Incline Disco Elysium - The Final Cut - a hardboiled cop show isometric RPG

[Reinhardt]

So it's shit?

 

[Tigranes]

oh hey on gog it comes with this strange piece of shovelware called UnderRail

never heard of it

 

[Prime Junta]

<resurfaces>

Pretty good first day, considering.

Spoiler

- Had a friendly chat with Evrart
- Had an even friendlier one with Joyce (she did not invite me onto her yacht)
- Got Measurehead to take down the vic
- Fridged the corpse and found the cause of death
- Broke Cuno (had to punch him, Kim did not approve)
- Poked around the tenements
- Opted into Communism

 

[Kasparov]

Do any of you even read reviews anymore?

Here's one.

Oct 15, 2019
by:Justin Woo


Platform: PC (reviewed)

Disco Elysium is one of those rare games that manages to be both retro and nouveau. It hearkens back to the late 90s golden age of isometric RPGs while pushing the entire genre forward. And it’s funny as hell.

Disco Elysium is the great grandchild of Planescape: Torment. All the narrative DNA is there: deep dialogue trees; a unique, off-kilter world; an amnesiac protagonist with a dark past. But that DNA has mutated and evolved in a petri dish of vodka and human suffering into 2019’s strongest candidate for Game of the Year.

Setting And Character
Disco Elysium is set in the city of Revachol, in a world not entirely unlike our own. It is a part of an archipelago of islands that attempted to rise up in communist revolt that was mercilessly crushed by other nations, who now run it from afar and profit off of the suffering of its people. Much of the city is a bombed out husk that was never fully rebuilt. Adherents to ideologies of capitalism, communism, moralism, monarchism, and fascism throw elbows and jostle for space inside of a few city blocks.

You play as an alcoholic, middle-aged cop who just finished the mother of all benders and woke up in a trashed hotel room. His memory has been drowned in a whiskey tide. He doesn’t even remember his name, what he’s doing here, or why there’s a body hanging from a tree outside of his window.

This is brilliant for a number of reasons. In most RPGs, you, as the PC, spend the first few hours of the game asking questions that would seem idiotic to anyone who heard them. “Where am I? What city is this? Can I get a brief history lesson? What is reality? Is magic a thing?” But as an amnesiac, you have a reason to ask these absurd questions (or to not ask these questions, to avoid making a fool of yourself - play it however you like).

Amnesia also creates a situation wherein the player gets to build the character they want to build, while still forcing them to reckon with a blighted past that they had no hand in creating - your PC is still inherently part of the world. He was a lousy, selfish drunk who hurt people, and the game barfs his mess into the player’s lap. One of the core questions of the game is “How do you handle the morning after?”

Speaking of which, that body? It was your job to investigate his murder, and instead of doing your job, you got hammered and left him there to rot. For a week.

Writing And Visuals
DE - Writing.jpg

Before I go any further, let me say that this might just be the best written game I’ve ever played. The dialogue is hilarious and your PC can make truly absurd choices. Live on the street as a hobocop? Go for it. Lick a rum stain off of a cafeteria counter? Why not? Punch a mouthy cockney teenager? Sure!

Throughout the game, your PC can offer political opinions on what’s going on in Revachol. Regardless, the game mercilessly satirizes pretty much every political position that you can take, and does it well. The game’s developer, ZA/UM, knows what they’re talking about, and take no prisoners.

You can be a good cop or an absolute disaster of a human being, and ZA/UM manages to make both choices poignant, funny, and fascinating. The game’s central murder mystery is a massive stanky, violent onion that gets more rancid the more layers you peel back, and I am hooked. I don’t want to know who did it. I need to know.

The folks you meet in Revachol feel real and multidimensional. They carry their secret hurts. They try to live up to their ideals while surviving just one more day. They do bad things for good reasons. Disco Elysium’s writers are cruel to ideologies and kind to people. In 2019, this is the kind of game we need.

DE - Face.jpg

Contemporary AAA games blow massive budgets on fully animated characters but never come close to the level of depth we see in Disco Elysium’s NPCs. Let me say it loudly for the folks in the back: PRETTY GRAPHICS CANNOT COMPENSATE FOR BAD WRITING! But great writing renders fully animated characters unnecessary.

