Blue Prince (2025) - Review

 I've played some good games based on board games, and I've played some bad games based on board games. But I don't think I have ever played a game where I thought "this would probably be better as a board game". But Blue Prince, released in 2025 by Dogubomb, might just be such a game.

The premise immediately caught my interest. As the sole heir of some wealthy, and also slightly crazy bloke, I am about to inherit a huge mansion. The catch however is that in order to inherit the mansion I need to find a secret room within the mansion. The next catch is that I only have a day to do it, otherwise I have to start over. The day is translated into 50 steps, and each room requires a step (by default) to enter. Oh, and the biggest catch is that the rooms don't stay the same from one day to the next. 

Some times all your choices are bad. Just like in life.

So Blue Prince is actually a build-your-own-mansion rogue-like, which is a very cool idea. Each day you start out in the big entrance hall and each door you open lets you draft a room from a pool of three to enter. These rooms can do all kinds of things, some are beneficial and some have drawbacks. To make your way through the mansion you are going to need a couple of things like keys, coins and diamonds, and you are going to be greatly helped by other things like sledge hammers, shovels and oranges. The rooms you draft have doors of their own, except some don't and are dead ends. Some give you buffs that last the day. Some give you debuffs that ruin your day. Blue Prince is a decently funny pun on the word "blueprints", and it makes some sense once you've understood the schtick of the game.

Just like any roguelike worth its salt, Blue Prince can award you permanent buffs. Once you've found the code for a safe, you've got it. Once you've unlocked certain parts of the estate, they stay unlocked. Certain rooms even allow you to move things over from one day to the next. You soon discover a lot of variables to take into account. Some rooms are more common in certain parts of the mansion and other rooms are more common in the later stages of the game. 

In the beginning of the game a lot of enjoyment comes from trying to explore the mansion and trying to uncover as many new rooms as possible, discovering what they do and how they some times can interact with each other to form buffs. As the days go by (because there is no chance you can beat this on the first day), you will manage to get further and further, and unlock weirder and weirder rooms.

This image will haunt my dreams.

Once you've played past your first week however, it can feel a bit like retreading the same old path since the first couple of rooms are usually fairly similar. There is the closet, and the bedroom and the nook. Even the observatory and gym hall quickly become old hat. Another feature of Blue Prince that irked me somewhat was what feels like a fairly high reliance on good RNG to get anywhere. It is a lot about trying to pry luck out of the RNG numbers through good choices, just like any good card game. There is no one to bluff here however, the game is ice cold and will suddenly thrust you into a corner even though you feel like you had a really good run leading up to it. All it takes is a streak of locked doors or drafted rooms with too few doors, and you have to click that dreadful "call it a day" button and start over.

Part of the problem is the walking itself. Walking through the same rooms over and over, and having to backtrack constantly, trying to keep track of the correct turns so you don't waste any precious steps, becomes more tedious than I want it to be. I end up wanting to get past the first third of the game quickly so I can continue building on the later stages, but the early rooms are just as important as the later ones. Rooms you have drafted tens of times are just as important, because each room taken out of the draft pool doesn't return (by default). That influences future draft pools and future choices. So I have to slow down and think about the parts I want to rush. It reminds me of early video games, where dying on the boss sent you all the way back to the beginning of the stage that you had already mastered rather than allowing you to practice more on the boss. It's almost like the game can sense this, because it keeps the pace and interest up by introducing new concepts just when you thought you were just banging your face against the same locked doors.

Every now and then a completely new room will be draftable, maybe even some changes to the mansion that turn out to be permanent and that give you an advantage the next time you get in there. At some point I end up in that weird spot of wanting to /flip desk and thinking I am done with it all but then also thinking that I am not letting this dang game win over me - I am going to beat it!

Some times, diamonds really are a girls' best friend.

The game likes to keep its cards hidden, and after a while I wonder if it even gate keeps some of its secrets. Some are obvious, I can't open a special room unless I have found a special key. But when a new room suddenly is available for drafting, I can't be sure it was always in my draft pool and I have just been unlucky so far, or if the game wants me to fail my way through the house a few times before they bring out the big guns. Learning according to Mr. Miyagi if you will - Blue Prince will have you wax on, wax off for a while before you realize you were actually learning karate all along.

