So I know I retired from making D&D stuff, because of burnout. I did decide it would be okay for me to make my own games. This is a WIP of a short one I’m working on. I’m working on this and three games at the moment. Not all at one mind you. So here I present: Scrolls. It’s basically a joking take on what an Elder Scrolls tabletop rpg might look like. Complete with the ability to glitch through the floor and other bugs.

Still need to make the skill trees.

[PDF]

Hmmmmmm what about games that give heavy-metal vibes. If that's too vague, maybe TTRPGs that have the same vibes of DOOM or Quake? Thanks for being an awesome Tumblr page, btw <3

THEME: Hellbusting Games

Thank you so much! I haven't played either of those games, but my roommate sure has! here's what I found.

Warrune, by CurseNightGames.

HELL IS TOTAL FUCKING WAR

WARRUNE is a brutal gridless tactical RPG inspired by Doom, God of War, and extreme metal. Play as badass warriors who have gone to hell to wage eternal war. Vikings vs. Space Marines vs. Demons. DOOM SHIT!

An eclectic system that combines aspects of tactical RPGs, story games, and board games that emulates the frantic combat chess of the latest Doom video games. Warrune is 42 pages, and comes in an easy to read black and white PDF, a red PDF for that old school metal zine feel, and a black and white booklet format to print your own zines at home.

You don’t have any stats in this game; you roll d666 for everything, and count the 6’s vs 1s. More 6’s? You succeed. More 1’s? You fail. Combat is for theatre of the mind but still tactical, with an armoury’s worth of weapons, equipment, and special powers that will help you absolutely obliterate your enemy.

If you want a solo or GM-less option, this game has it! Enemies can be fully automated, giving you a chance to dive into hell either by yourself or without a leader.

qvke borg, by Bird Silhouette Games.

"In a land dying a slow death at the hands of irrefutable prophecy, the thread of reality unravels. As the universe-that-was frays at the seams, more horrifying truths manifest.

Writhing with eldritch hatred is the QVKEMOTHER:

SHUB-NECHURATH reaches out across the cosmic void. Her infinite armies stand poised to bring this realm under her sway. She has heard rumours of the Two-Headed Basilisks and seeks to unseat their power, disprove their apocalypse and usher in one of her own."

QVKE BORG is an unofficial expansion compatible with MÖRK BORG. It’s inspired by the atmospheric, action-packed shooter videogames of the early 1990s. If you ever wanted to bring ROCKET LAUNCHERS into your bleak fantasy role-playing game, this is the book for you.

If you want to play this game you’re going to need MÖRK BORG as well, in order to know how the rules work. Immediately diving into this game will give you a bestiary, followed by character options and lore. This is directly inspired by the game Quake, so it should be able to easily replicate what you’re looking for! If you want an adventure to go along with this, the author has released one called Doorway to Blasphemy, about hunting a heathen down through a vile and overgrown keep.

Hell Grinders, by Bannerless Games.

Another beautiful day of brimstone, heat, fire, blood and guts. You and your buddies buckle your gear, and get ready to shred the forces of Hell’s faces off. 

HELL GRINDERS is a turbo-charged boomer shooter-inspired roleplaying game about killing demons and angels as the baddest bastards around. If you want to flashback to the '90s, ripping and tearing your way through hordes of hideous beasts with your besties while knee-deep in radioactive slime, all to the sounds of heavy metal and industrial guitar licks, this one’s for you.

LUMEN is such a good system for combat, especially if you want your power to feel powerful and competent. Even though there’s only 4 classes, you can mix and match skills and abilities to make a unique character who can kick ass in a way completely unlike your teammates - and LUMEN is also great for team synergy, setting each-other up for success. 

You can die in HELL GRINDERS but that doesn’t mean the fun stops for you - pick up another Grinder on your team and keep going, and hope you can finish the mission before all of your backup team members run out!

Aether Operations, by World Champ Game Co.

Traverse the realms in a forever struggle of imbalance, defeating powerful warlords and cleansing corrupted artifacts. Brutal and dangerous, even the most routine beasts spew damnation at the mere presence of you: the Manipulators. The unique denizens of each realm aspire to purge you in whatever malicious possible ways available in an effort to gain more power and bring the imbalance of reality towards a coming doom.

