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Thoughts: Disco Elysium

disco_corpse

Disco Elysium is a text-heavy narrative RPG in which you play a cop with amnesia trying to solve a murder case in a sci-fi city. Because of these themes — and not least because of the amnesia — it has been described as a successor to Planescape: Torment, which is one of the most powerful curses in gaming1. If anything, though, that description is hugely underselling what Disco Elysium is trying to do. Planescape is nearly 20 years old now and was unnecessarily constrained by the relative infancy of the story-driven CRPG, while Disco Elysium is a game that’s fully aware of what it is and where it’s coming from. It knows the player is probably going to have expectations on how it’s going to work based on their previous experience of the genre, which is why it immediately sets out to subvert them.

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  1. Right next to “successor to Master Of Orion 2”.
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