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While I’ve played indie games with a pretty wide variety of styles and levels of quality since the launch of the Switch I can’t say any of them has defied easy explanation as much as Disco Elysium for me. When I’d heard it described (almost always with highly flattering platitudes) by others I’d envisioned it as more of an elaborate and odd RPG, but while it has some of that genre’s DNA I think that expectation is really misleading. In my mind it’s much more like a traditional point-and-click adventure in format and style but that then has an extremely deep, rich, and honestly a bit perplexing character definition and leveling system. Doing away with more traditional stats, classes, and even descriptions, the closest comparison I can come up with for how you put together your character would be the Fallout titles, at least in terms of how it burrows down into very specific traits that then can exhibit themselves in unexpected ways in the game. Then, getting to the experience of it all this feels like the most elaborately conceived and written interactive novel ever. The amount of reading you’ll have to do here can honestly almost be exhausting at times and you’ll want to unlearn the classic adventure habit of exploring every conversation tree or you’ll be drowning in very well-written and descriptive prose that can be positively fixated on the smallest minutia depending on your traits and what you’ve got going on in your head. None of this is really to complain, simply to put out the expectation that this is a very different sort of game that, depending on your patience and desire for exciting things to happen, could be engrossing and fascinating or maddeningly slow. [This is now available physically at iam8bit.com and at retailers around the globe for $39.99]
Justin Nation, Score:Nindie Choice! [9.1]