Backlog Elysium

Memory Loss and Characterization

The game puts you on the shoes of a detective that has drank himself into complete amnesia. Amnesia is the usual cliche used in games that have you decide how you are going to shape your character, and that is fine. There aren't many ways of presenting a blank slate for you to fill out and at the end of the day it doesn't matter as long as the rest of the game is good. The problem in DE (Disco Elysium) is that the game keeps beating you over the head the person your character used to be. But not in a "your past caught up with you" kinda way, it just straight up reminds you every chance it gets of your past characteristics, and it's always the same. For example: your name. If there's a person that knew you before, you have the option to ask them your name, or anything about you, really. This option doesn't go away after you learn your name, in fact, you could have read 10 biographies of your life and still ask the drunk hobo you met once what your name and life story is. You can ignore it, and I recommend doing so. The problem with this is that your expectations of something different usually outweigh your cynicism of knowing the answers won't change, so I clicked on every chat option that could tell me something about the past of my character, and boy does it get old really fast.

Moreover, the RP in RPG. It's not as deep as you heard. It boils down into three categories: politics, personality and "morality". On the politic spectrum, you can be a moralist, communist, fascist, centrist and another one which I don't remember. On personality, you can be depressed, egotistic, an asshole, boring, etc. (honestly I don't remember them all, I think there were around 7 options). On morality you can be bad, good, and honorable. You might be asking yourself, "But, max, this doesn't seem so bad. In fact, it seems like a lot of choices to flesh out my character!" Well, you're wrong! Never doubt me again! How dare you go against me in my own review! ... In all honesty, you're right. The problem is that there's absolutely no nuance. If you want to be a boring cop the option will be plain as day, same for everything else. It would have been easier if you had chosen your stats before starting the game and it chose the appropriate dialogue options for you. On the same topic, the only thing affected by it are a slight change in dialogue. If you're a communist there's a slight chance a character might reference it here or there, but other than that, the game's exactly the same.

Detective work.

As I previously said, the game puts you on the shoe of a detective. Now, this doesn't mean you get to act as a detective, it just means your character is one. The amount of thinking you need to do in this game to progress is tantamount to the amount of thinking it takes to stare at a wall for 25 hours. Anything you need to do is neatly and thoroughly told to you by the game mechanics, that being your stats, conversations with your partner/suspects or simply following what it says on the task menu. I'd say it's a highly interactive visual novel than an adventure or RPG game. This is where I'd point out the game needed some sort of combat, but that's a personal wish, because I enjoy tactical combat in RPGs. In truth, it just needed some sort of challenge other than clicking on everything and talking to everyone, then following the tasks given to you.

Now, that's not to say the game's necessarily boring, but if you expect to play as a regular Sherlock Holmes deducing the shit out of stuff and confronting suspects with your oh so clever discoveries you're in for a bad time. You'll be playing as someone telling Holmes to do his thing, but never doing it yourself.

The (literal) throw of the dice

Why is this here? I like to be punished by the rng as much as the next guy, but when I fail a 97% chance for the eight time, something went wrong. First of all, I don't understand why the devs didn't allow you to get a 100% chance of success. You can be an omniscient god and still have a chance of failure when asked what is 2+2. Second, they didn't make losing fun. The flavor text is funny (the writing in general is excellent, but more on that later), but other than that, it just makes it so you can't do something. There is no real consequence to failing, and I'm pretty sure you can get through the game by failing every stat check, which is okay, since passing them is not only random, but also arbitrary as to how the amount of points you have in a skill gives you the win percentage. It just isn't fun when you fail them, and winning them isn't rewarding.

This is mildly alleviated by the fact that you can retry most checks if you put points into the used stat. Of course that means you won't be able to retry most checks with stats you don't plan on developing. This is somewhat of a problem on checks that have bonuses, for example, if you interrogate a suspect thoroughly you will get added bonuses to a stat check (ie: "+1 for asking about backlog" "+1 for shaming him on the size of his backlog", etc). I failed "inflated" checks of 70-80% that I wouldn't get to try again because I wasn't dumping points on the stat used.

Of course, none of this matters, since you can save scum every check. I don't have the muscle memory for it so reloading a save usually meant a lot of time lost, so I barely bothered.

If I were to develop this game, I probably would have used hidden stat checks. Logic more or equal to 7? You pass! Sadly, that would remove the only challenge the game presents, but when your challenge is just being annoying, better to be easy than the alternative.

Spoilers Inbound

The story seems intriguing at first, but little by little you realize it's utterly inconsequential. The dialogue focuses mostly about characters and the towns history. That would be fine on it's own right, but the main focus on the game is story progression. (The next part is spoiler heavy, and even thought I don't think it will detract from gameplay, since the game's strong points don't rely on it, I would still advice you to skip it if you want to experience the game for yourself. Otherwise, keep on reading, you've been warned.)

