Have yet to finish it at the time of writing due to its Baba is You approach to difficulty, but I think it’s safe to call Catherine one of the most unapologetically auteurial video games I’ve played. It’s absurdly unique— pretty much the only piece of media I can think of to cross block pushing with girlfriend cheating, and in that regard it’s extraordinarily well realized. Tense, mind bending escape sequences are so masterfully woven together and juxtaposed with chill, Yakuza style bar crawls. But just as Vincent’s nightmare towers crumble below him during his climbs, so too are his reprieves brief. When hanging out at the Stray Sheep, time passes as you talk to each character, check your texts, even take a hard earned slug of beer. A mantra of Persona 5 (for which Catherine was a tech demo) is “take your time”, but here alas you are afforded very little— it’s keep moving or die gruesome after all. But where our tragic protagonist has to suck this up with a pit in his stomach, his journey is hardly grueling from the player perspective (though it is REALLY fucking hard at times). Gameplay is tight and snappy, challenging but fair, so much so that it even attracted a small yet dedicated corner of the FGC. Combine that with its brilliant excellently paced writing and you’re in for a treat, just keep in mind one with both a high skill ceiling AND floor.

Why do tech demos always hit so hard?

Now this is a game I'm entirely on the fence about. On one hand I think how the game is structured in tandem with the unique interactive mechanics and its overall non-linearity is downright brilliant (with a few hiccups, of course) And on the other hand I absolutely despise the unsatisfying and rushed finale that literally renders most of what you do in the game completely pointless.

Alright, so the beginning stretch of this game can be tad bit confusing and overwhelming but after sinking in a few hours and getting accustomed to all the mechanics and skills it's very easy to get hooked in and fast. The different skills aka the various parts of your psyche that affects the dialogues and how you interact with the world is unarguably the best part of this game. Depending on what part of your psyche you put the most points in you will get VASTLY different outcomes of little tasks like getting a hanged body down from a tree, while also affecting your abilities to pick up on certain leads. Which ultimately ends up giving the game a lot more variety and replay value than it'd initially have if it stuck to the more linear and rigid story telling formula of most other CRPGs. Also the way all the seemingly pointless and insignificant side quests loop back into main quests in the most unexpected way imaginable is done competently and can lead to a lot of "ah ha" moments. I also appreciate the fact that despite the game being entirely reliant on texts the dialogues are delivered in a digestible manner with everything fully voice acted and the voice acting is surprisingly top notch. At first when I was trying to read through every single line of text I thought the dialogues felt dense but that's objectively the wrong way to go about playing the game as you're punished for picking too many options. Once you start playing the game as it is intended you start to appreciate how well written the character interactions are with a lot of genuinely funny banters that don't feel forced. But there is something else entirely that can actually interfere the with the game's pacing and it's the constant DnD skill checks which forces you to do a lot of backtracking and chore-ish tasks just to have a higher chance of succeeding and even then you can fail. Which I can see being the main contributor behind putting off a lot of people and rightfully so and it's objectively a bad game design approach when most people playing the game save scum repeatedly to get past them.

Now onto my main gripe with the game and it's the ending. The finale is flat out terrible with absolutely zero thought put behind and it contradicts the whole investigation this game revolves around. Without delving too deep into spoiler territory, it's the whodunnit. It's entirely detached from everything you do throughout most of the game, from every lead you gather throughout your entire investigation. And to address all the idiotic copium takes I see defending this god awful ending like "oh no but it's supposed to be meta! it fits the themes! it was never about the murder mystery", The game quite literally frames itself as a murder mystery that is LITERALLY your entire objective throughout the whole thing and the game failing to deliver a proper satisfying conclusion shouldn't be above criticism, it's objectively bad and if you can't see that you lack critical thinking skills. Also if there ever was a game that would benefit from having several different endings that vary vastly from one another it'd be THIS but what the game delivered was the exact opposite an extremely linear final segment which contradicts the rest of the game's open-ended nature.

Disco Elysium is a game that has a lot of never-before-seen unique mechanics in a narrative game with a lot of entertainment value but all of it is bogged down by a HORRIBLY botched ending.

Disco Elysium

One of the most interesting games that I’ve played, politically rich and philosophically dense game which is definitely a huge standout. I initially assumed this would be a confusing experience but it has a surprisingly easy sense of direction while you make your way across many intertwined offshoots of the main plot in order to figure out the killer behind a murder mystery, a catalytic event ready to ignite a civil war.

Where I find the game’s sense of direction a huge positive I do think its also a polarizing title, the pace is in your control but the conversations you have often become too meaty or the dialogue feels overproduced sometimes, simple conversations double and triple in size and if you really don’t like absorbing long-form thinkpieces the game throws at you it may be a bumpy ride. There’s a LOT of worldbuilding and if you aren’t familiar with baseline communist history etc the game may feel confusing and at worst, a history lecture. In some ways I find the world of DE a weird kind of satire or parody of which it derives from.

In this way, the game tells two stories, one is on the surface, and one is on the back, I’ll only be tackling the one on the surface since in all fairness, I think I barely understood the story on the back myself in complete detail.

