- Joined
- Oct 19, 2007
- Messages
- 5,480
So, finally beat the game. This makes me want to commit my thoughts on it to the Codex, in a form a long-winded pseudoreview, if only to kind of settle my own mind on it. I will try to keep it spoiler-free, but one can't chop wood without sending splinters around.
DISCO!
Up until two weeks before the release, I held my cool. I kept one eye on No Parley With Partying Anthropomorphic Animals as the time went on, but only in the middle of September did I buy into the hype. It did not last long, but god, did I spend some time spamming my acquaintances about Disco Elysium. Unprecedented freedom! Play the NPCs against each other! Best emulation of tabletop RPG session ever conceived! Future of entertainment!
I started feeling silly some time at the end of day two. As mentioned previously by other, more esteemed Codexians - the game is not that long, promised open world is more like a Bloodlines/ Deus Ex hub on steroids, the skills which, when raised too high, were supposed to influence your character, at most give you a -1/-2 to a roll. Yet I kept trudging on, and I am happy I did.
Infernum
Our main hero has seen better days. We might not yet know who, when and where we are, but some things are universal. Vivid descriptions of a hangover, piss- and cum stained trousers and deadly light fill the game right after the opening. Whoever this aging sack of carbon and proteins is, he tried really hard to wipe the entire slate clean, and he did it, the absolute madman. Now, we have to deal with the fallout.
The first few hours are absolutely brilliant. As I said - I was hyped as hell, and the game opens in a really powerful way. The writing is consistently impressive - more on that later - and right until you finish your first jog around the Martinaise, you feel like this might be the best piece of software ever conceived.
Thing is, once I spent an in-game day and a half talking to everyone present, finished first few mini-quests and played with underlying mechanics a bit, I felt a bit of a letdown. It was probably the gentlest, most satisfying letdown I ever experienced after getting hyped, but still - I realized the grand, marketing promises were just that, marketing. You can't really play anybody against anybody else, no more than implying that person X cracked first, or building up masculine solidarity by ragging on women. You can not do whatever you want, arrest whoever you want, or sleep wherever you want. Technology for bringing the tabletop experience to a computer is not here yet (obviously unless you discount 'virtual tables' such as NWN). Obvious? Sure, but god, did that realization hit me the moment I tried to peek into certain somebody's bedroom.
Purgatorium
Here I am, complaining about a piece of entertainment that seems to gather almost unilateral praise across the internet. I guess I just had to get this off my chest before saying that DE was more fun than a barrel of monkeys.
Optics first: visuals are great. The painting-like backgrounds, stylish characters and feel of the entire world resonated with me greatly. It really brings in the feel of "a world not entirely unlike our own", with more than enough food for empathy, yet with enough place for the thrill of discovery. You really feel like a character from some alternate universe's Bulgakov's story. I fell in love with the torch; the way light from it follows your cursor is genius. Dispersing the darkness never felt so satisfying.
The animations are few and far between, but they were crafted with utmost care.
What did not make all that great of an impression on me (and I mention it only due to my contrariness, as this did not influence my enjoyment of the whole thing in any way), was the thought cabinet's art. I see people exalting it, but after closer examination, it turned out that it is just a tad too artsy for my tastes. It doesn't really mesh with the rest of the world, and while each icon could be given a story to correspond with a specific thought, it just does not... pop. Blame my lack of an actual art degree for that.
Soundtrack is... fitting. The music was created to specifically be background music, and it could not stand on its own in any way. I am listening to the Whirling in Rags track right now, though, so it must be doing something right. As a whole, the game's audiovisuals were a pleasure to take in.
Elysium
The writing takes the cake, though. Mechanics are the tableware, audiovisuals are the appetizers, but soup, meat, potatoes and the dessert of DE consists mostly of writing.
Do not consume too much of DE during a single sitting. The constantly poppy, in-your-face writing loses its luster when taken in too big an amount, but otherwise makes you laugh, smirk, blink, and frown. This is not the epitome of high literature, but it is one of the top three best-written games ever. I loved how the characters were, well, characterized, how your skills complain about each other and vie for your attention. The authors not only had a firm grip on wordcraft, but their DMing experience taught them how to engage their players. All these tricks and skills: for your pleasure only.
It carries the entire game on its back and makes you feel for our main hero. The "oh no" moments creep upon you, and the small triumphs do feel sweet. The authors leave a lot of guns around - all of them Chekhov's (the car, the cryptid, the curse, and more). The story is surprisingly focused, considering how different the character builds can be, and how differently the main character can be played. I did enjoy these few moments when gameplay and writing worked together - exploring dark places with a torch, or first talk with a certain, supremely obese sleazeball.