The graphics serve the game well, on the right edge of cartoonish it will make things difficult to find only when it wants to, and never because of bad design. Even though walking through a huge mansion like this would definitely freak me out in real life, I never ever felt threatened in Blue Prince. The threat is also completely inanimate, you'll never get hurt or die, just pride damaged when you build yourself into a dead end for the fourth time in a row. The music manages to find the same level of atmosphere without ever feeling the urge to make me feel stressed or nervous. The experience could've easily veered into a furnitured version of Cube, instead it always feels like nice stroll through a park you walk past on the way to work.

So much about the game works and the core idea is brilliant. So how do you keep the fun of drafting out the mansion, and eliminate the tediousness of having to actually literally walk through the whole thing? A board game of course! I really think Blue Prince would work even better as a card game where you draft your way through the house and build it out in front of you. It would eliminate the annoyance of backtracking and just keep the best parts of the game available. Writing this text I actually thought the connection was so obvious I had to search to see if someone else had had the thought - and of course they have. I've got my money ready for when it happens.

Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine (1999) - Review

 Kids today don't even know the pain of not having WASD controls (even though I have encountered some PC ports of modern games that try to emulate double joysticks, I assume, by forcing you to play with WASD and IJKL - yes I am looking at you Moonlighter and Katamari Damacy). Every time I try out a game from pre 2005-ish I worry about this. The main issue is the simple fact that it can differ so much from what you are used to. Until creators have agreed on the way to do it, they all throw things at the wall to see what sticks. A lot of the things that are thrown are simply not good. But most of it just takes some getting used to. The controls of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine manages to be both of these things.

Off to a great start

IJatIM, as I am going to shorten it, was released in 1999 to PC - and Nintendo consoles interestingly enough. So back then, you could choose to play this either on N64 or on the computer and I really wish I had an opportunity to try the console version to see if the PC version is just another bad port. 

Just like everyone else I am a big fan of Indiana Jones and unlike everyone else I actually really enjoyed the most recent movie, The Dial of Destiny, which also sort of happens to tie in nicely with this game. After I had seen the movie I sort of felt like I had to experience ALL of the Indiana Jones stuff I had missed out there, especially game wise, knowing there to be loads. I had already played The Fate of Atlantis a bunch of times, but there was so much more to explore. So I bought a whole bunch of them on GoG and pure randomness made me decide on trying this one first. Why not in chronological order? That is just not how my brain works.

If you've seen any N64 game, you know the graphics. They're blocky, but right up my nostalgia alley and definitely nothing that bothers me. In fact, I go back to these old games to experience these kind of graphics. They can be frustrating some times though, as it isn't always entirely clear which objects you can interact with and which not, or where you can move to. The camera angles can be a problem too, and I often felt stuck not knowing what to do next simply because my objective was out of my visible frame, the only way to see them was to free-look around. It's difficult to explain to some one who is only familiar with more modern games why this is even a problem, because we are so used to being able to take in most of what is around us at all times when playing a game. But back then games were designed around fixed visual frames and it annoys me when the creators put things outside of it, unless they're supposed to be hard-to-spot special secrets.

Indy gets around

The plot is familiar if you've seen any of the movies. Indy basically goes about his business when he gets thrust into trying to avert the bad guys getting their hands on some mysterious trinket and taking over the world. In this game that trinket is the Infernal Machine, a device so similar to the Antikythera Machine in the Dial of Destiny that for a while I thought they had genuinely rehashed the idea. In this game he gets joined by Sophia Hapgood, and I loved seeing her again after having visited Atlantis with her in The Fate of Atlantis. I always wondered how she and Marion would get along, though Sophia and Indy seem to be more digging partners than anything else.

In IJatIM you control Indy by using the arrow keys - something that used to make perfect sense until game makers realized that was a horrible place to have your hand if you also wanted to use the mouse. That is not a problem in this game though, the mouse isn't used. You press alt to jump, ctrl to interact/shoot, space to take out your weapon and shift to run (the only one that came intuitively to me).

