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.

Atom RPG (2017) - Review

 I am always on the hunt for something to scratch that old Fallout-itch, especially the Fallout 2-itch (which explains why I haven't played Fallout 4 or Fallout London yet, they're not isometric enough). 

Wasteland 2 turned to be a waste (pun intended) of my time. A gameplay system that is too penalizing also ends up being boring quite quickly, at least for me. And I don't recall Fallout 1 or 2 being in any way cruel when it came to chance of success. As long as you played it smartly you'd make your way through. Be smart about which odds were in your favor and you'd survive. And maybe that was the main difference, in Wasteland 2 I rarely felt like the odds were in my favor. Or it felt like I was always betting on the wrong horse, in terms of which skills and stats I decided to improve. 

That's fair, not everyone should try to straight up copy the Fallout formula, it might just mean what you're serving isn't my cup of tea.

Time to check out another contender, then - Atom RPG. It calls itself a "post-apocalyptic indie game" and says it is inspired by Fallout (and Wasteland, in fairness), among others. So far, off to a good start.

An RPG is only as good as its stories and characters, for some reason I find that almost to be even more important when it comes to post-apocalyptic RPG's. The sci-fi and quasi-futuristic setting lends itself especially well to memorable experiences in the hands of good writers. Fallout made good use of this with their different explorations of the human condition inside the vaults, the consequences of the idealistic factions taken to their extreme and who could forget the tragic story of Harold and Bob?

Atom RPG seems to have been trying to get this right, and for the most part it does. Even though the player is a nobody with a cliché starting quest (find a group of people who have been lost), it sets you on the track to talk to and experience the waste which is far from empty. People have created small societies of all sorts out here and all kinds of religions and ideologies have had an opportunity to find footing. It is as it should in the apocalyptic world.

You get plenty of opportunity to makes decisions on whom to help out, as different factions and people looking for power will ask for you help. It is far from obvious which is the best course of option, which I appreciate. You'll have to go by gut feeling, and some times you won't be happy with the end result. Yet I don't feel cheated or like I've missed out on something important. Rather I feel like I got to leave my mark on the world and it's not supposed to be easy.

There is a starting direction to motivate you into going out into the wastes and it won't take long before you get a whole bunch of other quests. They will range from eradicating wolves, picking up a library book (Lord of the Rings) and infiltrating bandit gangs. These quests will in turn make you discover new quests or maybe a quest that seemed straightforward will branch out in front of you and become a lot more complicated than it first seemed. I started to collect all the quests I could and talk to every person I met in the hopes of completing some quests almost by accident. It can feel overwhelming or be just the kind of thing you're looking for. Personally I felt like I had to start focusing on a few quests before I got too confused. It gave me a bit of FOMO, where I was worried I travelled to new locations without having all the appropriate quests for the area, but I kept telling myself it was ok. A lot of the quests are memorable too. I stumbled upon a tiny side quests clearly inspired by the movie "the Thing" and that one will stick with me.

At one point some clearly not-so-nice guys convinced me to go down a dangerous looking bunker to grab all the loot I wanted. It sounded too good to be true and as I expected, they robbed me of all my stuff when I emerged again. I thought I could trick the game, reloaded and unloaded all my stuff inside the bunker. I go out the door and think I am being smart when the robbers have nothing to rob. Only I am the fool when the robbers realize I am trying to trick them and decide to kill me instead. The game is a lot more clever than you expect at times.

Even though we're living the post-apocalypse, there is a lot to see and do. With more quests in my log than I know what to do with, finding my way around feels a bit tricky. Even though each area has a map, there are no annotations nor the possibility to add any, meaning I still don't know where anything is located. Every building and alley looks like another shack. I guess it is difficult to make the wastelands to look anything but that, and maybe it's a bit much to ask for, but all the gray and brown does get tedious after a while.

On the other hand, Atom RPG makes a decent job at sprinkling a variety of locations around the Wasteland for you to discover. Everything from a mutant circus to a roaring forest, not just the regular derelict vehicles and worn down wooden buildings. The people who inhabit the place are equally diverse. From someone with an "outside" perspective, they almost seem oddly un-bothered by the fact that the world has gone down the toilet, metaphorically and aesthetically. But maybe this is exactly how people would react? They'd just accept the new reality of things and eke out their existence. 

