Kathy Rain: Director's Cut is essentially the same as the base game, except in 16x9 widescreen. Supposedly there are new puzzles, locations and dialogues, but most of the time I couldn't tell anyway - it's been a while since I played the original release, and the new fits seamlessly with the old. It only starts getting noticeable around the middle of day four, at which point the additional content kinda throws off the pacing a little by padding the play time, but it's not a big deal and only noticeable if you've already played the original game. Other than that, my thoughts on the 2016 version apply here as well. Either version of the game is a good choice, but the Director's Cut offers a little more.
I expected Martial Law to hit close to home, since the game takes place in my country and not long before I was born. Alas, it didn't. The idea behind the game is sound - to show people, especially foreigners, what communist Poland was like. And having the game take place just before Christmas 1981 was a good choice, allowing to show the kindness of the common people in those difficult times. Unfortunately, Martial Law gives me a strong impression of being made by people too young to remember those days and whose knowledge of the era comes from contemporary films, stories heard from their elders and overall cultural osmosis. By far the worst offender is the language the game is written in - that's how people speak today ("mam kilka spraw do ogarnięcia"), not how they did in the '80s. Also, there are some rather stupid linguistic mistakes, such as using "także" instead of "tak że" (two very different things), or too many verbs taking the 3rd person singular form when they clearly should be in 1st person, or most sentences not ending with a full stop… you get the idea. It's like a 20-something kid wrote a game about how he imagines Poland in 1981 and just published it without asking anyone for a second opinion and with no proofreading. It's a shame, really, because Martial Law had a lot of potential stemming from an idea hardly ever used in video games. As far as the gameplay goes, it's quite basic. You just walk around, talk to people, do a few simple fetch quests, that's about it. You also have jump and punch buttons, but neither is needed to finish the game (there's one NPC you can fight, but it's entirely optional). Finally, the game is very short, lasting only about half an hour. So, overall, Martial Law is quite disappointing, but there's still a chance it might get a few people interested in the history of Poland and its post-war tribulations. If you're at all curious about the subject, I'd recommend doing some reading on it rather than playing the game.
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 think 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?