But Revachol and its residents are beautifully hand-painted. I’ll take these brushstrokes over a thousand mo-cap recording sessions and a billion polygons. You can’t see their pores in 4K. But you can see their world, their lives, and how it all fits together. ZA/UM stays laser-focused on what matters and ignores what doesn’t. I’m grateful for this; you will be too.

Mechanics
DE - Mechanics.jpg

Disco Elysium’s mechanics play like a tribute to the tabletop role-playing game experience. Skill checks involve rolling two six sided dice and adding your skill rating. The game even plays a cute little die-rolling sound effect when you make a check. Unlike other games, which try to hide the resolution mechanics from you, the game shows you actual die faces, which, as a lifelong TTRPG gamer, I adore. Succeeding is one thing. Actually seeing your critical hits and misses is a whole different level of joy.

Failing a check also doesn’t stop the game in its tracks, forcing you to grind side quests until you can re-attempt it. The game keeps going, and you’re forced to make due with partial information or the consequences of failure.

Like in TTRPGs, conversation and investigation are the core of Disco Elysium. If you play this game, expect to do a lot of reading. Almost everything in this game is handled via dialogue trees, including physical conflict.

There's no "combat" per se. However, you still have hit point tracks for health and morale. Lose all your health and you’re a dead man. Lose all your morale and you quit being a cop, live under a bridge, and the game ends. At one point, I looked at the wrong bit of graffiti, and it reminded my character that only he alone can rebuild communism!! He had a nervous breakdown, entered a fugue state, and quit the force.

I love this, but I’m also tired of RPGs that place story behind difficult fights. I’m not here for combat mechanics. If I wanted that, there are a million other games to play. I’m here for the story.

Character Generation: Your Skills Get Mouthy
DE - Skills.jpg

Your character’s stats start with four broad attributes: emotional, mental, physical, and motoric. You have enough points to be strictly average in all attributes, which means that if you are going to be exceptional in any particular field, you have to be deficient in another. Each attribute contains six skills, and skill ratings are capped by their base attribute. If you took four in your mental stat, your mental skills can only go up to four. This radically changes how you approach the game; I created a brainy, chatty cop, which means that physical solutions were almost always a dead end for me.

You get expected skills like Empathy and Endurance, but you also get more bizarre stuff like Electrochemistry, which is your ability to take drugs, be tempted by drugs, and party hard. Half Light allows you to physically defend yourself and clap back against insults. Savoir Faire makes you slick and helps you steal things. Drama allows you to lie and detect lies. One of my favorites, Inland Empire, is a measure of your imagination. It allows you to get hunches and make wild conjectures, which can hurt or help you.

But that’s not all. Each skill acts as a voice in your head. When you succeed at a skill check and get more information about a scene or character, the game doesn’t just hand you additional data. No, the skill actually has a conversation with you - the skills are characters riding around in your head. Inland Empire is a mad poet. Electrochemistry is a hedonistic party animal. Rhetoric is a prudent thinker.

As you move through the game, your character comes upon notions like “Rebuild Communism!” or “Work out a lot!” or “Be a hobo!” and you can slot these thoughts into your Thought Cabinet. At first they provide skill penalties, but once you’ve dealt with these penalties for a while, these thoughts are “internalized” and the penalties transform into bonuses, with an occasional side order of drawbacks. Unfortunately, you never know what bonuses or drawbacks you’ll be left with, and it costs a skillpoint to forget an internalized thought. I love the Thought Cabinet, but I’d love it more if I could add or drop thoughts once they’re internalized. No one likes paying for a respect.

Clothes can also provide skill boosts or penalties. Dress for your skill checks for best results. Also, every item has a colorful, amusing description to go with it. Don’t expect “plate mail +3”, but do expect snakeskin shoes that you threw through a window while drunk.

Also, you get a hideous tie at the beginning of the game, and it constantly tells you to do drugs. Like I said, Game of the Year.

