Tag: Disco Elysium

Completed Disco Elysium for good now.

This time I played the Sensitive cop. Out of the three archetypes, this is the most balanced one, as he has plenty of health and morale. I did pick the Revancholian Nationhood thought, though, that damages your morale when you pick the wrong dialogue options without much benefits. That was a mistake.
This time I tried to avoid cryptozoologists on purpose, get my gun and help with the welkins MMORPG game. Also, turns out when you play as Sensitive Cop, your necktie starts talking to you in a crazy voice.
Then I painted myself into a corner with the Hardie boys. There’s a Logic check that you need to pass to start looking for Ruby. And I failed it. Usually, that’s not a problem, as you can retry the check if you put another point into the skill. But since I’m playing Sensitive Cop, I have just one point in Logic. So I had to wait the entire day doing nothing, in hopes that the communist club plotline will bring me somewhere. It didn’t. I just ended up reloading a very old save.

The only qualm I have with the game is that the ending has less variance than might seem. Titus can survive, Ruby can die, you can arrest Klaasje, and not know anything about phasmid, but still the killer is the same old man on the island which you never met. I can’t say “it’s not a great writing” about a game with greatest writing since ever. But I still feel a bit cheated, just a little bit.

One thing that the game doesn’t explain well is how important “Volition” skill is. During the first 4 days, you don’t get into any fights at all, and rarely ever get hurt. But your morale gets damaged during dialogues quite often. And if you’re morale hits zero, it’s a game-over, just like with health.
On the 4th evening the fight between mercenaries and Union “regulators” finally errupts. I’m not sure if it’s possible to completely diffuse it, as you shouldn’t be able to know who the real killer is by this point. I survived it by having the armor, and not having any gun, as I let Ruby go (so I didn’t pick up her gun from the corpse), and I didn’t manage to recover my pistol.

Got the first ending. I let both Ruby and Klasje escape, Titus dies, and Colonel was killed by a crazed communist on the island that is still fighting The War. And there’s also the huge telepatic insect that I got to chat with. After all that, Harry is accepted back to the force, and Kim joins him in Presinct 41.
Also, I didn’t manage to complete the MMORPG quest.Now I’ll try another build and pick different thoughts to see if I get another ending without a guide.

The game uses real game time: some characters will go to work and return in the evening, shops close at night. A bit like Shenmue. That also means that you need to hustle for money to pay for your hotel every day, as you start the game not just broke, but also in debt. One way to earn money is to collect empty bottles scattered around the district.
Perk system is interesting. Perks are called “thoughts”. You need to learn, or “internalize” them first, which takes a few hours of game time. During that process, you may get some negative effects as well.
Some checks are straightforward: fail them once, and that’s it. But some actually benefit from repeats, or picking the right option before the attempt. Sometimes it also works the other way around: if you pick a wrong option, you get a debuff for your attempt.

It is indeed very impressive, with the amount of dialogues (a lot of them internal), all voiced, and skill checks. I have played Planescape Torment only as a teenager, so the closest comparison for me would be LA Noir.
I’ve recently listened to an interview with creators of Dark City, and how the City is supposed to be from different epochs and placed, making the viewer uncomfortable. There’s a similar theme there, where a city is both post-WW2 Berlin, divided between external powers, but uses French names, and the struggle between communist Union Workers and capitalists is more of US in the 20s.
And our investigation doesn’t start with a dead girl! Instead, we have a security guard that was apparently lynched by some Union workers.