4.5/5 ★ – beardedgoddess's review of Disco Elysium.

This was an exceptionally unique and nuanced take to a politically/intellectually centered video game. It's genuinely an enigma to me that it was able to be created at all for an indie developer. Superficially, it has an incredibly beautiful art style; one which I am at a loss to be able to put into words. Almost psychedelic, but I'm sure that could possibly be the purpose. The voice acting and sound design is also something worth mentioning. There are so many types of dialogue with differing personalities (many of which are your own) and they are all performed superbly. The soundtrack is subtle but expressive of all the complexities that the game offers. At the heart of the game though is its world and the politico-socio-economic intricacies that form the setting and its recent history. It's a very in-depth and thought provoking world with highly detailed historical tangents and variables that affect even trivial parts of the game and its characters. Many reviews revel in citing "communism" as its most surface level ideology, but it treats all of its highly complex political ideologies in a very nuanced way. YOU the player have very one-dimensional responses in your dialogue choices for the four stereotypical political/socio-economic ideologies, but it is in stark contrast to the incredibly well-developed world and characters that you interact with. Noid, as one example, is a punk kid who seemingly is able to deconstruct the big two economic ideologies in maybe the most sane manner. Similarly, the world reflects our own in how individuals corrupt the perfect utopias of each ideology. The unionist leader--supposedly the "good guy," representing the little worker's rights in the face of an exploitative a-moral company--is more corrupt than any person in the game, and quite possibly the biggest villain, while the executive head that came to negotiate with the union is the one with actual integrity and general care for some reasonable outcome for the workers. I also appreciate how, despite many of the mongoloid proponents of the communards in our real world, the realities of how completely asinine its beliefs *in practice* and *in theory* are are shown here in all its glory. We are in a world where there are no perfect solutions, and that is because we are in a world made up of individuals. It's a truly remarkable gem of a game, but I'm not sure if I can recommend it to everyone. It's main problem is that it's a very intellectually focused, politically-minded game. That's not for everyone at all, and it speaks to the achievement percentages of people who actually played through it. It also has a unique RPG system, that is functionally completely subjective on how you level up your detective. You legit don't have to level up skills until you need to, but sometimes you don't even need to at all. So, you're thrown into this incredibly dense world, showered with colloquialisms, and the history and politics of it, while the main character is also just as ignorant as you. It was very slow-going for me, but momentum will pick up if you let it. It's worth it to finish the game to experience such an idiosyncratic masterpiece of fantastical world-building and realistic takes regarding the complexities of our modern existence.