So far it all seems pretty straight forward, it felt like something I could learn. Though the first fifteen minutes I thought it would be impossible for me to get used to it. The controls are tank in the most tank way possible, and it's not so much the individual buttons but the combination of actions that get frustrating. Indy just doesn't do what you want him to do unless you do it exactly right and it is so slow. Running toward an edge will have Indy drop over it (some times killing him) but just walking towards it he'll stop. You have to move right up to a ledge and press jump for Indy to grab onto it and some times you have to move about a bit to figure out where the sweet spot is. To move down a ladder you have to back up to it. It doesn't help that there is no quick and easy way to spatially orient yourself. There is a way to go into first person, a feature that is some times absolutely necessary to use, but just as everything else it is slow and clunky.

But there are redeeming decisions as well, Indy controls surprisingly well under water and he will auto aim when using guns (though this also works only half well). You can also change the difficulty setting to off set some of the damage the enemies do. But unfortunately it's not enough. In the end there just is a lot of having to redo sections because Indy fell down instead of jumped, or got needlessly hurt because he wouldn't move behind cover fast enough, or turn fast enough, or go up the ladder fast enough. It was a long time since I save scummed as hard as I did in this game. And honestly it just ends up being stressful and feeling unfair in a way that is not fun.

The villains are the Soviet this time around.

There was a particularly horrible section of rafting down a river, trying to avoid rocks that would sink your raft. Wrestling that little boat in the currents felt like wrestling a baboon over a banana. When I had finally gotten through the section I also realized there was in fact a slightly easier way to do that I had overlooked, so that's on me. But the frustration left a sour taste in my mouth and this was just one of many frustrating moments.

It's unfortunate, because with slightly more comfortable and responsive controls I think I would've had some good fun with the game. Indy visits some interesting set pieces and the atmosphere is definitely Indy enough to make you get into the adventure feeling. Indy will spout some one-liners and the occasional cut scene will move things forward at a good pace.

This is the right way to do a game with the Indy franchise, it's just hampered by frustrating controls that end up making you regret exploration and regret trying to look for secrets. There are secret areas on every level where Indy can plunder collect treasure which he can use to buy useful items between stages. Things like antidotes, first aid kits and bullets that are absolutely necessary to get through a stage. 

The game ran fine and I didn't have any weird bugs or glitches playing it, until I did. Trying to boot it up one time it suddenly decided to crash my screen, leaving it black and unresponsive. I had to connect a second monitor to get myself out of that pickle and at that point I decided the game actually wasn't worth the stress. The stress of trying to get Indy to move where I want him to, the stress of doing the exact same thing but getting completely different result, the stress of very slowly inching your way through hazard only to realize it was the wrong way and all wasted time. 

I only got about a third through the game before I gave up - a good game completely reduced by the very clunky controls.

Alien: Fate of the Nostromo - Board Game Review

Whenever someone tries to make a board game out of one of my favorite IP's I pray that they've managed to recreate and capture some of the magic from experiencing that IP.

Well, do you like the Alien movie and enjoy playing board games? Then look no further, as I can present to you one of the best board games based on a movie that I have ever had the pleasure to try.

Let's boil down the boxes that this game has to check - the Alien movie, released in 1979, is one of my all-time favorites and manages to build up an atmosphere and create a world building in its confined spaces rarely outdone before or since. The slow build up of realization among the crew and understanding just how much they are in over their heads is a master piece that I return to often. I am a big fan of all the first four Alien movies as they come in very distinct flavors, and the flavor of the first Alien movie is "what even is this and how do I survive it?". Sheer panic from the moment the baby alien rears its ugly-cute head until the very last scene.

How do you recreate that feeling in a board game, when the people playing it are sitting comfortably around their own table with friends and absolutely nowhere near the silence of space? I don't know how they did it, but probably with a lot of love for the source material. It hits you as soon as you open the box, but since I don't want to spoil it I am not going to reveal more than that. Let's just say that little touches of Easter eggs here and there give you the impression that this is not some cash grab trying to exploit a name, but a genuine attempt at bringing the full Alien experience into your own hands.