Stray Thoughts
Don’t expect to hear disco music in Disco Elysium. Most of the music is melancholy and electronic - a reminder that the post-communist world of Revachol is still fighting the post-war hangover.

The voice acting gives you a nice feel for character and setting. The variety of accents and races lets the player know that Revachol is just as diverse as our real world; kudos to ZA/UM for that.

For some reason, Disco Elysium is marketed as an “open world” game. I feel like someone in the marketing department saw that the term “open world” gets lots of hits and tried to ram this square peg of a game into a marketing round hole.

Do not show up to Disco Elysium thinking that you’re going to climb and reactivate radio towers or clear enemy strongholds using stealth. It’s not Far Cry or Shadow of Mordor. Disco Elysium is a massive story game with a ton of great sidequests and phenomenal writing. It gives you fewer options than you would have in a standard open world game. But those options feel well-integrated into a greater whole, rather than busy work created by a dev creating “content” to conform to a design document.

Anyone who loves isometric RPGs, story games, walking simulators, or Telltale Games should moneyfist their monitor, cram some cocaine into their router, and download Disco Elysium immediately.

 

[Jinn]

The only thing in that "The Short Review" that's a real disappointment to read.

- Not a challenging game at the slightest

 

[conan_edw]

It has a metascore now

 

[Egosphere]

oh hey on gog it comes with this strange piece of shovelware called UnderRail

never heard of it

just give it a shot and it might make de look like shovelware

 

[HeatEXTEND]

w

oh hey on gog it comes with this strange piece of shovelware called UnderRail

never heard of it

what the fuck?

 

[Deflowerer]

It has a metascore now

Hopefully bonuses are tied to 95+.

 

[Lacrymas]

Kasparov is it normal?

Spoiler

Oppressed/depressed proletariat member pondering how to create a revolution against the bourgeoisie. Seems pretty normal to me, given the circumstances.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Wow!
According to GOG gamepage this already has quality DLC released for it.

Spoiler

Underrail: Expedition.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Will Durant

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Ok, started playing. Very early in, but so far, enjoying it quite a bit.

Excellent dialogue, way above most games, heavy skill usage within dialogue, and the game got me to laugh out loud 2-3 times in the first 30 minutes.

 

[Infinitron]

Holy shit, 92 / 100 from PC Gamer...

https://www.pcgamer.com/disco-elysium-review/

DISCO ELYSIUM REVIEW
A cop adventure inspired by classic RPGs.

You are not well. You've woken up on the floor of a grimy hotel room with a hangover so devastating you might as well be dead. You don't remember who you are, which city you're in, or what happened the night before. Apparently you're a detective, in town to solve a murder, but you don't feel like a cop. You feel like shit.

Disco Elysium is a detective RPG of improbable depth. It's part Planescape: Torment, part police procedural, part psychodrama. Your fatally hungover detective peels himself off the carpet, naked except for a pair of soiled underpants, and begins the laborious process of piecing his broken mind back together, while simultaneously attempting to solve a gruesome murder on the wrong side of the tracks.

The game has stats, skill checks, companions, quests, and an interface inspired by classic Infinity Engine CRPGs and tabletop roleplaying games. But it also has a lot in common with visual novels and point-and-click adventures, with dense, branching dialogue and the ability to intimidate, charm, or bullshit your way out of tricky situations via several novels' worth of brilliantly strange, vibrant dialogue. There's no clicky Baldur's Gate-style combat here: everything happens via skill checks, dialogue, and text, including when things turn violent.

A man has been found hanging from a tree in an empty lot and it's your job to find out who killed him—if you can get near the corpse without puking. Disco Elysium's sallow, flare-wearing protagonist is a total disaster. The taste you get in your mouth the morning after a heavy night of drinking made flesh. The sticky floor of a discotheque given life. But the beauty of the game is how you can remould this grotesque lump of sin into something else entirely.

Thanks to that skull-shattering hangover, and the amnesia conveniently brought on by it, your detective is truly a blank slate. You can reveal things about yourself by talking to the poor souls caught in the wake of your apocalyptic bender. But you're also given the opportunity to suppress these discoveries, even down to denying your own name and choosing a new one. The degree of freedom you have to shape your character's psyche is really quite astonishing.

