The main draw of this game is the writing. The graphics are nothing special and the art is sylized. Not great, merely stylized. Like most narrative games, the game play itself is a major hindrance to the story. Navigating the world is slow and gets in the way, padding out the game length uncomfortably. The writing isn't even great. There's a lot of effort went into world building and trying to create a full fledged setting, but it's all pointless padding. Your personal encyclopedia will chime in with all sorts of useless details with names and dates and rarely do any of these details ever have any relevance to the active conversation. It's mere fluff, and it's very dry fluff. The writing hints at covering all sorts of deep topics. From pursuing comical over-the-top styles of detective work to exploring the setting to politics, but it just doesn't deliver. There's too much padding between the style options and given the cumbersome gameplay, replaying to explore the different options is intimidating. And the political options? All of them are terrible. They're ridiculous over the top caricatures. This could work except the rest of the gameplay is super serious and this contrast falls flat. The depth of various story line quests is strange as well. Like with the worldbuilding, there's tons of hints that there may be a deep story to pursue here and there, but it's hard to tell if spending time on a side quest will be rewarding. Some end abruptly and others drag and prattle on. The writing tries to play with edgy themes, but its far too shy to get serious with them. There's a kid calling people the c word and the f word (no, not the 4 letter one), but it censors the f word. And this level of half-heartedness is felt in so many other of the themes Disco Elysium toys with. It would not surprise me, for as much as this game attempts to do the eggshell walk, that it still does not end up being labelled problematic in 10 years.
This is just a review of the demo so take this with a grain of salt, but that's still a few hours of gameplay and I seriously doubt the fundamental formula changes. With that out of the way... Seems like a middling game. The building happens in 2 steps: Placement in 3d and then again in 2d. 3d placement follows two simple rules: not colliding with other modules or airlock approach and some ports only take blue modules and some only take orange modules. It's trivial to build the entire station as a single long line. There's no pressing need to consider the station's moment of inertia or any other metric that rewards building a compact base. Additionally there's no correlation between the 3d placement and the 2d placement, so any module can be anywhere for the effect. 2d placement is similar. Once the module is added in 3d, the 2d modules can be placed. They do need to be connected to the lines with resources, but there's no throughput limitations so this also can be built as one long line. Or if one prefers, taking the Factorio approach and having a main line that transports resources and branches of identical modules. Beyond this, picking missions to keep your modules busy (and thus paying for themselves) is the whole game. More resources and modules are added during the game, but the fundamental simple rules don't change. Beyond that, the UI is bit clunky and doesn't follow the usual tropes I've taken for granted and took a little getting used to. (Seriously, vertical lists have a horizontal scrollbar at the bottom that indicates the list's vertical position!) The writing is very peculiar and makes lots of references to bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake and not in a tongue in cheek humorous way. The game's intro credits a German grant, which may explain that quirk.
