Why Disco Elysium shoot itself in the foot
Before I get into it I feel that this is mostly a rant that I need to get out in the world not because I disliked the game but precisely because I liked it so damn much and I felt the game prepared me for some better final sprint.
Thing is that the game is quite filled with choices and lore to explore which makes each person have a different perspective on the ending depending on what content they encountered before that but I feel that a good design should be the one where, despite taking different routes, you get to the ending equipped to make the most of it. It could just be that the route I took through the game make the ending boring but if that is so it is still a design failure.
First of all it felt really weird to have a hard skill check guard the progression even if doing other quests in the area made it easier was still a bit off putting that my smooth talking and logic focused cop needed to "listen to the wind" to be able to progress the quest.
Secondly, and this where I get my main gripe with the ending, the murder gets solved deux ex machina style. The whole game I ran circles around Hardy boys, Klaasje, Joyce, Evrat Claire I am lead to Ruby which turns out to be a bust but still an interesting plot development. So far so good. But then....your end up on an island where a guy you had no reason to suspect, no mention of, some totally random dude who simply confesses with relative ease to EVERYTHING!, deus ex machina. Everything I did so far, all the people I "opened up", all my investigations, clues, etc., was a bust, a dead end, a detour that lead to nothing unless I had found this rando holed up on an island that I was given little reason to suspect. I guess my biggest problem with this is the fact that the game gave me no heads up and no reason to care for this dude. Ruby was much better alluded to: the missing hardy member, unaccounted footprints, the lorry with drugs, her involvement in the frame up etc. It all fit together somehow. I`ll admit that there were some hints, like the footprints remain unaccounted for and lack of gunshot reports, but it was far from making this final reveal feel satisfying in any way . It felt like the game went: "alrighty then, you had your fun, now look what the solution was." and you sit there like a 5 year old being shown how the puzzle was supposed to fit together. The game gave you no tools to even remotely suspect how this would play out.
Was this supposed to send a message? That life is random and not really satisfying? That random stuff happens? That the ghost of a long unresolved problems such as the violent crushing of a revolution came back to haunt the city of Revachol?
Maybe all of these but it still an ending that is out of tone with the rest of the game.
Then is the Phasmid, the damn giant bug, that jumps out of nowhere to complicate things further. It`s baffling to me first of all because the game keeps pointing towards some greater supra-natural elements but then back pedals on it. I chased around the mystery of the curse affecting businesses but ended up concluding that it was jun of the mill capitalism and decision making that lead to the downfall. The church ended up pointing towards some interesting directions but it never gave me more ways to explore after I arrested the guys planning to turn the church into a meth lab. I understand by reading that some people learnt more about the mystery of the disappearing sound by having the ravers co-exist with the researcher. Then it`s that whole the Pale thing that isn't really explained much. So there are elements of weird, out of this world, but they are never fleshed out, never established if they are an established part of this world, if they are "real" or just one possibility and people don't really know yet. I treated the whole quest about the bug hunt as a humorous runaround and then this thing jumps up, and it muddies the waters further by telling me that its pheromones drove the old guy crazy. The conversation with it might be all in the characters head(even if Kim admits it is real he never hears any words) but still felt patched on, something that comes out of nowhere just as you had another major plot development. And it appears to you for no real reason and its appearance has no real effect. It is too much, too late, too fast for too little. It would have probably hit me a bit differently if I had experienced different plot lines but then again, i feel that ensuring an even outcome for all plotlines should be a design choice(for example if some other plot choices make the whole ending feel less random and stitched together that is a major design weakpoint just as bad as having none at all).
I loved the Dolores Dei so much more than this, it was a dream sequence but so so informative, emotional and deep. The conversation with the bug is *trying* to be deep but felt more like an exposition dump of new, supernatural info, that feels unnecessary just so you can get to the "i need to do something with my past" mentality.
After all of this you get ANOTHER exposition dump (that is 3 in a row) exposition dump when you meet your team back on shore. They function as an epilogue of some sorts but also fill in a lot of story gaps but many things feel redundant and just piled up.
To conclude: The ending feels out of tone, random and overfilled with information. I feel that the team ran out of time and just condensed several ideas in a short segment of game.