And yeah, it brought some other, less fortunate things from the tabletop. Sometimes, your DM decides that the story needs to go in a certain direction, and fudges dice rolls - I think we all know which two situations am I talking about. And, unfortunately, sometimes, at the the very end of the campaign, DM realizes that he has no actual idea on how to wrap all of this up and the group is slowly disintegrating, so he cobbles up an ending from what is lying handy, adds a small deus ex machina, undercooks the whole thing, and serves it to players.
Yeah, I am not a fan of the ending. It is functional; gives closure to our main hero and to the case, but after few marvelous dishes you'd expect the dessert to be some delicious, aged cheese or maybe a cake that amazes your palate - but what you get is a muffin from a nearby brand coffee shop. It's good, but hell, yöur güt feels strongly that with a tiny bit of something else it could have been a dinner for the ages.
I loved the photo, though.
Prosperium
The mechanics are here, and they are perfectly serviceable. I do enjoy the idea behind white checks. They heavily discourage savescumming, simply because it was usually easier and more satisfying to pump a point in a skill or take a look around for a retry than to reload. The red checks are a mixed bag - the ones important for a story tend to be satisfying no matter the outcome, but some others (such as impressing Rene, if I remember correctly) have no business being red, as they offer no fall-forward option, and do not lead anywhere. Still, the way skills were handled was a breath of fresh air. Surprisingly enough I greatly enjoyed the static checks, which were pretty hard or outright impossible to savescum (you would have to reload and bump a skill before trying the conversation - but sometimes you do not even know that a test is taking place).
I do not mind that there are fairly few occasions for combat. I ran and played combat-free sessions; after all, whether you are trying to recollect a piece of key information or hit a motherfucker with another motherfucker in-game, boils down to rolling some dice and looking at numbers. I would be happy if my high-phy cop had a few more chances to pummel someone (underground fighting ring? Someone deciding to off our hero for interfering with their plans?), but eh, I will take trying to convince myself to ask someone for a handout. Afterward, I can pretend I looted it from their body, since in some other game the same check could be contextualized as beating someon over the head with a tire iron.
The thought cabinet is a weird beast. Somehow it feels both integral to the gameplay and a bit disconnected from it. The internalized thoughts occasionally give you nifty bonuses to skills, but more often they just raise learning caps. Very few of them actually do something interesting - one thought gets you bonus XP for observing the world, another (supposedly?) gets rid of a bit of censoring as you finally stop obsessing over sexuality. The Precarious World gives you bonuses in a few tests, but that's pretty much it. I wish the thoughts were given a voice as well, to argue with and direct you just like skills did.
I played a 2/3/5/2 cop, with H/E coordination tagged. I had no problem reaching what I felt like was great majority of the game's content, although I did juggle clothes a lot. Took no drugs, was the sorriest cop that ever brought down a two-meter-tall race theoretician, and a laughable centrist to boot. I ended up with a nice sum in my pocket, huge amount of unused healing items, and no armored boots as I kind of assumed that the game discourages you from going for them. But yeah, the game is pretty easy.
For a while I considered playing through as a high INT/ high PSY druggie artsy maniac, but seeing how the skills barely ever interact with each other negatively, I think I will have a cheated 6/6/6/6 playthrough to fiddle with all the content that I missed. I will need to try and fuck up in some dialogues - for most of the game, I felt that all I had to do to reach the best solution, was exploring dialogue trees without saying stuff that's obviously stupid. I really wish the game asked you to formulate a cohesive theory a few times. What you do right now is mostly walking around the world, preparing a checklist of observations and checking them out afterward, saying what you have to say.
Disco with Furries, or How We Ran This Joke Into the Ground
And there I go, again with the negativity. I guess that with all the positive press and reception I just do not feel I need to defend it all that much. It is a great, great RPG, up there with the greats. Just like, dunno, AoD, or anything from Top 10 of Codex Best RPG list, everybody should play it at some point in their lives. It does not need to be right now, though. The game will not change your life, but it is a nice addition to it.
Just to wrap it up - technicalities. The game was bug-free for me, but not really all that stable. It crashed three times while talking with Titus (taking me to blue screen every time), a few more times in other areas, and tended to inexplicably stutter every now and then. It is perfectly playable, although you might want to save often.
One Day I Will Return to You
Disco Elysium will probably be my best-remembered game of 2019. But it has one, strong contender it will probably lose the fight for the GOTY title, and that is ATOM RPG. Funny how things work out sometimes. I do not really think DE has material for more than one alternate playthrough, so I am going to delay it for a while, until memories of the first playthrough leave my personal thought cabinet.
This will take a while, though. I am likely to remember a lot of characters and events from DE, carrying them with me for some time, talking about how much of a wonderful ride this game was.
That’s a helluva review there. Glad to see somebody who knows what they’re talking about (i.e. Another tabletopper) speaking eloquently on what, to me, is the very heart and soul of the game.