AeOps is for 2-5 players including a gamemaster with optional rules for gm-less play. Players, as Manipulators embodying Spirit, Brain, Bone, or Meat, use up to seven six-sided dice while the GM uses a diminishing Balance Die, downgrading from d12 to d4 with each stage representing further destabilization of the Realms and a quickly approaching reality cataclysm.

You’re fighting more than demons in this one, but they still want you dead. With GM-less options, this might be a good game to look at if you’re not sure who’s up to GM, or if everyone wants to be a player. Will you be able to prevent a cataclysm? Or will the realms come crashing down around you? You’ll have to play to find out.

HellGuts: Imp Scout Edition, by Mitchell Daily.

Hell is unleashing its demons through unholy rifts between our dimension and theirs. These demons exist only to torment, profane, and destroy human life. They are a powerful scourge that threatens to overwhelm the entire solar system and beyond should they not be stopped. 

Enter the Hellslayers, those exalted to the task of rending fiendish flesh and bathing in blasphemous blood. The Hellslayers are forces of nature standing above the easily slaughtered masses and taking the fight to Hell itself.

HELLGUTS is a gory romp through brutal hellscapes. Go kill some demons, Hellslayer. 

This game depends on dice pools of d12s, with action difficulties ranging from 2 -12. The more successes you get, the more bonuses you get, with your character attributes represented by three “organs: Muscle, Spine and Brain. This is a combat with abstract range and room for description, so your characters can describe how they brutally decimate the legions of hell. 

Right now HellGuts is in playtest, but it already has a couple of adventures, as well as character and enemy keeper resources linked on the page. Tack on some safety tools and you’re ready to go!

24XX Breach, by Adam Schwaninger.

Hyperspace is a back door through Hell, and still the desperate line up for the Company jumpships. You were one of them, back before Hell spat you back out. Now when a jump goes bad, you go in. Breach the derelict, identify the incursion, eliminate the threat, and hope to hell the money’s good.

With quick character generation and quick story generation, you know I gotta recommend a 24XX game. Your character doesn’t just have as specialty that bumps up their skills, they also get Blessings, that give you really cool abilities, such as control over fire, acidic blood, or the ability to teleport through hellspace. Pick up an interesting piece of backstory or two and jump into Hell, ready to kick demon ass and get out as many people as you can. Simple, and sweet, that’s 24XX Breach.

Hey everyone, since I've got some new follows, here's a little bit of who I am.

I'm Erin, and I write, design, and create layout for TTRPGs. I got my start writing D&D stuff for DMsGuild, and now have branched out into designing my own creations. My three biggest projects are FIRMAMENT, Orphans!, and The Dreaded and the Deep.

FIRMAMENT is an action fantasy tactics game inspired by MOBAs and hero shooters. You play as a Champion of the Firmament, a warrior or mage empowered to fight back against the corrupt magic of Affliction. It's a power fantasy action game, so expect quick action and sick combos.

Orphans! is an all-ages rules-lite narrative-driven game inspired by gothic kidlit. If you loved A Series of Unfortunate Events or The Mysterious Benedict Society as a kid, or you know a kid who does, this is your game.

The Dreaded and the Deep is a play-to-lose nautical terror game. You will die at the end, it's just a question of how long you can last and how you are changed trying to stave off the inevitable. It draws a lot of inspiration from Sunless Sea, so if you like exploring the Underzee, you might like sailing the Dosolti Sea.

You can find all of them on itch.io at Veil's Edge Games.

What is Destiny: Become Legend?

Destiny: Become Legend is a custom tabletop roleplaying game fan project co-created by @frombrad2worse and @cassiefisherdrake , crafted from the ground up with a unique dice system designed to capture the rich universe, expansive lore, and tactical combat of Bungie, Inc.'s sci-fi shooters Destiny and Destiny 2.

Click below the cut to find out more!

