Disco Elysium is an incredible story and world crammed into a very interesting RPG held back by some frustrating and obscure mechanics. Taking the role of an amnesiac detective with a lot of internal thoughts on everything, you try to solve a murder case over a period of multiple days in a small fictional village in a fictional universe with enough parallels to our own world to make it truly fascinating. I managed to get to the end of the game almost by forcing myself to play through it because at some point I just felt I was stuck on everything and spent so much time wandering around aimlessly that my fun with the game was sucked away. It is nonetheless an incredible thing.
You start the game by creating your character - either by picking up a preset through 3 options - or creating your own, assigning points and selecting a signature skill - meaning you’ll get bonuses with that skill and all skills of the same row - but not skills are created equal, some are way more chatty than others and might define your playthrough more if you select them while others are useful, but won’t color your adventure as much. You can increase your skills as you level up and temporarily boost them with pieces of gear - although most gear will often lower something else - and skills are used in a lot of places.
There are obvious skill checks that can either be white or red - meaning that you can attempt them multiple times or only once - and little hidden checks that are peppered across conversations. Sometimes you’ll fail an Empathy check and don’t pick up that the person you are talking to is angry, for instance. The obvious skill checks are sometimes required to continue the story and some times are forced on you at important times; The ones you can attempt multiple times get unlocked until you increase a specific stat or under some certain conditions that aren’t obvious, so you can be tempted to wait until your stat is higher to try a check, this can spectacularly backfire. I waited forever to do one of the first tasks the game expects of you - inspecting the body - because I just had no chance to get the check right, but at some point I tried because I had ran out of other things to do and the game gave me a lot of tools at that point in order to succeed at that check. How could I have known?
Most of the game is done talking to people and inspecting things. The rest is done walking around a map that feels way too big at a pace that feels way to slow. The time doesn’t pass in real-time, so you can take your time and decide how you’ll spend it but I had to burn time in some of the in-game days because I was just out of things to do. Nonetheless, the writing and voice acting they have in there is incredible, the universe they have created in the fictional city of Revachol with its colored history, great cast of characters and politics really feels like it’s a real, living place. As an amnesiac cop, you can say a lot of weird things and go in plenty of weird directions, which the game encourages, but even with the tooltips proclaiming that you shouldn’t shy away from saying weird things, saying the wrong thing at the wrong person might hinder your odds at a critical junction. And the game can be dour, sad and cynical about things. Some of the characters are plainly offensive, some are charming and bad things might happen to them depending on what you say and do. I’ve managed to not save-scum my way through the game, but it took a lot of force of will, especially when a 92% odds check failed me.
You have a great gallery of options to customize your cop, political ideals, cop archetypes and random thoughts that all meld in your head in the form of the thought cabinet; It takes time to fully internalize these passive skills and you need skill points to remove them. There are multiple ways to approach many situations depending on your skill set, and from what I understand you can get to the end of the game no matter how much you mess up - as long as you keep enough healing items to avoid running our of health or morale. In practice, I’ve tried starting a new game now and the beginning feels so similar even with the multiple slight differences that I’m not sure how much of a fresh experience it actually is and it just feels weird to do a thing I’ve already did, but just off.
Overall I enjoyed Disco Elysium, it’s incredible and there is nothing like it, but it also had some aspects that annoyed me and made me enjoy the rest a bit less. If anyone asks, I’ll recommend it all the way with the few caveats that it’s a different kind of game and requires a bit of a personal investment. I’m still sour about that ending, by the way. That’s not how mysteries work!
