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I finally finished my first playthrough of Disco Elysium last night.
At first glance, Disco Elysium looks like yet another of the several isometric CRPGs that have come out in recent years, such as Pillars of Eternity or Torment: Tides of Numenera or Tyranny or whatever. However, despite the fact that there are indeed RPG elements like skills and leveling up and such, as well as dialogue trees similar to those games, I would say that Disco Elysium is really more like a point-and-click adventure game, more like Gabriel Knight than Baldur's Gate. Hell, I'd say more like Gabriel Knight than even Quest for Glory, which had traditional, RPG-style combat.
There's no combat at all in Disco Elysium. While there are situations that could be seen as akin to "boss fights," in a way, everything outside of basic movement and looking for things to click on in the environment is handled entirely through the dialogue system. Sometimes, in the dialogue, a particular line (usually associated with attempting to take some kind of action) will be locked behind a skill check. Pass the check and you succeed at the action. Fail the check, and you don't. This governs everything from persuading someone to breaking open a door to firing a gun, including the rare occasions where you might get into a "fight." White checks can be retried under certain conditions, usually in the form of simply leveling up the associated skill. Red checks are one-and-done, however, regardless of whether you pass or fail. As such, when you come upon a check, you may want to wait (if you are able/allowed to do so) until you find ways to increase your chance of passing before trying them, whether that's through increasing the skill tied to the check (either through leveling up or equipping appropriate clothing) or via unlocking mitigating bonuses through additional dialogue (there or elsewhere). And... if you really don't care and just want to save-scum (I admit I did, on occasion), just know that everything is based on dice rolls. Two 1's is automatic fail, no matter how high the skill percentage, and two 6's is automatic success, no matter how low. As such, it's still possible to fail a 97% check or to pass a 3% check, no matter what else.
The main thing about Disco Elysium, though, is the story. I've long said that Planescape: Torment is one of my favorite games of all time, almost entirely because of the story. I won't say that Disco Elysium surpasses P:T in that regard, but I will say that it's a very close thing. You play as... a guy (I almost said his name, which is a thing you can find out [or choose to ignore in favor of other "names" you may choose for yourself] in the course of the game) who wakes up in the room of a hostel. (EDIT) And... well... since that trailer just goes ahead and spoils it in the first five seconds, I guess I'll go ahead and say it, too. His name is Harry. (/EDIT) He remembers almost nothing about himself or about the world he's in. He doesn't even understand the concept of money at first. And to that end, even as late as the final conversation at the end of the game, there are still "Wait... what is <topic>?" dialogue choices that you can make. (By the way, you probably should always pick those "Wait..."/"Hold on..." type of dialogues, regardless.) The guy definitely has a history and a presence in the world, but he remembers almost none of it, at least at first. And you, as the player, are allowed to shape his response to this history and presence in the world, either to accept it or reject it or go completely off the rails. In my first playthrough, though, I was mostly a Sorry/Boring cop, as I tended to avoid the Superstar Cop or Apocalypse Cop or other such responses. It's a thing.
And here is the other main thing about Disco Elysium, and the thing that was probably the most interesting about the game for me. Remember how I said it was RPG-like in the sense that you have skills and stats and such? You have four main stats, to which you set values at the start of the game, and to each of those four main stats, there are assigned six skills, for a total of twenty-four skills. The stat attributes remain at the levels you pick at the start, but the skills can be increased by leveling up or by equipping certain items/clothing. And... every single one of those skills acts as a voice (all voiced by the same voice actor, the narrator in the trailer up there) in the head of your player character. Depending on the level of a skill, at any point in the game, one of these skills (or many of these skills) may pipe up and make an observation or give the player character some advice. It could be good advice. It could be terrible advice. Sometimes it's blatantly obviously which is the case, and sometimes it's not so clear at all. You can choose to follow or reject what the skill voices tell you (and they will react accordingly). And, as the game itself warns you when you read the descriptions of the skills, it is absolutely possible to have too much of a good thing. I.e. if a skill level is "too" high, it may pipe up more often and in more inappropriate ways. And, even more importantly, these skills interact with each other, often arguing with each other and offering directly conflicting advice. For me, at one crucial point in the game, there was an entire scene where one skill (Volition) had an extended argument against several other skills regarding what was going on in the situation at hand. So, it's kind of like walking around with twenty-four "party members" in your head for the whole game. The most interesting ones, at least for me, were Encyclopedia (offers up semi-randomly remembered tidbits, of varying levels of relevancy, about the world), Inland Empire (allows you to imagine all kinds of weird shit, like having a conversation with a corpse, or bringing your loud necktie to life), Shivers (basically allows you to hear the city itself talking to you), and Esprit de Corps (usually allows you to intuit what Kim is thinking, and also occasionally gives you little short stories about what other cops in the city might be doing). Perception is a good one to level up sooner rather than later, simply because it lets you see/hear/smell things that you otherwise would miss entirely in the game world itself, even outside of the extra dialogue stuff that may be triggered by it. And your health and morale (basically two different HP values) are directly affected by Endurance and Volition, respectively, so you might want to have those at least not be dead bottom, as well, just to avoid really basic things like immediately dying two minutes into the game just from turning on a light switch, for example. Or not. I'm not the boss of you.
