Disco Elysium

⭐ 9.5/10

(Originally written by Rebecca)

Damn, what a game. Joe rec'd this game to me at Christmas, and I ended up buying it while it was on sale shortly after, because I love mysteries and I'd heard good things. It follows a cop who has lost his memory after what appears to be a manic bender, and is now trying to solve a murder case in French-inspired Martinaise as local and global political tensions rise.

The story and worldbuilding is PHENOMENAL. Pretty dark (suicide, racism, addiction, etc) but the story is so complex and layered, and there's soooo much lore you can uncover. Like, maybe too much. It did take a while to get moving, especially because I felt pretty lost at first, but things really picked up on day 3 of the game and I could barely put it down. It really did feel like I, personally, was solving a murder case. It felt reasonably true to life without being boring, and there are SO MANY choices you can make that will affect how things turn out. I, personally, based every single decision on if it would make my cop partner, Kim Kitsuragi, think I was cool. This was a good method for me. (I would die for him, in this game and in real life.) There was so much depth to the story, and just. It was so atmospheric and immersive.

I didn't finish every side quest, but I loved how most of them tied back into the main story in a way that made them feel worth doing in the end. And I cannot stress enough how invested I was in how things were going to go. I felt like I was RACING towards the end, just because I wanted to know what happened. I couldn't think about anything else.

My biggest complaints were a) the LOOOONG loading times every time you entered a new area (it could take a full minute to get through a couple doors), b) the insane amount of dialogue that wasn't relevant to the plot and was just worldbuilding that I would have been interested in if I wasn't trying to SOLVE A MURDER, and c) how little they held your hand when it came to mechanics. I had to look up how to fast travel and how to use thought cabinets, a section of stats that I still don't entirely understand. I wish there was a bit more of a tutorial, because I felt very confused for the first few HOURS of playing this game. And I wish more of the lore was confined to, say, a book I could read when I had a spare moment. The dialogue is fully narrated, which I either had to sit through impatiently or ignore while I tried to read a huge block of text about politics. That might be a me problem, though. I was too focused on the murder.

This really did feel like a super immersive murder mystery movie, starring ME as the detective. I loved uncovering my own backstory and learning more about the characters, and I still feel like there's so much about the world and story that I could learn about. I'm really glad I went for it and played this game, but boy was it grisly and unsettling and stressful at times. Some of the descriptions of the corpse and stuff made me physically ill. Absolutely genius game, but definitely not for everyone. I'm going to be thinking about it for weeks.

And I cannot say this loudly enough: Kim Kitsuragi please marry me please please please.