We are B (@cassiefisherdrake) and Danger (@frombrad2worse), two huge Destiny 2 fans and the creative force behind the Destiny: Become Legend TTRPG. B is a proud Titan main (Missile Titan Supremacy) and Danger is a filthy Hunter main (with a crippling Gunpowder Gamble addiction). Here's a picture of our Guardians!

We don't want to show too much until we hear back from Bungie's licensing team, but we'd love to give you a few glimpses into our game and the system that drives it! All you need to play is your imagination, your fireteam, and some six-sided dice.

In D:BL, the players, as Guardians, explore the vast universe, interact with its colorful inhabitants, and fight back against the forces of Darkness. When a situation with an exciting and uncertain outcome arises, you roll 2d6 and add stat modifiers to determine what happens. If things get dicey (pun intended) and weapons are drawn, combat begins. In combat, you have a pool of d6s you can expend every turn to fire weapons, activate Light abilities, and perform various Heroic Actions. Combat is designed to be fast-paced, tactical, and exciting. Just like the games, D:BL is built to be easy to pick up and fun to play for beginners, but contains a wide array of character customization options to provide a rich and rewarding experience for players that want to dive deeper and build the Guardian of their sci-fi fantasies.

While we wait to hear back from Bungie, we're cooking up an actual play livestream to show off D:BL in action. This short campaign will begin two years after The Taken War and will show how one small change can alter an entire timeline. But will it change for better or worse?

Each week, we'll join our two fireteams as they to race to save the Last City - and maybe even the timeline itself! Many sessions will even come with their own lorebook entry, read aloud at the end of play to further delve into Destiny's depths!

Whether you're ready to find out about the campaign, hear a fan-made lorebook, or just want to see how the mechanics of the D:BL system shake out, join us every Monday, at 8:30PM Eastern / 7:30 Central as we play live on our twitch!

Now you may be asking yourself - how soon can I play this at home with my other Destiny-loving nerd friends? And the answer is: soon! Right now, the system is in testing stages as we flesh out the rules, organize Vanguard playbooks, and more. Once we have things nailed down, the D:BL system will be free for all to play and engage with. Yes, free! After all, we are a fan project - our only goal is to spread far and wide so we can all have fun with our friends, playing together in the Destiny universe's sandbox. Follow us here or on twitter for updates, news, and stream announcements!

Change a Letter Make a New Game: TTRPG edition!

Take a game title and add, remove, or change 1 letter in the title and then say what the new imaginary game is all about in 1 sentence! Lanced (Lancer): An indie game about Knights in the afterlife after a particularly disastrous jousting tournament! (probably written by @prokopetz :P ) SSD 2.0 (HSD 2.0): A competitive game about assassins trying to get a hard drive with important secrets Pune (Rune): A game of dueling wordplay in the setting of Discworld

Aight (Light): A solo journaling game about chilling during the apocalypse

Remember to link the original games :)

Lancer (mecha) HSD 2.0 (Furry Sci Fi) Rune (Solo tactics) Light (Looter shooter)

Any tips for aspiring game devs? Like, maybe programs or common mistakes to avoid, or how to start networking? (Also if you're in need of a 3rd party playtester.. *wink wink* *nudge nudge*)

Oh there's lots of advice to give! I think one main one could be 'Do not start making a game until you have tested it on paper first'

As I said in a tag earlier at least 3/4th of a game is things that are not even making the playable game.

To elaborate, any kind of game can use this rule - Tactical isometric, turn based, 3D shooterer, Text Novels, Etc Etc - You need to test how a game would function before you commit the days and months of asset creation, time and money.

if you have a solid Concept Phase, you'll have a much MUCH easier time in Development Phase.

For text novels or more text based things its pretty easy! You do the whole script and events before even touching a program (Ren.Py is one I would recommend as an engine for 2D Novel Games!) - You can then make a mock-up of the HUD on paper to the scale of the window it'd be played in. Is it too big? are the edge of the text box too wide? Is it too intricate and distracts from the text and characters?

The same kinda thing can be done with all other game genres, make a mock up of some kind - For open world games with dialogue choices you can have your world concept done, and then run the story as a single person TTRPG with a few friends and you're the DM. See what they'll try to do. Can you see any bugs that might happen that way? Any areas that you didn't plan or expand on that caught the players interest each time?

