Disco Elysium

95% of the game is dialogue with other npcs and yourself. So if you don't want to read for 30+ hours this is not the game for you. There is absolutely no combat. The RPG aspect is that you can level up different aspects of yourself like logic, reaction time, composure, endurance, etc. and as those skills come up in conversation you are having not only dialogue with the npcs but also yourself on how to proceed. It is very unique, and very awesome if you are into it. One of the most unique, thought provoking games I've ever played.

Disco Elysium is one of the best games I've ever played. It's an RPG, but it's a very different one, with no combat and heavy focus on skill checks. It's also a detective story, that feels amazing to slowly unravel until you finally solve the case.
If you want to try it, I'll give you three advices:
- Don't look for spoilers, be a real detective.
- Don't metagame or reload if you fail a check, live with the consequences of your choices.
- Don't skip text. If you are tired of reading, stop and play again another day.
While Disco Elysium has some replay value, it's all about the first playthrough. Don't spoil it and enjoy the ride.

So only played 90 minutes but I'm already floored.
Look every time a game has the "choices matter" tag on steam I put this to test. So I play for an hour, then restart the game and look how much deviation and "choices matter" there actually is.
And where most games fail in this regard, this game fucking nails it. So I did two quick test runs, with two completely different charactes, and while the "dialogue beats" are, of course, mostly the same, the way you get to them is so ridiculously tailored to your character you would think the game is actually written for the character you create in the beginning. Never ever in ~25 years of gaming did I encounter this feeling of a game respecting my character with the depth and intricacies as this does. I'm in awe.
Edit: 5 hours in. I actually had to start a new save. Not because of a bug or I'm at a dead end or something like that but because my character became such an asshole through my choices (hey I wanted to test the extremes, you know) that I can't identify with him anymore, and even feel repulsed by him if this make any sense, lol. What an awesome game. Which other game even challenges you like that?
Final edit is coming after I beat this game.
If some dev is reading this I do have some minor quibbles though:
- For the love of god don't cloud sync the game settings. My laptop for work is a potato compared to my at-home-gaming-rig and it's a pita to always have to change my settings if I switch pcs.
- It would be awesome if you could not only up a skill when you level up, but be able to reduce the point of a skill as well (for people not playing the game already: There can be downsides if you are too good with a skill. Like how you can be "too empathic" or "too logical" in real life to the point people think you're a weirdo). Would make room for more build diversity. I don't particularly agree that if you want to play a master of logical deduction you 'have to' be some kind of a drama queen as well.

At last count, I own around (EDIT: I have no idea how steam counts games. 194?) games on Steam and I've written a review for one. That was to say I didn't like Stellaris. I'm going to write a second one, and tell you why Disco Elysium is the best computer RPG I have played...ever. And why maybe you might want to buy it.
See, I've been a Dungeon Master for the last 10 years or so, gathering nerds around a kitchen table to play roleplaying games. I love it. You get to make worlds, play these huge personalities, plonk them down in situations and see what happens.
I've played lots of computer RPGs too. You've got your Fallouts (1 to 3), your Planescapes, your Mass Effects, your KotORs, your Skyrims, your DOSes. But see, the thing is, there's always something that's been missing from most of the computer RPGs I've tried that keeps me going back to tabletop gaming.
The truth is, most computer RPGs are funhouses.
What I mean is, a lot of computer RPGs take your blank slate of a PC and put them in interesting situations. The player's role is to explore the map, meet the NPCs and Experience it. Look at this moral dilemma, Commander Shepherd! Ooh, come chat to this entertaining robot. It thinks it's a person! Haha, if you take this skill, you can talk to this here dog!
If you talk to most people about their favourite computer RPGs, they'll probably tell you about their favourite NPCs. I loved HK-47 in KotOR. I thought Morte in Planescape was fantastic. But. I don't remember Anything about the characters I played. This character maxed persuasion, I think. This other character learned to cast a spell that summoned meteors.
You never get to Be the memorable NPC. You only ever get to meet them.
In Disco Elysium, you get to be the memorable NPC. You get to be the loud, or morose, or delusional, or obsessive character that you want to play. The skill system is not, contrary to most other RPGs, full of outward-facing things like 'MORE CRITICAL HITS' or 'BE SNEAKIER'. It's inward-looking. There's a skill called INLAND EMPIRE that just means you imagine inanimate objects talking to you. There's a skill that makes you better at conceptualisation. The 'rhetoric' skill is tied to your character's propensity to lie. In Disco Elysium, your PC's psyche is the point.
Disco Elysium understands why I play tabletop roleplaying, because I want to explore being interesting characters.
If you want to min-max your stats and find ways to optimise a combat build, don't pick up this game.
If you want to play a straight-arrow boring cop who solves murders with an occasional gun-fight, I don't know if this is the game for you.
I have threatened to arrest a man I owed money to, then harangued him about his love life. I confabulated wildly to a kooky old lady and told her I was some kind of PSYCHIC GHOST BUSTER. I keep telling people we need to EAT THE RICH. I've internalised a thought that I might be some kind of rock star SUPER COP (i am not). I gave myself a quest to sing karaoke. I sucker-punched a child. I lie constantly to cover up my insecurities and my sardonic partner catches me out, like a child. I think I'm supposed to solve a murder?
I am hobocop. I am a delusional communist. I cry at case files. I have lost my gun. I insist places are haunted (they are not). I am a hot mess.
I am my own memorable NPC.
I barely care if I ever solve this crime, I am having so much fun.
EDIT:
I finished it I stand by everything I ever said
10/10 GOTY
Lt Kim Kitsuragi best boi 2019

