It’s a brilliant meta-commentary mirroring the precarious state of mind the main character has that could crack at any moment with only the slightest provocation. Yes, that must be why the game itself will just crash every two hours and lose all your progress for no reason.

Probably would have given 4.5 stars if it wasn’t for that. I was in the middle of a long late game sequence and it happened right after a hard check I finally passed. Absolutely infuriating horseshit.

Also I’ll be very honest, for all the wild turns this game takes, the one thing that I still think about more than anything else is why they censor the f-slur (especially when there’s so many other naughty words put to good use, including the r-slur 😬) Really, why? You have this gritty world full of mean people who say mean things, why the line drawn in the sand here? We all know what the dumb twelve year old kid is saying. Go ahead, game, you can say it. Faggot. I’m a big boy, I’ve been to middle school before, I can handle it! And yeah, I can accept that some people can’t, but then the thing to do is not write that usage in the game in the first place. No one who’s going to be triggered by this game is going to feel any relief that there’s a beep instead! “Wonder what word was supposed to be there? Could have been any of them, really 🤷‍♂️”

I did a quick search and found some people saying it’s hidden until you complete the “homosexual underground” thought, which would have been neat. Except you better bet your bottom ass I completed that thought, first of all, and second, having done so I can confirm this is not the case, as a certain very-communist character near the endgame has some certain very sweeping opinions on the bourgeois. I just don't get it…

I don't know how to go about writing my thoughts on the most critically acclaimed game on Backloggd. How daunting of a task is that?! Especially when, to put it politely, I hold a dissenting opinion. And maybe the only one ever about this game. So, instead of trying, I'm going to copy and paste all the notes I frantically jotted down when I finally finished it at 1:30 in the morning, a play session that was bookended by work the night before and work the following morning. Feel free to read, critique, or ignore at your leisure.


So much irrelevancy to the case
Very frustrating for me in particular. I am not a Skyrim gamer. I do not appreciate when side quests take so much spotlight away from the main quest.
I want to solve this murder. Anything that isn't directly related to that is worthless to me (outside of getting xp). Why should I bother painting walls, looking for imaginary bugs, starting a night club, exploring cursed buildings, attempting to persuade a cargo container to open, or any number of other quests that I never did?
Even the history and world building of Revachol often distracts from the case, although these often provide motivations for key characters and establish the tone of the world, so I'm more forgiving of it. Even if I skim through the details and forget them immediately afterwards.


The ending is amazing
I appreciate how many quests are neatly brought together and wrapped up in the end. It still does not justify the time spent on the quests since they are optional, regardless of how seamlessly they bolster the ending
That said, I love the phasmid


Very respectable above all else
A game that dares to talk about serious subject matter (politics, long-term consequences of our actions/allegiances, corruption, racism, rape victims)
A game that doesn't need to "game-ify" itself with marketable clichés, and is confident in its own identity
A game thats gameplay is reading , yet still embraces interactivity and its inspiration in table-top mechanics to make it something only possible in this medium
Is it the best example of something like this in the medium? No. But it's the exact kind of game that we need more of


The voice acting is stellar, especially the narrator, even if the deliveries often lack a natural-feeling speaking pace.
And also thank god for it, I could not imagine playing through all of this without voice acting


Concept of allegiances is a little half-baked in my opinion. Like, sure narratively maybe my political allegiances say something about me as a player or about my character or some larger thing about my political allegiance itself or the corruption of police, whatever. But at the end of the day, my sole objective is to solve a murder. With a game with this many branching dialogue options, what information I choose to disclose or not disclose to other characters is important, and as this game often shows, people are easily manipulated. Saying the right thing in the right way to the right people gets me to my objective faster. My perception is that my precinct thinks I'm a joke anyway, how much influence over their reputation could my actions possibly have? I guess I think that what politics I choose to "side with" doesn't actually have as much impact as the game thinks it does. What if I just want to role play as a cop who lies? Do the means justify the ends? Does that make me corrupt? Who cares about what a drunk, disgraced cop does anyway? I have no significance here. So long as I can do my job, nothing else matters


I think the game is undeniably pretentious. Maybe its the point? Being an amnesiac protagonist is so overdone, and the ending kinda deus ex machinas some bullshit excuses about why I have the potential to be a complete god at everything despite what an ugly, pathetic, sack of shit I am. The whole limbic system, reptile brain, shenanigans of spouting hopeless cynicism about life circumstances I have no idea about is very pretentious. Please stop attempting to overstimulate and impress me with overly detailed writing and your enormous dictionary and preaching to me the relatively shallow, cynical, and nihilistic perspective on life and the world (the expression, my mysterious ex-lover, all my internal systems, etc.)


Easily save-scummable, disappointingly so. I wish the game would incentivize living with your failed checks in a better way


Game lies to you. Don't know if I like that. I like how it encouraged you to take agency over you interactions with the game and not just exhaustively explore every possible game interaction. It's good for storytelling as well as thought-provoking gameplay decisions. On the other hand, it's stupid. The game constantly encourages you to do things that are in your least interest, and can sometimes feel like a cheap trick or slap on the wrist for not knowing better. Maybe it's even a little demeaning.