In Alien: Fate of the Nostromo you and friends step into the shoes of the crew of Nostromo at the moment when the Alien has just become fully grown and is stalking you through the corridors. You get a chance to rewrite history, because unlike in the movie (spoiler alert), you can make it so that more than just Ripley makes it out alive.

Each of the five characters, Ripley, Brett, Dallas, Lambert and Parker, are distinct from each other and depending on which setup you play with your tactics will have to accommodate the skills of your crew. This is a cooperative game, where you all try to beat the odds and survive the last few moments on the Nostromo. Each game you draw a certain amount of objectives you need to complete before you can move on to the final objective, which is also randomly drawn out of a pool of possibles. This means that the variables from one game to the next can change quite considerably, but one thing stays the same - the sheer panic of trying to navigate through the ship without being jumped by the Alien.

The game has a set of mechanics that allow the Alien to move around or randomly attack you from a vent. Because of this, each move has to be carefully calculated and risk-reward is always highly present. The ratio between the knowledge that the players have, and the randomness of certain events is very carefully balanced so that you never feel truly safe in a choice but also rarely feel completely cornered. Let me stress though, this is not an easy game - the odds definitely feel stacked against you but that just means success tastes that much sweeter.

Each character has a certain amount of actions they can take each turn, for instance moving about, picking up/dropping/crafting or using items. The items are useful, even necessary in many ways as they allow you to avoid or move the Alien which becomes extremely handy. The Alien is never far away on Nostromo and seems to constantly drool down your neck. Everything is designed faithfully around the original movie, the tools you can use are incinerators, flashlights or electric prods to mention a few and even Jonesy the cat plays an important role. 

The board itself is a beautiful replication of the Nostromo with little details from the movie. You have to move about to complete the objectives, but every move you make also brings the Alien closer. After each players turn the Alien gets a turn, in which it can move about the ship - always moving to the nearest player. Because of this it almost felt like the game got more difficult the more players you added, because each extra player gives the Alien another shot at moving in on someone.

Because the players control the Alien they're free to make the tactic choice if two players are equally close to the Alien. It is hard not to make choices for the Alien that benefit the group, but in the end it rarely matters. The Alien has the upper hand and every single game I have played so far we have made it out at the skin of our teeth.

You can choose to make it even harder on yourself by introducing Hard Mode, also known as the Ash character. Ash is another hostile force on the ship that moves around according to set rules, where he just messes up your plans in general. We have yet to try this mode since we find the game is difficult enough without him!

Because you play the game cooperatively, there is a lot of room for younger players, or players with less experience in board games, to join in on the fun. I can see how my son (12 yrs) loves being an integral part of the success of the group and he contributes with a lot of tactical ideas that allows us to beat the game. For my daughter (8 yrs) the game is too stressful however and she takes each set back (as in, being attacked by the Alien) very personal. Whenever the Alien catches one of your crew you lose morale and have to run away. Lose enough morale and the game is over. But set backs are definitely a part of the tactics in Alien FotN, some times you will end up in situations where throwing yourself against the Alien is part of one of those calculated risks I mentioned earlier. 

Each crew member has a nice looking figurine.

There are situations where you are just at the moment of success and suddenly feel like you've been thrown back to square one by an unlucky draw of a card. It's a frustration that feels fair however, and it never truly ruins the fun of the game. It is easy to want to go "oh, well let's pretend I didn't move this way" when you realize that is where the Alien was hiding all along. There is no one policing your game but yourself, so whether you want an "honest" run or not is up to you.

There is a bit of setting up with this game as you have to start by placing a lot of tokens and drawing things like objectives. But once you're started the game doesn't let up, it absorbs you and it is immensely fun to discuss moves with your friends, trying to find the most efficient way to solve the objectives without getting caught. One runs off in one direction, another tries to lure the Alien in a different direction while a third runs in with an incinerator to burn out the Alien nest. Carefully laid plans come crashing down and you have to scramble to come up with a plan B. It is immensely fun and fascinating to see how well they've captured the feeling of the movie and make you really feel like you are a part of it.

