Just finished Disco Elysium.
Absolutely loved the game, but the reasoning behind that feeling is primarily based around the strangest thing that I've ever put at the top of any "reasons why this is awesome" list I've ever made. The skill portraits are fantastic. Made even better by the fact that they interact with you in speech so you can feel the personality of each skill as you play the game. Inland Empire so readily evokes the feeling of an internal world to me just by looking at it, Authority really brings across the feeling of the word, and just by looking at the images of Half Light and Physical Instrument I knew immediately what the concept was despite not really knowing what it "meant" on deciding a character setup. Some of the portraits wander a little into creepy, (Savoir Faire and Hand Eye) but I still knew exactly what they would do for me just by looking.
The other part of this was how well the skills interact in the game, in logical and illogical ways more or less how you would expect someone to act - particularly someone coming off an extreme bender. Authority wants people to bow down, Half Light sizes up an enemy and knows you'll get your ass kicked so tells Authority to shut up, Logic starts digging for alternate solutions and Suggestion offers a method of convincing the other person that a fight isn't necessary. Where it gets really interesting is when you over-level a given skill. All the sudden Encyclopedia keeps spitting random facts at you in the middle of conversations, or Endurance starts getting really masochistic and tries to convince you to eat damage just to prove you can.
The game is on a bit of a timer which I wasn't in love with, but they do it in an interesting way and its pretty clear that the developers designed the time limit around getting 90-100% of everything done before the clock is up so it doesn't end up being too much of a stressor. Basically, time only passes when you're reading or talking. It barely moves when you're just walking around, so you can explore to your hearts content and as long as you don't talk to anyone you don't have to worry about burning all your time. There's some amount of stuff to find but its a point and click adventure, not Skyrim, so there's really only so much you're gonna find.
I found the plot to be pretty engaging, as it goes from "why is this a mystery" to "will I ever meet someone honest" to "maybe aliens did it" in a matter of days. I'll spoil it and say that it wasn't aliens, but they were on my list at some point, right beside Communists, a cryptid, and a cursed commercial building. At the start I basically decided that the proposed solution must be bullshit because otherwise the game would be over in like an hour, but it turned out to have real logical connections spun into a web of lies that stretches all over town. You're a cop in a town that does not have cops, so nobody trusts you, nobody wants to talk to you, and you're very much on your own so the story has more to do with experiencing a very interesting fictional world while playing whack a mole with lies than it does with trying to Sherlock deduce your way to a solution. Politics are very much a part of the game, but its tough for me to say how much my reactions shaped what I was shown just based on the fact that otherwise the opinions of the developers would appear to very much align with my own which would be unexpected.
The actual game system is punishingly slim - more or less a modified DnD system (I want to say Pathfinder but that might be off) that basically has no combat. You have skills that will set off passive checks at times, and active checks that involve a dice roll + modifier vs difficulty will also happen. Mostly these are for arguments where your ability to bullshit someone, threaten them, dominate them, etc effects the outcome - but sometimes its just like "are you dexterous enough to touch this without knocking shit everywhere". I was basically fine with this because yeah you'll brain fart and miss a roll and not make a connection, or you'll fumble a boule into the sea, and that's annoying but fundamentally its an interactive self lead story with a lot of depth and paths rather than a Fallout style roaming game so it makes sense that the game needs to be guided with little luck and your own skill choices.
I hear this was a really successful game for the studio, and I'm happy to hear that. Hopefully they make another point and click sometime - its a very underserved genre these days.
Right now? Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3
Me and pudgy Stephen Curry are currently hamming it up and battling our way through the Empire and the Allies as the new Communist world order. George Takei had better watch his ass.
