Disco Elysium

its good writing in the sense that it's super adaptive without showing a lot of seams. i'm not a huge fan of the style

i don't know what that means

What's with the scare quotes?

― Camina Burana Drummer (Leee), Monday, 6 January 2020 22:56 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Idk just that a lot of games touted to have good writing do not

I was fully ready to find DE grating or too self-conscious but I'm frequently quivering with mirth at some of the dialogue options it offers you, and the skills-as-internal monologues thing is handled well

its good at adapting to your dialogue choices and stats without being obvious about whats going on behind the curtain is what i mean

I liked the writing a lot more as a low int high physical character. Which I think is an achievement.

MINOR SPOILER MAYBE

the v pretty title screen is the view the shooter would have had of martinaise

this game rules

yep

Still waiting for PS4 version ;_;

Still waiting for it to go on sale, but I very much look forward to my first playthrough.

Hardcore!

Hardcore to the mega!

Internally coherent!

hurry up and release this shit on PS4 ok

Have there been any status updates? These dudes and Team Cherry re: Silksong have been pretty quiet. I guess they've been busy!

this game is amazing

I know a few of us just started playing this business, so I’m bumping

I'm just waiting for it to go on sale again, which is bound to happen by mid-December at the latest.

waiting for switch/pS4

I really want to go back and play this again using a significantly different character roll and political direction, but man is it addictive and I'm not sure I want to get sucked back in

Still waiting for PS4 version ;_;

― emil.y, Wednesday, July 8, 2020 3:07 PM (four months ago)

hurry up and release this shit on PS4 ok

― Specific Ocean Blue (dog latin), Wednesday, September 23, 2020 12:48 PM (one month ago)

waiting for switch/pS4

― Four Seasons Total Manscaping (forksclovetofu), Tuesday, November 10, 2020 7:20 PM (three hours ago)

Still waiting, waaaaa.

put a few hours into this over the last couple of days and i’m very much enjoying myself, although my character’s tendency to die of despair after touching some stuff in a car or kicking a trashcan is... confounding

I have died zero times, but I feel like you’re still playing it a correct way

i have worked out that my character's pitifully low volition was what was causing him to regularly die of the vapours when confronted with a petanque ball

another hour or so into this now, enjoying it even more now that i've decided to become solely responsible for reviving communism

One thing I didn't realise early on is that if it warns you your volition is dangerously low in response to some traumatic humiliation, you can click one of the healing items in the bottom left to get it back immediately

yeah, i didn't realise that until a few hours of embarrassing deaths - i should have mentioned it here to spare others the same miserable fate

How does this game compare to something like, say, Oxenfree (which is fun enough but basically a story-based game where you pick dialogue options and they slightly affect what happens in the end)

never played that one, nor the often-mentioned Planescape: Torment which is mentioned in hushed tones as a parallel experience

worth noting that the conversation trees (and the Thoughts that come to you while conversing) can be very engrossing and wordy. many words

PS:T is the watershed, a verbose dark fantasy Memento avant la lettre. Very much worth playing if you enjoy DE.

Feels kind of weird to me that they're announcing some sort of definitive special edition of this before it's come to any of the consoles in the first place. Supposedly PS version comes out in March 2021, and Xbox/Switch version in summer of 2021, though I wouldn't put much faith in those latter two, which is too bad, since I'm sure this could be a good Switch/portable game. I'm still super intrigued, though.

Is full voice acting really necessary for such a reading-intensive game? I hate how it's become an absolute must these days.

you can turn it off! I do when playing dragon quest xi

Sure, but it's not a binary. I like partial voice acting to highlight key narrative moments.

a lot of jrpgs still do the "main story scenes are voice acted, incidental dialogue and sidequests are not" thing but people always complain about it so apparently it is necessary

i suspect its usually more a budgetary than directorial choice

switch performance will likely be dogshit : /

Which sort of makes me more intrigued. There have been some downright magical Switch ports (Ori, apparently Witcher 3, a lot of the Bethesda stuff). Then again, speak of the devil, Doom Eternal clearly ran into a million problems on Switch. But they got Control running on the Switch, right? Granted, it's on a server, iirc, but that's a game that doesn't even always run well on more powerful consoles, maybe they will do something like that?