\o/ Isometrics and top down, grab some grid paper and chess pieces! Lable what they are and see how the game functions at its core mechanics!

You get the gist of it by this point :D

By doing this you'll minimize the amount of troubleshooting and rewrites you'll inevitably have to do (You'll always have to 'fix' something) - and learn more and more about game you're creating :D

Beyond that a number one rule that was hammered into me in my studies ''Never fall in love with your first idea''. <- EVEN if the first idea is the one you'll end up with, always, ALWAYS go more and push the design at least another four or five times (we usually go 12 to 20).

-

For networking, I went to school and have some connections from there - but starting fresh out I can really only offer advice wise that it is a long process, make friends in all kinds of fandoms and places - share your information and take theirs, its a give and take \o/

It does get easier the bigger you make that circle, but also can be more tiring to keep up with it. Try to focus on 2-3 platforms at max as any more than that and you'll be overwhelmed trying to keep up with everything.

-

And for playtesting we would love that \o/

Our plan is to get the working prototype [anywhere from a year or two from now who knows what the future holds] and then once it is to a proper play-build (A Game Slice) it'll be opened up to the public :D

Cause all walks of feedback are important!

Disco Elysium (2019) - A Review and Analysis

A postmodern role-playing game for a much different audience. A combination of skillful artistry and unfulfilled potential. An attempt at tackling difficult topics and pandering to different tastes. A full package, with deceptive contents...

I enjoyed playing through Disco Elysium, but for completely different reasons than those that initially sold the game to me. Going in, I believed that it would be the type of RPG that I had been looking for quite some time – one that is not burdened by most of its interaction with the world happening on a grid, scanning through a list of spells and abilities, franticly pausing every frame, trying to min-max numbers as to not get destroyed by a pack of menacing farm animals of a slightly higher level. Examples of that in the genre would be classics such as Baldur’s Gate or newer re-iterations like Divinity: Original Sin and Shadowrun: Hong Kong. What I would habitually find myself doing is picking up the game, sinking my teeth into it, eventually hitting a numerical roadblock in some quest, and almost immediately retiring to a life of “not playing that game ever again”, as I am faced with the option of either save scumming and beating my head against the numeric wall, until by some fluke of the numbers I get the “good” number and am allowed to proceed; or could just stop doing whatever thing I am currently invested in and go somewhere else on the map, where the numbers are not as disagreeable, so I can get my personal numbers high enough to where the numbers I was having difficulty with before seem less impressive and I can pick up that quest again, but this time only halfway through, struggling to remember contextual cues that were relevant perhaps a few hours ago, but are now a forgotten footnote in some journal entry.

In both cases, the immersion gives way to the idea of gameplay, as the perhaps flawed ideal of an RPG is that which is based on table-top role playing games, such as Dungeons & Dragons, the aforementioned Shadowrun, or anything else that follows the same formula. From my personal experience in TTRPGs, the same issue persists, namely in having meaningful choice and character development take second fiddle to massive 3-5-man 1-2-hour combat encounters in between the more immersive moments of dialogue between players, non-player characters or story development. I’ve always felt that combat is so abstracted from everything else in TTRPGs in the way that it suddenly shifts into an entirely different game, which unlike the elements of role-play is less free-form and bound to a rigid set of rules. You’re no longer interested in how things look, feel or act, but rather how large a number is on a sheet of paper; and this contention of mine seems to always be translated into the video game counterpart of this genre, carrying the same problem from one medium to the other. Games even seem to compound upon the issue, by putting you in charge of multiple characters, where your custom created character is somehow not only equal to them, but at the same time the savior of the universe and all that is holy.

I cannot help but believe that the party ought to be AI controlled pawns, considering that they are supposedly different people with their own goals and aspirations; thus leaving the player to micro-manage their singular character – their avatar in the game world, rather than developing a form of psychogenic schizophrenia by having to deal with each and every one of the party’s members (now, admittedly the remakes of both Baldur’s Gate games have such a feature, but the combat AI is so poor, that you still have to go and remind them that they actually have a whole list of spells that they could be, in fact, using to… for instance, heal you, as you sit there bleeding profusely, crippled and powerless on the ground).

