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Disco Elysium: The Final Cut - PC Gamer interviews the game's narrator, who never acted before

Commissar SFLUFAN

By Commissar SFLUFAN
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Commissar SFLUFAN

Commissar SFLUFAN

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Game Information

Game Title: Disco Elysium

Platforms:

  • PC (Oct 15, 2019)

 

Developer: ZA/UM
    

Review Aggregator: 

OpenCritic - 92 average - 100% recommended

 

Critic Reviews


Gaming on PC - 10 / 10

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Disco Elysium is an unforgettable journey that shouldn’t just be experienced by all RPG fans, but by anyone who has ever played a videogame.


IGN - 9.6 / 10

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Disco Elysium is a deep, sharply written, unique blend of noir-detective fiction and traditional pen-and-paper RPGs.


Wccftech - 9.5 / 10

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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.


GameCrate - 9.3 / 10

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I've never laughed this much while playing a game. Well-read, nihilistic, dark, and intellectual, Disco Elysium is like your favorite poli-sci professor huffed paint and ran naked through the quad.


PC Gamer - 92 / 100

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


USgamer - 4.5 / 5 stars

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Disco Elysium wants to get you in touch with the voices in your head. This detective RPG calls back to the old Infinity Engine games like Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate, but it put a unique spin on everything. With a beautiful oil painting aesthetic, it also features a system that treats your skill like additional party members, each with their own opinions on your actions. Ultimately, every lengthy run-though of Disco Elysium is about the consequences of your choices and actions, adding up to some fantastic stories. A great, surprising entry into RPG canon.


Fextralife - 8.5 / 10

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Disco Elysium is certainly not a game for those that are faint of heart, but if you have a sense of humor, and you're looking for a breath of fresh air then Disco Elysium is a must buy game. If it doesn't make you laugh out loud a time or three, I'll ride the Cock Carousel.


ACG - Buy

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Video Review - Quote not available


Rock, Paper, Shotgun - Unscored

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A masterpiece, but flawed, and proof positive that if ZA/UM can do flawed masterpiece for their first outing, they might already be chipping away the flaws in time for their next.

 

Bloodporne

Bloodporne

Posted
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I'm not really familiar with this genre but what the art direction interested me and on paper, this sounds really cool. 

 

Do you guys know if there are any plans for this to hit consoles?

Keyser_Soze

Keyser_Soze

Posted
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20 minutes ago, Bloodporne said:

Do you guys know if there are any plans for this to hit consoles?

 

Nothing has been announced but you never know. Divinity Original Sin  and Wasteland 2 eventually made it to consoles.

Bloodporne

Bloodporne

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39 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

Nothing has been announced but you never know. Divinity Original Sin  and Wasteland 2 eventually made it to consoles.

Figured as much, I didn't see it mentioned. Looks great though for sure. I'll pick it up if it ever hits PS4.

Keyser_Soze

Keyser_Soze

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2 hours ago, Bloodporne said:

Figured as much, I didn't see it mentioned. Looks great though for sure. I'll pick it up if it ever hits PS4.

 

Specs are pretty low for this game, do you have at least an i5? :p

Bloodporne

Bloodporne

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9 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

Specs are pretty low for this game, do you have at least an i5? :p

Computer gaming beyond basically 1999 is out for me. The only actual computer I own is an incredibly shitty old work desktop I sometimes use for work at home. We used to have a MacBook Pro in the house for anything computer related but my ex has it. Haven't had the extra money to invest yet. 

Mr.Vic20

Mr.Vic20

Posted
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I am "working from home" today so I have a few phone conferences this morning, but this afternoon I'm firing this beauty up! I will have Impressions from my play session some time tomorrow morning. :fedora:

Mr.Vic20

Mr.Vic20

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Guys. Seriously guys! The writing in this is just plain fun! I can't recall the last time I've laughed along with, or simply silently appreciated the quality of, so many of a protagonist's dialog options! We've all had to make hard dialog choices in games before, but that difficultly rarely comes from being so pleased with your options that you'd like to try a few of them and see where they take you! I love this game! :sun: Oh and the graphic style is nice as well! :p

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legend

legend

Posted
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Just now, Mr.Vic20 said:

Guys. Seriously guys! The writing in this is just plain fun! I can't recall the last time I've laughed along with, or simply silently appreciated the quality of, so many of a protagonists dialog options! We've all had to make hard dialog choices in games before, but that difficultly rarely comes from being so pleased with your options that you'd like to try a few of them and see where they take you! I love this game! :sun: Oh and the graphic style is nice as well! :p

 

Very encouraging to hear! I'll be getting this one soon!

Xbob42

Xbob42

Posted
Posted

I've been playing this game non-stop since it came out, and I had zero interest in it prior to seeing a video review on launch day.