Am I right, though, that this seems like a big open-world game that might benefit from portable Switch play? I've been avoiding spoilers, because the praise has been so fervent, but I kind of get the sense the PS4 might not be the right fit for this. I could be wrong, though.

Some beautiful art in this game, seems reason enough to play

Disco Elysium’s map is... not big

It takes a while to walk your ass from end to end because of circuitous paths but there are basically just a handful of areas

I finally picked this up on Steam thanks to the Noah Caldwell-Gervais appraisal, and I'm loving it. It's revealed that at heart, I'm a Moralist Sorry Cop, and that's about right. I do regret terrifying a bookship owner who was minding her own business.

Looking forward to the Final Cut version as well: 150,000+ words of new content, free to all present owners, fully voiced including personality traits. It may not need the additional voice acting, but I'm a fan of most of the current characters, especially the internal monologues, so I'll have something to look forward to for supercop, sad sack, and savior of communism playthroughs...

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut arrives March 30! https://t.co/Lqd6q39QOq

— Disco Elysium (@studioZAUM) March 17, 2021

oh my god oh my god oh my god

I'm glad I waited.

Yesss

xbox this summer....please hit game pass...

when i got my PS5 last week i checked to see when this was coming, definitely on my want list

Tbc I only care about the final cut on PC because I am one of *those* snobs.

the turn of the ending was one of the most emotional experiences I've had playing a video game

Hmm, comes out on Switch this summer, doesn't it (supposedly)? Seems like a good game for handheld, for once.

wandering around at work mumbling Measurehead quotes

did anyone play ‘esoteric ebb’? looks like a kinda medieval DE

Yes, me. It is very DE in its format - you are a sad loser whose traits talk to you, often fucking you over in absurd ways. It is also quite political in a similar way to DE, but it's a lot simpler in its approach to those political topics. Also would say it's less mediaeval and more D&D fantasy, which obv takes tropes from mediaevalism but, y'know, it's not about history, it's about goblins. I had a great time with it, some very funny moments, good gameplay, very much worth a go, but DO NOT go into it expecting it to match up to DE.

A horrible mirror this game for my own internal dialogues, sometimes

― the Don King of donking (Noodle Vague)

I feel you on this. Still stand by my comments upthread that DE is much more grim than funny (and it is very funny).

the dragon that must be chased

in a way it's remarkable that the games I've played since have (just about) measured up to it - albeit I've been *incredibly* picky about which ones I've played

feel like user emil.y could probably advise well on where to take myself next, but here's a ranking of my nascent Steam library:

DE
Undertale
Return of the Obra Dinn
The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe
The Excavation Of Hob's Barrow
Slay The Princess

All at least very good. But where can I find games with this level of writing? Especially with this level of grimly funny writing? I have friends who've advised me but besides all the above they've also recommended stuff that doesn't quite trip my sensors. Maybe I should just trust them...

ftr Pentiment doesn't run on my computer >:|

Don't know what's on PC but maybe

A Space for the Unbound
Danganronpa - this is crazy divisive and my brain is broken so I might be way off
Indika kind of annoys me but I think you might dig it

Dredge maybe too

None of those are as, um, portentous as DE but I don't know what is. If your main interest is things that are *writerly* and not necessarily gameplay forward then maybe look at the world of Visual Novels but again that stuff is pretty divisive

Oh you might get a kick out of Doki Doki Literature Club but you have to go in spoiler free

Appreciated, ty!