The only games which I have seen managing combat and RPG elements successfully are listed as a fundamentally different genre, known as “immersive sim” or “0451 games”. To name a few, that would be games like those of the Deus Ex, Dishonored and even the Fallout series. Most of those are first-person, for the most part shooters, with some emphasis on a singular character’s development through dialogue and stat point distribution. My main point can roughly be exemplified by comparing the naming convention and the reality for both genres: one is a “role-playing game”, the other is an “immersive simulation”; the first being used deceptively, as you could be playing a multitude of roles at any given time and also suspending that role-play to participate in some rather lengthy tactical combat for what could be 50% of the game’s runtime. On the other hand, you have “immersive sim”, which according to Warren Spector (game designer of Deus Ex and Thief fame) is a game in which “you are there, [and] nothing stands between you and [the] belief that you're in an alternate world”. I simply cannot emphasize enough how even the most engaging narrative and the most skillful writing can be tarnished by this type of abstract combat, which feels so fundamentally foreign and somehow still intrinsic to the idea of role-playing games and immersion.

Disco Elysium seemed to be the odd one out – a RPG that has no combat, except that, initiated by your choices in dialogue (more akin to playing an animation than actual combat). It was also advertised to me as having quite an in-depth ideological system, that was affected by your choices in-game and would automatically adapt dialogue according to your flavor of politics, philosophy or culture through a series of thoughts, which you would internalize, if used often enough. Frankly, it seemed like wish fulfilment for a jaded immersion-loving straight-edge centrist such as myself.

Upon launching the game, I was quickly introduced to the persona that I would be inhabiting – a deranged, drunken amnesiac, who in some cases would pass as a cop, but only if one’s notion of law-abiding is that of a drug-fueled abusive lover; also known as - the farthest thing from me. I already knew that my journey through the game would be that of a redemption arc, where this horrible piece of shit human, was going to become the most squeaky-clean, drug- and alcohol-free centrist known to all of Revachol. A true test of the game’s systems in action – from deranged and corrupt, to the straight and narrow. To my eventual surprise - I could do all of it, and very successfully at that. By the end of my nearly 24-hour playthrough, I had achieved my ideal vision for the character, with only a bit of resistance, which I will briefly mention further down the line. For now, I had succeeded in using all the tools available to me in order to internalize the thoughts for centrism, rejecting any form of drugs, and by the end almost managing to squeeze in the time to internalize being sober, cut short due to the spontaneous conclusion of the game.

The thoughts system was not entirely what I had initially imagined. Namely, what I had envisioned was a system, which converts whatever responses one made throughout the game, into non-internalized thoughts, which would begin to alter the dialogue options available, and only after choosing to emphasize said options, would it eventually internalize and give you a lot more radical options based on said thought. What it would turn out to do instead is make the acquisition of thoughts work in a similar manner, but make the process of internalization a menu, in which you “equip” thoughts into available slots. It seems like a minor inconvenience, but it makes the thoughts feel like yet another item that you just set and forget, rather than the thoughts of a person being actively developed over time, based on what kind of discourse they engage in. I suppose the idea of having it take anywhere from thirty minutes to six hours to internalize is there to be the substitute for the drawn out process of internalization. It is in a way saying “I feel like turning into a centrist in the next thirty minutes.”, while going around doing investigative work around a crime scene. The more active process I envisioned, would indeed take a lot longer, but it would be massively more immersive, as more and more options become available to you over time, rather than after some arbitrary timer has gone down.