I'll give credits to the story to make sense until it decided to throw everything out of the window. EXCEPT! Everything relies on introduction of characters, or, in other words, game progression. The mystery moves at the pace it wants to, and there's nothing you can do about it. It has an extremely linear story-line, which in turn restricts the player. Where's the freedom or improvisation usually found in rpgs?

I admit I'm the least qualified person to give an opinion on this, but maybe the writers should have used Knox's ten commandments of detective fiction (except maybe no.5). Simply put the murder the story centers itself upon isn't fun to solve or play through.

Let's talk about it

This is probably the most talked aspect about the game, and with good reason. The quality of this game's writing is amazing and it should win every award there is about it. I don't know how to review writing since I'm a dum dum that barely reads one or two books a year, but if I were to throw a few buzzwords around, I'd say it has a lot of wit, it's very smart and they nail down the comedic aspects, you'll laugh a lot playing this game. The writing alone is probably worth a playthrough if you can ignore everything negative I said about the game.

Now that I got the praise out the way, you need to understand: the writing *had* to be this good, since it's 85% of the game. If you're not talking to someone you're walking on your way to talk to someone, and if you're examining an item or area, you still have dialogue in the form of the skills you choose for your character. In this game, the stats you choose will talk to you and aid you in your detective pursuits. This is the unique part that distinguishes this game from any other, and it's a twist so beautifully performed and interwoven into gameplay it sort of saddens me it was used in this game where everything other mechanic is forgettable and boring, but I'm hopeful the devs will continue to use it and improve it in their future games. What you can get in replayability terms will probably come in the form of testing different skills throughout multiple playthroughs, since the rest of the game mostly remains the same the second time around.

Worldbuilding and Extremes

The only gripe I have with the writing, is it's habit of oversharing. There must have been some history fanatics on the writing team, because a lot of the dialogues are about explaining the intricate history of the city, the multiple historical figures that affected it, dates, events, geography, most things you can think about developing for a fictional city, they have it covered. I'm sure there's plenty of people that find it interesting, but I'm not one of those people. By the fourth time I was being told about the revolution, I was already skipping through text at a moderate pace. By the hundredth, I was falling asleep, desperately trying to grab any speck of attention I had left, lest I missed something important. I'm not gonna sit through the million words script the game has and decide what's important of not, but I'm pretty sure you could have condensed or left out a little to make it a bit more digestible. Then again, I can always say I'm not the target demographic and leave it at that.

Gameplay

It's serviceable. You highlight things with tab, you click on things to get a description or to interact, and you click on people to talk to them. The running around is really tedious. I encountered a lot of backtracking or just walking around in general trying to find new dialogue options or things I missed, it accounted for a sizable portion of my time spent with the game. I wish there was a fast travel system. And the playable areas aren't even that big!

Artwork

I liked the style used, and while game models and scenery is nothing breathtaking, a lot of love went into the artwork and it shows. The stat screen specially has some interesting characterizations in the form of paintings of the different skills you can acquire.

Music and Sound design

This is a really weird aspect of the game. I barely ever heard it, almost at all. I remember the distinct sound of something shuffling when you try a stat check, but other than that, maybe some faint background music when you walk around. Another weird detail is that some character voices have different volumes, but not quality, like they were all recorded in the same microphone, but the director forgot to tell some voice actors to get closer to the mic. Either way it didn't affect my experience neither negative or positively, I really don't know what to comment on it.

Controls

You can't rebind keys?! Such a seemingly simple feature that would enhance the experience for so many of us. I wanted to rebind the tab key(used to highlight objects) to my middle mouse key, so I could exclusively use the mouse, but couldn't. I ended up using AutoHotKey, but I don't think it would have taken the devs much work to include a native option. Other than that, also serviceable. You click on things and dialogue options, not much to discuss here.

Initial Reaction and Disappointment

To be honest, I was ready to hail the game as exceptional upon my first 6 hours of gameplay or so. I was having a lot of fun with the dialogue and the exploration, and I remember thinking how the tasks you're assigned don't really feel "forced" filler quests like in many other rpgs, but instead are very organic and you don't really feel like you're ticking down a list, but instead living in this fictional world and feeling part of it through the tasks given. That feeling went out the door pretty quickly, since every task boiled down to talking to someone, then having to interact with an object or talk to someone else, then talking to the original person again to finish the quest, or simply just passing a skill check without any further input. You do this all throughout the game, and it's very repetitive.

Final thoughts

All in all, Disco Elysium is an okay game greatly elevated by it's writing, with a fantastic introduction, which sadly doesn't have enough surprises to last you until the endgame, but remains consistent enough that while repetitive, it doesn't become less enjoyable.

I feel like I've been too negative on a game I very much liked, but I also feel that it has been somewhat misrepresented as this perfect game that can do nothing wrong by most of the player base and journalism in general. Every game has flaws, ignoring them isn't gonna make them go away and it robs the opportunity for improvement, and this game is definitely not perfect.