Through conversations you control every facet of your personality. You're given a variety of ways to respond to people, and this dictates your personality, how the population reacts to you, and the outcomes of quests. The things you say and decisions you make in Disco Elysium really, actually matter, affecting your role in the world and the inner workings of your mind in a meaningful way.

You also have to watch what you say, because doing the usual RPG thing of exhausting every conversation option regularly leads to you putting your foot in your mouth and getting someone (or yourself) in trouble. Characters will remember things, so it pays to think carefully before making any rash decisions or betraying someone. Then again, a cavalier attitude can lead to interesting, unexpected things: an example of how well Disco Elysium caters to different play styles.

Skills are important too. There are 24 in total, ranging from logic, perception, and reaction speed to endurance, conceptualisation, and authority. A character with high authority might find it easier to pressure a timid witness into spilling their guts. A high logic character can divine truth from a clear-headed analysis of a crime scene. There are some more esoteric skills too such as inland empire, which lets you pluck inspiration from dreams and talk to inanimate objects.

Conversely, a character with low perception can miss case-breaking clues floating right in front of their face, while a low endurance cop will struggle in even the most trivial physical trials. All the defining traits of the best fictional cops are in there, but importantly, the worst are too. So if you want to have the superhuman insight of Sherlock, but also be a self-destructive mess like The Wire's Jimmy McNulty, Disco Elysium lets you.

When you create a character, your starting skills are determined by the stats you roll. Your base stats are intellect, psyche, physique, and motorics, which make you better or worse at certain things. But as you play you earn experience points that let you upgrade any skills you like, allowing you to sculpt your character further. You might start out physically weak, but stick enough points into the appropriate skills and you can become a force of nature.

And I haven't even mentioned thoughts yet. As you speak to people you'll reveal thoughts that can then be slotted into your brain and developed over time, unlocking stat buffs and fascinating, insightful nuggets of story. Some of these have a major effect on your character's mental state, while others are more frivolous and largely played for laughs. You're limited to three thoughts to begin with, but skill points can also be used to unlock more. And the more thoughts you develop, the more complex your character becomes.

The result of all this is one of the most preposterously malleable characters in RPG history. You can create a highly empathetic communist disco music enthusiast, a self-deprecating artist who punches first and asks questions later, a deluded rock-and-roll cop with a passion for democracy, or a drug-addicted feminist psychic. Every person who plays Disco Elysium will have a different experience as a result of the frankly audacious depth of its role playing.

The game is set in the fictional city of Revachol; specifically a dreary, forgotten district called Martinaise. Plagued by poverty, crime, corrupt unions, and scarred by a violent revolution, it's exactly the kind of place you'd expect to wake up after a three-day drug binge. It's gorgeous, with a stylish, painterly aesthetic, expressive characters, and detailed backgrounds. But it's filthy too, which is relayed mainly by that gloriously rich, evocative writing. A vividly described autopsy made me feel genuinely queasy.

Many of the people you meet say disgusting, offensive things, which is entirely justified by the grotty bleakness of the setting. Martinaise is a horrible place filled with horrible bastards. But there are flickers of warmth and humanity, too. People making the most of a bad hand, struggling against an uncaring world. It's a lavishly realised setting with acres of history and culture to discover, although occasionally, in some optional conversations, I felt like a mountain of rather dull, long-winded lore had been suddenly dumped on my head.

Typically the writing is funny, subversive, and, admittedly, a little self-indulgent at times. But it's also incredibly good, with an anarchic literary flair that makes even the most matter-of-fact conversation hugely entertaining. There's partial voice acting too, although it varies wildly in quality. The sleazy, rasping delivery of your ancient reptilian brain, which regularly emerges to taunt you, sounds wonderfully evil. And I love the soft, calming voice of Lt. Kitsuragi, your partner, who is a kind of moral centre for the wild and unpredictable protagonist.

Freedom in Disco Elysium isn't just limited to shaping your character. The structure is also extremely open-ended, letting you pursue the murder as doggedly, or not, as you like. A list of tasks is constantly building up in your notebook, and you can perform them in any order you like: including those linked to the main case. And they're all interconnected, meaning doing one task before another can open up completely new avenues of investigation.