I like Writerly but I also very much like solving, making choices, responding to clues, feeling like I'm in a private tussle of wits and expectations with the game designer...I will research these later yes

Blue Prince then for puzzling

A lot of my other suggestions are more story/meta in terms of experience

esoteric ebb maybe

how are we feeling about the new ZA/UM game? ‘fuc dem scab bastards’ or ‘I’m installing day 1’

The Case of the Golden Idol and add-ons/follow-ups might be a good bet too, very different in style and without much in the way of nostalgia or whatever it is that DE captures but great puzzling and very atmospheric

similar in graphical style to Hob's Barrow too

ty all. have weighed it all up and decided to go for Scarlet Hollow even though it isn't finished yet

Ach, such a shame about Pentiment. Did you give Lorelei a go yet?

If you can stand a text adventure, my favourite from last year was Type Help, which you can try for free by following that link. As I said on the poll thread, it's being remade by the same people who remade Roottrees (which you might also enjoy for the Obra Dinn style puzzling and the slightly mysterious story), but I think the text adventure on its own is one of the best I've played. Puzzly and spooky.

Recently also enjoyed The Seance of Blake Manor - it's not quite up there with Elysium or Stanley Parable but I'd rate it alongside Hob's Barrow for quality story with a side order of puzzle (also yes, once more it is spooky).

You might also like some of the language-deciphering games that are out there: Heaven's Vault for character and story, or Chants of Sennaar for pure puzzles.

Danganronpa - this is crazy divisive and my brain is broken so I might be way off

― Wildfowler (Noodle Vague)

I really like the Danganronpa games and I am so fucking embarrassed about that fact. Not sure it would be imago fare, but I just want to admit my shame.

how are we feeling about the new ZA/UM game? ‘fuc dem scab bastards’ or ‘I’m installing day 1’

― ||||||||

Basically not going to support it... unless it turns out it's exceptional, in which case fuck it, throw my morals out of the window.

I would have bought The Seance Of Blake's Manor earlier if it ran on my system either :( the same friend who recommended me Barrow (user tangenttangent) recommended me that too. And she recommended me Chants of Sennaar! All squaring nicely...

2h into Scarlet Hollow, it's wonderful, a big step up on StP which is already great

Lorelei eh...okay...I might give Type Help a little go at some point soon too, ty!

Norco

Ah dang, system requirements can be a pisser. I have a mac but my bf lets me use his laptop for windows games (lots it still can't run as it's not a dedicated gaming machine), and he's also a massive nerd so we have a gazillion consoles too, hence my vastly increased gaming experience over the last few years.

If you like Type Help and don't find the fact that there are no graphics off-putting, I can recommend SO MANY good text adventures. The only problem is that thanks to our government, IFDB is geoblocking all UK users from the actual games (you can still use it as a database, and some games can be found elsewhere, but it's an absolute fucker).

Glad you're enjoying Scarlet Hollow! I love it. Btw strongly recommend doing a run with the 'talk to animals' trait if you're not already using that one.

I chose Keen Mind and Hot, what can I say

(obviously I'll try all of them, this feels like just about the most replayable game of all time)

I chose Keen Mind and Hot, what can I say

looooooool

i didn't know that about the IFDB

for fuck's fucking sake

I also very much like solving, making choices, responding to clues, feeling like I'm in a private tussle of wits and expectations with the game designer...

blue prince is what you want then

type help is getting a remaster as 'the incident at galley house' later this year fwiw

reports seem to be that zero parades is surprisingly excellent and manages to be its own thing instead of just being a second string disco elysium imitation. i'm curious and will probably get it on sale because i have other stuff to play for the moment.

some people seem to like esoteric ebb as a de-like so i guess that's worth looking into but i didn't find the demo compelling at all.

Will def consider Blue Prince yes, hopefully there's a narrative element to it (which I'm realising is probably important to me)

My first SH playthrough was incredible, devastating, joyous and terrifying. It's going to be one of the greatest things ever made and I've barely scratched its surface

there is a strong narrative element to BP but it's scattered and mostly not on the surface

Ooh okay, that's good

I wonder about playing this through again. I was quite thorough on my first playthrough, so i'm wondering if a second one would be significantly different beyond a few dialogue options.

A little while ago I started a pure strength build and managed to knock out Measurehead in one punch.