Beyond the skills, there are also times in the game when you will acquire "thoughts," which can go into the "Thought Cabinet." You do this by choosing to "internalize" a thought. Doing so will not only affect skill levels (positively or negatively, and also depending upon whether the thought is in the process of being internalized or has completed the process), but may also directly affect the world itself. As one minor example, internalizing one particular thought will enable you to see certain posters on walls in the world that you otherwise would not notice. Maybe not the most useful or relevant thing in the game, but still interesting. By the end of the game, I had completely unlocked all of the slots in the Thought Cabinet, at the expense of skill points (which are more than plentiful through the course of the game), completely filled it up, and then had to use additional skill points to "forget" some of what I deemed to be less important or useful thoughts in order to make room for more worthwhile (or at least more potentially interesting) thoughts that I found later.
The setting of the game is pretty interesting, too. On the surface level, you're in a small town (or, rather, small part of a much larger city, though you never see it), that is still trying, and some would say failing, to recover from a war that occurred decades ago. And there is a ton of lore about the rest of the larger world that you can find through the course of the game which definitely makes it all feel more "real." But beyond the surface, there's some weird shit going on, as well. Like the stuff about the Pale, for example, or the stuff about cryptids. Mostly it's just more background fluff, but occasionally this stuff takes a more active role in the events of the game.
Here are a few minor tips. While I've heard that you should go into this game as cleanly as possible, with as few spoilers as possible, here are a few things that I wish I'd been more aware of prior to starting. Tip #1: Time only passes while you are in a dialogue (which, to be fair, is most of the game). I think it's something like 10-15 in-game seconds for every (new, unique) dialogue that you see. This means that you can walk around on the map as much as you like without worrying about time passing. In fact, there came moments in the game when I had to actively make time pass, via reading a book or via playing a board game with Kim (though I would have done those things regardless), because of events that were only going to happen at a later point in a given day. Tip #2: Don't worry so much about failing skill checks, especially the white ones that you can retry later. This one took me a bit to get my head around (and even then I still save-scummed a little, even so, at least for some of the red checks). In fact, for a few of the checks, being "successful" at passing the check actually leads to a situation becoming "worse." One example of this is if you meet the two old guys outside and then "successfully" throw their ball into the bay. They don't like that very much. Similarly, don't feel compelled to use all of your skill points the instant you level up, which is definitely something different from almost every other video game. It might be better to save some or even most of them, so that if you come upon a skill check that you really feel like you want to pass, you can drop some points into the corresponding skill when you need to. Tip #3: Money is tight on the first day, intentionally so. However, by the end of the game, I had something like almost 300 reál, and that was after buying out everything in the bookstore. So don't worry too much about getting money. That said, even so, I would recommend heading west past the bookstore and finding the plastic bag, sooner than later. If you equip this, it lets you see and pick up recyclable bottles and the like, which you can find all over everywhere and then take to the convenience store (on the northeast side of the map) for some extra bits of money. There are other, easier (almost too easy) ways to make money, though, involving internalizing certain thoughts, which then give you bits of money just for seeing certain dialogues (the craziest of which, at least for me, was a thought which made it so that I got a whopping 2 reál every time the Encyclopedia skill said anything at all, and I didn't even get that thought until like day 3 or so, [EDIT]
Speaking of Kim... Kim Kitsuragi is your police bro. Outside of a certain single exception, he will stand by you through thick and thin, no matter how shitty you may treat him, and even given that certain single exception, he still comes back later. (I did not treat him shitty at all in my playthrough, at least not intentionally so, though I've read horror stories to the contrary from other players.) However, depending on how well or poorly you do during a certain "boss fight"-type of event, he may be removed from the game entirely. I didn't let that happen in my playthrough.
In conclusion, on the whole, I'd have to say that Disco Elysium is one of the most interesting and unique games I've played in a long while. I absolutely, definitely recommend it. (I think that if/when I play it again, though, I'm going to "cheat" and set all of the stats/skills to absurdly high levels at the very start of the game. I've heard this referred to as something like a "full-on insanity playthrough," given that, essentially, you'll hardly be able to take a step without every skill offering an opinion about it. Basically, it's a way to hear
And, of course, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the soundtrack, i.e. one of the better ones I've heard in a while.
This is (the OST version of) what you hear whenever you step foot in Martinaise proper, even during the "tutorial" stuff at the start when you step out onto the outside balcony of the Whirling-in-Rags. (I actually prefer the in-game version, though.)
This is the morning version of the Whirling-in-Rags theme (OST version, though pretty much the same as the in-game version). It will change over the course of the day, but still retains this same overall melody. You'll hear this a lot during the first couple of days, but then less so as you start to venture out in the rest of the game in the later days.
And this (OST version) doubles as the main theme of the game that plays on the title screen, and also as the theme for the fishing village that you travel to later on in the game, once the walkway opens on day 3 and beyond.
