjoy the game will depend on how willing you are to go on that kind of a ride. The game is not an RPG, regardless of how it wants to characterize itself; there is only one way to play through the game. Player choices and character builds only serve to affect the narrative framing of the experience. More akin to a visual novel than a crpg. It is also not a mystery game that you as the player can solve. The elements required to "solve" the case are hidden behind conversation triggers that you have to experience in a fixed progression. Need to find a suspect in hiding? Don't go looking for them on your own; they're not in the game until you have the conversation which triggers them to be in the game. Want to find your gun? You need to work with the person who is blackmailing you; you won't find it any other way. This design for the game almost had me quit multiple times in frustration. That and the large amount of illusion of choice. In spite of how entertaining and interesting a lot of the dialogue options are and the conversation possibilities they open up, most (perhaps all?) of the time it has no real consequence on the game's trajectory. Ultimately I think it was still worth playing, but I am a bit disappointed that the result didn't live up to the promise. A few different design decisions and I think this game could have been incredible.

The way dialogues are done makes it the best role playing game ever in my opinion. BUT The investor took over the studio and original game creators were thrown out. Sad, strange and silly situation.

- Character progression is skewed and the game prefers well balanced characters. It forces you to balance your character with a mechanic that enables you to repeat diceroll check when you level up according characteristic of yours. (If you dont want to F5/F9 the living s*** out of it) - Tempo and storytelling in the last third of the game is bad. The game blocks your progression with forced single characteristic skill checks and becomes very linear without giving you much agency over what happens (Telltales syndrom) and ends with anticlimactic plothole of an ending, leaving the rich potential of all the motives presented to you in the first two thirds of the game unused. - Thanks to all aforementioned facts it has very poor replayability and I would not pay full price for it eventho I dont regret doing it. - Subjectively some large walls of the text were bloated, out of the context of the story and boring + Great atmospheric beginning with nonlinear exploration based investigation. + Beautiful graphics + Great amount of detail in the backstory of the world + Lifelike characters with meaningful dialogue Conclusion: Wait for a sale if you are not an old school RPG nerd that has nothing to play at the moment and be aware that the game has at most 2 playthroughs in it.