Played Disco Elysium over the course of a week in a sleep-deprived stupor, treating each in-game day as my one session for each real-life day, except for the last two days, which I just went through in one shot.
I haven't played a game like it, where you can feel the ~weight of its world's~ histories and ideologies bearing down on every character you meet and every corner you cover, reflecting where we are in the material and philosophical points in our history. Also, it indulges weirdness, which I am personally a big fan of. The closest thing to it in terms of being a somewhat distorted magnifying glass of the enormity of real life is Dujanah, but that's on the other end of the genre spectrum with that game's surrealist approach and glitch/clay-punk aesthetic.
The skills as party members and the Thought Cabinet are ingenious RPG mechanics.
and yes the descriptive prose and the internal dramatic narration in this game are actually poetic and yes shivers is actually the best skill
Disco Elysium is proof that we can have 25+ hour RPGs that are riveting from start to finish without any traditional combat systems and that video game writing could be so much sharper, so much funnier, so much more unpredictable, so much more illustrative, so much more challenging, so much denser, and so much weirder.
I haven't played a game like it, where you can feel the ~weight of its world's~ histories and ideologies bearing down on every character you meet and every corner you cover, reflecting where we are in the material and philosophical points in our history. Also, it indulges weirdness, which I am personally a big fan of. The closest thing to it in terms of being a somewhat distorted magnifying glass of the enormity of real life is Dujanah, but that's on the other end of the genre spectrum with that game's surrealist approach and glitch/clay-punk aesthetic.
The skills as party members and the Thought Cabinet are ingenious RPG mechanics.
and yes the descriptive prose and the internal dramatic narration in this game are actually poetic and yes shivers is actually the best skill
Disco Elysium is proof that we can have 25+ hour RPGs that are riveting from start to finish without any traditional combat systems and that video game writing could be so much sharper, so much funnier, so much more unpredictable, so much more illustrative, so much more challenging, so much denser, and so much weirder.