If feeling like you're always on the brink of disaster is not your cup of tea, this game might not be your thing. Otherwise, I can't recommend this game enough because whether you are an Alien fan, a board game fan or both - I can almost guarantee you are going to have a good time.

X-COM: Terror from the Deep (1995) - Review

I have mentioned this before: When jumping into a game series I haven't tried out before there is always the question as to where to begin. The first game? The reboot game? The best game? With Assassins Creed I just picked one at random (Unity), and that was a mistake. With Saint's Row I picked the one that looked like most fun (IV) and that worked out pretty well. With Star Control I started from the beginning and that ended very quickly...

Here I am, doing it again. I decided it was time to check out X-COM even though I am no big fan of strategy games (except Settlers 2 which I love, and this odd little game I tried ages ago called Steam Marines), but I have heard so many good things about these games that I figured I needed to find out what the fuss was all about. What caught my interest was talk about how you invested in your fighters, always worrying that you would lose them. Then, of course, Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle really put X-COM in the forefront as being its inspiration. While I never wanna lay my eyes on a Rabbid ever again, it only further increased my curiosity towards X-COM.

So I looked in my library to see which games I owned and it turned out I had the first five to choose from (skipping First Alien Invasion). The very first one, UFO Defense looked too old-style for me, so I opted for the second oldest - Terror From the Deep, released by MicroProse (famous game developer also known for Sid Meier-games, the Civ-series and MtG: Duels of the Planeswalkers to mention a very few) in 1995 for MS DOS.

As I boot it up I am immediately thankful that I can control it using my mouse, and not some odd keyboard combination of keys. Off to a great start, because with these old games from the 90's it really is the wild west when it comes to gameplay controls and I never know what it's going to be like. Unfortunately it can be a big reason that some of the older games are difficult to play. I am greeted by some great, creepy music that sets the tone right from the start. I am a sucker for some good atmospheric tunes and XCOM TftD does it well. There is a threat lurking, somewhere, and I need to root it out.

The game starts me off by asking me to pick where to build my base. It has to be somewhere underwater, which makes sense based on the title of the game. Clicking around in the menus I can access a "Geoscape" which allows me to look around on the surface of the Earth. At first I have no idea why I would want or need to do this, because as will become very clear, the game doesn't explain a single thing to the player. I am assuming this is because it originally came with a thick manual, but unfortunately the version on GoG doesn't (old games on GoG in fact often come with the original manual, but for some reason this one doesn't). 

For that reason I decide to simply learn as I move along. Best case scenario I will learn by doing, worst case scenario I will fail horribly without knowing why. In this Geoscape scene I can choose to "Intercept". It's the first button on the menu so I click it. Apparently I have submarines that I can launch around the globe, so I give it a go. It seems straightforward enough and I can also ask my subs to do things like patrolling, though at this point I have no idea what will happen if I do. The subs need to refuel and do so automatically, it also seems like my base can't run out of fuel. I also discover the time buttons, which allow me to choose at which speed time moves forward. The options are plentiful, I can move at 5 second increments - i.e very slowly - up to1 day increments, which is the fastest. I stick to 5 sec for quite a while before I dare try to move faster, and it's not until I do that things actually start happening, because TftD is a game that values its slow pacing. As soon as something does happen though the time moves automatically back to slow, so that you have plenty of time to make your decisions - a very welcome game mechanic.

She's a beauty, she is.

Continuing my exploration of the menus I find where I can actually go to my base and do some good old base-building. The menu here is pretty self-explanatory and familiar even if you're mostly into more modern games. I can choose to do research and allocate researchers. I can choose to manufacture and allocate technicians. I can expand my base, gear up my team, recruit more people and a bunch of others things that I am not sure of. I am in fact not sure of anything, I just click around and see what happens.

Suddenly I get the message that an alien sub has been spotted. I can send my sub to intercept, which of course I do. I get the mission briefing that I need to neutralize the alien threat and try to find alien technology if possible. I can always choose to abandon the mission if I feel like but I guess that isn't something I should strive for.

