Posted on: January 16, 2024
Bloodrunsclear
Verified ownerGames: 1219 Reviews: 143
Disco Elysium/Shadowrun in Fallen London
I'd argue that Disco Elysium was the first big foray into a roleplaying game entering the realm of the psyche as much as the traditional 'ability scores'. You had to contend with your ego and id which carried on conversations in your mind so that each encounter was a battle with the self...and that legacy continues with Syndicate only in an imaginative fantasy/steampunk alternative London. This is not an action RPG with the emphasis firmly on the 'roleplaying' aspect. You aren't just dictating a character's path of their humors, their memories, what they will risk and what they are capable of. You can get into fights and undertake skill checks but out of these you lose 'hope' instead of health, and most of the time you're balancing your chosen aspects of personality with choices to unlock new 'tarot cards' which create new opportunities. Take a blunt approach? Unlock new opportunities to intimidate and smash things. Become introspective? Discover new options for deeper thought and self control. It's ambitious, it's fascinating, and it's no slouch in terms of breadth. You can collect inventory items, come up with different solutions to problems, unlock new paths with choices made that are unique to each new play through. There's multiple characters with their own interlocking stories so it's not just Disco Elysium with a steampunk skin. There's also a card based instead of dice based element of random chance. Similar to Disco though anything you can walk away from is not game over. You failed a test? Let it be a lesson and the earned unintentional changes to your character perhaps set a new path entirely going forward. Nice graphics, pleasant music. No voice overs, but thankfully there's a lot of definitional info for the slang and weirder concepts in the dialogue itself. I want to see more games like this that put the RP back into RPGs.
Is this helpful to you?