Your stats make a big difference to how you can achieve your successes. But where Wasteland 2 constantly made me feel like I was the underdog, or two steps behind, Atom RPG gives me options. Maybe I can choose to solve a situation with barter, speechcraft, personality or strength. The end result might differ, or maybe several options are useful to reach the same solution. Either way this means I will never feel like I've put points into the wrong things, it just means I can choose which way I want to be able to solve my problems. This ended up being an absolutely crucial difference that turned a frustrating system in Wasteland 2, into a fun one in ATOM Rpg.

There is a talent system. And it took me almost 15 hours of game time to discover it. Either that says something about how little Atom intends to hold your hand, or probably a lot more about my eye sight. The talents feel useful and allow you to further niche your play style down certain paths. Some balancing choices mean some skills seem less useful, but that could also just be me not understanding the game properly. It's probably the latter.

The waste is also surprisingly a lot less hostile than the average post-apocalyptic game. You are far more likely to encounter friendly traders than mutated wolves. And the traders are actually friendly, rather than turning out to be mutated wolves in disguises. Almost a disappointment that. Traders can sell you all kinds of things, and you can find useful stuff lying around all over, especially in people's cupboards. As long as they don't have line of sight of you doing the thievery, they won't care.

A crafting system allows you to put things together into mostly useful things, like various equipment. This turned me into a veritable hoarder as any little piece of toilet paper you pick up could turn out to be a crucial part in something you want to craft. Filling up my bags did not take long and I soon had to realize I couldn't run around picking up everything I saw like a 3 year old on a sugar rush.

You get experience for most things you do, lockpicking, saying the right things in some conversations and of course combat. But each level requires a lot of experience to reach and after a few hours I started to feel under levelled for the quests I had gained. Guess it's not a real RPG unless you've got to do some grinding. 

There seems to be a lot to say about a game that is mostly brown/beige, running around smacking mutant ants and talking to semi-alcoholic people. But I keep having fun with Atom RPG. There is a lot to tinker with and every little achievement feels like a big success, because the game is just the right amount of stingy with its praise. It's not a difficult game, but it also doesn't hold your hand. It opens the doors for you to explore it, and never badgers you to stay. In a world where the gaming culture is all about catching your attention and not allowing you to leave, it feels refreshingly pleasant. 

Arx Fatalis (PC, 2002)

 I didn't really start playing PC games until around 2005, coincidentally just after World of Warcraft was released *cough*...

So when I say I have a special place in my heart for PC games from the time between 1995-2005 I suspect it must be false nostalgia at play. Or maybe these games just capture the essence of the zeitgeist in gaming for me, story-wise, graphics-wise and game design-wise.

Because of World of Warcraft it took me a long time to get around to actually playing games from this time, but since then I have slowly made my way through games like Deus Ex, Thief, System Shock 2 and Anachronox to mention some. If there is something I've learned that the main thing that is stopping me from enjoying these games is how badly the controls have aged.

This ogre makes questionable art.

And now I am at it again, playing the action RPG Arx Fatalis. Arx Fatalis was released in 2002 and developed by the French studio Arkane Studios. They went on to develop the much liked Dishonored games, of which I have played the first and really enjoyed it (you can read my review on that game here).

In Arx Fatalis you start out as an anonymous hero who has, surprise surprise, lost his memory. When you create your character you can choose which stats to focus in. I am not fooled anymore and always go for melee heavy stats, since magic usually turns out to be powerful but difficult to use in PC games of this era. Arx Fatalis is no exception, but more on that in a bit.

You wake up in a goblin prison, probably destined to become the meal of some monster, but fortunately for you getting out of said prison turns out to be quite simple. 

You can tell Arkane went a long way trying to make a control system that would fit everything that you should be able to do and also not be cumbersome. Compared to some of the solutions we have nowadays though they've definitely not ended up with the best system.