Intercepting aliens moves you into an isometric, top-down view of a more classical action strategy style. I've got my squad of marines that are ready to move out and a bar of buttons to order things around. Yet again I have no idea what any of the buttons do, but figuring that none of them are likely to cause me to explode I try them out at random. They do the obvious things, open up inventory (which also lets you pick things off the ground like in many CRPGs, move between characters and between layers of the battle field (layers being height differences). I move my characters simply by clicking on them and then where I want them to go. They both seem to have something similar to action points, dictating how much they can perform within a turn, and something similar to stamina, which I think is affected by the quality of the terrain. It also seems my marines get tired after some fighting (who'd have guessed?!) and start walking extremely slowly. Or maybe they are weighed down? It is anyone's guess.

Underwater, no one can hear you scream.

I frankly love the graphics of this isometric view though, it's for the most part clear what I am looking at and the sprite work is beautiful. All my little marines are named and I can see what gear they are hauling, though I have no idea how useful any of it is. I can without much trouble see that none of them are wearing much more than a pretty basic weapon and what I think are throwing weapons (they all automatically wear what they need to be able to breathe underwater), so no armor. 

I move my characters around the field and notice that if I move a character that is out of screen view, it will teleport into position. It is only when I look at them they go through the full motion of animating their movements. This is also a welcome function since this saves you from just looking at a screen waiting for your marine to get into position. Once all my characters have moved and I end my turn, the aliens get to do their turn, hidden from me. Unless I have spotted them of course. Just like in Heroes of Might and Magic.

The first aliens I encounter are tiny things that I one-shot with trouble. They also aim like Stormtroopers so I make quick work of them. My son suggests I shoot some stuff inside the alien space ship, which makes things blow up and incapacitate two of my marines. Thanks kid. But it is cool that the environment is interactable, I really like that because I am thinking it can probably be just as easily used to my advantage.

Not for the claustrophobic.

Hyped on my easy win over the little aliens and coming back with some alien artefacts to research on I quickly set out to discover more aliens to kick back into space. But then I learn that TftD is not as gentle as I first thought. Wrestling my subs turns out to be tricky, I am unclear whether I have to boat around the oceans and patrol to come across aliens or not. When I do my subs inevitably have to come back to refuel, and that is also inevitably when the aliens show up. The nations of the world who decide on my funding each month aren't happy that my subs sit back in the base refueling instead of coming to the aid of the people of the world. Neither am I! 

Then, when I finally catch up to another alien sub, I come across some other aliens who definitely don't play nice. Maybe they realized that sending their weakest troops didn't do them much good, because whatever they're sending out now can easily one-shot all my marines as soon as I see them. There is just no chance for me to fight them, and so I rather flee than send my troops into an early grave. The tables have turned. So I start to think. My marines clearly need more of everything to fight those guys - armor, better weapons and health packs. So I start researching those things. And maybe I can try to grind some of those weaker mobs when I come across them, for materials, or whatever they drop.

The game can feel a bit unfair at times. Just stepping out of my sub I get murdered by something off screen. Good bye Malory, it was nice knowing you. I guess that is the harsh reality of alien warfare, but it is difficult to know what I could've done differently. In another mission I find out the hard way that the weapon I decided to bring only works underwater, which I happen to not be. Well... that sucks. In some missions you are supposed to save civilians which seems like a fairly impossible task, as I hear them getting slaughtered in the distance. 

But otherwise there isn't much I don't enjoy about XCOM TftD, and the things I don't like are because I don't know the mechanic yet. For a game that's over 30 years old it plays surprisingly modern. Nothing is explained, but it's also quite welcoming to just try things around and see what happens. It is also a very slow paced game, which requires you to tinker, add a thing here and there. I was already expecting to have to do a few restarts to get the hang of it, but I have in fact survived longer than I thought I would. Usually money is the first thing that goes out the window but the slow pace semi-tricks me into thinking I am doing ok although only a short amount of time has actually passed in-game. In this it is similar to one of my all-time favorites - Settlers 2 from 1996.

This is how you do it.

Fortunately, nowadays a manual is only a quick AltaVista search away. The manual is actually really instructional, showing how to get through the different parts of the game step-by-step, just like a tutorial. An IKEA manual would be proud. It is to the games credit that I got most of the steps from the manual just by trying things out dynamically in-game.

