Disco Elysium - The Final Cut is the definitive edition of the groundbreaking role playing game. You’re a detective with a unique skill system at your disposal and a whole city block to carve your path across. Interrogate unforgettable characters, crack murders, or take bribes. Become a hero or an a...
Disco Elysium - The Final Cut is the definitive edition of the groundbreaking role playing game. You’re a detective with a unique skill system at your disposal and a whole city block to carve your path across. Interrogate unforgettable characters, crack murders, or take bribes. Become a hero or an absolute disaster of a human being.
Disco Elysium - The Final Cut is a groundbreaking open world role playing game. You’re a detective with a unique skill system at your disposal and a whole city block to carve your path across. Interrogate unforgettable characters, crack murders or take bribes. Become a hero or an absolute disaster of a human being.
Full voice acting. All of the city's beautiful people are brought to life with full English voiceover. Play characters against each other, try to help them, or fall hopelessly in love as each word is spoken to you with the appropriate accent and emotion.
New political vision quests. Face the reality of your worldview as your political compass leads you down new paths. Discover more citizens, a whole extra area, and monumental sights as you leave an even bigger mark on the world by chasing your dreams.
Unprecedented freedom of choice. Intimidate, sweet-talk, resort to violence, write poetry, sing karaoke, dance like a beast, or solve the meaning of life. Disco Elysium - The Final Cut is the most faithful representation of desktop role playing ever attempted in video games.
Countless tools for role playing. Mix and match from 24 wildly different skills. Develop a personal style with over 80 clothing items. Wield 14 tools from guns to flashlights to a boombox, or pour yourself a cocktail of 6 different psychoactive substances. Develop your character even further with 60 wild thoughts to think – with the detective's Thought Cabinet.
A revolutionary dialogue system with unforgettable characters. The world is alive with real people, not extras. Ask probing questions, make insightful observations, or express your wildest desires as you play cop or something completely different. Disco Elysium's revolutionary dialogue system lets you do almost anything.
Carve your unique path across the city. Explore, manipulate, collect tare, or become a millionaire in an open world unlike anything you've seen before. The city of Revachol is yours for the taking, one small piece at a time. From the streets to the beaches – and beyond.
Hard boiled, hard core. Death, sex, taxes, and disco – nothing is off the table. Revachol is a real place with real challenges. Solve a massive murder investigation, or relax and kick back with sprawling side-cases. The detective decides, the citizens abide.
Disco Elysium is hands down the best game I have ever played.
- Gameplay: it has a unique approach to RPG. At the beginning you choose the abilities you want to focus on, like any other RPG. The higher the score the higher the probability of success. But here is the twist. Success and failure are not clear cut. You can succeed at something and wish you didn't or you can fail and it can be wild and owning up to your failure as a badge of honor.
- The protagonist: since the beginning you have a rich internal landscape which is shaped by the kind of character you have chosen to be. Those characteristics are voices inside of your head that make for very interesting (and often hilarious) internal monologues. DE is a game that rewards the player going off the script, trowing the script completely out of the window. IT. IS. FUN.
- The story: it is never banal. You are a mess while the world around you seems to collapse. There are politics, history, social and philosophical themes, mystery and the soprannatural/mystical
- The setting: the city of Revachol is so beautifully depicted. It is raw and poor, and reminds of a post sovietic city. There are opposing factions, each one with their own agenda and view of the world. The contrast between the messy and broken protagonist and the people of Revachol is striking: where everything is exaggerated in you, the people around you defy clichèes. The writing does a conscious efforr of hooking you up with the usual tropes, only to deconstruct them and revealing deeply human and complex characters that don't fit neatly into a box.
- The art: the whole game is beautifully handdrawn. The music and sound accompany the player and convey emotions. The final cut also has voice acting which adds to the depth of the game.
All in all. I loved every minute of this game!
I head GREAT things about Disco Elysium before playing it. But luckily for me, while hearing about how good it is, I avoided all exact spoilers about WHAT it is about. So I had a chance to experience the game first-hand, fresh and unbiased.
And it was awesome.
Disco Elysium is a great, unique experience. It’s not like it’s without it’s flaws, but as a package it’s a great adventure, and really creative. If someone isn’t into video games and thinks derisively of them as something that’s dull, uncreative, brutish and poor entertainment, I would recommend that they try Disco Elysium. I consider it a good contender in the “video games can be true art” argument.
Let’s talk for a bit about the downsides of Disco Elysium, since I don’t have a lot of to say on that point. It could be said that Disco Elysium is not really a RPG, but instead something akin to an interactive visual novel. And I think there’s a lot of truth to that assertion, as Disco Elysiums gameplay loop consists almost entierly of engaging in dialogue. But the thing is – that’s only a flaw if you let it be. It wasn’t such for me. I don’t hold much stock in traditional gameplay loops, for me games are an intellectual and an emotional experience, rather than a gameplay challenge. And Disco Elysium delivered well on both of those fronts.
