Overall I must say its a nice titel, good job to the Bischoff Brothers. They seem to improve their games on every step and same time stand proud of their roots. + wonderful illustrated worldmap, great maps at all I wished modern cRPGs would have more. just to say its charming oldschoolness but also "living", similar to PoE2 for example. + great retrodesign of the UI like Fallout 1/2...pure love + damn freakish, bizarre and absolutely unique NPCs! (should be an homage to Planetscape Torment/Torment ToN) and first Fallouts obviously) + fantastic atmospheric world design of post-apocalyptic/but more far future of africa + very short loading screens, 2-5s + no bugs found or experienced + pretty in-between-story(s) of your mates But like all games there are some not so good sites on it: - even the story is somewhat cool, futuristic yet tribe-esque, very mysteriously (what actually is good) but very hard to understand though - there are some more endings and you can fulfill more different decisions to theses, but usually you have always to choose between 2 sides...save A to kill B... even you can always ask for friendly actions, but theses tribes/identitys are too stubborn. - gameplay is somewhat annoying because of single maps you can visit are too small. so you can usually talk to around 1-2 NPCs, investigate a terminal or find one item on nearly all maps. this let you fly around very often with your aircraft, searching for quest-items or quest-relevant hints (and at the half game I started to look for walkthroughs, as the world gets too complex) - i'm heavily missing a real quest-log for overview what you should/can do next - some riddles are ridiclious that dev's had to help questioning players... - at some point I knew that 2 items had to be combined, but the merging mechanism seemed bit clumsy here and stopped. after seeing this has to work on other players, retried it and worked then. I wish they would do a cRPG with this designs, world and atmosphere...
This type of game it really maxing out what a dialog-system in great RPGs should be. Even every little not so important seeming sentence could thrive you forward in your case. Lot of unpredictable happening, thats pretty cool. Lot of dialog options, even later in game you could/should come back to some NPCs and get new options to talk about, cause you got new informations you wouldnt connect to these maybe. The dialogs are from serious to nonsense talking, but mostly pretty funny. You even can sometimes talk to your horrified necktie... or usually it talkes to you ;) Its kinda funny to play a ruined cop, obsessed of bad habbits, with his memory lost after heavy drinking session it seems and still up to every situation (your subconscious will remind you!) which could give him the next shot, fix or drink. You are no super hero or bulletproof badass cop! Exactly Ive died also from heart attack at some point or when I recovered a loveletter from my beloved woman(?) from former times, I collapsed unconsciously for 1-2 hours ingame, while my mate Mr. Katsuragi was away till next day he said. But for my luck he came back directly afterwards and I woke up in his car, giving me to drink. It is this unpredictability that makes this game working so fine "just on dialogs"! Lot of freaky stylish outfits to gather, that let you be a kind of Disco Stu or Brawler Cop - depends on how you set your skills. I visually love this impressionism/dadaism/abstract art-style pretty much. Besides Im no big fan of this alternative-timeline with french/english 1940-civilwar-style (what I would think of) of architecture, lore and history, very lot of strange sounding names and locations, even there are dutch or finnish elements of language visible - If Im correct. But all this suits well and usually is not failing for anyway great atmosphere and makes it also very unique.
Note: playing just for some hours, but the core seems stable. Ay, I was curious about it, just seen it few month's ago and now it was there. Buying? Not buying? Accidentaly pressed the button and was suprised by getting a bonus on top (Underrail.. a game I wanted to give a try for some time now) - so it seems to be a win-win situation, all fine. Im no true fan or fanboy of crime series, but with this game my mind get flushed with True Detective (despite I've seen just 2 or 3 episodes), at least the scenes of the first episode, the girl hanging from the tree with the antler crown.. and the fucked up cop in interview. Yeah, the magic of this game obviously is because you play a fucked up and failed cop, fighting your inner deamons and talking to your horrified necktie sometimes, but you do your work and fortunately got a nice mate teaming up early, to help your existence to solve the case of a murder. The scenario reminds me more of an early stage (shortly after ww1) of 20th century europe, instead of alternative 1951, somehow france, somehow british and a pinch of soviet russia. Its more like an (nicely done, but illustrated text-)adventure game, really without a fighting mode as usual in classic rpg's or rpg's in general. Maybe remember of DOS Game Sam & Max? In fact, I was young at that time, but played it a bit or watched my friend doing so, but I got it from memorys back - Disco Elysium is like an adult Sam & Max in crpg-engine. The falloutesque (1 and 2) postapocalyptic, nihlistic humor is also in there - its funny cause you have lot of free but weird questions and answers in dialog too, Even I'm not that special in english (native german), its pretty decent to understand... got more problems with russians translated english in RPG "Encased" few weeks before (even DE dev's are also not far from russians, hehe) So whats else to say? Im not finished, but hopefully they already work on a second party..its a must!