Martinaise is a large, open space made up of several distinct areas and the sheer volume of stuff to interact with, people to talk to, and quests to pick up is quite overwhelming. You'll investigate a dilapidated apartment block, a frozen coastline, a crumbling boardwalk, a dockyard, and other suitably grim locations, all of which are brought to life by that beautiful art—not to mention atmospheric music, lighting, and ambient sound design. It's a place you can really get lost in.

How you complete tasks and solve crimes is dependent on your character. If you're the physical, all-action type, you'll deal with situations in a more direct, aggressive way. But if your character is psychological or empathetic, you might find a more subtle solution. Crucially, every kind of player is catered for. In my experience you'll never hit a brick wall because of the way you've built your character. This makes Disco Elysium a supremely satisfying RPG, because if you want to play a certain way, it's primed to accommodate it.

The thing about Disco Elysium is that my experience of it is completely unique to me, such is the dizzying variety of skills, stats, thoughts, and conversation options on offer. You could play through it five times and still not see everything, so there's no one experience to assess. But I can say with certainty that it's one of the finest RPGs on PC if you value depth, freedom, customisation, and storytelling.

THE VERDICT
92

DISCO ELYSIUM
An irresponsibly deep detective RPG that lets you be any kind of detective you want. Even a bad one.

 

[Lacrymas]

 

[Durandal]

I somehow wound up doing a backwards jump into an old lady in a wheelchair while flipping both birds, only to die miserably.

And I forgot to save.

 

[Fenix]

Do any of you even read reviews anymore?

Kasparov my man, get well soon and with rest of team.

Spoiler

Also, that separateness from them in such victory hour can give you very different perspective you could explore

 

[rusty_shackleford]

you know it's great because … *checks notes* … the same author gave deadfire an 88/100
https://www.pcgamer.com/pillars-of-eternity-2-deadfire-review/

 

[Fenix]

Also, an observation...
I knew it would be better to *just* play it, and not to try munchkin the shit out of the game like I usually do.

Of course I failed my Composure check, and start to reload like crazy at KLAASJE MISS ORANJE DISCO DANCER.
And you know what?
I realized that everybody in their sane mind will complete at least one playthrough while I still be realoding at Day 1...

There is no point to do it - at all.

 

[Infinitron]

https://wccftech.com/review/disco-elysium-dont-blame-it-on-the-boogie/

Disco Elysium Review – Don’t Blame It On the Boogie

Tabletop roleplaying games don’t always refer to themselves as games. It's a bit of challenge given what the G stands for in RPG, but it makes sense in a way. When all the players sit around the table with Games Master at the helm, it isn’t exactly about winning. It's about telling stories. Cooperative storytelling experiences are some of the most satisfying and fascinating experiences you can have, and Disco Elysium might the first video game that captures that same feeling.

In Disco Elysium, you are a detective trying to resolve a murder. From the looks of things, you’ve solved it once, got blackout drunk and destroyed all your deductions. Bravo! But while you’re doing all these things that look and sound like your typical top-down RPG, like dialogue branches, ability checks, and searching the environment, the experience itself is quite different. You never exactly feel like you’re competing against the computer. Even when NPCs are purposely withholding evidence, and you know it, it all adds to the story. Instead, it feels like you’re working with the game to tell a story.

And that narrative is fantastic. What starts as a simple lynching quickly spiral into past revolutions, union action, and possible supernatural threats, all encapsulated in an intriguing world that you won’t want to leave. But even when you fail skill checks, which is a simple probability engine, it still feels like you are progressing with the game rather than fighting it. Angering a witness might feel like a punishment in other games, but in Disco, it’s just the push you need to find a new clue or lean on that one mysterious character you’ve been avoiding.



The characters you’ll meet in the game are some of the most interesting, and with partial voice over its so easy to lose yourself in the interweaving conversations and lore that comes from talking to everyone you come across. But while the acting and writing are fantastic, the actual recording can be a little tinny. It sounds like some of the characters were recorded on poor quality microphones and it's immediately noticeable, breaking an otherwise incredible performance.