All at least very good. But where can I find games with this level of writing? Especially with this level of grimly funny writing? I have friends who've advised me but besides all the above they've also recommended stuff that doesn't quite trip my sensors. Maybe I should just trust them...

ftr Pentiment doesn't run on my computer >:|

― imago, Wednesday, May 20, 2026 11:04 PM (six days ago)

how do you feel about mouthwashing lol

i got a friend who is very very enthusiastic about a particular brand of visual novels... her favorite stuff is doomed yuri, stuff like SIGNALIS and 1000xRESIST. i think she also likes, uh... heaven will be mine? "hypnospace outlaw", you might dig "hypnospace outlaw". idk, how do you feel about the classics? stuff like psychonauts? that's got great writing. or fallout: new vegas?

ummm, let me see.. "to the moon", fucking amazing writing on that, i kinda still need to play the followup games but i think they're probably good too. we're talking... that's kind of along the line of what's called "visual novels". "we know the devil", i fucking love "we know the devil", for instance. it's very short but excellent.

i also really like the writing in Spiritfarer, again it's not something i'd call _funny_ but i do think it's very uh... it's not a "doomy" game despite the subject matter, i don't think. very well written. "hatoful boyfriend"? maybe? idk how you'd feel about that one. it's kinda along the lines of doki doki literature club. there are definitely superficially "funny" elements to it, i mean, it's a pigeon dating sim so...

interactive fiction is one that i really used to play a lot and i lost touch with. emily short is, like, a legend now and i'm still like "oh yeah, she did galatea". there's this weird kind of divergent/convergent evolution with IF and visual novels, at least in ludic terms. in storytelling terms western "IF" tends to focus less on visuals. i remember... i can't remember the name haha but i tried a couple of games from the IFComp a couple years ago... ok I looked it up, it's called LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST. haha looking up the rankings in the results summarizes it well, it made 11th place (out of 67) but the ranking curve is what's interesting, as opposed to the other games near the top of the list, which tend to have a curve peaking around 8 and 9, the mode of this game (the most common score) is literally 10... it ranks where it does because there are a lot more low and VERY Low scores than anything else on this section of the list.

i've actually for a long time been wanting to start a thread on how excellent the writing in the "powerwash simulator" games is. it's really fascinating to me because of the _subtlety_ of the writing. are there people out there complaining about powerwash simulator's "woke agenda"? i don't really follow discourse lol. these games are woke as fuck though and the character writing here is really fucking good imo. the rec for chants of sennaaar made me think of a video i saw that recommended scriptorium: master of manuscripts, which just came out and i haven't played much but which sounds AMAZING.

probably _my_ favorite out game in terms of writing, though, just incredible game, is "kentucky route zero". god. such a fucking great game. anyway here's this post in list form:

MUST TRY
Tux and Fanny
Kentucky Route Zero

CLASSICS
Psychonauts
Fallout: New Vegas

OTHERS
Mouthwashing
Spiritfarer
LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST
We Know the Devil
Hatoful Boyfriend
To the Moon
Powerwash Simulator and Powerwash Simulator 2

HAVEN'T PLAYED MUCH
Hypnospace Outlaw
SIGNALIS
1000XRESIST
Scriptorium

final recommendation: my single most trusted source for games is the recommendations by the steam curator Wholesome Games. they're never going to recommend something like Mouthwashing or LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST (which isn't actually on steam i don't think), but the stuff they DO recommend is often very well-written, they recommend a lot of top-notch indie stuff that slips under the radar of a lot of other folks.

emil.y, since i haven't kept up with interactive fiction at all since, the early '00s, i'd love to hear any particular recommendations of yours!

oh shit i left Little Inferno off that list, sorry Little Inferno :( i distinctly remember writing about it in my post and i guess i must have deleted that bit and never added it back. it doesn't initially seem like a story focused game but there's a VERY LONG coda that's basically all story, i'd call it more than half the game. i haven't played the more recent update, despite FULLY INTENDING TO.