To modern sensibilities the feedback-loop is probably too slowly tuned on XCOM TftD. Even though there is always a feeling of something to do, the sense of real successes are, at least initially, far in-between and hard-earned. If this sounded like it could be your thing, but maybe want something with a quicker turn-around, I can highly recommend FTL: Faster Than Light. It retains the same feel of tinkering and micro-managing, and high level of failure (in a good way!). But for a game from 1995, X-COM: Terror from the Deep is a banger.

Disco Elysium (2019) - Review

Some times I try to get through things even though I have a niggling thought at the back of my head that keeps telling me that I don't have any idea what is going on. More often than not that thought transforms into the realization that maybe this isn't the kind of experience I want to spend my time on. But some times not understanding what you're doing is actually part of the experience, part of what keeps you moving forward, looking for that one piece of information that will make it all come together...

Disco Elysium has been lauded by pretty much everyone since it was released, and so it wasn't odd that it ended up on my radar. What all those reviews didn't prepare me for though is that it is a novel camouflaging as an RPG with DnD inspirations. If you don't like to read (or listen to a lot of talking), this is not the game for you. Fortunately I love to read, so should be all good, right?

You play as an anonymous drunk, who quickly realizes he is supposed to be a cop trying to solve a case. A murder case no less. Your buddy cop tells you this as you struggle to comprehend where you are, who you are and why life has to be so complicated. It is a little bit comforting that the main character seems to be as lost as I feel most of the time. I literally just run around talking to random people I come across, but that is my job so it works out.

It starts off RPGy enough, you get to create a character by allocating points. This just means that you can't be really smart and really strong, you're either or. Or somewhat half-bad at both. I decided this was the game where I could finally go hard-core smartass, like I've always wanted in the Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gates. Those game tease you with the possibility to roll those kind of characters, without actually making a game that allows you to play that way. But Disco Elysium, surely, would treat my brains differently. I was hoping this was the kind of game where I could talk myself out of a gun fight if needed. 

Mostly this turned out to be true, though my brainy-ness at first just seemed to mean that I talked a lot to myself without actually accomplishing much of anything. Of course, I haven't had a brawny playthrough so I don't know how much more efficient that playstyle is, though I strongly suspect all the talking is unavoidable regardless. The fun consequence of my lack of physical prowess is that I create a character that legitimately seems like he can die if he stubs his toe hard enough. I've heard of people who have rolled DnD characters that ridiculous, but it was an interesting experience to play it myself. It keeps me on my toes (!) because I literally have no idea what will do damage to me. Beside being shot to death at one point, which seems like a predictable albeit unfortunate work hazard when you're a cop, I'm also at one point close to dying because I kick a door to hard. I guess such is the path I chose to wander.

The stakes are somewhat offset by the fact that you can save and quick save whenever you like. Before long I know to quick save before any conversation or pretty much any choice of consequence. Then I realize I have no idea which choices will end up having major consequences and I just end up quick saving before pretty much any interaction with anything. All the inner voices give you hints towards what dialogue choices are beneficial to go for, and I actually really like the system where the game doesn't necessarily outright tell you which is the "good", "chaotic", "evil" or "neutral" path but just hints at it. Even then you can still mess things up with a misinterpretation or a bad dice roll. It makes for dynamic but confusing dialogues, as much entertaining as they are difficult to try to master.

There is however a disturbing discrepancy between the cleverness of the writing/dialogue/game system and the fact that other parts of the game feel so very... game-y. People will stand in the exact same spot throughout the day and onto the next. That makes sense for the bartender at the inn, even though he is looking at the same broken taxidermied bird for days, but less so for the woman outside the book shop trying to figure out which book she wants to buy. Or pretty much most of the people you interact with. This makes them seem a lot less like people, and a lot more like sign posts, there more to offload information and exposition than to make the world feel like a real place. Maybe this intentional? You do question reality a lot in the game, and the way the game is designed I question the game a lot as well.

