Actually finished my first blitz game,
Disco Elysium.
And what a game it was. Honestly, usually words just pop to my mind when I write closing thoughts and it's all smooth sailing, but with this one, it's.. not. DE's closer to incredibly smart literature, and I'm not equipped to write about that sort of stuff in any meaningful depth.
But I can throw praise at it, at least. Disco Elysium might be the best written game I've ever played. The thing about this game is that it seems to do pretty much everything
incredibly well. The story is an intriguing, complex web of different characters, motivations, factions, events and causes and effects. The characters are distinct, fully realized, interesting, fun, sad, frustrating, lovable, hilarious, varied and sometimes,
painfully believable. The world building is absolutely spectacular -
the best I've come across. The dialogue, internal and external, is an absolute treat, and the sheer range of different conversations and most of all dialogue choices you'll be coming across in the game is immense. It's very well paced, and aside from maybe some Encyclopedia deep dives, it never feels dragged out.
And best of all, it all flows perfectly. There's SO MUCH variety here, and it always feels cohesive and solid and meaningful and part of the whole. The game can effortlessly go from tragic to hilarious to creepy to intriguing to heartwarming to philosophical to introspective to critical to thoughtful.. And anything in-between. All of this while utilizing one of the most unique RPG and narrative systems I've ever seen, the skills and thought cabinet, AND being one of the more reactive CRPGs I've seen. It's frankly just mindblowing to me that it works this fucking well.
Now, as far as being a GAME goes, it's solid, but there's a fair amount of room for improvement. There's a lot of QoL improvements they could implement - most of the frustration I felt stemmed from the painfully slow and lumbering movement of the main character and the way the camera is 100% locked on to him at all times. The skill system wasn't the most intuitive around either, and it was easy to find myself saving up skillpoints in case I ran across hard dialogue choices, or ones that I wanted to try multiple times. It also wasn't particularly clear to me what, if any, other effects the thought cabinet thoughts had after internalizing. I think some of them unlock completely new dialogue choices? It was never very obvious what and where.
But in short: GOTY, and one of the best CRPGs/narrative games I've ever played.
Oh, and I just fucking adore a lot of the soundtrack. I've had this song:
https://youtu.be/hjUORWa-k-w?t=2935 (48:55) on loop for the past hour or so. But since there's no official OST release yet, I actually booted the game up again and ran to the shack where it plays.
