Disco Elysium

Finished!

As to dog latin's point: I agree that the narrative pace slams into a wall at the end, and as far as murder mysteries go, having the two most damning suspects not even in the picture until lateish in the game is unconventional -- and I had quite a few additional skill points left over that I hadn't spent yet.

BUT, I was still transfixed by the exchange with the Deserter, for reasons aesthetic (that voice) and for the cautionary tale that (I think?) the game was trying to tell? Like, I was trying to be a pinko, but then comes this comrade with revolutionary bona fides, washing away all the ultraleftist posturing that I'd been engaged in prior... but he's basically a fascist, an example of this idealized past, a symbol of Communism done right that's incredibly seductive and evil.

The UI sux though.

lol ah hell the spoilers.

this game is pretty clunky on the switch - it lags, you can see graphics loading, it has full-on crashed a couple of times (which i don't think i've ever seen happen on a switch game at all before) - and there's so much loading! there's a part where you have to go back and forth between two characters to compare their stories, and they're in the same building, but there are three load points in between them, and it takes so long just to travel from one character to the other!

that being said, i love this game to point that i don't even care about all of that. it's so good and fun and weird. it looks really nice when you zoom in all the way, but i have to keep it mostly zoomed out most of the time so i can see where i'm going and what's around me.

Yeah, that's partly why I caved and got it for the PS4, though god knows when I will actually play it.

The load times even on the PS4 were quite infuriating.

finally got a bug that kept me from advancing (nothing was interactable, including doors, so i got stuck in a space i couldn't leave) and the worse part it was in a section of the game where you can't save, so now i have to do that whole chunk over

i think i'm near the end though? really enjoyed the part of the game with the church and the electronic musicians

Yeah loved that bit. Shame about the bugs. I really wonder if I'll replay it and if I do whether it'll be a very different experience or not

YEKOKATAA THE PLACE TO BEEE!

Dialogue heavy RPG’s not typically my thing, so this being almost entirely dialogue was a tough sell, but I was looking for something low stress last Sunday afternoon and took the plunge. Totally grabbed me, found myself playing way too late into the night this week. Just finished it up. Easily the best writing in a game I’ve played. Kind of a Pynchon thing going. A+, glad I picked it up.

I played the “definitive” version. On PS5. Load times were super snappy (could see that being obnoxious otherwise) but still hit a few, thankfully not game-breaking, bugs along the way.

A TV series of Disco is in production on Amazon Prime

Well that is entirely unexpected, but I’m curious.

honestly i would take a whole season that is all about converting the beat down building into a ghostly EDM venue

somehow i never finished disco, but i'm close. i had a computer change just as i was near the end and don't really feel like starting over again.

Easily the best writing in a game I’ve played

same. i have never so consistently smiled or laughed or just paid attention to writing in a video game before. It's hard to pull off for 20 hours! the breadth and depth of it is very impressive.

The church/club section was definitely my favorite bit. Once that peaked I honestly would’ve been totally satisfied if the game ended right there. But there were some great things to come. Loved the phasmid stuff.

I picked the brainy path, seemed like the obvious choice for a dialogue driven game, but I am super curious about how this plays out as a physical character. Probably run through it again down the line.

yeah, it would be nice to just run over the big racist dude who blocks the bridge pretty early on.

that reminds me, though, that the only way the writing/story occasionally lets me down is the caricatures of the different paths you can go down, communism, fascism, the union, etc, are sometimes just a little too exaggerated and oversimplified. i think it works for the most part, though, because in general, the game does a great job of making you feel a little bad about every decision you make, like everything you do is both kind of a good decision but also clearly not what you should be doing, all the time. it's so fucking good

Measurehead (lol) is just very committed to his race realist ideology

did anyone else play the shameful way i did? if there was some kind of important skill check and i had a reasonably good chance of passing but instead failed, i'd re-load and do it again until it worked

:(

Oh totally. I was rarely onboard with any of the didactic political paths and the game makes a point of calling out the dangers of centrism and/or not choosing sides all the same. Like there aren’t really “good” options most of the time, it’s a big mess, everything’s challenged. It kinda rules.

I still ended up as a maybe half assed communist, apocalyptic art cop.

That was an xp to Karl’s previous post, but yes, I scummed and reloaded constantly to pass a check.

Why I mentioned how great it was that load times were zippy on PS5 lol.

I wouldn’t be able to stomach it, but seriously interested in how the game plays out as a full on fascist, racist meathead. Surely all points lead to some same-ish kinda endpoint, but I wonder what kinds of divergence are built into this thing.