It also doesn't help that the people you talk to are such caricatures, it just emphasizes their roles in the game as The Thing That Tells You Where To Go, The Thing That Stands In Your Way, The Thing That Has The Next Answer. They all have their one schtick and they schtick to it, pardon my pun. I don't know if I put my points in the wrong things, but this kind of one-themed conversations is exactly what I wanted to avoid when I went with the brainy guy. While there is options to talk people out of things, threaten them or confuse them (you can even talk a door into opening with enough rhetoric skill), it rarely makes it feel like there is any development in their thought processes. It might be an effect of the somewhat limited scope of the script (I mean in narrative, not depth), you are only there to solve a murder mystery over a handful of days after all, but I've played games like that before that never came close to feeling like talking to robots as much as this does some times (ironically one of them is literally about talking to robots, Primordia).

Disco Elysium unfortunately also ticks one of my biggest no-no's for games, which is that the art design never ever should hamper the playability. It doesn't matter how fancy or artsy your game looks, if it makes it harder to navigate in any way, you have still failed in what is supposed to make a game fun. Disco Elysium looks like it's been painted with an oily aquarell (water painting is apparently the English term for it but I prefer the Swedish one - it sounds posher) in rainy gray and brown colours. Pressing Tab highlights interactable objects around you, and the game would've probably been completely unplayable without it, because even with this feature I frequently struggle to figure out where my character can move to. I even at one point had to look up where to go next because I couldn't identify a passage as walkable from looking at it. As you walk around you can look at certain things that are highlighted, but the information serves no other purpose other than world-building, as if they had to label the things lying around because they're too hard to make out with the eye. "It's a broken window with some dust on it" or "there is some gravel on the ground here". I am making those ones up, but they would fit in the game without trouble.

Most of the game feels like a dream sequence where things only make sense on a surface level. As soon as you start to think about it you realize that none of this can really be for real. I think this is entirely intentional. Just like in a dream things seem to just happen and I rarely get a feeling that I figured something out or was an instrumental part of the world. Time moves on as you move around, and the game just decides it's ready for the next scene to play. Suddenly the game tells me I can quick travel, but not how to do it. I am still wondering. Maybe several play throughs would open up the inner workings of the game for me, right now entire game mechanics make no sense to me - like the "inner thoughts" that you can "research" and appear seemingly at random. I don't know what purpose or benefits they serve, and since they cost ability points to research I entirely opted out of investing in them. 

The voice acting is overall good, though I chose to skip through most spoken dialogue and read the text on my own instead (and I definitely didn't read all of the text because there is so very much of it). That is nothing on the game though, I am simply not a huge fan of spoken dialogue (the Yakuza series being a huge exception!). Otherwise there is some passable music playing in the background and the odd sound effect here and there. Overall the game feels very quiet and you'll mostly hear a lot of talking. It just adds to that weird sensation of everything being unmovable around you.

By in-game day 3 I am starting to feel fatigued. Fatigued by the constant gray, the constant sadness, the constant nothingness. Fatigued by being someone so pathetic everyone seems to laugh behind my back and I have no idea why I am this way. Fatigued by running the same route, trying the same doors and speaking to the same people saying the same things. The sense of achievement is too close to zero at almost any given time and it almost feels like being stuck in a hamster wheel. 

Disco Elysium tries a lot of things and I especially found the exploration of the main characters inners thoughts to be interesting. This is something I haven't seen done in this way before, and a lot of the time it worked well. I liked that enough points in the right skills would allow me to know if someone was telling the truth or even suggest dialogue options for me. Too few points in other skills could result in some hilarious situations like dying from kicking a door frame too hard.

Unfortunately the rest of the game feels like a wet, smelly blanket. The characters leave me uncaring because I understand too little of what is going on or why anyone is motivated to act the way they do. No one feels like an actual person with feelings and thoughts, they all feel like mannequins in what is possibly just a big hallucination. My character and me clearly just go through the motions, trying to pretend for long enough to maybe awaken a feeling of purpose, that just never comes. Everyone says they love Martinaise yet I can't shake the feeling that everyone I talk to would actually rather be somewhere else. And so it turns out, would I.

I will miss Kim though.