Let's get some things out of the way beforehand. There are some things that are mediocre or even bad in DE, which to some might feel like kicking a cow in india, but thats just the way it is.

C O N S :

- steering with a Joypad on a Switch not always felt amazing It's quite impressive that they managed to optimize this for mouse, joypad and even touch, but I encountered some passages that were pretty uncool to control. With a mouse/finger you click where you wanna go and the character would go there. With a joypad you need to guess where you can go and often thats just not possible. Also the running animation doesn't feel dynamic enough to be fun to steer with an analog stick which is also something that doesn't matter with a mouse.

- Interface and items on consoles
maybe I didn't put enough skill points into my real-alter-egos interfacing perk, but first of all, the whole way they handled items and their usage with R3 and L3 is weirdly implemented. As soon as you understand it, its OK but they way they handle this never feels well documented and its a lot of guesswork which item you can put on L3 and R3 to use yourself and which item is just activated when you need it. Second the latter, the activated ones, this was not very well done. You get a prybar and think "cool I got a prybar now" but of course after the first usage you keep it for the rest of the game, believing you might need it as it says it would just open locked things. Guess what, you'll never need it again. And the same thing happens to most items that are not usables like drugs or cigarettes. I guess I'm just too used to have a prybar as that single most important item like in Half Life. But if you don't let me use it, just make him throw it away after it never will make any sense again.

- Clothes. I mean for many this says it all. There have been memes around the game making you go through every single garment item before any white check to see if theres anything useful to push your stats. This is very tedious and among the biggest reasons that hold me back playing the game again immediately. Surely I'm gonna but I need a break from clothes-browsing.

- Some Bugs, freezes. No Armageddon but still annoyances worth mentioning.

- At some points it can happen that you are sorta clueless and thats when it can become a bit bland and frustrating. Usually there are some threads to follow and one leads to the other and there are always dialogues and stuff... but when the game demands you to find that one clue to get the story moving forward, it can become pretty hard and tedious to find that, ending up running around, talking to people again, searching all possible dialogue trees (including choosing a lot of things that you deliberately didn't choose before to stay in character but then try out because maybe it helps progressing). Its not necessarily a huge strength.


P R O S :

+ ..... I'm kidding, of course I won't list all the great things now like a list as this list would take forever.
I am more and more turning to someone who prefers to only play indie titles for the rest of my life as after Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium is just another game that breaks all known borders of how smart a game can be without ever feeling pretentious or cheesy. It's absolutely highly recommended to watch some making of videos about Studio ZAUM on Youtube as it makes clear, this is just one of those games, that just happen as a result of a lot of happy or not so happy developments, circumstances, a lot of luck and even more work but can't ever be done again like this. If you read Jason Schreyer's books about the hell many companies and especially indie studios had to go through to get anything out, it seems like a paradox that an estonian team that never did a videogame before would create an RPG game to rule all RPG games through .... its writing. I mean seriously?
Well, gamerpeople, the joke's on you, it turns out, that books are still the most immersive medium over interactive media and combining these two might rarely end up being a success. But when it does, it is called Disco Elysium.

I could write a lot more great things about this game, but I feel I should leave it as spoilerfree as this. Maybe the absolutely wonderful soundtrack and of course the voice acting (by the way the narrator wasn't even a voice actor and might be the best I listened to in years) has deserved some special credits.
I am just utterly grateful to be alive at a time when this game came out to experience it along many others for the first time. Needless to say that, while I filled some paragraphs with some cons before, none of them matter anymore once you see the credits roll.

Reviewed on Sep 28, 2022


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