there is a strong narrative element to BP but it's scattered and mostly not on the surface

― Wildfowler (Noodle Vague)

Yes. The question of whether or not there would be a strong enough narrative hook was huge for me before going into Blue Prince, and the demo didn't give a strong indication that there would be, but I definitely feel like there was a very rich story in there, often hidden but always bubbling away under the surface. Narrative is deeply important to me and I feel like it delivered well. I said on the dedicated thread but I was playing it together with my boyfriend, so our play experience was slow and we ended up only playing to the first win condition, but that was honestly satisfying enough! I am tempted to try to explore the other layers on my own, tbh.

I wonder about playing this through again. I was quite thorough on my first playthrough, so i'm wondering if a second one would be significantly different beyond a few dialogue options.

― rameau in the main room (dog latin)

I did this recently, just feels like a Disco Elysium kind of time period. I was also very thorough on my first playthrough, so I don't think I experienced anything notably different, but I did allow my rolls to fail much more (I was terrible about savescumming the first time). Went for mystical over smart this go around, which gave me some different options and dialogue. Possibly the main thing that stayed the same was that I couldn't bring myself to play any other way than communist, not even ultraliberal, never mind fascist. My loyalty to Mazov cannot be swayed. Apparently if Kim gets injured there's a way to have Cuno be your partner, but I won that roll so didn't get to explore that.

how do you feel about mouthwashing lol

I keep wondering if I should try it, but it just seems so... edgelordy. Would you make a case for it?

emil.y, since i haven't kept up with interactive fiction at all since, the early '00s, i'd love to hear any particular recommendations of yours!

― Kate (rushomancy)

Well, you mention Emily Short in your post, and I would say anything by her is a mark of quality, but especially Counterfeit Monkey. I think you specifically, and quite possibly imago, would love Eat Me by Chandler Groover - it's a limited parser game and the writing is just INCREDIBLE, very, uh, sensory. His Midnight. Swordfight. is much shorter but similar in tone and quality (seriously though, play Eat Me, you will love it). If you want something sad, both Of Their Shadows Deep by Amanda Walker and The Absence of Miriam Lane by Abigail Corfman will get you sniffling. Ryan Veeder's games are always fun, love him as a creator. Oh! Cannery Vale by Hanon Ondricek, I remember that one being wild.

Also, you mentioning Hypnospace Outlaw reminded me that I used to always rep for Digital: A Love Story by Christine Love. Haven't thought about that one in ages but I bet it stands up!

Digital is still great but definitely on the border where IF and VN meet

I keep wondering if I should try it, but it just seems so... edgelordy. Would you make a case for it?

― emil.y, Tuesday, May 26, 2026 7:11 AM (forty-four minutes ago)

sure. framing matters - when talking about extreme content, it's not just about what a game says, but how it says it. honestly i'd say that in its themes and setting "mouthwashing" isn't a million miles from "Analogue: A Hate Story" - ultimately it's a study in the effects of patriarchy and capitalism on human beings, _especially_ women. of course the risk of a lot of these games is that of "preaching to the choir", which i _don't_ think "mouthwashing" is. the upside of games like these is that if done well they can be really validating, they can be a mirror through which we can understand and emotionally deal with the fucked up world we live in. that's the way i've always related to "edgelord" content. sometimes in doing that i'm cutting against the grain of the authorial narrative, and sometimes i'm going with the grain. if the creators and i have the same approach to the material, it can be cathartic in a good way.

for the record i do think "mouthwashing" is a better-written game than "analogue". that's not me putting down christine love, who i think very highly of as a creator.

gonna spoiler this cuz it's not directly related, but thoughts on "perfect blue" (with spoilers for that film):

i went to see "perfect blue" in theaters with a friend for the first time a couple days ago and talked about it and she reacted EXTREMELY emotionally badly to it. she hadn't really seen any other Kon films except for Paprika when it came out, which is a LONG time ago, and looked at "perfect blue" as an example of the pitfalls of "men writing women". in particular she was unhappy that the movie boiled down to a fight between Mima and Rumi, that Rumi was "revealed" as the "killer", and that the film suggested that this was because of Rumi's 'dissociative identity disorder'. My friend is a singlet, but in our community, plurality is very common. my friend also didn't like that Me-Mania was presented as being physically deformed.

