Disco Elysium is a detective RPG in which the detective is a barely-functioning disaster and you are strapped in for the ride. There is no combat to speak of; instead the entire game runs on dialogue, dice and the twenty-four skills that make up your fractured psyche.
Disco Elysium gameplay: a skill check mid-roll, two dice cast while Perception, Interfacing and Visual Calculus chime in with their readings
Those skills are characters in their own right, constantly arguing in your head, flattering you, lying to you and occasionally talking you into genuinely terrible decisions. The writing is staggering in both volume and quality, veering from a gut-punch of tragedy to absurd comedy within a single conversation. The watercolour art and the mournful soundtrack give Revachol a lived-in, hungover beauty that very few settings ever reach. It is dense, occasionally exhausting, and unafraid to let you fail in ways that reshape the story instead of ending it. Nothing else in the medium is this ambitious, and almost nothing else trusts the player this much.
