I have not much to say, yet I’ll do my best to say something. First of all, I love it. I love the style, the environment, the voiceover, the dialogues, the quirky and messed up main character, who can be as psychotic and random as the player wants him to be.
Yes, this is the game. The game about failure and going on despite whatever bullshit you did, do and will do. You’re assuming the role of a cop, and not just any cop, but a wino-cop with glorious Captain Price facial hair (I know there’s a name for it, but I don’t remember it… or don’t know). And amnesia. You drank so much you lost your memory and can’t remember a thing. From the start you already know what sort of cop are you. One of those who makes it to the news.
I didn’t play the game for too long. Hell, I played it may be for an hour. I didn’t even make it through the first day, but already was mesmerized by its graphic style, by dialogues, by narration. In no way it is a simple one, as someone on Steam said it looks like whoever wrote those dialogues swallowed a thesaurus. Well, what can I say? In no way it is written badly. On the contrary, at once it has this peculiar Borrowesque style where sentences tend to turn into lengthy, complex strings of jargon, colloquialism, and dialects. It adds to the overall atmosphere of craziness and mystery.
The world itself reminded me much about this one game, called Pathologic. The same weird style of narrative, the strange city in the middle of nowhere surrounded by weird, at times hyperbolic characters, who have rather strange and radical views on life, politics, and society. The same energy. Only Disco Elysium is full of black humor, and it pushes you to be the worst person you can be. It makes you want to steal, run away from the bar without paying, flirt with random women, punch kids in the face, and shoot at corpses because they won’t get any more dead than they already are.
Fun game. Also, a rather complex one since there’s a lot of text to read. A lot of things to remember and notice. And yes, I know that the majority of the dialogues so far are nothing more than a filler to make your searches for progress less obvious, still it is fun. Even though I’m actually thinking about turning off the narrative since I read faster than actors read their lines.
The RPG element, while I wasn’t able to appreciate it to the fullest, looks like a good old DnD sort of game. Where for every critical action that requires some specialized knowledge, skills or attributes, you have to roll the dice and based on your skills, you have a better chance to roll a success. I think you can abuse this system with save-loading scam to get always the best outcomes of your actions, but what fun in that? I don’t know, maybe for perfectionists there is. I prefer to go with the flow even if it means I’ll end up with an early game end because my character and his partner missed the rope with a revolver and my character decided that this was the end of life and had a meltdown on the spot.
So far, it is fun. I don’t know how it’ll get in the future, but the sheer amount of options and play styles means there’s a lot of ways to get through the same interactions. At least that’s what I suppose. I don’t know how it is in reality. Maybe there are just several valid options or no real options at all (illusion of choice) and all you do is just discover different responses to some of your actions that lead to the same outcome, anyway. I don’t know. But I’ll try to see.