Disco Elysium [The Final Cut]

This game could have been incarnated as a terrific novel in the contemporary psychedelic sci-fi genre. Its very literary writing is similar in style and tone to that of China Miéville's, and it's just as satisfying. In this respect Disco Elysium will surely be remembered as raising the bar for video game writing to new heights.

However, it is not a novel. It is a clunky point-and-click adventure game with some poorly realized RPG elements. It does some things well, but the complete package is a mess of poor design decisions and frustrating implementations.

I'll start with the best aspect of the gameplay: choices matter in this game. They affect not only the course of events, but also the character of the protagonist. You can wallow in self-pity. You can be a cynical professional. You can be a spaced-out doom poet. And you can explore many spaces of mental illness. I counted depression, addiction, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and schizophrenia. You can be a caricature of radical communism or a despicable neo-liberal or just plain selfish. Your choices come to play not only in dialogs but also in your character's skill selection. Almost all of the skills manifest as voices in your head, which present new storylines and directions. (They also give you advice, though it's not always good advice.)

Unfortunately, the game's core mechanic is the dismal opposite of "choices matter": it's dice rolls. So many of the most interesting events in the game are blocked behind a random number generator and the outcome depends on your skill point assignments and your ... clothing, for some reason. The game seems to encourage you to just accept the roll of the dice, even if they fail. But ... it's also trivial to save scum: save before you roll, re-load when you fail, select the right clothes to give you the best bonus (???), and repeat until you get the outcome you prefer. And so the bottom line is simple: a low chance of success means more save scumming and more reloads until the random numbers are finally where you want them to be. It's arbitrary punishment, and it shouldn't be in this or in any other game.

And, let's not ignore how broken and buggy this game is. Even after being patched multiple times since the game's release you will still encounter game-breaking bugs: items you can't select, story events that aren't triggered, graphics appearing in the wrong place, voice acting not matching the text, and many more. But worst of all is your character's locomotion: a point-and-click adventure is focused on ... pointing and clicking. But here clicking will very often not activate the interaction. You'll constantly be trying again and again to get the most fundamental mechanic of the game to work.

Otherwise, the user interface is clunky and poorly designed. The organization makes little sense and it takes far too long to access little things. I also don't understand why, for a game so focused on reading, the text is so small and pushed aside to a small portion of the screen. The whole user experience is baffling.

And it's also poorly optimized. Loading screens take far too much time and occur far too often. Moving from one tiny room to another seems to require a reload of the entire game. This adds on to the frustrating slowness of the point-and-click interactions, and of course makes save scumming all the more annoying.

The presentation is for the most part great. The graphics are gorgeous and evocative, and the voice acting (greatly expanded in the Final Cut edition) is superb. The soundtrack, though, is somewhat anemic and doesn't hit as hard as the story does.

So, how to evaluate this game? If you enjoy good writing in this particular literary genre then you will likely love it. But, be warned that as a game it can be exasperatingly shoddy. All in all, I am very glad I played it and am looking forward to further games from ZA/UM, hopefully with more attention paid to the quality of the gameplay.