an insane kaleidoscopic nihilist view of late-stage capitalism, the gig economy, and the current zeitgeist. beating you down with just the utter horror of the biopunk augmented future, every action you take getting you closer and closer to losing every part of yourself and becoming nothing more than a frothing at the mouth killing machine.

with that in mind i must also say that the game is actually fun! a lot of these more artistic projects sacrifice gameplay for thematic cohesion (see gone home), but this game uses it's systems to create artistic comments. the stock market fluctuating based on player action, the varying difficulty system reflecting loss of humanity through continuous genetic reconstruction. and each objective can be performed in a seemingly limitless amount of ways, a lot of games state that the player has control over the way the play but none of them feel as fully free as this one does.

i've completed the main storyline, gonna take a break before coming back to it so i can hold onto some semblance of sanity, but there's still so many secrets to find that i'll need to come back to it. and the amount of ways to tackle each scenario really adds an immense amount of replay value

continually eludes rational understanding, often brazenly so with each ending feeling like the twist climax to an entirely different game,,,on its own it might Explain Everything, but forced to exist with everything else it becomes a free associative nightmare with no bottom to the pit. and yet emotionally , it remains completely and constantly coherent...from the initially stressful Social Horror as u learn the mechanics, to the intimate horror of dissociation from the self, to the cosmic horror of the impossibility of quantifying a self at all...at least, not one that can be controlled by you. thank god you're Not you! you cant imagine anything worse then being you

laser targeted at at least fifteen of my mental illnesses

a very high rating is a foregone conclusion, but i feel weird enough just Playing an incomplete game let alone putting a numeric score on it. still that foregone conclusion is impressive given that this is at least a little outside my wheelhouse...im not good at fps games, nor is the relatively minimalist arcadey level design what i look for in this kind of fps campaign...the game is defined by its setting of hell, but mostly has far more in common with the hyper abstract worlds of early id software games then the progressive locational satisfaction and internal logic built on by the likes of Dusk (a strong favorite of mine). still it is hard to argue that the game doesnt wrench as much moment to moment emotion as possible out of everything at its disposal...like quake, its abstraction allows for undiluted expressionism in its locations, which set the stage for its well-praised intensely focused and outrageously gratifying mechanics, which occasionally wrap around with perhaps the most inspired part of the games presentation, which is to pump the sparse plot full of Traumatic Lore and Operatic Melodrama...might be harder for people who arent me to swallow if the act of playing wasnt so involving, pulling u into the world before u know whats going on. i will say, its a little difficult for the game to keep a complete hold on me when im not actively playing it...i need a bit more then Very Very Very Fun and Very Very Very Cool for it to leave a deep impression in my heart. but perhaps this is just an arbitrary mental thing due to the games unfinished state, and when its finished and i look back on it, the impression will be clearer. and even if not, its hard to be too disappointed that its main aspiration is just Be The Best Designed FPS Of All Time, especially when as far as im concerned, it basically succeeds.

so fucking blessed to be living in the golden age of 3d platfomers. was gonna say golden age of indie 3d platformers but tbh no reason to section them off, its not like theyre a AAA genre for anyone other then nintendo anymore. this one scratched some itches that even a bunch of the others i love havent quite scratched...perhaps one of the most comforting games for me in the comfiest genre for me, despite also being a good deal more difficult and finnicky then many of them. or perhaps its because of that!!! for a 6 hour experience that amounts to a tutorial, one world, and a big final stretch, every single part is mined for as much as it can possibly give in its small size...a reminder of the experience of these older games, which demanded that u cut your own way thru them until u knew them in and out, from your own abilities to the spaces u are asked to traverse to the quest threads you follow to promised rewards. what begins in overwhelm is slowly chipped away into total intimacy, and surprises under the hood of every aspect...a seemingly complicated and janky moveset turns out to be both simple and extremely versitile, a seemingly chaotic and dense world turns out to be perfectly compact with no uninteresting space, big intimidating platforming challenges turn out to just be a few more persistent attempts away from delicious satisfaction.

two random notes: (1) this rly brings back the lost art of Needing To Orient Your Movement In Relation To An Unideal Camera Angle. i think a lot of ppl have it in their heads that this is """bad game design""" because its a barrier to instant satisfaction, and its understandably perfectly avoidable in a dual stick world. corn kidz mixes dual sticks with weird n64 type buttons for specific camera reorientations (like zoomouts and top down views) and occasional semi-fixed angles, or just places where there Isnt rly an ideal angle. this game rly affirms to me that the skill of orientation is as valid as any, it was definitely one that you Needed to develop playing n64 platformers, so admittedly i had a head start. they know their audience! ppl should be more willing to accept "awkwardness" before we optimize and overpolish the entire character of Play Experience out of video games. (2) your hooves make clopping sounds. perfect video game

did all the riddler challenges in a dissociative haze. not the worst 100% ive ever done but obviously generic AAA stuff. replay rly makes it clear that the pronounced physicality of controlling batman and the general creative enthusiasm/comic booky tone r the main elevating factors to a game that makes you Feel Like Batman in the most vaporous way possible. the riddler being Shocked and Appalled that u deduced yr way to finding an easter egg hidden in plain sight rly, rly dispels the already flimsy illusion. detective mode woated. attempts at self-critique aggressively insubstantial and unfollowed on. fun game, but a harsh illustration of the hard limits of most AAA design ethos.

far be it from me to pin down something hyper-intricate to one central thing but i truly think that just about everything in disco elysium, or at least all of its sources of power, comes back to the fact that harry du bois is not a character that literally anyone would choose to play as. the western rpg and its roots in tabletop games are so fixated on systems and stats and customization as controlled self expression...it is not a question of if the world will bend around your whims and personality, it is a question of which world-bending tools will be most easily used by you. the most obviously intuitive way to approach an rpg is to project an idealized version of yourself...to be able to carry your ideals, tastes and curiosities into a world that will react to and reward your unstoppable individualism. even in a group setting, this has to be one of the most common sensations being chased.

if there is any character in the world of disco elysium that can give you this power fantasy (and there almost certainly isnt), it is not harry du bois. harry is a horrific bloated shell with a largely unchangeable past that u are forced to exist in, no part of even as something as mundane as his appearance would come from a character creation menu. and despite your uneasy judicial power, you have no ability to sway the horrific and contentious material state of the post-everything world around you. and, of course, you'll endlessly fail a bunch of dice rolls.

it is both crushing and balming. relief from the responsibility of saving the world, overwhelmed by the responsibility of saving yourself...but both tasks that should not be approached alone. you cannot create a better world on your own, but if you are so inclined, you can see and create little glimpses of one everywhere around you. the cruelest and kindest aspect of the game is that it will never give you an out...it will never let you sit with any complacent excuse. you must still interact with the world and others...even, Especially, since you cannot simply bend them. the deconstruction of rpgs starts as comical and disempowering, and slowly brings focus to all the tiny lights and colors around you that you would miss from the birds eye view. the world is a canvas...just not a blank one meant exclusively for you.

no matter how much we think we understand, no matter how powerfully we spec into Whatever, no matter how thoroughly we sketch out this wretched world and its interlocking mechanisms, we can never comprehend everything. there is always something strange and wonderful out there, something that will increase your understanding of what was ever possible. perhaps the world wouldnt be beautiful and wondrous enough to be worth saving if the one person who had the power to could perfectly understand everything. perhaps this should be misery for those who seek understanding...but really it's the opposite. the joyful process of understanding is never over...and everything you learn along the way will be worth it for its own sake. there is never any excuse to stop. so go and be free...you are living a power fantasy an rpg protagonist could only dream of