Recent reviews by phooey

This game is super scary. Thank goodness caves aren't real.

so fun and full of potential

YOU — Wait, first -- what’s this *communism* even about?

RHETORIC — Failure. It’s about failure.


Disco Elysium is a non-traditional, open-world RPG that utilizes dice rolls and dialogue trees instead of combat. You play a strung out amnesiac. To me, Disco Elysium is like Twin Peaks; It’s meandering, it’s strange, and every single person is a puzzle. Oh, and there’s a murder case to solve, too. It’s the kind of game that you should go in blind for and it suits any story-driven gamer, especially bookish ones. Please go play it. Please just sink an hour or three in instead of thinking really hard about how this one’s burning a hole in your backlog. The writing, the world whose depth had me thinking I’d literally forgotten about a whole country in world history, the characters, the characters, the voice acting -- every aspect of this game will redefine your standards for RPGs and storytelling as a whole. You want a video game whose “evil” playthrough doesn’t feel like an afterthought? A game with actually meaningful, difficult choices? A game where failure is more than a punishment?

Every single playthrough will be unique. You will be heartbroken when you try to share a story from your run with a friend who played the game who has no idea what you’re talking about. Yet you’ll both have seen this world and felt the range of its emotions, every possible one.

Just play the damn game.

The rest of my review is Things I Wish I Had Known, or Things to Help you Decide if You’d Like this Game’s Mechanics.


You have a highly unique set of “skills” which you may allot points to at the beginning of the game. The skills are really characters fighting for attention in the protagonist’s mind. They have distinct motives and drives, but none of them are perfect, and all of them are capable of lying or making mistakes. During difficult conversations, asinine observations, and while fighting or accepting ridiculous impulses, you earn EXP, which can be used to buy and allocate more skill points. So, theoretically, talking more is always better. Except when it isn’t.

There are 24 skills divided into 4 categories: Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics. When starting out, skill point allocation seems like a really tough decision. So think of it this way: which area of basic human function seems the most frustrating and upsetting to live without?

If you neglect Intellect, you will be stuck in situations where you’re staring at an obvious clue that you literally cannot decipher. You may not be able to even notice clues.

Without Psyche, you are going to be pretty difficult and awkward to talk to. You won’t have the emotional maturity to handle difficult conversations.

In the absence of good Physique, you’ll be a spineless, tired, fragile thing with no instincts to back you up. You won’t have your gut or your intuition to step in when you need them.

Failing Motorics, you’ll be useless with your hands, your reaction time will be unreliable, and your perceptiveness will be poor. You’ll need to take things slow.

Even with all the EXP technically available in the game, you’ll never be a well rounded individual. There will always be pieces missing.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Easy: Failure] — Of course, you could always solve this by doing some drugs!


Aside from skills, you have “loot,” which are actually thoughts. You can obtain thoughts by navigating thoughtful conversations, pursuing particular sentiments persistently or aggressively, and by exploring novel ideas. Your thoughts take time to ponder, and they often come at a cost, but they are what truly shapes your roleplaying, far moreso than the skills. There’s a ton of unique thoughts, but only so many can be conceptualized, or equipped, at once. Using the thought cabinet, you can be many things at once; both a misogynist and a feminist; an art critic and an anti-housing anarchist; a sharpshooter and a homosexual. One thought is called “Date of Birth Generator.” It can be found by digging into the main character’s past. Once conceptualized, it raises the Logic skill cap, but lowers all Physical skills by 1. What the game doesn’t tell you is the overwhelming storytelling significance of remembering one’s age and the complications that ensue. Another thought, “Finger on the Eject Button,” procs following the player’s pursuit of several suicidal thoughts. Conceptualizing this thought gives you +2 Authority (“Nothing to lose”) and +2 Suggestion (“I always liked you the best”), which are massive stat gains, but the MC becomes plagued by suicidal impulses, which can end the run.


You always roll two D6’s for skill checks, which have the following difficulty ratings:

Trivial: 6-7
Easy: 8-9
Medium: 10-11
Challenging: 12
Formidable: 13
Legendary: 14
Heroic: 15
Godly: 16
Impossible: 18-20

Your dice rolls are affected by the level of the skill being tested, the stats of your clothes, skill modifiers from your current thoughts, passives collected throughout the game, and a few hidden passives never revealed to the player. Taking drugs, smoking cigarettes, and drinking alcohol provide massive stat bonuses and are often necessary for difficult checks if you’re intent on exploring every avenue and area of intrigue during one playthrough.

Two 1’s is always a fail and two 6’s is always a pass. So there’s an element of randomness to rolls to break things up every once in a while or allow breakthroughs.

There are two instances where dice can be rolled: white skill checks and red skill checks. White checks are repeatable if failed, but only after altering one’s skills using points or the thought cabinet. Red checks can only be tried once and are not repeatable. They’re rare but extremely impactful. Reading this, you may be tempted to have a finger on the quicksave button at all times. I would actually implore you to not reset your save (often) for a few reasons:

1. Speeding through all the conversation(s) you’ve gone through since your last save will be draining, may result in different outcomes, and it will lessen their impact. Essentially, there’s always a chance you won’t see that particular skill check again.
2. Some of the best possible moments in this game are only found through catastrophically failed skill checks; through drawn-out panic attacks, through the ugliest of conversations, the most embarrassing tongue ties, and the cringiest of mistakes. You’re probably not going to die on the spot (you might) or “lose the game” or ruin a “good ending” by messing something up. This game is about failure.
3. Seriously, this is the only RPG I can think of that doesn’t punish the player for failed decisions, poor decisions, or stressful judgment calls. Embrace it.

Or reroll your saves. I don't care. Just play the game.


This game is, like every piece of media, fundamentally political. It’s very on the nose, and to someone who identifies as “apolitical,” it may be hard to get into. One of the very first hurdles players face will be trying to bypass a jacked race supremacist and phrenologist[en.wikipedia.org] called “Measurehead” who literally asks you to internalize the thought “Advanced Race Theory,” also known as racism. Many players’ builds will necessitate them learning racism and then discussing its nuances with him in order to move the story forward. You can unlearn the thought later if you want, but other characters will always remember what you did and said. Or, you could go on to have a robust career as a full-blown fascist. Who cares.

"But isn't this game made by communists?" you ask. I ask instead: You know who's the absolute meanest and most critical to communists? Other communists.

love this game but i keep having to stop to play with my real cat. he is very jealous

> Minecraft

"Similar to Games You've Played: Portal 2 and Fallout New Vegas"

Awesome soundtrack I still listen to constantly, beautiful and memorable environmental storytelling, and scathing political commentary. The DLC has the best levels yet and wraps up the story.

I feel comfortable saying Umurangi Generation is the most underappreciated game of 2020.