Ok so I've been playing Disco Elysium lately and it's really, really good. It's hard to compare it to other games but at its core it's an RPG, with lots and lots of dialogue and little to no combat (as far as I can tell so far). You play as a washed up detective who wakes up in his hotel room after a massive booze and drug bender and with very little recollection of what happened, or even who you are. You and your partner have to solve a murder case in the run-down district of the city you're in, which leads into all sorts of political shenanigans. But while you're trying to solve the case you're also picking up minor cases here and there or are just helping out some people with things they want to do. Or not.

So that's already an interesting enough premise, but the best part is the character 'development'. You have a total of 24 'skills' which fall under 4 major categories - intellect, psyche, motorics, physique. There are no classes or anything but you distribute points across these 4 categories during character creation, which defines the starting level and cap of each skill. But after that you can choose to upgrade whichever skill you like within those limits. There are several ways to raise specific skills to higher levels than your level in the larger category that it's a part of would normally allow, too. For example when I snorted some speed (the drug) my 'psyche' category was temporarily raised with 1 point, which allowed me to boost a skill under it beyond the normally allowed maximum. Even after the drug wears off that skill remains raised.

What happens is that during dialogue and interaction with the environment, all of your 'skills' will act like aspects of your personality that may give you clues, commentary or just make really bad suggestions. As an example, if you see a barbell and interact with it, your 'physical instrument' skill will start egging you on to try and left it, while your 'logic' skill might try and dissuade you. When speaking to a person your 'drama' skill might encourage you to make outrageous claims or outright lie (for no good reason), or it might be able to tell you that someone is probably speaking the truth. This is all based on constant skill checks. It really is quite impressive.

On top of all that they might start proposing you adopt certain beliefs or thoughts after you have said a few things that might suggest you are interested. My 'endurance' skill for example tried to persuade me to adopt a belief in fascism after I said a few things about relying on oneself, about strength through perseverance. Or another skill might suggest you consider communism if you make a few comments about the working class' plight etc. You can dismiss these if you want, but if you show an interest they are added to your so-called 'thought cabinet' where they can be internalized (if you have a free slot and want to). Basically this means that you will consider them (they usually give a small temporary bonus or penalty while doing so) for a few hours and if you don't switch them out before they reach 100% the will become internalized, ie locked in and become part of your personality. With much better bonuses.

It doesn't have to be ideology or a serious world view though. There are some properly weird thoughts too. At one point I was speaking to a girl about persevering in the things she was pursuing and one of my skills told me I should tell her about my supposed hero, 'Contact Mike', the boxer who beat all the odds to become world champ. It was amazing. I went on a massive rant about this probably non-existing boxer and about how we should be more like him, and this resulted in a thought I could internalize. Since I loved the rant so much I did - so now one of my permanent thoughts in the thought cabinet is 'The Litany of Contact Mike'. It's bizarre and amazing at the same time.

All of this weirdness and these systems made it hard to really get my bearings at first, but after an hour or so I fell in love with this game. There is SO MUCH dialogue so you need to be ok with that, but it's so well written that it doesn't get old very quickly. Perfect for playing with a nice glass of beer or wine or whiskey. I also realized that I shouldn't worry too much about failing certain tasks or locking myself out of certain things. It's part of the experience. I punched a really annoying kid early on in the game (yeah, I know) and now I can't speak to him at all anymore. But he seems to be essential for a few side quests I still have to solve. Whoops. But I've also noticed that you can approach a lot of quests in several ways though so it's entirely possible there may be an alternative solution I haven't seen yet.

Anyway, really good stuff. Looking forward to playing some more tonight, and in playing a completely different type of character next time. So far I've mostly been trying to make amends for my asshole behaviour during my sorry bender (giving me the 'sorry cop' trait) but I've also showed a lot of interest in art during my talks and the game has me down as an 'art cop' now - a mix of a detective and an art critic. I mostly focused on raising my physical attributes and intellect so I usually fail hard at empathy skill checks - like when I had to tell a lady her husband had died, which was painful as hell. Oh and I'm keeping up my drinking and drug habits. Walking around town as a cop with a bottle of vodka in your hand gets some strange reactions from people, and makes my straight-laced partner not like me very much.

Trailer won't tell you much since this game is about the story and weird systems, but hey:

Finished the game and it was amazing. I don't have much more to add than what I wrote before but I'll give you a visual example of one of the 'thoughts' in my thought cabinet, 'before' and 'after'.

As you can see I initially have a penalty to perception because I can't even look at all this shitty art, but once I internalized the thought I can. But then it still makes me so angry that my hands can't stop shaking (hence the penalty to motorics). But I do gain experience and morale from passing conceptualization checks.