Another big detractor is having to use skill points to unlock new slots for thoughts, which would otherwise be put into your more practical skills. Theoretically, one would think a human has an almost infinite capacity for new ideas; and one is surely not going to want to internalize them all. A good example would be the “Volumetric Shit Compressor” thought you gain early into the game, which mainly fulfils its purpose in one skill check for less physically able characters as a part of a single quest and is never made use of again, beyond its flat stat bonuses. No other thought in my playthrough had a temporary pragmatic function like that, which feels like a missed opportunity. Its temporary nature is where the skill-point cost seems absurd, when they could be better used to improve one’s skills. In what way would the character becoming more skillful help them stop “getting their shit together”? Wouldn’t one discard the though immediately after it’s no longer useful? The way the system works currently, meant that I spent most of my points on slots and playing around with thoughts, rather than improving my character until the very last parts of the game, which in effect made the game more difficult than intended. The decision to make thoughts equipable and not persistent passive perks that can upgrade into more radical or complete versions of themselves is perhaps one of my main disappointments with the game. The effect on scope would be minimal, as the game already has the dialogue options for those thoughts written and would only need to change their acquisition and internalization to be less menu-driven and more player-driven.

I tangentially mentioned not having skill-points to freely use until the latter parts of the game: That in turn made skill checks a lot more difficult and perilous, by making white skill checks (ones you can fail and retry upon increasing the skill they require) harder to re-unlock once failed and making red checks (ones that you cannot retry once failed) almost impossible, if not clothed in every stat-boosting piece of apparel in one’s inventory or seasoned with every potentially hazardous bottle of booze or glowing fairy dust left lying on the ground. White checks also do not unlock after one has used a consumable item or changed a piece of clothing to boost said stat, which encourages save scumming, as there is no way to change clothing in the middle of dialogue or knowing what the skill check will be, leading to one of the many pitfalls which I described earlier.

An even greater fault is that some quests just drop dead in their tracks, if the stat check is not completed. Moreover, since one cannot be proficient in all four skill categories, I would regularly hit a brick wall, upon being faced with a Psyche or Physique skill check, as my character mainly specialized in Intellect and Motorics. The thing about hitting a brick wall in Disco Elysium is not so much that you fail and have to face the consequences, but rather cannot continue at all and the narrative stops dead in its tracks until you can succeed the check. Sometimes quests are tied to each other, so not being able to progress in one of them means that you can’t progress in any of them. Suddenly an entire quest chain can just be gone at the click of a button. It got to a point where I would prefer to hear that all my efforts were in vain, fucking everything up irreversibly, rather than having a white check get locked and sit there in my journal, waiting for me to miraculously gain five points in some sub-skill of Physique. One way to fix this would be to have more obfuscated red checks with uncertain odds that lead to failure states. At least that would be more immersive than the current offering, as one could live with the consequences, rather than be left guessing what it could have been if one had slightly higher skills. This, however, could be difficult, as there is a dice roll to every skill. Not being skilled merely means you have less of a chance of succeeding or, alternatively, a higher chance to fail and lock the skill check.

The one thing that the game does great when it comes to skills is the addition of secret tasks. If one were to follow particular lines of inquiry, they often lead to some skill check down the line becoming easier, due to the things learned beforehand about that topic. This system rewards being thorough and attentive and is, perhaps, the best feature of the game. However, observations made through the “shivers” system (where orbs of information will show up contextually above the protagonist’s head, revealing information about the environment or elaborating on something relevant) do not appear to factor into these skill checks. This often leads to you reading something important when it pops up in the overworld, but upon engaging someone in conversation one must often select benign lines of dialogue, acting like one hadn’t made those observations to begin with. The dissonance is even more infuriating whenever Kim (your companion throughout the game) tells you that you are obviously wrong, because he also made those observations but (unlike you) could talk about them. It would have been a lot more diegetic if there were dialogue options available for you to repeat the observation to Kim instead, perhaps as you talk to him in the overworld (a feature that is woefully underutilized, and shows the same five or so options throughout the entire game, except whenever Kim wants to talk to you about something he deems relevant – an ability, which you would think the player should have had as well).