I said Disco Elysium is unique, and it’s skill tree is a great example of this. You distribute skillpoints to develop your character, as you would do in most RPGs. But here, each of your skills is actually also a character – they chime in conversations all the time, and each have their own, distinct personality. They bicker with each other and offer you advice. And what’s really cool is that it’s not always GOOD advice, even if you “succeed” the skill check and have a high skill. Because each skill has a “portfolio” and an “agenda”, it might end up overcorrecting, and giving you advice that it CONSIDERS good, but it’s actually bad. For example, if you have a high half-light skill, you might end up lashing out or being aggresive, and if you have a high inland empire skill, you gain visions and wild imaginations that grant you more context, but end up deepening your character’s derealization and mental illness.
The thoughts system is similarly interesting, equipping your character with perk-like thoughts that make up his personality and political beliefs, but most thoughts give you both an advantage and a disadvantage of some kind.
Seeing how Disco Elysium mainly consists of dialogue, it rises and falls on it’s writing. And that’s consistently very good.
Even though the game can be rather verbose and overlong at times, I never felt bored by the dialogue. It’s witty and quite fun. In fact, the game is downright hillarious at a lot of times, and I chuckled to myself more than a couple times reading some of the more riddiculous dialogue options.
That being said, I think despite being funny, the game is also quite serious, and even sad at times. I am not known as a person with a wild sense of humor, so I tried to approach the game in a mostly serious way, and it still ended up being a compelling story about a broken, suffering man and the misfortunes of his would-be marriage, as well as his various failed ways to cope with his terrible state of being.
Now, Disco Elysium deals a lot with politics as well. I was a little anxious to learn that the developers thanked Marks and Engels at an award ceremony. I come from a Central European country that suffered much during the communist times, and that has comparatively thrived under the recent-ish free market, liberal rule. So I was worried I’m going to get a love letter to communism that’s going to tell me it’s the greatest thing ever and if you don’t agree you’re a Bad Person And Suck.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn that if Disco Elysium is a love letter for communism, it’s a very bitter love letter. While the game kinda did tell me I might indeed Suck for supporting the status quo-holding capitalist-liberal foreign overlord regime, it didn’t seem to have that many great things to say about communism, either. It acknowledged the very real problems with the theory, and especially the practice, how it often falls into authoritarianism, and how a violent revolution often ends up creating more suffering.
In general, Disco Elysium seems to critique every ideology to a degree. Not the same degree, to be sure, since it seems to have a pure disdain and riddicule for the fascists (as it probably should), but to a degree anyway. Even centrism doesn’t escape it’s critique, seen here as a form of radicalism in itself, a radical abdication of responsibility, a lackluster adherence to the status quo.
A paragraph is worth dedicating to Kim Kitsuragi as well, your main partner and companion throughout the game. Kim is a well writen and itently likeable character, which helps tie you to the game and to a lot of it’s stakes. I wanted to make it and solve the case, so that KIM COULD BE PROUD.
The game is full of skill checks, and that makes it ripe for a replay with a different statblock, as you’re going to discover a lot of additional and different content. I watched a bit of other playthroughs and they seemed different enough to mine to be worth replaying the game at least once.
The story of the game isn’t actually that deep or complicated in the sense of the actual PLOT, but it’s told in a very unique and entertaining way. That made it one of my top favourites of all time, apart from maybe Planescape: Torment.
Ever goto eat a cake and find out it's a bit mushy... you are horrified.
Then you keep eating it and, against all odds, it is delicious!
That's Disco Elysium.... Your character is revolting at the start, but you can change that.
There's almost no combat, but if you love a good story, you won't care.
The graphics are simple and good.
The sounds fit, the items fit... your character fits; it's immersive.
Character seem real... motivated and complex.
The world, city and setting are all interesting... you can learn a lot about this world as you go.
There is really only two potential downsides... this game has no conventional combat and there is a LOT of reading involved.
If you love a good book, this is basically the biggest choose your own adventure ever made!
Was obsessed with this game for 4 days straight. However for a RPG it's suprising how easy it is to receive the same outcomes and endings no matter what kind of personality or build you take but it generally a very easy game unless you turn on hardcore mode. My gameplay advice would be to consider using the thought cabinet as mostly keys for tiny extra bits of story.
I really wanted to give it a try. Spend couple hours playing it, but from my perspective it's waffly. Just got bored.
Setting is more than great - it's really intriguing, graphics are adequate /could not care less/, sound and music is fine.
