So I Tried... Disco Elysium

Each edition of So I Tried… I will try a game that I have never played before. Will I find something new to love? Will I find something new to despise? I'll take a full half hour, no matter how bad it gets or how badly I do, to see if this is the game for me. This time, I played Disco Elysium.

What I Thought It Was

When I first found Disco Elysium, I judged it as an action-adventure RPG title, and I pictured something along the lines of the early Fallout titles. The small glimpses I got to see through the screenshots looked like a stylised post-apocalyptic title that shocks players with heavy themes and tough choices. I was already pretty excited to try out the game because I enjoy games like those, but my interest was especially piqued when I saw it had nearly 100,000 reviews and was just shy from Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam.

What It Actually Is

It turns out that it's not post-apocalyptic, and it's much more satirical and over-the-top than I could've fathomed from the screenshots alone. Even after I had read the description for the game, I had expected something a lot more serious than what I got; it was jarring when my necktie started talking to me! While I expected heavy themes, I thought it was going to be more along the lines of Telltale's The Walking Dead, but never two children throwing rocks at a dead corpse and using a slur against it. It was far more gruesome than I anticipated.

Will I Keep Playing?

Originally, I had thought I wouldn't. While I don't mind the satirical nature or the rawness, the constant shifting in tones doesn't let me enjoy the game in either of its forms and instead, I'm left wanting for a different game. That being said, however, I found myself thinking about it more and more as time passed, and I recalled the shock of some of the jokes almost fondly, so I will try it once more, though this time, I'm taking it far less seriously.