Overall Disco Elysium is great. I dig the presentation and the writing. It weaves a compelling narrative and provides fun role-playing mechanics. BUT: It is possible to inadvertently soft-lock the game on the first day, requiring a reload of a previous save. Several customers across Steam community and Reddit have been reporting this as a game-breaking bug (google “Disco Elysium room 1 locked” for details), but according to an official statement by the developer, this is actually by design: “If it’s 02.00 and everyone has gone to sleep, the streets are empty and you can’t do any -- or enough, at least, to pay Garte -- then congratulations: you are the hobocop now :) The only way to get out of this jam is to load a save from earlier. At minimum before 02.00” Nothing rips you out of the experience more than having to tab out to google a showstopping bug, which then turns out to be a poorly thought-out feature in an otherwise deeply engrossing game. Just reload your save? Really? How disappointing.
This review is as spoiler-free as I can manage. To be fair, you must expect radical surprises when you buy a Daniel Mullin game. Meta-narratives are his entire shtick, see Pony Island. As such, when the big twist came after a few hours of great gameplay, I was excited to see where it would go from a storytelling perspective. Gameplay-wise, however, the twist also brings about a sudden and frankly baffling increase in game difficulty. Without warning, the main game loop, the "Inscryption" card game, increases both in scope and complexity. The game expects you to press onwards against difficult odds, without first at least easing the player into what amounts to a brand-new superset of the old game rules. In addition, the twist introduces CCG mechanics, meaning that your deck is no longer at the mercy of the RNG, but that you must collect and build your own deck of cards to play with instead. I really, really wish the developer hadn't included this feature. I'm am terrible at CCG and atrocious at building my own deck. I can't do it and have thus far been happy to leave those kinds of games (MtG, etc.) to others. Had I known I would be faced with those exact CCG mechanics in what I assumed to just be an FTL-esque rogue-like "but with cards", I probably wouldn't have bought the game in the first place. Make no mistake. The first act of Inscryption is great, but if you are not a fan of CCG and sudden difficulty spikes, be mindful of your purchase!
The game is a mediocre but mostly playable action-adventure looter-shooter in a beautiful but empty open-world. The main issue however, aside from the heaps of bugs, is that this game is simply not as advertised. It is a stripped down, bare-bones, Early Access-esque version of a far superior game that probably got lost on the cutting room floor at the 11th hour in development. As such, Cyberpunk 2077 has neither the quality nor the quantity of content you would expect from the developers of the venerable Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt and its amazing DLCs. I trust and hope that CD Projekt RED will stick to their long tradition of providing excellent, post-launch support for their games, so that Cyberpunk 2077 may become a game worthy of our attention down the line. But right now it is nothing but a mediocre game containing frustratingly many wasted opportunities.