my take on the film was very different... though i thought it was flawed and ambiguous, ultimately i saw the film condemning the way idol culture fetishizes youth, the trauma it inflicts on people, including rumi, a failed idol trying to live her dreams vicariously. it echoes a lot of the themes i saw of generational abuse in Akira - the larger issue is not that rumi is a woman, but that both rumi and the men rumi kills are replicating patriarchal patterns of abuse. a lot of the ambiguity i think comes from the dialogue in the "show-within-a-show" "double bind", which takes the form of a shitty patriarchal "crime drama". you know, 'edgelordy' in a kind of, like, SVU way. it has all these tropes of, like, saying that the killer is a 'man who wants to be a woman', and then pivots, when the story starts to center around mima's character, to say that the killer has 'dissociative identity disorder' - rumi definitely does have some psychological thing where she has this persistent belief that she's the 'real' mima, but i think that's very different from the way it's presented in the film, which is much more similar to (the infamously misogynist) alfred hitchcock's coda of "psycho". actually writing it out i _do_ think it's interesting that the killer switches from "man-who-wants-to-be-a-woman" to "dissociative-identity-disorder" when the (again, very clearly misogynist) writer changes the story plot to center around mina. it says something about the ways patriarchy medicalizes and pathologizes the effects of the trauma it inflicts on us.

---

i was looking through my unplayed games and ran across once upon a jester (which is on ridiculously good sale for a game that just came out, i feel dumb paying full price for a game i haven't played but also money is fake and i had the fake money in my bank account so) and wondered if that was a game i should recommend and it's in a bundle with "techno banter" which is a game where you're a bouncer in a berlin club and you decide whether or not to let people in and it's got a dialogue-based battle system, like the swordfights in Monkey Island except presumably Orson Scott Card had nothing to do with "techno banter". anyway i mean lj if you don't know lucasarts seriously so many of those games have great writing. like grim fandango too. really tim shafer...

ok i just found out about shafer's credit on Star Wars Episode I Racer ("never actively tried to sabotage the project") lol

yeah i definitely know Digital and its followup Analogue, love went on to do Ladykiller in a Bind which I played a little of and was interesting but didn't blow my mind or anything and then "Get in the Car, Loser!" which i don't think i've played. i didn't know that she published a novel last year, which seems pretty interesting. honestly my bias is towards work in a Certain Demographic, i also love the writing on Anna Anthropy's old games haha. i do find VNs really interesting, it's not the milieu i come from but something like "white album 2" is something i probably should play at some point. and of course like, uh... what's the acclaimed anime where john titor is a character... steins;gate, that started out as a VN. most of the VNs amelie doree talks about in her videos aren't games i'd _play_, i'm not really interested in eroge (i guess L.L.L.L.L. is probably some sort of eroge but it doesn't have graphics which hits different), but, i mean... you talk about danganronpa, VNs often have the same kind of strengths and weaknesses.

the last IF game i really remember playing in loving before, idk, shit changed for me, was varicella, i really liked that one, people seem to mostly not remember that one these days even though "photopia" was a big fuckin' deal in the community when it came out. "photopia" didn't interest me but "varicella", that one i liked.

Will def consider Blue Prince yes, hopefully there's a narrative element to it (which I'm realising is probably important to me)

it has a narrative beneath the surface and it's compelling enough for a while but sort of spirals out unsatisfyingly and goes in some odd directions. it's one of the weakest aspects in the end though i wouldn't say it's terrible or anything. if you go into it wanting a narrative more than anything else you will be disappointed. if you want ~80 hours of a very elaborate puzzle box that happens to have an ok narrative as part of the puzzles then you will be absolutely delighted