(+) Story (NOT CONCLUSION THAT’S THE CON)

I really liked the way the game tackles the story; you can take a non-linear approach and solve other problems which in one way or another tie around to the main story and you’re often times rewarded with some sort of acknowledgement having resolved a problem before its officially pinned as a to-do task. The first time I passed the check in the library and ventured into the abandoned commercial center it really felt like the game ticked the right boxes in my head, this compliment bleeds into the entire game, the way its able to keep you tethered enough to remember any tasks that have either a time-gate or a special tool requirement is fantastic, I knew exactly when I had to place a call, visit someone, wait for a bridge to be repaired, when to use a password, who to talk to, where to buy something, it didn’t feel like a web of tasks that was difficult to understand, the game is intuitive in how it hands out its tasks even if such tasks are sometimes inferred.

There’s a VARIETY of outcomes that come from your decisions, either you punch the racist meathead or internalize critical race theory, you forge signatures to fuck up the fat pig or don’t take that risk and get them from the source, the conversations can have so many variants and its honestly astounding how much effort it must have took to map it all out.

(+) Characters

Some good and some mediocre, its not that their quirky or something they just fit right into the world of DE, even the most annoying ones (Cunou). I enjoyed both Harry and Kim and their mini interactions (a mix of briefings, decision makings and jabs), Joyce is fun and the one who outlines the pale for us, Titus is a righteous man with platitudes that he holds dear, the military agents are erratic, spontaneous and violent, Gart is this annoyed manager who actually holds the rundown shed of a hotel dear, Klaasje draws you in with her charisma, blanketing her offenses effortlessly with a veneer of coolness, and many many more. The character writing is good, even as my aforementioned complaint about the dialogue being often times too meaty.

(+) Soundtrack

I like it a lot, its very atmospheric, somber (24 HOURS OF AMBIENT MUSIC)

(+) Gameplay

Sometimes the camera fucked up which annoyed me (in the last island), I found spending time via conversations and reading books to be a weird system but it also meant that I wasn’t risking anything with an in-game timer incase I wanted to step out for a bit and walk around and check places. I originally thought the map would be confusing but its actually so simple, I wonder if you can zoom out since most of the time the limited view was what threw me off a bit. I wish when I was outside that I could directly trigger fast-travel instead of having to go to a central hubspot to activate it which annoyed me, but walking around meant I got to see some faces again and check if they had newer dialogue and it doesn’t take that long to get from A to B in this game so all’s well I suppose.

The DND elements were very unique with these cacophony of voices inside your head being able to provide extra layers to every conversation, again my pre-conceived notion was that they’d fuck with the pace of conversation and make the game annoying, but it was the exact opposite, they were the often times the most interesting part of conversations and I enjoyed it when they went against each other which was particularly amusing. It also genuinely feels like you’re a madman that’s trying to navigate a role of a detective as if you’re animating a dead body.

I did infact cheat some checks, to anyone’s dismay, when I punched the meathead I succeeded but failed when I had to do a follow-up attack, annoyed me so hard because it was such a rare check to pass, other times I redid the check for the Klaasje door on the balcony a few times and got lucky even though it was another rare check but yeah even if I didn’t do that I knew how that I could just investigate the kitchen at a specific time and get access to that place. Another instance I had to paint a mural and got annoyed and redid it 3 times as well.

The point is I redid some checks because I wanted to have some narrative or gameplay control instead of the tedium of running around for alternatives which, I know, is very anti-DND of me. But overall, I faithfully committed to the checks since they led to fun outcomes regardless.

Before the end I got some advice from gappy to tie a few loose-ends so I could actually complete the game but it wasn’t anything too tricky I just refused a few tasks so I wouldn’t be locked into something that made the game conditional.

(-) Story Conclusion (SPOILERS)

The game’s conclusion is the biggest negative, I hate the conclusion, I hated the reveal of this X character on this X island that committed the crime, it felt counter-intuitive to the investigative nature of the game, where we spent the entire time ruling out suspects and fake claimers to be given a complete random guy at the end. This was the same for the person who took our gun, there’s so many old women in the game but nope its some X old woman who’s afflicted with some neurological disorder who took it. Ruby was faceless for the most part but at least you were already looking for her so I didn’t hate the fact that when we “catch her” we haven’t seen her before.

The conclusion is also bad because even though you ALREADY get the opportunity to investigate the trajectory of the bullet and its possible locations, there’s an X spot that Klaasje conveniently realizes before departing that allows you to single out the location of the culprit. There’re so many other ways to communicate this exact thing, had the MC himself come to that conclusion after re-investigating the place I would give it a pass but this was just such a bad plot device and it made any pre-investigation feel completely useless. You literally CANNOT guess who the culprit is because you don’t even know who they are. I enjoyed the idea of a mysterious X person, sanctioning themselves on an island for 40 something years and being the victim of this mysterious insulindian phasmid but the outlandish nature of the ending does not outweigh the nonsensical-ness of it. The complexity of the game does not beget an ending, which in my opinion (outside of the phasmid) was quite lame.
The game also wraps up with some mini reveals about you and your companions before the credits are rolled which don’t feel all that shocking especially for the final moments.

I quite literally cannot understand WHY this is how they handled the culprit, why not have multiple culprits or secret accomplices to spice up the game? Infact even Ruby would have qualified for a much better culprit than the one we got.

(+) Conclusion

Very good game and one of a kind, jaw-dropping level of depth to worldbuilding and conversations, it’s a bit fat in a lot of areas but I just happen to NOT be the target demographic for it. With a flop ending that left me just a little bit sour, I feel like this is one of the most competent detective games that genuinely make you FEEL like you are part of the investigative effort that ties everything together as you march around, barging into offices and crying on Edgar’s painful chair.