One of the reasons it's so jarring is because the rest of the audio is truly incredible. From the glum, alien music that drifts in from the city you’re exploring, to even the electric sound of the ability checks, its a game you’ll want to play with headphones whenever possible.

Some of the best characters you’ll come across though exist only in your own head. We’ve all played games where characters have protracted conversations with themselves because the developers couldn’t find another way of telling the player that information. Disco Elysium is different. Here players are subjected to long conversations with different aspects of their personality, helping guide their decisions and fill in some of the missing information that came with the alcohol-based amnesia. At the beginning of Disco Elysium you'll choose what archetype to play, basically whether you want to be smart, feeling, charismatic or strong. I went with feeling, so the strongest voices in my head had strange names like Shiver and Inland Empire.

The game lets you understand what these voices represent as you play, with beautiful and yet vague descriptions helping you figure it out. It's a fascinating experience that progresses the story and is often very funny as well. In fact, all the writing in the game is great fun, either thanks to beautiful imagery or witty nonsense. One standout moment early in the game, assuming you wander in the same direction I did, will have you discussing communism. In this moment I had the option to back the ideology, dismiss it, or claim to part of a secret other option. And later on, one of my inner thoughts debated whether I would, in fact, become a communist because of some of my previous choices.



It's things like this, moments that have you develop your character not in menus but through conversations, that make it feel more like a genuine tabletop roleplaying game. That being said, there are some cryptic menus that let you explore games (costing in-game time) and spend points to improve the skills and voices in your head. The game lets you discover these systems on your own and it works so well I feel the experimental approach really helps you connect with the character.

Outside the voices in your head, the game is beautiful. The early area, a once precise coastal area decimated by old fighting and economic stagnation, is striking and enticing. History in Disco Elysium is steeped on top of itself and makes the world really worth just looking at. Exploring isn’t always safe though, but not in the typical fashion. Combat does really exist, so if you’re after something like Divinity: Original Sin or Pillars of Eternity you’ll be in for a surprise. Again like in tabletop games, Disco has you rolling invisible dice to commit most actions, but you do have a health and morale meter that can be damaged. What’s particularly exciting is the damage could come even from a conversation, always keeping you on your toes as you explore the world. In an apartment block, I lost a chunk of health just by looking at a piece of graffiti.

There is next to nothing not to enjoy about Disco Elysium. It might not be exactly what you expect (in fact, if it is you’ve clearly read too much about it in advance), but it does precisely what the developers wanted and it works so well in drawing you into a genuinely incredible world and story that it's a hard game to put down. Whether you’re racing the clock to catch that witness or having political conversations with the part of your brain that normally wants you to punch things, Disco Elysium is a unique gaming experience that should be attempted by everyone.

Review code provided by the publisher. You can get a digital copy directly via Steam.

9.5
It's impossible not to fall for Disco Elysium, from its intriguing murder detective work to the world it depicts, not to mention the voices inside your own head. It's an experience that could easily make the top of some Game of Year lists and for good reason.

Pros

• Interactive storytelling at its finest and most literal
• A fantastic world to explore
• A game that makes you enjoy failure as much as success
• Incredible graphics and audio to complement it too

Cons

• Some recordings aren't the best quality
• Timers might stress some people out

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Lacrymas

 

[Nano]

Holy shit, 92 / 100 from PC Gamer...

That means its at least as good as Dragon Age 2!

Also Pillars of Eternity.

 

[Haba]

Do any of you even read reviews anymore?

Reviews are for faggots, pig.

 

[Verylittlefishes]

This game is amazing. Buy it.

Also I think I found a bug: when I tried to "slip away and not pay" from the bartender (sorry, caffeteria manager!) in the initial location, my detective run to the doors, then abruptly stops, and the game is no more reacting to the controls, while still running (interface screen is also disappears, like in photo/cutscene mode).

 

[Lacrymas]

Lacrymas

Can't wait for the nuclear family to be destroyed by communist gays. Especially those with lingering honeyed smiles and amused glances.

Now, where are the vaguely progressive trannies?