Your character can basically enter three different modes - combat, casting and inventory. To wield your weapon you have to press "tab" and to cast you have to press "ctrl" (at least in default setup on my version). You can't wield a weapon and cast a spell at the same time. Combat is straight forward enough, your weapons have a certain damage and durability, pressing the left mouse-button will let you swing it.

Casting is a different beast however. Arkane has opted for a system in which you as a player have to "write" certain magic runes, with your cursor, across the screen to cast them. Not only that, but you have to combine magic runes to do most spells. Add to this that the game is extremely finnicky when it comes to accepting your "drawings" and I pretty quickly realized that combat casting was not going to be a thing in this game. Fortunately the system allows you to pre-cast and store up to three spells to quick cast in combat. You find runes lying around in the game and I have yet to find any combat-worthy ones, so I can't say if magic is useful in combat or not.

The inventory works well, in a similar style to how I remember Diablo working. Basically a grid in which you can store items, certain items take up more slots than others. To use an item in your inventory you have to open it with right mouse-button and press F over the item. It's very unwieldy in combat, which might be intentional, but works fine outside of it. The system as a whole is a bit counter-intuitive to me and if you take a break from the game it takes a while to get back into, but it's perfectly acceptable.

Dark and claustrophobic!

The graphics are typical for the time. Dark and claustrophobic. The game is set underground, which is probably more because of technical limitations than active design choices, the story is just built around it as an excuse. This means everything is candle/torch lit, but it works well enough. Another classic for the time is the color scheme, which at least so far in the game has been 50 shades of brown. If there is music in the game I have not noticed it. The soundscape however is extremely... weird. Items, weapons, enemies are all making noises that work well, but the ambient noise are these odd swirly whirly sounds that just adds an extremely creepy atmosphere where it doesn't really fit. 

As far as I have gotten into the game, about 3 hours of gameplay, the story isn't about anything other than me trying to figure out who I am. As I escape the goblin prison I stumble upon an outpost that requires help from the kind. I promise to deliver a message to the king and then the king asks me for another favor and I reckon it is going to continue this way. Every here and there you come across some character that gives you an odd side quest or there is some other issue to solve. These problems are definitely not self explanatory, but neither are they obscure. Not far into the game I have to get past an ogre, but he won't let me. After trying to figure out how I can appease the ogre, I try to jump into the moat and sneak up the path behind him instead. That worked fine.

Cyberpunk 2077 - 25 hour mark

Spoilers ahead! (Played on PS4)

At mid- December last year me, and a lot of other people, started playing the extremely highly anticipated game Cyberpunk 2077. I wrote down some thoughts on it after a few hours of gameplay; I thought Night City was fun to check out but didn't really feel "alive". I was unsure about the main quest and mostly stuck to doing side business. I hadn't really encountered any bugs or game breaking glitches. I felt combat lacked something that made it really interesting, but hoped more skills for my character and knowledge from my part would change that. I was worried I would find the game repetitive if that didn't happen.

So, some 20 hours down the line, have I changed my mind about anything regarding the game? Mostly no, but there are some things that have been positive surprises.

I am still a bit torn, or should I maybe say worried, about how I feel towards the game. When I am not playing it, I don't really have any feelings drawing me in to play it. It's not like how I felt about The Witcher 3, where I constantly wanted to play more to discover more adventure. So far I feel the main story is fairly meh and almost every character I have met is too. While I still think Night City is gorgeous and I actually really just walking around and taking in the scenery because there are fun little things to see and marvel at everywhere, all the people in it sort of break my immersion. Or maybe it is something about how the bad guys and side quests are all gathered up in little chunks around the map for you to deal with that makes it feel so planned out rather than natural and dynamic. 

An unwelcome sight

Over the 120+ hours I had on the Witcher 3 I never once thought "urgh, this kind of quest again" and the only enemy I got bored of were the dogs. I already feel like I've done only the same quest over and over in Cyberpunk 2077 and that's not even true, it just feels like it. Every enemy in Cyberpunk 2077 feels exactly the same because they are. In The Witcher 3 I fought everything from Drowners to Katakans to Alps to Giant Centipedes and even plants! In Cyberpunk the enemy is always yet another street thug (I guess I've seen a handful of drones as well).