Speaking of the overworld, Disco Elysium does quite a lot with the small real-estate it has on its map. For what feels like a small neighborhood, it packs tens of hours of content, a varied cast of characters and lots of places to explore. Walking around is encouraged by the game, almost to a fault. At many points during the game Kim will remark upon your seemingly absurd ability to run around without getting tired. There even comes a point where you are injured, and are told not to run to avoid further harming yourself. After about twenty hours I realized that this was in order to signal to the player that if they run all over the place, trying to finish everything as quick as possible, they would be left with a lot of extra time at the end of the day, which would have been perhaps better spent looking into side-quests or other optional activities. However, the walk speed is woefully slow and with the amount of backtracking one needs to do, means that you will be seeing the same places plenty of times, which only tempts you even more to not waste your precious time RP-walking. The game has benches, which you can use to pass the time, but they are only available whenever Kim is not with you, which is only durring the night, meaning you can’t make any meaningful progress by resting on one, effectively making them worthless. That and the presence of time-gated tasks, means you will most likely be trying to find ways to waste your time, prompting Kim to berate you even more for straying away from the main focus of the narrative, as he often does. If you’re a fast reader, the game luckily fast-forwards time based on how many options you’ve selected, rather than real-time. This is most apparent whenever you’re save scumming and going though entire trees of dialogue you’ve already read.

And you will be reading a lot, as this is what you signed up for when you relinquished the combat systems of your typical RPGs. A welcome change, I might add, as the dialogue is beautifully written and engaging for tens of hours. (The end credits even thank Chris Avellone for what is probably him lending a bit of his Midas touch when it comes to game writing.) However, there are of course flaws in the way Disco Elysium decides to portray some of its characters, as it is sometimes more interested in making political statements in a very one-note way that might shock some people, rather than what one would think are nuanced and fleshed out personas. A large part of the cast is wearing a thick layer of existentialism, which they seem to flaunt upon every given opportunity. The same goes for characters who clearly exhibit some variety of political radicalism; you’ve got your racist nationalist, your bourgeois-eating communist, your fence-sitting centrist (dubbed moralist) and a whole swath of colorful opinionated people whom you either interact with or endure. Everyone else is mostly pleasant to be around, if not a bit saddening, due to the overall melancholic way of life people of Disco Elysium are forced to lead, influenced by factors that they alone cannot control; an overall sense of futility present at every turn. Most of them have quirks that help them cope with their predicament, which you can explore in full detail through in-depth dialogue trees, leading to some intriguing interactions and ultimately some interesting consequences down the line. Every line of dialogue seems to have a lot of those, which is surprising for a game that so haphazardly makes you select dumb questions for answers you already know. An example of that is the one occasion in which I used a particular brand of alcohol to boost my “Pain Threshold” in order to open a certain mission-critical freezer. Which towards the end had Kim labeling me as someone who “drinks on the job”, even after becoming sober and internalizing the thought that removes all positive effects from alcohol, as well as the action leading to us retrieving an item, which we would later use to further the plot. Instead as a one-off sacrifice of one’s principles, it was seen as a major transgression that would only lead people into thinking of me as even more of a raging alcoholic, rather than someone who is trying to recover and “get their shit together”, as it were.

A major part of the game’s rhetoric is lost to those who do not have a dictionary that has been well tempered through copious forms of political jargon, coming from a various selection of manifestos, academic political analyses and some of the more famous philosophical works for the last century. I would go as far to say that some of the sentiments the game presents are absolutely impenetrable when it comes to wording. I’ll give you an example:

Heartache is powerful, but democracy is *subtle*. Incrementally, you begin to notice a change in the weather. When it snows, the flakes are softer when they stick to your worry-worn forehead. When it rains, the rain is warmer. Democracy is coming to the Administrative Region. The ideals of Dolorian humanism are reinstating themselves. How can they not? These are the ideals of the Coalition and the Moralist International. Those guys are signal blue. And they're not only good -- they're also powerful. What will it be like, once their nuanced plans have been realized?

If you immediately recognized that it was about centrism, then congratulations – you are a lot smarter than me and probably everyone else around you. For you Disco Elysium is the perfect college-level textual experience for your Tuesday-night 1960’s poetry club. For the rest of humanity, it’s a bunch of gibberish. Flowery prose and poetics are riddled everywhere and you're never really sure what you're doing, what thoughts you're thinking or what's happening to you.