What’s great is I can perfectly imagine Kim hating your guts in that scenario and constantly talking shit in the most moderate way

Kim is one of the best sidekicks in game history, although it is difficult to directly compare them to like, Luigi

Haha, for real, I was bummed on the days Kim wasn’t around. Dude was my ROCK.

I know it's possible to offend Kim and he disappears for the rest of the day, but I'm not sure if you can keep doing that

Playing this and really enjoying it. I’m on day 4 and haven’t had a drink yet - is that bad? Anyway I love everything about this game. Just resolved the church disco situation.

Recently finished this, it absolutely rules and is one of the most engrossing gaming experiences I've ever had

So it turns out that most of the original creators of Disco Elysium have been involuntarily pushed out of the company, including Robert Kurvitz, the lead designer and writer(!)

This is super fucked up, but unfortunately not particularly surprising for the indie games industry. https://t.co/Op1R46drgJ

— Joachim (@JDespland) October 1, 2022

Every week I have a moment of sadness realising there is no game like this and that I cannot play it again for the first time.

Church disco situation is a classic in a game of classics. I think Evrart Claire saying “Harry” is the best part of the game though. An Evrart Claire x Phoenix Attorney type crossover would be my dream game.

A friend gave me this game as a gift (PS4 hard copy that I'll play on PS5), so I guess I'll have to play it now. Hoping it will be a fun game to go through with my wife, after we finish Inscryption (been taking that verrry slowly, only just got to act 2).

Excellent wife game. Wish I could rope mine into single player games

Just got this to play on my 8yo's Switch when she's asleep. Very barely into the game but enjoying it greatly, though I have died numerous times already because I didn't understand how to raise my health from 1 point and thus keeled over after kicking heavy curtain, etc. I do feel it could restart you after death from just before the thing you did that killed you, though maybe I have taken more of the arcane backstory onboard by clicking around every point of interest in the bookstore four or five times.

I absolutely love the fact that if you min/max your character, you are vulnerable to some of the absolute silliest ways to lose a game imaginable (at one point I lost the will to continue because I put on a cost that was too dirty)

yup!

I hadn't played for a while and tried making a character that was uh, not physically inclined, and managed to accidentally electrocute myself by trying to turn on the ceiling fan in the first 30 seconds

Started this last night, created a mostly average character and in an hour we got as far as the ground floor of the hostel. I think my wife bailed, the amount of dialogue makes the pace too slow for two people (with different reading/processing speeds). While normally dialogue (and especially the process of exhausting dialogue options) is my least favorite part of a video game, and it appears to be the entire game here, it's obviously extremely well-done and I think I'm going to keep playing on my own.

I do like the skill checks/dice rolls, it really gives that feeling of playing D&D without the awkwardness of having to play D&D with people.

Yeah it starts slow but gets weirder and more interesting as you go. Kinda felt like reading a book more than playing a game.

I had a blast playing a character with high Inland Empire and Shivers skills; it heightened the weirdness and gave my investigator a real Dale Cooper vibe, w/r/t strange intuitions and picking up on vibrations.

I also recommend inland empire as a main skill - if you're going to play a game that's heavily influenced by twin peaks and lynch, might as well see what they got imo

to anyone playing the game for the first time, though, i highly recommend starting with an extra point in Endurance, which directly ties into your health. it is not fun to die while looking at a ceiling fan after reading half an hour of text at the beginning of the game

Or… IS IT?

it's one of those things that is very fun in abstract

Lol, at least I made it past the ceiling fan boss. I'll try to play it weird.

i think the bummer about dying to the ceiling fan boss is having to go through all the dialogue at the beginning again, without a way to skip. i get why it works that way - the skills you choose at the very beginning probably change how that opening dialogue goes (?), but holy crap it's pretty demoralizing

it also makes you think that the rest of the game is also going to be filled with gotchas and gamebreaking decisions, but after that it's much more forgiving! (particularly if you're willing to cheat like me and reload a recent saved game when things when failing certain checks)

I made it past the ceiling fan but shortly afterward died of shame because Cuno made fun of me. I had to redo a lot of progress but I laughed the entire time

I blacked out crashing into the wheelchair lady, but I'm not sure if that counts as a death? Also not really sure how saving works yet, I haven't picked it back up since that first session.

why in god's name do you not simply come back to life just before you did the thing that deaded you? haven't had a chance to play it again since my first couple of hours on it, but i must admit the prospect of rerunning all the sections i'd already played through twice before isn't exactly making me salivate.

You can save your progress before you interact with things, in fact I’d say the game goes out of its way to encourage you to do so by murdering you in comically ludicrous ways