i thought about playing disco elysium again but honestly i just had such a bad experience that i can't bring myself to replay it. sure enough, a big part of this is down to "i played a pc game on a switch".
the game really, really loves to softlock. there's some event triggers attached to character animations, and also characters love to despawn. there's also problems with the switch's smaller screen, and i did not realise i had to zoom out in order to click on specific things.
it felt less like "playing a game" and more like "tricking a game into playing". i'm also not sure i'd go back and try again, even if i picked the right computer to play it on. sure enough, the writing is great, but i think i'm just going to have more fun elsewhere.
i'm reminded of the difference between how new vegas and fallout 3 chose to implement skill checks.
in fallout 3, you kill people, put points into diplomacy, and then your speech options change from "Diplomacy 32%" to "[Diplomacy 38%]". meanwhile, new vegas has "ok? science 80? you can do this option now"
with fallout new vegas, having skills would unlock shortcuts, bonuses, easier paths through the game. if you failed a check, well, it rarely prevented you from getting through the game. there were even pathways for low skills, too. every choice had a consequence, and you'd play a slightly different game because of it.
with fallout 3? well, you needed to get certain skills to progress through the game, and if you didn't have them, tough shit. playing the game in an unintended manner meant saving and reloading your game to get past the rng. worse? playing the game in the intended manner also required saving and loading to get past the rng.
and well, saving and reloading, that's been my experience of disco esylium.
even if the writing reminds me of fallout new vegas, the game feels a lot more fallout 3 levels of janky. sure enough, i had to do a lot of save reloading to get past some of the softlocks, try every dialogue option in turn hoping this time the character wouldn't despawnβbut i've also locked myself out of the game due to how the skill checks function.
i'm not talking specifically about how "you can build a character so unhealthy that sitting in a chair kills you" (but yes i did do that, and i died way before the chair, i died reaching for a ceiling fan)
nor am i talking about how you can lock yourself out of progress on day one because you run out of money. no, kim would not sell his hubcaps, no, the boat owner would not give me money. yes i checked the walkthroughs. yes i checked every dialog option. yes, i had to restart the game over again.
... and i got really tired of restarting the game.
the last time i tried playing it, i ended back in limbo by day three, with no dialogue options, a lot of failed skill checks, and no way to repeat them.
again.
i'm just not willing to play through the game ten or twenty times to find out how i should have played the game the first time around, or searching through walkthroughs to find options that were not available to my character.
i really don't gave gamer brain. i don't enjoy replaying hours of dialogue trees to go back and pick the invisible right option. i don't enjoy the dissonance between "here, build your character, chose your path!" and "also there is an invisible list of correct choices you will only discover long after the fact"
but i also do not like "here is a skill check, roll more than a 3 to continue playing"
and as much as disco elysium tries to avoid it, i keep running into it.
hmm.
- playing the game is about multiple independent runs
- each individual run has a low chance of reaching the end
- outcomes depend on RNG
- overhyped
disco elysium is a roguelike