The writing is great. No denying that. Very detailed, communicates multiple perspectives well (thoughts/characters). Dialogue is always believable given what we know about the people. The characters are all surprisingly memorable and distinct, despite the large cast.
All that said, a work cannot be saved on writing alone. The pacing is often awful. Every time we meet a new character or find a new area, we have to spend half an hour learning everything they have to say/it has to see. It exponentially worsens the game when you factor for how irrelevant many quests are
Maybe just my playstyle? don't care. Also it's kind of the entire game, and in your best interest to do so, so no, not just my playstyle. I can't justify "oh just don't talk to/click on everything/one." Not engaging with a game is not justification for it doing something poorly


No humor. A little light-heartedness goes a long way to investing me in these people and the world they inhabit that make the tragic moments hit harder

I love Kim (and Titus)
I wish you talked with Kim on the balcony and reflected every night


Characters dying has little impact. Mechanically the only difference is that you can no longer talk with characters, but I feel like that doesn't matter, as many characters I have little interaction with anyway. I found it more impactful when Lisa and Morrell left after failing to discover the phasmid. They felt more "gone" that the characters who died


I believe most of my criticisms are criticisms about the game at its core, which is an unusual perspective for me. Ordinarily my criticism of a game (at least one I ultimately enjoy, if only partially), comes from how the game ultimately feels misguided or strays in some way (Chrono Trigger, Nier: Replicant, Zelda: MM & WW, Donkey Kong Country, Persona 5, Mother 3, Shadow of the Colossus, Owlboy). Otherwise I just hate it/feel indifferent about it.


My appreciation for this will definitely grow, and I may be persuaded to love it more


I feel like Ace Attorney challenged my understanding of the case and was a more effective "detective" game than this. I mostly went with the flow here
The game doesn't really give you suspects. You don't find out who the culprit is until you meet him for the first time. This isn't a detective game about narrowing down a list of suspects. It's a detective game about getting as much information as possible from everyone, and they all seem detached from the act itself. Even the Hardie boys who straight up confess to it. This isn't necessarily a criticism, but something I thought about a few days after playing.

Disco Elysium is undeniably one of the most concentrated, and achieved, works to focus on individual introspection on the most granular level. It’s clear about it from the get go, it begins with a typical RPG character builder, then an inner dialogue, with the background of a pitch black screen, then the first steps in the game in a cramped hotel room, where the inner voices will be your first companions, and finally the first long dialogue tree being established with, of course, a mirror. There is an important detail revealed in this first contact, the main character doesn’t remember anything, not even his own name. If there is not a memory, not a past, only one thing remains, the current self. The absence and rediscovery of identity flow in a perpetual conversation from our protagonist to the whole of Martinaise and back.

Though its RPG abstractions may seem childish at first (and they are, as in imaginative), the game creates a system to represent the particular human being through their various voices/traits. It zooms into what seemed to be already atomic and divides again. It may look like a total misunderstanding of something that is impossible to classify, let alone gamify, though, the brilliance is in being unashamed of its decision, of using the system as a means to construct the being, and not as a goal.

The presence of a layer of humor helps to ease its mechanical premise, and it won’t take long to be delighted with the flavor that each voice has. This same humor helps to introduce its devastated world. Disco Elysium’s premise is an easy subject to throw in the misery well, yet the total opposite occurs. The at first chaotic mind of our detective turns out to be the perfect lenses through which to discover an hypersensorial world where each corner and conversation is a suggestive sign of life, past or present, still palpable regardless. As our job is that of a detective, our instinct will be of adventuring, exploring and, of course, talking. The conversations are soon revealed as labyrinths where each character traces a glimpse of their own world. A world so present and so alive in so many people that their existence and their connection end up weaving the tapestry that is the true human life of seemingly dead Martinaise.

The game is insistent on searching for life in the home of death. A commercial mall where no store survives becomes the place for a woman to give birth to roleplaying dice, even if the roleplayers and game makers are gone too. An abandoned church becomes the home of the night raves of the youth that wants to connect with the ethereal in their own terms. The human vitalism is evident, the melancholy of Disco Elysium is noticing that the unstoppable external interests to exploit Martinaise inevitably permeate every one of these lives.

After life -- death;
After death -- life again.

Armored Core 6 is pretty easy and pretty shallow for an Armored Core game. Those two things are not necessarily bad; AC6 is probably the only AC game I'd recommend that isn't weirdly obtuse about everything. But AC6 slims things down to the point of losing some of the intricacy of its predecessors, and it creates a less interesting build experience. A less player-intensive experience, combined with AC6's easier levels and focus on 'monster' bosses, does not leave enough room for skill growth to allow players to become their own 'style' of master AC pilot. That is to say, AC6 is so easy and focused on scripted game beats that players do not get to express themselves as much in-game. If Armored Core's biggest problems are esoterica and difficulty, then Armored Core 6 over corrects for these issues. I look forward for the pendulum swinging back the other direction while I mad-rush S ranks like I need the COAM in my blood.