Putting points into skills also helps with “checks,” where the game rolls a virtual dice to determine if you succeed at an important action.
I put a lot of points into my empathy skill, for example, which meant that Empathy (the character) would often chime in with advice about how to respond empathetically in a situation.
You can also level up each of them as “skills” to give you advantages during the game. Usually, they add useful context, but other times, I wish they wouldn’t have said anything at all so that I could get to the next part of the game sooner. As each one of your personalities jumps in, you’ll have more text to read. Another, as far as I could tell, was something like a sixth sense about Revachol itself. During my playthrough, one attribute sometimes relayed short stories about other police officers. It’s kind of like Pixar’s Inside Out, if it was a murder mystery.īut like the historical details packed into the game, these traits can also have their own inscrutability. You won’t just be talking to other people, though: any one of 24 different parts of your personality, like your sense of logic, composure, or authority, can butt into conversations to discuss and debate what’s going on, sometimes even with each other. While Disco Elysium’s incredible depth of historical detail made Revachol feel like a real place, at times I struggled to keep facts and information straight. Characters frequently reference countries, races, and historical figures that don’t exist in our world but who are core to the societal and ideological makeup. But the game’s writing is sharp and often quite funny, which usually made all of the reading worth it.ĭisco Elysium takes place in what I imagine as a parallel universe to ours. Occasionally, these interactions can drag on, feeling a bit like a book chapter that just won’t end. With another person, I refused money so that my character wouldn’t feel indebted to him. One time, I convinced somebody to give me the jacket off their back, which I could then wear. You’ll explore a fictional place called Revachol and talk to a huge cast of characters to piece together clues about the hanged man’s killer.Īlmost every conversation or interaction has an extensive dialogue tree, allowing you to respond to or direct a conversation in ways that can influence other moments in the game down the line. In The Final Cut, an enhanced version of the 2019 cult hit role-playing game that made its console debut on PlayStation in March, you play as a cop with amnesia investigating a murder case about a hanged man. At some point during my time with Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, after I read yet another minutes-long dialogue sequence to try and learn more information about the game’s murder mystery, I realized I felt like I was slowly working my way through a long novel - one that went just a little bit over my head.