This is an incredibly written game – and I mostly mean in quantity rather than quality. Not that the writing is bad even a little bit, it's just So Written. At times it seemed a little too impressed with itself, a little too proud of just how much it had written and just how thoroughly it had considered everything about its world. The deluge of these instances made it difficult for me to resonate with the more rare moments that were clearly supposed to be emotionally impactful. Heaps and piles of world-building featuring places we'll never see and people we'll never know. Does it set the scene? Yes – does it establish the game's bleak tone? Yes – but it is constant and it is incredibly dry. Sometimes I'd go a full hour or so without encountering any moments like this, and suddenly getting caught in the current of yet more world-building would make me realize how much I was enjoying all the dialogue and narration up to this point (by contrast of how much I wasn't enjoying myself anymore). And this was with the full-game voice acting off, I can't imagine playing the whole game with it on. I kept voices on the "Classic" setting, and sometimes even that proved to be too much. The voice actors are great but their performances are absolutely not (save for Kim, of course). I found myself speeding through text faster than normal when they appeared so they would stop sooner. Which is a shame, because the tone and quality of their voices are great reference points to understand their characters better, but unnatural emphases and inflections regularly distracted from the meaning of the sentences rather than adding to it. Disco Elysium is an incredibly smart game but failed to make me feel much of anything, and I'm not afraid to say I value one of those things a lot more than the other.