I mentioned briefly that the game tries to depict centrism as a form of moralism (a term which it prefers over the former). Even so, it presents centrism as less of an effort to hold multiple perspectives and act with a full and informed range of understanding, but rather as the stereotypical “fence-sitting” argument, where no decision can be made now, and progress can only be obtained through a slow, incremental process. While on the surface, it would seem so – as a self-proclaimed and passionate centrist, I cannot help but disagree with the outsider view that the game seems to be promoting, favoring critique of the right and an emphasis towards the left side of the political compass (making small but insignificant jabs towards both throughout). Contextually, the game’s developers Studio ZA/UM, have displayed a clear favor of the political left in their public appearances, which may explain this somewhat skewed perspective. While it’d be lovely to go on about the politics of ideology, it’s better not judge the contents of the game based on the developers’ ideological affiliation, but rather on its own merits.

Considering the amount of reading one needs to do, I would hesitantly say that Disco Elysium is part RPG, part choose-your-own-adventure visual novel. I say RPG, because of the aforementioned brick walls, inhibiting progress in a way that no immersive sim ever would, as there would be multiple ways to get the same information, which is sadly not a thing Disco Elysium does well. The sheer volume of the text is also a cause for some, I would suppose, aesthetic concerns about the game. Graphically, the game is stunning with its unique painterly style, but it often values it over function, namely in having the UI serve little to no purpose, as Kim and your portraits take up the entire bottom left of the screen. At the same time the dialogue panel is put on the far right side of the screen, even though two thirds of it are spent zoomed in on some 3D models doing their idle animations, instead of having the text front and center, as the thing you will be most likely looking at for 90% of your time with the game. Other technical issues include shadows being displaced from where they should be, especially on stairs, as well as being incredibly jagged for a game that doesn’t really have high hardware requirements and very little real-time lighting, but all of this is frankly unintrusive, compared to the cramps in your neck from looking to your right all the time.

Every once in a while, you get to enjoy not having to read, as a select few scenes are entirely voice-acted by a talented cast. I am unsure, however, of the production team behind the recordings, as they seem to sound as if recorded in home studios with different microphones and sound processors. Other than that, the quality and range of the performances is wonderful, especially since it is coming from some lesser known actors in the industry.

When it comes to sound, the game does a fantastic job of establishing a lot of varied soundscapes for an admittedly small plot of land. The music is ambient, droning and subtle in all the ways that make you not think about it, until you are sitting there listening to the soundtrack on your own time, remembering all the scenes that every piece of music has lifted from monotony. All of the tracks have this aging, somber tone to them, much like the world they are written for, making the music an unavoidable essential part of the experience, as you walk the fields of Revachol with the wind blowing and the small creek near you emitting a slight babble. The only downside is that the mixing of all these layers is often horribly unproportioned. Everything will be quiet, until some random intercom plays two straight minutes of loud white noise into your ear. Those parts are few and far between, but still leave a surprisingly large impression for an otherwise spotless execution of foley and ambience.

Overall, Disco Elysium is a full package. While not necessarily the game that I hoped it would be, it was still an enjoyable experience with an incredible main quest, memorable characters and side quests, elevated by wonderful sound design and fantastic ambient music, with writing that will be unparalleled for years to come. While it is not without its flaws, and some of them are quite major - it does what it set out to do with flying colors and is sure to appeal to a lot of people, who have been looking for an experience such as this. For me, however, it also represents a lot of squandered potential. It is by no means an ideal game – far from it; but I would still recommend you play through it for yourself, just to see where it takes you. It has a way of challenging you intellectually, that not a lot of games can pull off, especially nowadays. It is an admirable endeavor in tackling difficult topics, whilst also spinning an intriguing narrative that keeps you invested until the very end.

Score: 7/10

"As a member of a crew of guns for hire, you're just looking to make some money doing jobs for anyone who'll pay. If you go looking for trouble, it'll often find you first."

Run and Gun is a ttrpg I made that's currently available over in my kofi shop for $10 that I did all the writing and art for. If you're interested in a not so rules heavy take on the tactical shooter genre of ttrpg then you might like Run and Gun! Hope you check it out!

[LINK]