Disco Elysium - The Final Cut

The backstory is interesting, you wake up in your hotelroom, no clothes, no memory.. Just a middle-aged drunk and a mess. I can relate. Next you pull up a necktie and start talking to yourself, trying to figure out who and what you are. Your different inner voices conflicting. The skill system is somewhat interesting, even if there are maybe a few too many skills. But it is something different, and lets you build your character in some ways. However, after a while the game becomes a bit of a grind. You need to optimize skills by saving skill points, and via wearing different clothes, repeatedly looking at a specific challenge and the skill check, optimize your clothes and skill points. Repeat this over and over. The dialogue is overly long at times, more like reading an interactive book. Not much puzzles, just run around and talk to people, hope you picked up the required items or dialogue options so further dialogue options are avaible. And as typical, towards the end the running around becomes quite a job itself. At the very end I realized I had missed some specific side-task to complete, even if I tried to finish most of them. And this left me without options to have the ending I preferred. So replay or reload from long before? No thanks with all the text and running around to repeat. The story is interesting, the characters are generally well though out, you have quite different options on how to relate to others, but I was hoping for more of an adventure and less of a book. Maybe if you like a game that is more like a lengthy interactive book, where you don't quite know what direction you are driving the story towards, this could be a good choice. I wouldn't call this role-playing or many other things on the store page though. I got it on a nice discount, and for that it is maybe worth it to spend some time trying it out. Some of the game style, at least in the beginning, is interestingly different, even if in longer term it was less and less of it..

First of all, in my opionion this game is more of a point-and-click adventure with RPG-elements than an RPG. I myself don't mind since I grew up during the "point-and-click era" with the likes of Monkey Island, Beneath a Steel Sky and so on. But be aware, it's a heavily story/text driven game with a lot of back-and-forth traveling and with little to no action. The game itself starts of somewhat slow the first couple of hours before the story really gets going. But then it really starts getting interesting. The game features some solid areas to explore with interesting characters and some fun and clever dialogues. The skill-check system adds an extra layer to the detective aspect of the game. I really enjoyed most of it, at least the first half of the game. But the second half of the game is where it starts getting less enjoyable. It gets more and more linear and you quickly realize that it's a quite "small" game in terms of exploration and variation. Most of the environments look the same and the quests become more fetch-like. The game is also not particularly challenging, many times it just tells you upright, where to go and what to do next, even in extremely obvious cases, which is a strange game design for a detective game. Overall it's a decent game, but far from a masterpiece like many reviewers make it out to be.

Disco Elysium is a game about scars. For most of my life, I believed that scars were a vestige of wound that had healed. But it turns out that scars are patches on wounds that never heal. A scar, like any other part of your living body, must be constantly remade. If you deprive your body of vitamin C (i.e., scurvy), the collagen that holds scars and fractures together becomes unstable and the old wounds open back up. Once we're broken, we never really come back together again. DE is about a broken man exploring a broken city that plays host to a broken society. Those breaks are mostly scarred over but, like a scorbutic, the man, city, and society have been starved of something essential to regeneration. When the scars in the man and the society begin simultaneously to burst, you're invited to decide how to address both the widening wounds and the underlying spiritual malnourishment. If there is a way in which DE is most like PS:T, it is that both of them are about decoding a story of scarrified and tattooed flesh to understand the past and plot a way toward the future. But DE and PS:T are not really similar games. Both beautifully (visually and verbally) depict unique settings with interesting, verbose characters. But PS:T is a fairly traditional RPG (you level up, fight enemies, memorize spells, etc.), while DE is not. DE's heart is its innovative "internal dialogue" system in which your skills talk to you. PS:T really has nothing like this. Where PS:T relies upon a roster of companions who serve as distorted mirrors of the protagonist's virtues and flaws, such that talking to them is in a sense talking to yourself, DE simply lets you talk to yourself outright. It's novel, it's fun, and it's funny. This is a must-play. It has left wounds, not the least to the ego of a proud writer who worked on not one but two lesser games inspired by PS:T (Primordia and TTON). (Abridged from https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197989271430/recommended/632470)

- It's for one play-through only, if you'll play it once you will see almost all relevant content. - Stats don't matter much, we're still role-playing the same cop, doing the same things, using the same tools. With INT 1 we can articulate the same responses as with INT 5 - we can save-scum - contrary to what ZA/UM are advertising this game isn't open world at all, we have invisible walls everywhere and in various forms. We can't walk to the other side of the town until Wednesday, we can't progress unless Kim is with us (even though we can ask the same questions and observe the same things and his presence changes nothing we still can't advance and if we can we die because of plot reasons, e.g. when confronting a certain person that has both me and Kim under control anyway). Another example, we can't talk with "Sunday friend" once we walk out even though we know he's in there (unless he jumped through the window) because it's just a scripted scene. Or we can't play the tape unless Kim is with us. Anyway, in no other game I've felt so restrained. Even not having a flashlight prevents us from advancing in a certain area, we can't hurt ourselves trying to do it or just walk by holding our hand on the wall, developers just didn't give us that option. Writing is very uneven, sometimes it's good, very good at rare occasions, and sometimes it's just atrocious. The world we can explore is very small and with not much exploration and the other part of town that opens up is rather empty, making walking even more tedious (and it is tedious because even running is slow, add to it constant loading and you have a disaster). There aren't that many quests either and although unique, most of them are quite boring. In general gameplay is almost non-existent so if one doesn't appreciate Kurvitz's "sophisticated" humour and writing he definitely won't enjoy the game. Add to all of it political correctness and SJW content and you have a game very much not to my liking.

Beautifully produced with clever dialogue, I was nonetheless bored senseless after about 3 hours and couldn't continue. To be fair I struggle with games that are 99% story with 1% clicking because to me, if I wanted that format, I'd read a good book. If you aren't like me then maybe you'll like it. If you like tactical or strategic thinking, and story is just an added bonus, avoid this like the plague.