Disco Elysium - The Final Cut

Disco Elysium is a paradox of amazing innovation, with poor execution. I understand the praise the game gets, but the experience was personally ruined for me by contradictions in the bad level design, world contradictions and the big fat story flop. Why should you play this game? 1. The art style is superb, not only making the game stand out, but being the most unique art design of any isometric game I have ever played. 2. The skill system needs to be in more RPGs, being a refreshing jump of creativity/innovation. Every skill has its own personality and converses inside your head, representing internal cohesion and/or conflict. You can also internalize certain beliefs/ideas to get boons and buffs. The skills meld with the game's premise of "detective with amnesia" by helping or hurting you as you piece together not only the crime, but your own life. Skill checks are where the level design takes a big hit. Certain areas or situations require you to pass one skill check, not having multiple avenues. Seriously, to get to the last section of the game, you have to literally "listen to the wind" and do it really really well, contradicting a logical detective/clue style game. The game lampoons outlandish ideas, like believing in cryptids, or super races, or insert any political ideaology besides grass-roots socialism. It lampoons stupidity on one hand, while introducing supernatural elements, meaning the "who done it" plot could be anything and logic does not matter. Lastly, the narrative was the biggest disappointment of the game. SLIGHT SPOILER AHEAD, but the game ends with a killer that not only I did not guess, but could not guess. Personally, having a shyamalan style twist ruins the narrative for me. Nothign mattered, and I hate that. Maybe I am just not deep enough to get it, or the game is being deep by doing this, but I do not care. I do not play games that throw out all of their build up with a contrived ending. I played it on steam, btw.

I was quite looking forward to playing Disco Elysium after seeing a review, as the game seemed to be quite up my alley. And the initial impressions were quite favourable, very long boot time that made me thing the game froze solid notwithstanding. I liked the audio-visual presentation, the voice acting, the characters and the initial story. As I was playing, however, my opinion was turning more and more negative, unfortunately. I turned on the light - my character died. I reached for the tie - my character died. I left the hotel, talked to a few people and examined a few items - I was flooded with side quest. I went to grab a coat - I ended up sidetracked and stuck in a side area, with the only way to exit leading through a guy that kills you with dialogue; I had to edit my save file to get out of that spot like it was mid-'90s again. And no matter what little thing I clicked on, the game treated me to endless walls of text that after a while I just started ignoring and skipping without reading. Perhaps I missed a lot of characterization and world building this way, but it honestly was too much, too everywhere. And the worst thing: I got buried under this heap of stuff before I so much as examined the corpse of the guy whose death I was supposed to investigate. I ended up uninstalling Disco Elysium and asking for a refund, because if the game doesn't care about me, why should I care about the game?

At first the game felt like perfect. Like most of reviewers describe it. Then I stumbled on unexpected progression hardlock, that you are never warned about during the game. YOU HAVE TO SLEEP in that damn cafe no matter what, and YOU HAVE TO PAY for it and you can not avoid that. If by the end of the day you have no money - that is a soft game over: time stops, NPCs are gone, you're stuck in this space-time continuum trap. And devs say this is by design. And this is not mentioned anywhere in the game. Some players may say, that there are a lot of ways to collect enough money and some possibilities to pay your debt, but that is true only in one case: if you grab that possibilities at day 1. On the other hand, if you manage to collect money honestly by yourself, like selling junk, collecting bottles, looting stashes, you can pay for day 1 sleep without involving those external help opportunities. And suddenly at day 2 they disappear, all loot is already picked up, no other money on the map, and all NPC dialogue lines about help are missing. And if you didn't save often enough, guess what? You have to start over. I played more than 20 hours for what? Just to find out that 2:01 does not exist in this world?

There's a lot of reviews here and they're pretty much either 5 stars or 1, so let me keep this very brief. If you like weird, dark, unusual games filled with lots of dialogue and mechanics you probably haven't seen anywhere else, check it out and try to give yourself some time to get into it. If you like straight-forward RPGs, adventure, action, sports games, etc., it's probably not for you.

This is literally my favorite game ever but the people who originally created the game and setting have been kicked out from ZA/UM and do not have control of their idea. I would highly recommend finding "alternative" ways to play this game as it is truly peak RPG gaming.