Disco Elysium (2019) - Detective RPG

Why is “Disco” in the title? I almost skipped this thread thinking it was a dance game.

Played the game for a few hours.

The game is definitely wordy, but I find it very interesting so far. Now this is a game commited to let you behave like an idiot. In multiple different ways.

I love adventure games and I love batshit stories. This is like Fear and Loathing the adventure game and I can’t wait to play more.

Do you not listen to music influenced by drugs as well? Or literature? I’m as boring as they come, I never got to drink alcohol because of my chronic pancreatitis and it has never bothered me when comedians, games, books reference drugs if done for a good reasons. I mean, the basis of a Dune is drugs. That would be awfully limiting.

Detective RPG is also in the title. ;)

I’m playing it on a Lenovo Yoga i5 with 8gb and UHD620.
At 768p with shadows turned down it seems fine. Not an action game.

Wow, very pleased by what I have seen so far. But wow, did this game give me weird dreams.

One strange thing about the game technically: it doesn’t seem to auto-detect the resolution of your monitor. On both machines it suggested 1366x768. Not sure I could tell the difference given the art style, but I did play for a while on my laptop before setting it to my screen resolution.

Yup, same here. Had to set resolution manually.

Same - resolution defaulted to 1366x768 on my 1440p display. Very odd.

I also noticed my GPU likes to jack this card up to (often) 144Mhz and then it’s really going nuts trying to cool the card down. I didn’t see any frame limit options in the graphics menu, sort of a bummer there, so I set my desktop refresh rate to 60 and enabled vsync through the NVidia control panel for disco.exe. That cleared things up - it runs at a steady 60fps and my card isn’t working so hard.

I’m curious what this means in this context? I don’t find that RPS reviews have any particular flavor except somewhat-politically-aware and not-right-wing. I don’t feel that @justaguy2’s comments hit that note.

As a guy who got really bored with Torment: Tides of Numenera and who much preferred the spare, effective prose of Hadean Lands to the turgid prose of Blue Lacuna, I feel like his comments are pretty valuable. Disco Elysium is one for my wishlist, but I’m probably not willing to spend $40 if it requires significant amounts of thrashing upstream through deep prose.

It doesn’t, it’s a very easy and enjoyable read. And I come from wanting to like and bouncing off Tides of Numera. I don’t know where his opinion is getting informed from, I would think something like this isn’t quite as subjective as, for example, a painting, but I disagree with him as I’m finding the writing to be very quick paced and easy to parse quickly.

Ok. Thanks! That’s useful too.

Yeah, I played very little so far but the writing has been really enjoyable so far. Considering I’m not a native speaker of English and that I had some trouble enjoying the likes of Numenera and Pillars of Eternity, I’d say that’s a good sign that the writing is actually good here.

From some of the Vids I’ve watched I believe you can run by double clicking the target location. Also you can hit the Tab key to see all objects nearby,

At least I always assumed it was the time period/style that they were going for with that title.

Yes on both counts. But your acuity, even with the tab key, is highly affected by your attributes, especially perception.

This is an alternate world, kind of quasi-50s, many years after a failed world revolution. Lots of political extremists about. But disco was a thing in the past. The opening moments of the story have you finding out that you were blasting disco music while on your bender the night before, and a younger woman commenting that she was a kid when the song was popular.

I would agree. Usually in a computer game, even moderate text is kind of cringey, and I have to tell myself to make allowances for game text. But not here, everything I’ve read to this point I’d be fine with if I were reading a book, a well-written book… But I understand that some gamers do not like to read books, or do not want anything book-like in their games. And for those people, I guess this is not going to be their thing. Because no matter how great the artwork here, you really have to read and think about what you have read.

This seems more than a little condescending considering the concerns/criticisms thus far have not been, “ew, writing,” but rather, “this writing is not as good as I generally like my writing to be.”

When there’s this much reading the writing is just not going to land for some people and then the game is going to be positively crammed with stuff they’re not engaging with. I don’t think it’s a “Marmite” love/hate thing because I feel the writing quality is enough to touch a range of people, but it will leave some behind.

It’s working for me - an event in game just made me really sad and I’m an cynical emotionless husk. I was surprised and delighted while I grasped the pain in my heart like I actually was the character in the game.

Also, the game has dropped all its Steam trading cards for me now and almost all of them have been “The Madman.” I’m beginning to feel personally attacked.

Any game that allows me to kick a mailbox and tell it to go fuck itself is doing alright in my book.