Disco Elysium, ostensibly a game about an amnesiac detective, is actually a game about shuffling through forest after forest after forest of inane dialog trees which, much like your senile grandpa or your former friend who accepted Ganja as his lord, savior and sole personality trait from here unto eternity, love to delve into endless rambling nonsequiturs about every subject under the sun despite never once having anything educated, insightful, logical, funny or even remotely relevant to say. The core plot makes sense eventually, I'm sure; I just never got any sense that it actually mattered to the developer. Especially when during all the endless walls of rambling you get to hope that every option you pick won't result in some contrived idiotic 'funny' behavior or arbitrarily deplete your health or throw yet more obnoxious tell-don't-show narration in your face and that arbitrarily placed dice rolls might possibly earn you some experience points toward one of the seventeen levels you need to finally pass one of the insanely high skill checks necessary to finally get on with the goddamn main plot. Or you can just make a mockery of what little gameplay Disco Elysium has, savescum your way past every single check and complete the whole thing in an afternoon. Either way though, a masturbatory arthouse version of Planescape: Torment packed with insufferable cardboard-cutout characters who don't ever talk or think like actual humans, unsubtle fascist propaganda ("look how many more successes you get from getting drunk and picking all the racist/sexist/homophobic/sociopathic options hur hur hur") and dream-logic 'puzzles' reminiscent of the very worst intrusive thoughts of Sierra On-Line's alumni is not something I want to spend my finite time on Earth beating my head against, especially when it has no storytelling merit or message to convey beyond the writer going "pay attention to me, I have a degree in philosophy from Diploma Mill University, 80 pounds of psilocybin under my mattress and 80,000 words about how social darwinism is good actually!". Yeah, you and every other dipshit with a pair of calipers and a Stormfront account, pal; but at least most other self-proclaimed genii on the internet know better than to charge 40 bucks for their insipid attempts at sounding smart.
The first, and hopefully last, game made by the Republican Vampire
Developer: ZA/UM
Publisher: ZA/UM
Released: 2019
Platforms: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, XBox One, XBox Series, Switch, PC, Mac OS, Stadia