It's an RPG that focuses on story and characters, there's no "combat," at least in terms of gameplay, there are some skill checks and choices to make if you get into a fight, but it's still handled in the dialogue window.

 

The game is like... fun depressing? The setting is very bleak in terms of the state of the world, but it's still colorful and modern feeling, the writing is lively and excellent and full of humor, but rarely outright jokes, it's very fun to read conversations and all of your different skills having their own voices contributing to conversations (i.e. physical instrument will pipe up about people in amazing shape or encourage you to get into fights, logic will offer hints when something doesn't make sense, there's like 2 dozen of these skills that each have their own personalities) is brilliant and makes "conversations" interesting even when it's your character, alone, inspecting an object. It really gives you a feeling of rapidly firing through thoughts and trying to figure things out, and often like the natural tangents that happen as you're thinking, like encyclopedia, which will interject with facts based on whatever subject happens to be the focus of a conversation, which can often provide crucial knowledge to asking the right questions, but just as often is useless trivia and bunches of names, but is always interesting and entertaining.

 

The fact that there's no combat has been a huge plus for me, because quite frankly I despise how every single cRPG I've played actually handles combat, it always feels like a weird road block to the interesting stuff, while this game ONLY has the interesting stuff. Time also passes (during conversations and certain things like reading books or sitting on a bench to intentionally pass time) so if you spend your time really grilling a certain person, you might be using up a significant portion of your day. And people aren't in one spot all day, so you might miss someone else entirely or potentially miss out on certain events.


This part can SOUND frustrating, but it all just feels so natural, like you're just doing what you want to do and you always feel like you're progressing, because it's not a game where you need to be here or there or you "missed out" on something, at least not in terms we're used to in games where you're trying to do a perfect run. You're gonna fail stat checks, you're gonna ask the wrong questions, you're gonna miss people entirely. It's okay, the game never flashes things like "Oh well you didn't do this guess you fucked up" in your face. Even through your failures you can still ultimately succeed, and don't even try to get a perfect run, because there's simply too many different stat checks for your wide variety of stats and not enough skill points rolling in fast enough to level them up. You can retry "white" stat checks if you put another point into that stat or increase it via drug use, and red stat checks can only be tried once, so you're more likely to put those off if possible, or skip them outright if a negative outcome seems likely and your percentage is too low to make the risk worthwhile.

 

That said, you're never really guaranteed. Each stat check has a dice roll associated with it. I don't think the dice do anything normally (fact check me on this) but if they land snake eyes, you always fail the check, if they land boxcars, you always pass, so even a near guarantee can fail, and a 3% almost-sure-to-fail can be overcome, if you're super lucky.

 

You can also change your stats based on what clothes you wear, which you can find in the world, purchase from shops, earn as rewards, etc. But they can also have secondary effects besides just +/- stats. Wearing some rubber gloves while digging in a corpse has obvious benefits, and wearing a t-shirt with a ridiculous image on it can elicit some reactions about your authority as a cop. Your appearance matters, but it only matters to some people, others won't give a shit because they're high out of their minds or just don't care.


Speaking of which, the game actively encourages you to pick weird and unusual dialogue options, with the idea being that since you're in a position of authority, people are more forgiving of the weird shit you might say and do, and this has made the playthrough very enjoyable for me, as I tend to avoid those kinds of options because they usually either result in poor outcomes or someone just calling you weird, or ending up as a total joke option. Here, different characters might engage with you and your random sad philosophy in the street, it's fascinating.


Anyway, I'm glad to see that despite there being no combat or anything similar to that kind of "normal" gameplay, they still have a lot of video game-like systems in place that are both logical and rewarding. The skill point system is very robust, the dialogue options are fantastic, the lack of focus on "winning" constantly is extremely freeing, the item system feels like an adventure game crossed with an RPG but in a way that makes sense and isn't you putting random bullshit together to solve some dumbass puzzle that only makes sense if you designed it, the way you can have thoughts and internalize them for lore and stat bonuses is weird and fun to engage with, the setting is beautiful and feels very lived in despite being a very unfortunate and otherwise depressing situation, the writing is brilliant, I can't say enough good things about this game.

 

I assume by Abby, Keyser meant Abby Russel of Giant Bomb. This does not seem like her kind of game AT ALL. She likes Nancy Drew games, and while there are some superficial similarities (detective adventure game yo) I can't see her being down with the style, or the type of writing going on here, and I bet she'd be put off by the gameplay systems, which she might not have taken the time to understand as she usually doesn't care all that much, although I haven't heard her thoughts on it as I tend to stick to the main Giant Bombcast these days.


The game definitely won't be for everyone, but if it sounds even vaguely interesting, I bet you'll really like it in the end. It seems super replayable, too, with the stat check and time system. Keep in mind you don't appear to be on a timer, per se, no one's told me I have 3 days to solve the case or anything, time simply passes and that's part of the world.

 

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Just me having a conversation with myself.

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