In fact it reminds me so much of how I ended up feeling about Skyrim. After having played it for 65+ hours I realized I felt cheated by the game and all its little icons beckoning me to check what was around the corner. There was always the same thing around the corner! The same dungeon, the same enemies, the same loot. I fell for the urge to explore and continued to harbour the hope of something new and interesting continuously until I was almost angry at the game for having tricked me. 

The main story of Skyrim didn't interest me in the slightest either, and Cyberpunk has at least the upper hand in that regard. While I don't find the main story particularly compelling, I didn't really in The Witcher 3 either - it's adequate enough and has me mildly curious. My main drawing point so far is by far Johnny Silverhand, whom I really didn't believe I was going to like as much as I did. 

At least Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't have a really annoying companion ruining your life. Oh wait.

When Keanu Reeves first showed up on screen and I got to know who Johnny Silverhand is and how he is implemented in the game I was actually not too keen on the idea. But he quickly grew on me and now I miss him every time he's not on screen. It's kind of unfortunate because since he never shows up during any of the generic side quests, that's just another reason for me to avoid them.

I've got to hand it to them though, to me the whole concept of Johnny Silverhand is genius. A long dead terrorist-rebel who's stuck as a data-avatar in your brain? He's too cool for school and while I don't consider myself part of the Keanu Reeves fan-club I will acknowledge that he is probably the only one who could've pulled this off. I usually actually detest when they use actual actors in games, but this is one instance where the casting was absolutely perfect, nothing else would've had the same effect.

Combat has some fun points, but it still hasn't evolved much from me just being able to run in wild and crazy and just hold a shoot-out. I don't actually need to plan ahead or need to use a different tactic. I guess you could blame the fact that I've only ever tackled quests labeled "moderate" or lower, but "moderate" shouldn't be easy right? Maybe I should try some "high" threat quests and get back to you on whether combat required some more thinking or not. Right now I will occasionally essentially Nuzlocke myself to get some thrill out of the fights, because while there are a lot of interesting skills to be had, when you don't feel like you need to use them they lose a lot of their fun.

Game designers should ask themselves, what would Pokémon do?

You get completely drowned in loot like this is Diablo 4. I stopped caring about what I was picking up about 15 hours ago. I still pick up everything because the game tricks you into thinking that some of those things might be really useful. They almost never are, the only time you'll notice any major upgrades or differences are within the first five hours of gaming or if you do some certain quests that reward you with good legendaries. After every fight I've got about 20-30 inventory items to sort through, ranging from sunglasses, y-fronts and yet another assault rifle. I think there must be a better way to handle loot from how I am doing it now though... I will figure it out.

I've put most points into Quickhacking, Breach Control and Crafting, in that order. So I am what you could basically call a mage in this game. And it is quite powerful. I can take out entire squads of enemies by getting them to puke their guts out while being on fire, while I am hiding behind some trash can giggling. It's a fun concept and I know there are a dozen other ways you could handle a fight, but like I said you never feel like it's necessary anyway. I would've liked to be better at sneaking, but have yet to feel like the game is actually well designed towards this game style. Often I find some interesting alternate route after I've murdered everyone in a building already, and that is not for lacking of trying beforehand. 

Combat in some ways epitomizes what I might think is the main issue with Cyberpunk 2077, it is trying to bite off so very much that only some very core concepts work ok and when they try to come together they just don't. The world aesthetics are great, but characters are not. Combat skills are great, but combat is not. For everything cool about it there is still something empty and tedious in every smile I see and every gun shot I fire.

And yet there are a lot of things to like about Cyberpunk 2077. It's not a bad game, and yet it is. I really can't wrap my brain around exactly what my problem with it is, it's like a nice looking pair of trousers that are slightly uncomfortable. I still intend and want to see the story through, so I don't feel like I am done with it yet. But I really doubt this game will manage to get 120+ hours out of me like The Witcher 3 did, with ease. But you never know.

And also I still really can't stand the voice acting for female V.