Disco Elysium is a game about shuffling through forest after forest after forest of dialog trees which, much like your senile grandpa or your former friend who accepted Ganja as his lord, savior and sole personality trait from here unto eternity, love to ramble on endlessly about every topic imaginable despite never having anything educated, insightful, logical, funny or even remotely interesting to say. All the while hoping that every option you pick will avoid some contrived idiot behavior or arbitrarily deplete your health or throw yet more obnoxious tell-don't-show narration in your face and possibly earn you some experience points toward one of the seventeen levels you need to finally pass one of the insanely high skill checks necessary to finally get on with the goddamn main plot. Or you can just make a total mockery of what little gameplay Disco Elysium has, savescum your way past every single check and complete the whole thing in an afternoon. Either way though, a masturbatory arthouse version of Planescape: Torment packed with insufferable cardboard-cutout characters, unsubtle fashy propaganda ("look how many more successes you get from getting drunk and picking the racist/sexist/homophobic/sociopathic options I totally pwned all those stupid women and fags and thinly veiled racial standins and beat the whole game in like 3 hours worship me and my elite alpha male aryan master race IQ hur hur hur") and dream-logic 'puzzles' on the level of a Roberta Williams adventure is not something I particularly want to spend any of my finite time on Earth beating my head against, especially when it has no storytelling merit or message to convey beyond "pay attention to me, I have a mail-in psychology diploma and 80 pounds of psilocybin under my mattress!". Yeah, you and every other smug jerkoff with a pair of calipers and a shitty podcast, pal; but at least most self-proclaimed genii on the internet know better than to charge 40 bucks for their insipid attempts at sounding smart while they push some pretty heinous beliefs.
Developer: ZA/UM
Publisher: ZA/UM
Released: 2019
Platforms: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, XBox One, XBox Series, Switch, PC, Mac OS, Stadia