Disco Elysium is a political satire murder mystery visual novel with strong writing, excellent voice acting, rpg elements, and some minor flaws.

I'll start with the positives. As mentioned, the game is very well written, which is great because there is a lot of text in this game lol. Characters are given distinct personalities through their dialogue and their voice acting, even those that are cliches are still implemented well and feel at home in this games fictional war torn city. If I had any critique of the writing it would be that at times, it felt a bit prone to over explaining various historical events and the various fictional races and locations of this games world. This may be due to my build skewing towards an intellectual so my encyclopedia stat was quite high.

While on the topic of stats, the game differs itself from other visual novel experiences by having an rpg element, where as you level up through completing task for the locals and for your overall case, you can invest points into various elements such as Intellect, Psyche, Physique and Motorics, and each of those has six different skills you can increase. These skills will impact your ability to pass various rng checks to help discover more about the world and the case at hand. At first this system can seem overwhelming and you will worry about your build but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't change the end result, just the journey of how you got there, which I like as it doesn't punish you for a "bad" build.

Finally, my only other main gripe that prevents this from getting a higher score would be the reveal of the killer. Without going into any specifics or spoilers, it personally did not satisfy me and thats a let down in a murder solving game. Also I hate that they implemented fast travel but made it so awkward to use in a game that can involve a lot of back and forth walking for various side quests grrr