A common thread among critics has been that Disco Elysium is the kind of game we're going to talk about as the turning point of an epoch -- that it's so influential we're going to talk about what games were before Disco Elysium and how they're different after it.
And that's really how it ought to be, but I'm skeptical that we'll see it happen, because the thing that makes Disco Elysium so special isn't some easy-to-reproduce aspect in its systems; it's the writing. And writing a game as brilliant as this has always been an option, albeit one few games are going to live up to. The systems are neat, the clownish dressup minigame to solve puzzles is something one could duplicate, etc., but Disco Elysium lives and dies by its writing, and that's not something everyone can just easily copy to create a new milieu of adventure RPGs.
It's wickedly funny and achingly sad in equal measure, a combination that probably won't lend itself to your average dragon-killing story or similar to come down the line. It's a game that wears politics -- not necessarily your politics or someone else's, but politics in general -- on its sleeve and is extremely sympathetic to people while viciously criticizing any given sector of belief. Disco Elysium is, for example, far too familiar with the communist worldview not to have the sympathies of its writers, but is also the most vicious and valid criticism of communist ideology I've ever seen. It's equally merciless to any of its would-be competitors. It's a game that's tender and sympathetic to its characters and positively ruthless to everything they believe in.
All of this is to say that Disco Elysium is the kind of achievement that deserves to be spoken of as a turning point in adventure/RPG games, but it didn't get there through some novelty of system. Whether we see more of its ilk is a question of whether developers and publishers show as much courage as it took to create this game in the first place.

I'm 44 and I haven't made very much room in my life for games. Work, continuing education, and my hobbies take up most of my free time. Still, I never forgot a game called Planescape: Torment that I played back in the late 1990s. I purchased the Enhanced Edition of PST a while ago and played through it again, it was for the most part as wonderful as I remember it being.
There was a game released a year or two ago called Torment: Tides of Numenera. It was billed as a spiritual sequel to PST, and I found the setting and the characters to be lacking. Distant. Alien for the sake of being alien. The writing was more flowery than it needed to be - it pulled punches when it should have gone for the knock out. I didn't find it to be a complete wash and I played through about 70 percent of it, which is quite good for me because as I've mentioned I don't make very much room in my life for media consumption.
I've only played Disco Elysium for a few nights and I can say that this is *it*. This is the spiritual successor to PST and I've found the writing to be so engaging that I actually considered skipping work on Thursday in order to stay home and play the game.
If it came down to a choice between having all of the games currently on my desktop available to me, or having only Disco Elysium available to me, I'd select DE. That feeling of course will probably change when I finish the game, or it might take another playthrough or two, but for now it's brightened my little corner of existence. :)
Games currently on my desktop:
- The Witcher 3
- Mutant Year Zero
- NieR Automata
- Deus Ex Mankind Divided
- Borderlands 2
- Star Wars Battlefront 2
- Life is Strange
- DiRT Rally
- Kingdom Come Deliverance
- Aporia Beyond the Valley
- Legrand Legacy

As a detective who has totally lost his memory after consuming an absurd amount of alcohol and drugs, the player's main goal is to uncover who is responsible for the murder of a man hanged from the tree at the back of the hotel where you are staying.
This case, however, is only a pretext for exploring a host of other complex narratives and themes, which include, but are not limited to: the class conflict between workers and corporations in the form of a docker strike against the owner of the port of City; the fall and failure of communist movements and revolutions, and the mastery of a moralist and liberal model that, in the long run, brought more misery and the popularization of fascist, racist and eugenicist thoughts; and the social and environmental decay of the world around Revachol , the city where these events take place.
Being a police detective, the player's main action is to talk to people in the neighborhood, whether or not they are connected to the case - but, in one way or another, they have some relevance to the world at large.
To help with this, and reinforcing the fragmented nature of our protagonist's mind, the player has various types and schools of thought, which are divided into elements such as physical, psychological, intellect and motor skills.
Each of these aspects is represented by an entity that has its own dialogues and perspectives on how best to deal with a situation, and options for dialogue and special actions - based on a digital data roll - whose success rate depends on how many points you devoted to a particular mindset.
With this system, the player can define the essence of who this individual you control, as well as how they treat people and investigate the crimes and problems around them.
It is through these foundations that Disco Elysium shines: every conversation or internal monologue, however inconsequential it may seem, offers something new, whether it be about Revachol, Martinaise, its inhabitants, the world around them, or their own character.
Disco Elysium is a revelation that can tie great text to a gameplay with a simple first glance system, but it allows for interesting situations and new perspectives depending on the type of character you have shaped.
THE GOOD
- Unique art style and overall mood
- Everything a fan of text-heavy RPGs could ever want
- Tons of replay value
- Interesting, entertaining, and hilarious game world with fully realized factions and characters
- The melancholy music and the solid voice acting immerses you into a post-war environment
THE BAD
- Some dice rolls breaks continuity
- Some choices are rather superficial
- English only
10/10
DISASTER | BAD | MEDIOCRE | OKAY | GOOD | GREAT | AMAZING | MASTERPIECE
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Reviewed on: Win10 Home 64-bit, Intel i7, GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4MB GDDR5, 8MB RAM